Well, this week I participated in the SharePoint Symposium 2010 as part of KM World.  Specifically I was part of the panel discussing the question of whether or not you can use SharePoint for WCM.

I’ll give a simple answer at the bottom, but I’m going to share the thoughts and opinions that were shared by others and myself.

Setting the Baseline…

My fellow panelists were Richard Harbridge and Shannon Ryan.  We were the second pro/con discussion of the day, so we had a few helpful points made prior to our session (notes below).  We each had about 8 minutes to make our point before a general discussion

Richard went first.  He is a full-fledge Microsoft junkie.  That said, he isn’t blind to the flaws of SharePoint.  Richard was well prepared and summed his argument up by saying that if it is a large and complex website, and you are part of the Microsoft ecosystem, then go for it.

During his talk, Richard did say that using SharePoint 2007 for WCM was a no-go.  That is an important point to remember. [Note: Since posting, Richard has posted his slides. They are good, but are much better when Richard presents them.]

Shannon spoke, focusing on the features you would be looking for in your website.  With his slides destroyed by a bowl of food, he talked us through his points.  Shannon’s focus was definitely on the website purpose before technology, though he did not neglect the technology angle.  He dismissed the internationalization features of SharePoint, saying that they required too much work for something that was out-of-the-box with other products.

Shannon concluded that if you had a large website with a lot of “static” content, it might be a good fit.  He also said that if you were a true-blood Microsoft shop, it might also be an option.

My Discussion

I was invited to present the Con argument, which wasn’t hard to make.  I started with the definition of SharePoint taken from Microsoft’s own SharePoint home page.  Take a gander:

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 makes it easier for people to work together. Using SharePoint 2010, your people can set up Web sites to share information with others, manage documents from start to finish, and publish reports to help everyone make better decisions.

- November 16, 2010

You’ll notice that the focus seems to be collaboration.  My first point really was taking a look at what SharePoint was designed to accomplish.  It does a fair job at collaboration and tends to be good enough for a large number of people.

The problem is that SharePoint wasn’t designed to be a WCM system.  You can use it as such, but that doesn’t make it a WCM.  I can hammer a nail into a board with a wrench, but it doesn’t make that wrench a hammer and doesn’t mean that it will work  well for that purpose.

I then discussed the changes from 2007 to 2010.  Starting from the basis that 2007 didn’t do WCM well, I focused on the improvements that had been made.  Most of the core infrastructure issues that I discussed in my previous post still apply.  What is easier is creating content.  Great! I can create and modify content easier which will increase the headache of keeping the website up-to-date in a managed fashion.

Let’s not forget video.  SharePoint can stream it, but if you want to do anything with that video aside from storing and streaming, start looking for another product.

My favorite argument is the Browser question.  SharePoint now supports Firefox.  Great, but be sure you use it on a Windows platform because it isn’t fully supported for SharePoint on other operating systems.  If you want to access SharePoint from other platforms, now you can use Safari, but it doesn’t come with full functionality.

So I am going to have a public website that doesn’t support all of the browsers that my users might have?  Where is the Chrome support?  Where is support for the next cool browser that will likely be released before SP2013 is released?  That doesn’t sound appealing.

I then went into the whole is it a WCM or a Website Management System (complete with WordPress reference)?  When you get down to it, SP is more of a portal product.  I can have a website running on a portal, but that doesn’t make it a Web CMS.  There is nothing wrong with not being a Web CMS, but that was the key question in the debate.

I then warned against making a lot of customizations because they might have to be all re-done with the next SharePoint release.  While on that topic, I mentioned that we were probably three years away from the next major release.  How outdated will SharePoint look-and-feel at the end of that time?

The long release cycle is a common problem with large platform vendors.  The web is releasing new things every few months.  The multi-year release cycle just isn’t going to cut it in the world of Web Platforms.

My closing thought….Just Because You Can Doesn’t Mean You Should.

