Or not…I have some disclaimers/notes:

• Going to try and use as much of Chistensen’s terminlogy as possible.  This isn’t to say that he has a perfect model, or even 80% model, of what is happening.  It just helps to keep the terminology consistent during this particular post.
• Every Content Management company is different and the observations will not apply universally.  Every company reacts differently.  That said, if I didn’t think that this applied to a large number of vendors, I would have targeted this post at particular vendors.

NOW we can get started.

Why Disruption Now?

There are several trains of thought out there that this dilemma doesn’t really apply to the Internet age because we are in a constant state of disruption.  This an important observation, so let me address this first.

The initial disruption was the Internet.  Since then, everything has mostly been a continuation of that disruption.  Much of the chaos has been sustaining technology for the original disruption.

Everyone agrees that the web impacted the Content Management industry strongly.  Stellant (now Oracle), Interwoven (now part of Open Text), and Vignette (now consumed by Autonomy)all came from the WCM space.  When you look at it though, it was just a new content problem.  Sustaining innovative technologies.  Unique needs, but no more so than Records Management, Imaging, or Digital Asset Management.

So what is qualifying as disruptive to Content Management these days?  Content Management itself has been disrupting the offsite paper record storage and microfiche industry, but what is actually disrupting the disruptor?  The Internet and the browser didn’t do it directly, but it became a sustaining technology for ECM.  The browser interfaces enhanced adoption over time for the existing vendors.  Definitely not disruptive.

Well, Content Management is being disrupted from a couple of directions:

• SharePoint: It isn’t SharePoint, but what it represents, basic Content Management for the masses.  It may not be the most functional, or scale to handle any situation, but it is easy to buy, install, and integrate into the most used productivity application suite, Office.
• The Cloud: Many SaaS Content Management offering cannot currently compete on functionality with the established ECM bigwigs, but that is just a matter of time.  They are established, have found a starting market, and are adding functionality.  As SharePoint demonstrated, they don’t need to match the established solutions to eat into the market share, they just need to hit the minimum requirement level, document sharing.

Open Source isn’t on the list because that is a model for solving problems, but not truly disruptive.   It is a just a different business model and not a sustaining technology.  For many, it boils down to appealing to people’s inner nature and a different pricing structure.  This is a gross over-generalization, but so is this entire post.

The Cloud could be called just a different pricing structure, but it is also a different delivery model. It is disruptive because no matter what the established vendors say, their software has not been architected for that environment, so it is not plug-and-play.

Those are the disruptions.  They are fundamental shifts in how Content Management is delivered.  They are shifts towards Content Management becoming more of a commodity (though we aren’t there yet).

Microsoft’s Attack

Okay, you can argue that they are disruptive at all or that they will just become a “sustaining technology” down the road.  If the latter is the case, most of the established vendors will survive. (Acquisitions and consolidation aside, we are talking about the actual software offerings).

When SharePoint arrived in the 2003 timeframe, it was nice, quaint, and not nearly functional enough to really have a significant impact on the Content Management market.  It wasn’t until the advent of the 2007 edition that it became an issue.

The initial response was pretty consistent, “Yeah, it does that, but it will fall apart under any real work.”  Well, the market didn’t care.  A large number of people didn’t, and still don’t, need the complicated solutions offered by the established vendors.

Over time, as SharePoint started to erode sales, the vendor strategy shifted to enhancing SharePoint.  This was fine and it started to drive sales, but SharePoint hasn’t stopped evolving.  In 2010 is has the ability to store content outside of the database, manages data better, scales better, and has better Records Management.  The need for SharePoint additional Content Management style capabilities is shifting towards archiving and governance.

When you look at this even more closely, it isn’t that SharePoint is a disruptive technology as much as it is a disruptive new vendor in the existing landscape.  So while SharePoint is very disruptive in its nature, it isn’t a “disruptive technology” as discussed by Christensen.

Still, ignore at your own risk.

The All-Encompassing Fog of the Cloud

Meanwhile, in the bushes, the cloud-based SaaS offering are lurking, ready to pounce.  They have realized a few important things:

• Not only do many people not need all of the functionality provided by the Content Management vendors, they don’t want to manage the data center either.
• Users are getting used to a rapid pace of innovation from their increased exposure to the ever-evolving Internet.  The three year “big release” has become a detriment  from an user expectation perspective, not to mention the nightmare for the IT and Change Management personnel.  Lots of incremental changes are easier to deal with than huge massive changes.
• The ability to share content outside of an organization is becoming more important, and not easier.  If I still have to email that 10 MB presentation to business partners (copying my colleagues), that really cuts into some of the important selling points of ECM.

The SaaS vendors don’t have all the answers, yet.  They are still working on security and many of the CYA features that your average CIO wants.  The thing is, those requirements are well defined, so it is just a matter of addressing them.  Research is only needed to prioritize, not define.

When those gaps are addressed by the SaaS solutions, who will win the market?  Those that are ready from day one, or those that try and create/market their solution after the questions are answered?  There is more to being a solid cloud offering than fancy marketing and a feature list.  The processes and the business value that they support is different than from a traditional software vendor.  Running a successful, secure, reliable, scalable online service is not the same as writing a COTS software package.

The Reaction

Some of the established vendors may tell you that their clients aren’t asking for the Cloud at this time.  They are asking for better business solutions, like Case Management.  Existing clients are asking for Case Management.  I’ve heard it.  The thing is that people that I talk to who are looking for new Content Management solutions are seriously considering cloud-based solutions.

How consistently are they asking? Well, in 2009 I was helping a large, 50K+ user, organization look at vendors, and they invited a SaaS provider to present their solution.  I knew going in that the vendors didn’t meet all the critical requirements, and I even told the client as much.  Didn’t matter.  They want to move in that direction as part of an overall strategy, so they were going to talk to the vendor about what the vendor offered and tell that vendor what was lacking for them to make a purchase.

Did the lack of a cloud-based solution get mentioned to the other Content Management vendors?  No.  The closest was when someone asked about external hosting and they mentioned that they had partners that can offer that service.  A savvy market research person would be able to see that question that as a potential need for cloud-based solutions, but a sales person, even if they are smart, don’t have the same channels.

But I digress and this post is already pretty long.

So the Content Management vendors, looking for double-digit growth, are pushing Case Management so they can land the multi-million dollar deals required for that growth.  Smaller cloud-based vendors don’t need to close deals of that magnitude to have double-digit growth in a quarter, much less a year.  The ECM vendors are chasing the large deals while the smaller deals get left to SaaS and SharePoint.

Christensen talks about this as companies moving up-market while the new vendors, based upon the disruptive technologies, tackle the lower market.  As the the firms innovate faster than the needs of the average customer, they can move up-market and take revenue from the established vendors.

So right now, SaaS vendors are doing this in the Content Management space.  They aren’t able to compete on functionality yet, but they are adding it faster than the market is demanding new features.  It is only a matter of time before they hit the minimum level needed for them to be a player.

There is Not Plenty of Time

As I discussed in the review, there are a ton of examples focused on the hard drive industry.  I think a more relevant example is the excavator industry.

In the first half of the 20th century, cable-actuated excavators ruled the construction world.  Each new model could scoop more thanks to larger buckets and deposit it further away.  The market drivers were bucket size and reach.

Then came the hydraulic excavators.  Made by new companies, these had smaller buckets and a smaller reach.  They couldn’t compete against the established cable-actuated vendors, but they worked well for people needing to dig precise trenches and other smaller tasks.

Over time, years and years, the bucket size and reach grew to the point that the larger construction project started to buy them.  While they could not in any way out-perform the cable-actuated excavators, they were more reliable, cost less per unit (though not less per cubic ft. bucket size), and were generally cheaper to operate.

By the end of the transition, which took decades, of the over 40 cable-actuated excavator vendors, only FOUR successfully transitioned to survive in the new market.  That is less than 10%.  Let me repeat a key fact here…

DECADES!!!

The technology was there and it was obvious.  Many established vendors entered the market once it was a viable solution for their clients, but by then it was too late.

Why didn’t they enter sooner?  Like many victims of disruptive technology, the margins were less on the new technology, which led to different processes within the makers of the disruptive tech.

Let me put it this way.  Let’s assume that I have historically made a 20% margin on my products.  I get two proposals.  One is for an innovative enhancement on an existing product that will increase sales 10-20% at the current margin.  The other is for a newly engineered solution that will increase sales around 5% at a 10% margin.  With finite resources hich do I approve?

It doesn’t matter if in 5-10 years that the second option will over-take the market, stockholders want results this year, and CEOs want their job next year.  The new markets for the disruptive tech are always fuzzy and ill defined.

This is why startups are the “source” of truly disruptive technology.  They can start with new business structures, values, and processes, that can take advantage of the different margins.  They also get more excited about that $50K deal.

Do you think EMC, Oracle, IBM, or Open Text get exited about $50K deals?

Where Does that Leave Implementers?

In reality, waiting for another post.  Let’s just say life can be good and move on to the wrap-up…

Is Pie Nuts?

While an in-depth study would be required to answer that question, not to mention my forced participation, I’m really talking about selling out to the concept.

Did I read the book, proclaim it as genius, and then seek to fit the world into the model proposed by Christensen?  Not at all.

I’ve been seeing this for a while.  Then this past Spring, I was talking about my observations about what I was seeing in the industry with some others and I was asked if I had read a couple of books.  One was Christensen’s book.  A month later, we were talking again and the book came up a second time, so I went and bought it to read.

What the book did was make me realize that what was happening was actually normal.  This happens in lots of different industries.  It is just harder to determine what qualifies as a disruptive technology in the IT field.  As computers disrupted microfiche in Content Management, the Internet is giving birth to the cloud, which is beginning to disrupt traditional data-center-based enterprise apps, like Content Management.

The best thing is that I realized that this isn’t happening because there are bad executives or managers at the established Content Management vendors, but because of the opposite.  Back to that hypothetical investment question.  What good manager would pick the investment that will increase sales by double digits?

In many ways, the established vendors are trapped by their own success.  There are ways out, but there is no set formula, I may not have the right answers, and I’ve rambled enough for now.  More later.

Flame on….

Think about it, why is a company in business?  Yes, to make money, but that goal will only get you so far, just ask the gnomes.  You have to have something to offer and the ability to convince your customers that you can deliver and still be around in the future.

So in order to inspire your employees and your customers, you create a Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG).  For example, maybe you want to create the market leading ECM solution.  Ten years ago, that was a challenge.  No one company had all the capabilities in house and the leadership of the market was in flux.  Now, to hit the same goal, you just take aim at the big boys and go forward.

But what does that really get you?  Are you leading or just following the trail already blazed?

What Do You Give the Person that Have Everything?

Out there in the greater US, there was a newspaper organization that set an impressive BHAG in the 90s.  They wanted to own advertising in their market.  For a large market, that is a heck of a goal, especially with the advent of more national sources moving into the region.

Well, a funny thing happened, they achieved their goal.  It was a most impressive achievement.  The question then became, “What now?”

That is a dilemma that companies face when they become successful, how do you define the next step?  Trying to maintain leadership for the sake of maintaining leadership will only leave you reacting to the competition.  That very process cedes the leadership position to other companies.

If you don’t have a destination, how can you lead anyone anywhere?

What is Next for the ECM Guys?

So the question is, what is next for the large ECM vendors?  They have big honking platforms that can do everything (if you know where to look) and are constantly comparing themselves to each other.

At the same time, they are flirting with Microsoft because they see a product and a company that may not have a vision for the future, but does have a vision for the knowledge worker’s desktop of today.  They are flirting because they are hoping to buy time for SharePoint to become the next Lotus Notes and collapse under its own weight, or become inspired to be the next big thing.

The future is closer than you think.  The industry needs a vision, something to aim for collectively.  This is a call to the vendors to articulate a vision that we can identify with and see progress against.

This is a question for all of the vendors and the industry as a whole.  If you think that any company in the industry is immune from what I am saying here, then share.

People need to know.

After all, if you don’t know what you want to be in 5-10 years that is more than what you are now, are you a company in which I want to invest my company’s future?

Not a rhetorical question.