Other Opinions

During and before the session, many great thoughts were shared.  Most of these thoughts are from the SharePoint Pros and Cons session with Tony Byrne and Rob Koplowitz.  The rest are here because I didn’t remember who said them and don’t want to get anyone in trouble.

• Most of those really large corporate websites running on SharePoint had Microsoft help build them.  If you aren’t really large with lots of money and visibility, Microsoft isn’t going to be helping you.
• WCM should be driven by marketing.  SharePoint is typically run by IT and is too technical to not have IT playing an essential role. (My random thought)
• SharePoint competes with different players in different markets, but there is no one solution that is a direct competitor to SharePoint.
• SharePoint’s best fit is file-oriented collaboration.  Integration with Office on Windows makes it very useful. (Tony Byrne thought)
• Using SP just for workspaces is overkill, take advantage of other aspects in order gain full value of investment in time and money.
• SharePoint is marketed to Business as product, IT and channel partners as a platform.
• For every $1 for licenses, you will likely spend $6-9 in services (IT and business services), similar to portal ratios.  (My experience shows that ECM tends to be a $2-3 ratio and specialized collaboration tends to be $1-2).
• SharePoint has a complex interface versus pure collaboration tools.  Training is needed.
• When asked SharePoint was weak in: WCM, DAM, and Social Computing
• The 3 year update cycle limits innovation.  On the flip side, do you want to have significant upgrades to core business systems every 6 months?
• Open Text has done the best co-existing with SP, all larger traditional vendors are doing okay, Oracle, IBM, EMC.
• “Cost, usability, and functionality” are reasons people aren’t using SP for external sites. (not credited on purpose, but it wasn’t me)

It was a fun session and a great event.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, the conclusion wasn’t very positive.  In a later session, Shawn Shell said very forceful and succinct manner, No (but in better terms).

So until 2013, use SharePoint for what it does best, collaboration and as a platform for .NET apps.  Remember, it is a very useful tool and is “Good enough” for most people and problems.  Just know its limits and let yourself be driven by the business problem, not by the presence of a Swiss Army Knife in your pocket.

This dalliance with SharePoint has not gone unnoticed by some people in the local area.  I was asked to co-present with Wyn Van Devanter to the Washington, DC Web Content Mavens group on what web managers need to know before making the move from 2007 to 2010.

I thought I would share my slides and offer a few additional notes for people.  For the record, Wyn tackled the first part of the presentation and I handled the second portion.  We could probably each speak to the other half, but we each presented to our strengths.

SP2010 Overview and Upgrade Planning

There were several discussions that spun out of the presentation.  I think the actual discussion was a lot more valuable than the presentation.

• Competition: There was a discussion on competition.  If you stick to the public website , there is a wide selection in the WCM/CMS market.  If you look at the Intranet usage, you are really looking at some of the newer Enterprise 2.0 players that offer a broader set of capabilities.  The legacy competition, eRoom and Lotus Notes, each have their own issues in regards to they’re being long-term players.
• Disclaimer: This is not an endorsement of SharePoint.  SharePoint is not designed for WCM.  It has a lot of requirements that drive other license revenue for Microsoft.  It has complexities and requires a Microsoft platform and .NET expertise.  That said, if you have SharePoint (MOSS) 2007, you are likely going to be on SP2010 in the near future.
• Future of SharePoint: We had a fun discussion on this.  It is my opinion that this version of SharePoint will mark the peak of SharePoint’s popularity.  The next version will likely ride on the coat tails of SP2010.  After that, I believe SharePoint will fall into the legacy category.  It is simply too big to innovate enough to maintain a lead over a long period of time.  Someone new is likely to come in and supplant them.  Of course, even with this estimate, that is some time away.
• SharePoint for WCM, Really?: Yes really.  While I have stated in the past that maybe SharePoint is not ideal for WCM, it doesn’t change the fact that people still use it for that purpose (at least the 2007 version).  They will likely continue to do so in the future as SP2010 is better suited to WCM than MOSS 2007.  The question you want to ask if someone proposes SP2010 for your website it this: What are you using for your website? Oh, and get references. Plural.