A Starting Point

We have talked to death about what ECM means.  We are pretty much working on the nitty-gritty details now.  We all know the WHAT.  It is time to look at the HOW.

How should people be interacting with their content in 5-10 years?  We know there will be more content, so let the engineers keep working.  The key is how will workers interact?

I’m telling you that we’ll be using our smart phones and tablets more.  We’ll be wireless and not always on our network.  That is obvious.

Forget the “cloud” and all the hype.  If a vision depends upon a cloud, that is pandering.  The cloud is a tool, a platform.  A vision may leverage the cloud, but it shouldn’t be central.

I wrote about Omnipresent Content Management (OCM) a while back.  The term is a little pretentious, but it had the virtue of being new, unclaimed, and applicable.  We might not be there in 10 years, but pick a point along the way.

The ECM vendors need to think about how to achieve that vision, or create their own vision that has power and evokes a new way of solving problems.  I listed three things, Storage, Identity Management, and Tagging as things needed for that future.  The middle item will not go away, the others will change as the future and visions evolve.

Pick a vision.

Define the vision clearly.

Map a path towards achieving that vision.

Share the vision.

After all of that, start work.  Don’t worry if we are following you.  If it is a good vision, and we believe you can get us there, we’ll follow.

Just lead for a change.

[Note: I said it in the post, this applies to all the vendors.  I'm not just saying that.  Right now, the grass doesn't look greener on the other side.]

Well not in Forrester’s world.  Only one new vendor (HP) was added and a few were cut, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

The 2009 Wave

Thanks to Oracle (again), you can look at the Q4 2009Forrester Wave for ECM Suites in detail. For those with less patience, here is a copy of the wave…

Before we talk about the individual vendors, let’s talk about the low number of vendors.  If you look at the 2007 report, many vendors are gone. A couple were acquired (Interwoven and Vignette) and some aren’t what I would call ECM (SAP and Xerox) vendors anyway.

The question is, where is Autonomy?  They bought Interwoven and weren’t new to the content space.  They aren’t mentioned anywhere.  Nuxeo got a mention as one of the two open-source vendors in the “reduced footprint” category.  The SaaS focused SpringCM (under “reduced footprint”) and emerging Laserfiche (under “process-focused” and “SMB”) both got a nod as well.

All of those got placed on the Quadrant, as did SAP and Xerox.  I wouldn’t be upset, except I like how Forrester structures the wave more than Gartner’s MQ.  I want to see more vendors in here.

Breaking it Down

Let’s look at some of the vendors…

• Alfresco: Forrester thinks they are losing ground.  They didn’t say as much, but last time they were on the verge of making the Strong Contender  classification.  Now they are just strongly a Contender.  I understand raising the bar as the market evolves, but Alfresco hasn’t been sitting on its laurels.  They lost a lot ground in Strategy according to Forrester. As for the Current Offering, looks like the increased focus on integration in this Wave hurt Alfresco.
• HP: Welcome to the Wave.  Still the only major vendor that I haven’t heard connected to CMIS in any way.  I’ve even heard that Hyland is working on it.  Forrester has noticed and made note.
• Microsoft: Love the realism.  There are gaps, but less this time around than two years ago.  Microsoft  has a vision.  When 2010 comes out, they should push their way into the Leaders.
• Open Text: Getting hit on their Strategy.  Constant acquisition of the competition can do that.  Getting things integrated, as always, remains their biggest hurdle.
• EMC: Not much to say, except they got dinged for their poor WCM.  This is a growing trend.
• IBM/Oracle: Feel the love, especially with IBM.

To be honest, nothing surprising, just reinforcing.  I like how Forrester has the Leaders spread a little and how getting closer to the upper-right corner is rewarded.  You need a strong Strategy and solid Offering to get rated well.  Market Presence is measured by the size of the dot.  It just makes a lot more sense to me.

You know what is missing this year?  The score weighting.  Smart move as I trashed it last year and it gives people something extra when they pay for the full details.

Overall, the scoring had nothing massively off, though I’m not sure why Alfresco took so many hits.  The next couple of years is going to be critical for Alfresco as they start to hit middle-age and strive to be more.

Personally, I think EMC (Documentum) and IBM (FileNet) are Niche Players in the WCM world at best.  Why?  Their WCM products sell into a very specific niche, those companies that already have, or are making, investments in their EMC or IBM platforms. If you know of either product winning a pure WCM bid, let me know.

Well, no comments on them winning a bid.  Doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, just means that people that know of such wins didn’t read the post or care to comment. My point still is that EMC’s, and IBM’s, WCM offering is not the “Challenger” as the MQ seems to suggest.

Let’s dig in a little.

In the Challenger’s Corner We Have…

…EMC, IBM, and Microsoft.  I’ve commented before on SharePoint’s WCM “capabilities” so there is no need to revisit them here.  SharePoint 2010 promises some upgrades to those capabilities, but we’ll just have to wait and see.  As for IBM, they are in the same boat as EMC, so much of this applies to them as well.

Now we have EMC.  Of the “large” ECM players, they had the worst position in the MQ.  One could argue that IBM may have been a micron worse on the Completeness of Vision axis, but EMC is clearly below IBM on the Ability to Execute axis.  Given the inflation to execution from EMC being a large ECM vendor, I would argue that all of the Visionaries, with the possible exception of Clickability, are much better situated in the MQ as well.

The Vision is clearly lacking, or is it?  What Gartner calls Vision includes many factors, including innovation.  It is hard to innovate with a long product release cycle that is the norm for ECM systems.  You develop an idea, pitch it, and it gets approved for the next release, in 9 months.

I’m making a timeline up here, but the point is that there could be a lot of innovation going on at EMC, it just takes too long to get to market.  By the time the new features are finally passed off to the sales and marketing folks, they are last years hot items.

There will be a two year difference between 6.5 and 7.0.  That is fine from an ECM perspective, and preferred by my clients.  From an Internet perspective, that is a lifetime.  How can the WCM product compete?