There were more, but these are the ones that I remember clearly and that aren’t covered in the slides and notes.  Feel free to drop questions.

References

These are the links from the Reference slide of the presentation.  I am providing them here for easy reference.

• Microsoft Upgrade Resource Center
• TechNet Upgrade and Migration for SharePoint Foundation 2010
• TechNet Upgrade and Migration for SharePoint Server 2010
• Websites hosted on SharePoint

Good luck.

Pardon me for disagreeing.

Here is the basic problem, because we can’t agree on what to call anything, we can’t agree where anything is going.

• Is ECM Dead? That depends if you think ECM means one repository.  If so, then yes.  It doesn’t mean one repository though, or at least, it shouldn’t.  If we can’t agree on what it is, how can anyone claim it needs to die or is already dead.
• Is WordPress a CMS? That depends on how you define the “Management” in CMS.  Maybe it is a Website Management System?  Maybe the WCMS is going to go away as what actually goes into a website broadens.

If we don’t agree on the terms as practioners, how can we expect the business users, and the users in the rest of the world, to understand what we are talking about?

What ECM Is

Okay, here is the definition, and then I’ll bring out a couple of key points….

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is a strategy for the coordinated management of all content throughout an organization, allowing for people and systems to find and use content from within any business context using platform agnostic standards.

Ready for the key bits? Here we go….

• Enterprise: This is not necessarily a commercial entity.  This represents an organization, a group, with a common goal. That goal may be to make money, but it may be to create monetary policy, or save the rainforest.  It may not be the best term, but Organization Content Management has zero zing and would restart all education efforts.
• Strategy: ECM is a strategy.  ECM is not a product.  It is not shrink-wrapped, shelfware, or turn-key.  You may need products to implement an ECM strategy, but you don’t buy ECM.
• Coordinated Management of all content: This means that the strategy encompasses all content.  Documents, records, blogs, web pages, video, EVERYTHING.  The strategy may be to have separate systems for some of the content, but it is a coordinated effort.  It does not have to be centralized.  That is so last decade.
• Any business context: If I am in email, I can find what I need.  If I am in SharePoint or in Word, I can find what I need.  If I am on a train in Jersey with my Blackberry, I can find what I need.  If I am sitting in a bar with a potential business partner, I can find what I need.  You need a strategy to getting the Content to where the work transpires.  Content flows to the person, not person to the content.
• Platform Agnostic Standards: This is a little overkill, but to achieve a coordinated strategy, you need standards that don’t care about the platform.  This is beyond CMIS.  Who I am and what I can access also needs to follow me in the Enterprise.  If I don’t have a central repository, that information, as well as the content, needs coordination.  This statement is plural for a reason.

I think that covers the points that I wanted to make here.  Now to the other point…Pantheon?

ECM, Not a Prerequisite for Content Management

This is a point that I think needs to be made, and this is a big mental leap forward from where I was when I started this blog three years ago…

ECM is not required to implement a Content Management System. Sometimes, it can hinder implementing a CMS because the concept of ECM as a strategy and not a solution is not understood.

It is an optional part of the Content Management universe.

Examples?

• A federal agency needs to manage their website.  They implement a Web Content Management System (WCMS) to solve their problem.  (They passed on the WMS)  No ECM strategy involved.
• A business may just want to scan invoices and serve them up online for their customers, but not worry about everything else.
• A government agency may want to process applications online.

They just want to get things done without implementing a large solution.  The thing is, their is now a disconnect between what ECM is and what is sold.

The product companies have been selling ECM and saying that you have to buy their product to have a hope to achieve it.  What they are selling is an ECM Platform that can scale and hold all of an organizations content in one place.

That is overkill.

Any successful ECM practitioner will tell you start with a simple project that has easy to measure results.  It is the low-hanging fruit approach.  It works, but it also takes time.