Open Source the Interface

Maybe EMC should open-source the user interface for their WCM product.  I’m not saying that they should scratch their development team.  I’m just saying that they should enlist the community to help them out.  It might not be a large community to start, but it would accomplish a couple of things:

• Allows for clients to add that one little feature that seems to be missing.
• Avoids the 2-year delay by freeing it from the standard release cycle.  There could still be an officially branded release, but that could be focused on back-end functionality and a tested front-end version.

EMC can still make money with the back-end and through maintenance.  In a few years, this interface could back onto the Documentum platform using CMIS, and then be used to front other systems, leading to more revenue streams.

Will this work?  No idea.  I can tell you that the Documentum WCM product line is not working now.  It is, at best, a checkbox feature for the ECM “suite”.  When I talk to the WCM community, EMC never comes up.  Not once.  Even by accident or as a joke.  It is that far out of the community’s mind set.

EMC needs to figure out what they want to do, even if it just to be content with where they are.  Not inspiring, but it would be refreshingly honest.

Jon Marks did a good job of comparing Gartner’s and Forrester’s latest rankings and highlights how a “Niche Player” may be worth considering. CMS Watch has stronger words on the topic, talking about some of the differences between their methodology and Gartner’s.

I have a few of my own thoughts to add into the fray…

Five Years? Really?

Did you know that to be included, you have to be in business for five years and span two continents? I’m thinking that means no Drupal (via Acquia) for the next 3-4 years, depending on when they start the clock. Drupal is widely considered to be one of the leading open source WCM products (simply called CMS by the OSS WCM community) out there.

Janus Boye has Drupal on his 10 product shortlist. When talking to Tony Byrne about what open source WCM systems I should look at for a project, Drupal was one of few he listed off the top of his head. I didn’t pay for any of that information, but neither did Drupal.

Did anyone notice that Alfresco didn’t make the cut? They were in the 2008 Magic Quadrant for ECM, but they don’t qualify here? I remember being pretty excited last year when they made it. We thought there was hope for fair and balanced evaluations on day. That hope may have been smashed.

Alfresco has the needed revenue to qualify, but they missed out. Why? They were founded in 2005, four years ago!  If a company is big enough, and stable enough, to be an qualified ECM vendor, don’t you think they can make the WCM cut?  Gartner says in the MQ that Alfresco will likely to be one of the first such providers to meet all inclusion criteria in the medium term.

I’d love to know the source of this “5 year” limit. I wonder if it will creep into the ECM MQ later this year and remove Alfresco.

Ability to Execute

One whole axis is devoted to the ability to execute.  This is where open source vendors get destroyed and commercial vendors get unfairly rewarded.  Some of the factors that go into this axis are:

• Overall Viability: The bigger the company, the better they will score. This is all about the financial health and ongoing financial investment into the product.  Large companies with wide product lines benefit, like Microsoft, Oracle, EMC, and IBM.
• Sales Execution/Pricing: Aside from the obvious, the level of interest from Gartner clients is included in this metric. So if a client likes your vendor list, you reward the vendors? Maybe they should take a client not liking the list as a chance to educate.
• Customer Experience: This comes from references provided by the vendor and Gartner clients. If I help a customer deploy Drupal, and they love it, there is no reference unless it is Acquia’s Drupal build.
• Operations: The larger more experienced companies will do well here, just like the Overall Viability option.

Open Source products don’t score as they should because the community is not taken into account. Alfresco and Acquia employees don’t do all of the product development for Alfresco and Drupal.  They don’t provide all of the support.  If you use the community versions of those products, you still have a vast network of support through the community.  The sum of the whole needs to be taken into account.

Let’s not forget about partners. Solid partners can easily make-up the gaps that Gartner finds in open source software.  A solid partner community gives the financial stability and operational support that is looked for by Gartner.

The Magic Quadrant is about the company and the product.  It needs to be about the company/community and the product.  The evaluation factors that discriminate against open source are factors that I would care about if I was trying to determine which WCM vendors with which to invest money.  They aren’t factors that I need to know if I am trying to determine if I can implement a particular WCM system.

Personally, I think EMC (Documentum) and IBM (FileNet) are Niche Players in the WCM world at best.  Why?  Their WCM products sell into a very specific niche, those companies that already have, or are making, investments in their EMC or IBM platforms. If you know of either product winning a pure WCM bid, let me know. I’ll have more on this train of thought in another post.

• We are implementing the Web Service binding for CMIS. While REST would be better for what we are doing, it was felt that the Web Services binding would be easier for the development team to churn out.
• As a result of that, the participating vendors are Alfresco, EMC, IBM, and Nuxeo. Microsoft wanted to participate was not sure that their Web Services binding would be complete in time.
• Each vendor will have a two issues worth of articles from AIIM’s bi-monthly publication, Infonomics.  In addition, each vendor is welcome to add their own white papers and collateral to the system.
• Users will search on metadata and/or full text. All searches will be round-robin sorted so that each repository has multiple hits on the first page, assuming that they have any content that meets the criteria.
• The system is being developed in .NET because we were able to identify a free hosting server that could support the effort.
• We, including myself, are going to be at the Expo on April 2nd to talk about it. I’ll share the exact time when I have it.

That is about it. I’ll be working and trying to get a basic search up this week. The second step will be performing this in a federated manner against multiple repositories.

I’ll share the journey as it unfolds. Until then, here is a modified version of the metadata model:

Object: AIIMContent

* Each Vendor will have the same value for all content in their repository.  It will clearly identify the vendor and may identify any other repository product information. For example, in my development Documentum repository, I’ve set this to “EMC Documentum”. Of course, EMC may actually us a different value if they desire.

Well, Microsoft appears to be doing things right so far.  In addition to showing a desire to participate in the AIIM effort (along with EMC, Alfresco, IBM, and Nuxeo), they hosted the first OASIS CMIS Technical Committee meeting out in Redmond, WA.  More important than either of those actions is the implications of this MSDN article, Integrating External Document Repositories with SharePoint Server 2007.

What Did Microsoft Do?

From all appearances, they created a way to consume some CMIS services within a specialized Document Library, called an External Library.  They used a Microsoft Silverlight application for the custom Web Part interface.  Why Silverlight?  I suspect it was to promote two technologies at the same time.

For the external repository, they created a custom repository consisting of just a simple directory structure with XML files to store document metadata and repository specific information.  In front of that, they implemented four of the CMIS services: repository, navigation, object, and versioning.  This is in no way a CMIS compliant implementation, lacking all the services and the REST implementation, but it is sufficient enough to demonstrate the capabilities, and benefits, of SharePoint working with an external repository.

Does this answer the question of how best to integrate Documentum and SharePoint?  No. It does show how SharePoint can act as a Federated front-end and expose existing content into SharePoint.  This approach allows for a single SharePoint integration point, supported by Microsoft, that will allow users to interact with content from multiple external repositories.  That is all I ask from Microsoft at this point as that is the one of the strongest use cases for SharePoint and CMIS.

There is still a long way to go though.  Getting the authentication and authorization mapped properly is not addressed, but is recognized as a weakness.  They mention a few ways to address this as well.  I don’t consider it an oversight as this is more of a practical proof-of-concept than a finished product.  With CMIS only at version 0.5, I’m not overly concerned at this time.

If you want to play with the project, you can grab the code from Microsoft.  As Shawn Shell at CMS Watch indicates in his post, Making it Real, there is a lot to dive into here, and even more to watch for down the road.  This implementation may not be how things are done when the final implementation is released, but it does show some of the current thinking.

Meanwhile, In Redmond

As mentioned above, the OASIS CMIS Technical Committee met in Redmond in the latter part of January, and Microsoft hosted.  According to John Newton, who gives a nice write-up of the 3-day event, this is not the first CMIS event that they have hosted.  The event was well attended.  Attending companies/organizations include:

• AIIM (by phone)
• Alfesco
• Day Software
• EMC…David Choy is the chair of the committee
• Exalead
• Greenbytes
• IBM…Al Brown is the secretary for the bindings
• Microsoft…Ethan Gur-esh is the secretary for the data model
• Nuxeo
• Open Text
• Oracle
• SAP…Presented the security proposal

From John’s account, which you should read, this was a very productive event and I am enthused by the progress.  I look forward to hearing more about the future meetings.  It looks like the standard is about a year away from finalization, but that is more determined by the process for comment than any real hurdles at this point.  I just hope I didn’t just jinx it.

One sentence that caught my eye, in a non-CMIS way, was, OpenText presented hierarchical properties.  I think that comes from the old Docs Open product that they acquired from Hummingbird.  It was a great feature and one that I wish I could implement effectively in other systems.  DOCS Open is the first Document Management system I ever implemented.  I even worked as a consultant for Hummingbird back in the day.

Ah, memories.

Here’s to Microsoft, EMC, Alfresco, and the rest of the committee giving us some good ones.

[Edit: The meeting notes are online in PDF format.]

Maybe I should request a parade on my first day of work the next time I decide to start interviewing for a job.

In the midst of all this, on Wednesday evening I had quite an enjoyable evening at the monthly Web Content Mavens event here in DC.  It was, as always, a fun time talking to various people about their challenges implementing WCM and ECM systems.  I even ran into a few Documentum people.  The highlight of the night was listening to, and talking with, Tony Byrne, founder of CMS Watch.

I like Tony, and not just because he has bought me a beverage or two in the past.  Tony doesn’t mince words.  He tells his honest opinion in his drive to educate people on the world of ECM.  Previously, he had spoken to the Mavens on Social Media, but tonight was focused on the Web Content Management (WCM) marketplace as it stands right now.

Picking on the Big Guys

Tony is an equal opportunity critic.  After giving a quick breakdown of the market players, he talked briefly about the big WCM players, including EMC.  He didn’t focus on many of the positive things, but you can go to their individual web sites for that information.

• EMC: Documentum’s WCM product has suffered for years from their lack of understanding of the WCM market.  I think they are improving and have some nice features for Web 2.0 support, but time will tell.  I have never been really impressed by the system in the past.
• Interwoven: They deliver great features but at their core is some really old technology.
• Vignette: A decent solution that I have used a few times.  I see them entering a death spiral now though.  Tony described them as that really old guy on life support that has enough money to live forever.  Of course, they just may get bought at the rate that their stock price is dropping.
• IBM: Tony doesn’t think that IBM has any faith in their solution, Lotus WCM.  To be honest with you, I think understanding anything IBM does in the ECM space is a challenge and the effort may not even be worthwhile.
• Open Text: Tony’s discussion about RedDot was one of the most entertaining parts of the evening. He likened Open Text’s products to the Brady Bunch, with RedDot being the surly kid in the basement.  It is as if they don’t know what to do with them.  Tony wouldn’t be surprised if they bought a WCM vendor.  Considering their track record, I wouldn’t surprised if they bought one or two with a social media company thrown in for good measure.
• Microsoft:  SharePoint???  Tony calls it a mid-market solution and an after-thought.  I’m there with him.

To be fair, Tony believes that every solution is perfect for some organization.  He even said later that years from now, Vignette will still be out there, regardless of what this years brings for them.  It isn’t about which WCM system is the best overall, but the one that is right for YOU.  When Tony points out a flaw in a product, that doesn’t mean that it is a bad product or that there are no happy customers.  It just means that it isn’t perfect.

Of course, there is always the question of how long a system has to go to become perfect, but that is something for another day.

What WCM Needs to be Doing and What It Sucks At

This is a quick little list of things that WCM systems need to be doing these days.  If your system isn’t doing this, they are falling behind.

• Friendly URLs: This doesn’t mean short, thought it doesn’t rule it out.  This means readable.  The names should be automatically generated base upon properties.
• Repository Search: This is a no-brainer to me, but not to all of the smaller vendors.  This isn’t just full-text, but meta-data as well, if not primarily.
• Dependency Tracking: If you change one component of a website, how widespread is the change?  What is the impact?  What will it look like?
• Better System Management: Need to be able to effectively manage the WCM system.  This doesn’t mean 10 million options.  Over-engineering can be just as bad if users can’t use the system.
• Better Management Metrics: Reports should tell you how the system is being used.  The data is usually there, but it should be surfaced for the non-IT people.

The more entertaining list was what most vendors still suck at.  One is the user interface.  Tony believes the interface should be configurable.  Nobody is going to design a system that will work for the Web people at a bank, a non-profit, and a retail chain.  They think differently and being able to modify the UI to fit how the users think is useful.  Tony then got into a point that I think is valid, but maybe a little over stressed judging by the crowd’s reaction.  Java and the newer Flex UI’s are useful and powerful.  They are also locked-down and don’t have all of the accessibility you want in a WCM system.  Tony doesn’t like them for that reason.

I’m torn on the UI question.  I like the look of some of the Flex interfaces.  Of course, I’ve suffered through a few bad interfaces over the years and I’ve probably set the bar far too low.  I’m torn on the issue at this point, so chime in if you have an opinion.

Open Source and Cannibalization

These are two random things that were discussed that I wanted to share as they really made me think.

Tony spent a fair amount of time on the question of Open Source.  He said some nice things as a whole.  He commented that it isn’t free, just a different business model.  In fact, he has observed that the Open Source products are starting to have the same spectrum of vendors/products as their commercial counterparts.  Tony thinks that soon that Open Source will cease to be its own category in the WCM world, if not already.

With money getting tighter this year from this recession thing that people are talking about, Vendors are looking to tighten their belts.  Tony thinks that the WCM space will have a decent year.  I think that all ECM solutions should weather things well as the ROI, at least the perceived ones, are well discussed.  Unfortunately, our opinions on this don’t matter as we aren’t the vendors, or stockholders, that want better balance sheets.  Tony predicts that the WCM vendors (and through extrapolation, most IT vendors) will start to cannibalize their partner channel.

What does that mean?

It means that they may try and do more of the services themselves.  This may mean cutting the partners out of the process.  It may also mean that they will start hiring good consultants, even the ones their partner’s payroll.  It won’t apply to all vendors, but it bears watching so nobody is taken by surprise.

Turns out that HP has decided to buy their way into the market, but only with a single product, Tower Software. Like EMC, HP is looking to broaden their Information Management offering by adding Records Management and eDiscovery. If that is all they were looking to add, then buy Tower was a great move. I have always heard good things about their software for those purposes, though I always had doubts as to their complete ECM capability.

Alan Pelz-Sharpe makes the same assessment and adds some more useful insight. However, I think that HP’s competition for comparison is more EMC than IBM. EMC and HP are both from the world of hardware, acquiring Information Management related software to manage all of the data sitting on their hardware.

Alan states that they still need a better search component. Welcome to the world of EMC. Will EMC or HP add it first? This is a two-stage race. The first one to buy has more selection. However, the integration of said software is the second-stage. Integration is important and not to be over-looked. Just ask Microsoft.

What is Next?

The Big Men then enter a fun debate on the merits of the acquisition. I think that HP’s acquisition actually makes things harder to figure out. I can’t see HP buying any other ECM vendor, unless they are looking for a place to spend R&D money. Multiple solutions make life complicated. Just as IBM and OpenText.

The thing to consider in future acquisitions for HP is Tower’s architecture. They are heavy into Microsoft technologies. This isn’t a bad thing, unless you happen to be working for an anti-Microsoft IT shop. What this does do is lean future acquisitions to platforms that are, at a minimum, well tested on Microsoft.

That leaves OpenText. They can make it on their own, but they need to actually consolidate things if they are going to pull things out. After acquiring IXOS, Hummingbird, RedDot, and Artesia, putting everything into one place still isn’t easy. If I had to pick a buyer, it would be NetApp or Microsoft.

To be honest, I wouldn’t want to acquire OpenText if everything wasn’t consolidated. Of course if I bought them for 3 of their platforms, sold one off on its own, and just provided a migration path for the one that was left, that might work. Don’t you think that Artesia and RedDot would each make a nice CEVA?

I have come back to this topic through multiple avenues. One is the concept of Invisible ECM from Billy and crew over at Oracle. It resonated very strongly with my previous discussions on Transparent ECM. We can debate terminology later, but what is important now is the shared concept.

A second avenue comes from my need to explain where ECM is going, ECM 2.0, in a simple and concise way. I can explain it and speak passionately on the topic. The need to get the concept out there in one breath has become more important as I talk to more people.

I have developed a proposed definition for your consideration. I would love feedback. I will approve all constructive comments for sharing, though I may not respond until a subsequent post. I’ll throw it out there and then discuss it briefly. Remember, I want this definition to have a soul.

Enterprise Content Management is the empowerment of all content within an organization. This is accomplished through the centralized management of content, allowing for people and systems to access and manage content from within any business context using platform agnostic standards.

Enterprise Means Everything Managed Together

The Enterprise in ECM started as being able to support various Content Applications throughout the organization with the same tool. This led to WCM, RM, DAM, and Collaboration applications all being developed or acquired by each major vendor.

The growing problem now is using content in applications not provided by the ECM vendors. These are applications that I have previously referred to as Content Enabled Applications, but Gartner and others refer to as Content-Enabled Vertical Applications, or CEVAs. (Gartner’s term pre-dates mine so they win the terminology battle.)

For example, documents in a case management system (a solid example of a CEVA) should be retained in a central repository. From here, records management policies and archival rules can be systematically applied.

Traveling the Road to ECM 2.0

When ECM was first coined, you would have been hard pressed to find a vendor that could actually deliver on the definition. The biggest hurdle these days is finding a proper project manager and plan that leads to a successful ECM implementation. People often blame the vendor, but usually it is the integrator, or lack thereof, that dooms an ECM project.

ECM 2.0 tries to make that easier. It’s very nature is to support other applications. Using supported standards, the ECM system is plugged into the back of a CEVA. If needed, a WCM or collaboration solution (RedDot and SharePoint respectively) can be plugged in as well. Organizations shouldn’t have to use the Content Applications from their ECM platform vendor. There are advantages to doing so, but it shouldn’t be required of the organizations.

Delivering an ECM 2.0 platform is a tall order. It isn’t just about scaling for volume or handling all types of content. Those things are important, but not what separates old ECM from new ECM. What is different is the way the ECM platform acts as a platform supporting the Enterprise. To get there, at least two things need to happen.

1. A standard for the ECM world needs to be set and implemented: Like ODBC and JDBC with databases, ECM systems need a standard interface. In today’s world, a SOA standard makes the most sense as it would loosely couple the systems together. If I had to pick a technology, I would go with something built on Web Services, but mostly because so many ECM vendors allow communications in that manner.
2. ECM Platforms need to leverage external user stores for authentication and security: A classic example of this is as follows…I have a Word document in SharePoint. It has a set of access rights assigned to it which is mirrored in the ECM system. When the security is changed in one place, it needs to automatically change in the other. All the users and groups that exist in one system should exist in all systems. Ideally, there is only one instance of the access control lists and users that both systems leverage.

This isn’t going to happen over night. I know several organizations, in different verticals, that are facing the problems that ECM 2.0 addresses now. Their solutions are functional, but far from ideal. They are locking themselves into a set of technology and putting themselves into a position where they cannot upgrade one piece without upgrading the whole.

The requirements are forming in the heads of the users. The first vendors that get there with a robust solution will flourish. I suspect that at least one of IBM, Oracle, or EMC will fail to deliver in time and will drop from the top three. The question is, who will rise up to take the vacated spot?

Navigating EMC.com

Well, navigation is okay. A lot of content has to be searched for now though. User Groups are hidden away. I only found them because I knew what to search for on the site. The pages are also still boasting the old look-and-feel.

I also can’t seem to consistently get to Mark Lewis’s blog since the change either. I hang quite a bit. I can only find the link on the Site Map (or in my personal links). On the page listing the blogs is a link to an article he has written on Information 2.0 (which may get a post later). On the same page though, there is a link to the neglected blog of Cornelia Davis. It hasn’t been updated in four months and the link is to a post five months back.

I will say that it is fairly simple to find product information, but that is as far as I am willing to concede.

EMC Competes Against Who?

Here is where I really get disappointed. There is no vision for Enterprise Content Management. There are products, but any vision seems missing. There are things on the overall vision of EMC on their new Leadership and Innovation page. You can’t get to all of the articles without mining for them. This is very frustrating. I want to work with a Leader in ECM and Information Management, not someone that appears to just have it listed.

Let’s take IBM. With one click, I got to their Information Management page which tells me what they are doing in Information Management. One more click and I’m on their ECM page, complete with vision, sub-solutions, and just about anything else you might want to learn about IBM and ECM.

I know that EMC has one vision for Enterprise Content Management, or at least they did. I’ve seen it several times in the last year. This new design left it out. Are they going to depend on their sales guys to deliver the vision. Not a good idea without the online presence to back it up. I’m not calling out one company’s reps over another. I just know that after getting a spiel from a sales guy, I like to check facts and get more details online.

I’m sorry, but the site seems more targeted at people comparing EMC to Network Appliance (NetApp) than any of the vendors that the ECM world tracks.

eRoom and the Map of the Ancients

One surprise, eRoom is not that hard to find on the new site. You just have to know if you want Documentum’s Collaboration eRoom or eRoom product family. Really, the content overall is the same, just some context variables that mix it up. Shame that it is basically the same product as 3 years ago.

Actually, this was refreshing. If they gave it that much visibility, maybe they really are investing in it. I’m hoping to find out in the near future. I can tell you that I love that little product, as do people that are just getting to know it. It just needs some love. If it is getting the love, then that love should be broadcast.

“Nothing to See Here”

So Bex posted earlier today on this and said that from a Content Management perspective, it doesn’t mean much. I tend to agree with him. Though, to be fair, my first reaction when I heard was Oh f**k! After all, WebLogic has always been my favorite Application Server. It was easy to maintain, upgrade, use, and scaled well. Now I’m concerned about what may happen to it in the future.

Bex also didn’t see much synergy. Aside from the minor annoyance with the patents, Bex saw Oracle acquiring a competitor more than expanding their offerings. Luckily for me, I had another perspective hammer at me.

“The Sky is Falling”

So I had a little debate earlier about what this meant with a colleague. He thought that this was a problem for EMC. His view was that this was putting EMC behind both Oracle and IBM in the space due to a lack of middleware and personalization capabilities. I conceded that this did give the SOA story for both companies a greater edge.

He kept focusing on the Portal piece. Apparently, there is a lot of grabbing in the market for a more personalized, portal-like, solution. I think that this more of the SharePoint vision. That isn’t a bad vision if you can get all the pieces to work together and scale. Let’s not forget the ability to scale.

Life is more than good stories though. This deal also isn’t executed yet. We don’t have any good ECM SOA standard yet. Without that, nobody wins. It looks like Bex may be starting to see that as well.

The Report

In general, no real news in the rankings as compared to Gartner. No surprise there. Why rock the boat?

There are a few key things to note.

• The basic report gives the scores in each category. This is great. I can look and see how each platform did in an individual category. This allows me to look to see which product may be right for me.
• Alfresco is included and considered a credible contender. For a company as young as Alfresco, that isn’t bad. Heck, they got an analyst to even rank their product. That is noteworthy all by itself.
• Old versions. This isn’t their fault and is just a matter of timing. Next year, someone else will have a major release near the cutoff date and will benefit. If a product wasn’t released by April 2007, it wasn’t evaluated. This helps those with major releases around then, such as Alfresco with its release of 2.0 in February.
• Incorrect versions. Forrester does need to get a clue here. They say Documentum 5.3 was released in March 2007. THERE WAS NO RELEASE IN MARCH 2007! 5.3 SP4 was released in December 2006 and the core 5.3 was released in March 2005. I wonder about the accuracy of the other vendor release data.
• Vignette was the only one without a score of 5 under miscellaneous. They got a 3.68. No details in the copy that I have as to why. I can’t believe that everyone else got a 5. Did the analyst actually try and use all of the documentation and training, or did they just see if it existed? A bigger question is, “Who did Vignette piss off to not get a 5.00?” Maybe they got knocked on internationalization, but I just don’t see it.
• Note the relationship between Microsoft’s Strategy and their actual Offering.

Forrester, Brandy, and Platform Readiness

Forrester defines Platform Readiness as, Is the vendor’s core set of ECM capabilities part of a common platform, or does it consist of different, independent products? After looking at the scores for each vendor, I have to ask myself, What are they smoking? I mean, come on! Most of the major vendors got a 5.00 in this realm. Let’s break down three vendors quickly:

• EMC: Documentum Content Server and eRoom.
• IBM: FileNet, Content Manager, and Lotus Notes.
• OpenText: Livelink and Hummingbird (eDOCS).

I didn’t even break a sweat on that. Now, they evaluated the first product suite listed for each one. SHORT SIGHTED!!! If a vendor doesn’t have one platform for everything, then they should get docked. If they can’t merge the platforms, or don’t plan to do so, dock them on Product Strategy as well.

From what I can tell, Forrester had nice expensive dinners with each of the big vendors. Over brandy they decided to wear blinders when deciding what to evaluate. As far as I am concerned, this calls every score into question. If you are going to evaluate a vendor, then do so. If you are going to evaluate a product, then do that. Don’t do one and call it another.

For the record, I’m not saying that Gartner is any better. I didn’t see any breakdown of their scores, so they were spared this scrutiny.

[Edit: See the newer The Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Content Management, 2008 write-up.]

The latest version [This is the now old 2007 version] came out a couple weeks ago. There has been, and will continue to be, some criticism of the Gartner, Inc. methodology. For now, let’s set it aside and look focus on what the report says. While it may not cover all the vendors, and may not define “leader” in the same manner as others, the information inside can still prove useful.

A Quick Indictment

Before getting into the details, the leaders are called out:

Three of the market leaders — EMC, IBM and Oracle — are all going to market with similar messages around archiving, e-discovery and compliance. They are more reactive than proactive. As market leaders, they can, and should, be driving change in the market and forcing others to react. Content management is about more than just repositories. Organizations building overall content infrastructures or architectures need to address an expanding variety of content types across a continuum and must also deal with collaborative processes.

Sounds like they are trying to challenge the big guys to drive change. While EMC is starting to market more as infrastructure, they haven’t quite put all the pieces into place yet. I can’t speak in detail to the others, but the point carries. They have the ability to lead and they should do so. Now.

The Quadrant

So, what is all the fuss about?  Check the report to check out the graphic.

[Removed Graphic on 11/11/2008 at "request" of Gartner, Inc.]

• The only pure-play left in the Leaders Quadrant is Open Text. As such, they should us the lack of an outside agenda to take a truly leadership role in the ECM marketplace. However, they have lots of similar products through acquisitions over the years, Hummingbird being the latest. This overlap shows a market-share that is spread across competing products. Fixing this problem is probably a first step before being able to take a leadership position as a thought leader.
• IBM has the “best” spot an admirable location in the report. However, many of their products are loosely coupled. They also have two repositories in FileNet and the DB2 Content Manager. They seem to understand how SOA is important, and they have everything that they need. Can they put it all together?
• EMC has none of the concerns listed above. Their problems stem from either components lagging the marketplace in features (WCM) or not gaining mind-share in the market (BPM). The other concern is how the ownership of the Documentum product by EMC, a hardware vendor, is impacting the focus. I’ve expressed concern in the past with talking with others, but recent developments have had me lean back to hopeful.
• Oracle is still absorbing Stellent. They bear watching. Stellent has always seemed to lead the technical advance, but can it maintain that advance while it becomes stronger with Oracle’s backbone. Is applying that backbone the right approach?
• Microsoft is listed because, well, they are Microsoft. However, SharePoint appears to have been docked on their “ability to execute” (lack of comparable scalability and features). Even when you read the Cautions, you wonder why they are included when they don’t seem to have all the ECM components. Next year, if we don’t start seeing some of the more established and successful open-source vendors, I’m crying foul.

IBM Press (Various authors)2006

The time came for me to read-up on SOA in order to further develop my concepts of how Enterprise Content Management should fit within the Enterprise. So I starting looking for some books on the topic. A large majority of the recommended books were hundreds of pages long, not exactly easy reading for the Metro. I researched and picked SOA Compass from IBM Press.

The book is written by a collection of authors pulling on the wealth of information on the developerWorks website and from practical experience in the real world. The experience shows, as does the developer background. I quickly realized that this was not going to be easy reading and I was quite glad that I had a solid developer foundation to pull upon.

Throughout the course of the book, the authors expound on the various characteristics of a SOA environment. However it was lacking any uniformity in the examples given. In addition, it was heavy on mentioning IBM products, such as Tivoli. At times I almost felt I was reading a marketing brochure. Perhaps I was. I think that is the major flaw in this book. Listing the features of a product that solves a problem does not truly explain how to address the problem.

I did gain a new appreciation for experts in SOA. The sheer number of Web Services standards became daunting after a while. I don’t think that WS-* accurately conveys the number. I can even see why some people strongly dislike WS-*. There is a lot to it and that is even before you add any standard definitions on top of it.

Now for the positives, and there are quite a few. They did manage to cover quite a bit of ground and I kept seeing tidbits that I had read elsewhere over the past few months. I also discovered why many of those other books were so long. Once you realize that a simple list of characteristics isn’t going to cut it, you are left with either generating 600+ pages of text (as opposed to 219, including the very nice glossary), or writing sections that leave you exposed to several terms, but grasping at times for more detail.

Ok, so maybe that didn’t come out as positive as I planned. Overall, it was a good book. It was quite informative and provides frequent links to locations to learn those missing details. Most of those links are on the IBM website, but that is understandable given the Authors all work for IBM.

The best part of the book was Chapter 10 when they introduced some Case Studies. Up to this point, Web Services was presented as the end-all, be-all for SOA. That hadn’t been stated, but that was the implication. The first case eliminated that myth. The real life examples helped highlight the goals of a SOA. If they had taken one of the case studies and discussed in each section how the different SOA aspects were addressed in that solution, I think the book would have been dramatically better and more enlightening.

I did accomplish my goal from reading the book. I have a broader picture of SOA and how best to try and fit ECM into the bigger picture of the complete Enterprise Architecture. Once I get a chance to compose my thoughts in more detail, I think I am ready to start making the case for a new, SOA-based, ECM standard.