The thing is that the same approach can work and take less time.  Looking back at the fruit, why by a tall ladder to gather it.  All you really need is a basket or something to put the fruit into.  Well, with an ECM strategy, I buy a basket that will work with whatever ladder I decide upon later.  I know that one day I’ll want to buy that ladder to get to the fruit on the upper branches, but simply knowing that is enough.

So from a ECM perspective, let’s look at the website.  Maybe I buy a WCMS that supports CMIS.  That way, when I decide that I want to automate my invoice processing and publish it to my website, I can have the systems talk to each other.  I don’t have to decide on the ultimate platform because the standards allow me to pick on merit.

If your ECM strategy is to have a large ECM Platform, call a large vendor that is on the CMIS bandwagon.  If your strategy is to store it all in the mysterious cloud, call one of the SaaS providers out there and ask them when they are going to support CMIS.  If your strategy is to solve one content problem and leave the rest to SharePoint or a shared drive, you can do that as well.

Remember, an ECM strategy doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to be something that helps an organization achieve their goals around content management as a whole.

And if they decide to put it off and solve the immediate pain, so be it.

Thanks to the Documentum voters splitting their time between two topics, discussing the recent Gartner MQ for ECM is today’s topic.  The voting was an interesting little diversion that I’ll revisit later.

I’m going to talk about the report here.  The recent controversy around Gartner is a post for another day.

Staying Out of Trouble

Last year I was threatened (my word) by Gartner for putting a copy of the MQ here.  I was also chastised for several other nitpicks. So I will only link to Oracle’s courtesy copy of the 2009 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Content Management this year to avoid wrath.

One thing to remember is Gartner really doesn’t want you to compare a vendor’s location in the MQ from year to year. That is both well-advised and unrealistic.  To be fair, as the measurements and industry change, scores change.  Movement isn’t just dependent on vendor action, or inaction.

However, we are human and we like to perform comparisons. I have a copy to perform the comparison for my own interest.  The link I had online to last year’s report is no longer valid, so you’ll have to take my Word on it.

Looking at the Leader Quadrant

The first thing that you notice is that the same five vendors are sitting in there. One a second, closer, inspection, you notice a few things:

• They are much more closely bunched. There are any number of reasons for this. I think that Oracle, EMC, and IBM aren’t doing anything that really distinguishes themselves from the pack.  Microsoft just caught the pack, and Open Text keeps acquiring companies, watering down anything they may do to stand out.
• Microsoft has the “prime” positioning. Okay, this doesn’t mean anything other than bragging rights, but they are the most “visionary” and their execution is second to IBM. Of the five, they shifted the most. Keep in mind, SP2010 isn’t out yet, so next year’s MQ could be very interesting.
• The analysis of EMC reveals nothing new. This is a negative reflection on EMC, not Gartner. The product stack works well together, but the price list is long and complicated and the lack of an overall strategy.  This is not new.

My general opinion on these vendors is this, they are large and “in-charge”. They also aren’t exciting and are going to be less flexible going forward in adapting to the market.

Other Fun Notes

There are some other things that caught my attention this year that I wanted to mention…

• Alfresco: Last year we celebrated Open Source playing in the game. Now Alfresco has jumped quite a bit to the right to become a Visionary. This is a well deserved move.  They have added RM to their solution and they have been very visible leaders regarding CMIS in the industry as a whole.  Their open-source nature and smaller size is part of what is probably keeping them from moving their position into the leaders quadrant. Though, judging by the vendors their now, maybe they should strive to be the best visionaries possible.
• Laserfiche: A newly evaluated vendor, they seem to want to join the ECM ranks.  Their product is pretty solid from a DM/RM perspective. Their web interfaces need some investment and they need to be looking at CMIS if they want to ever grow beyond their current location.
• HP: Every year, I grow more disappointed.  Tower TRIM was a fairly solid product.  Even after the acquisition, it still is, but it feels static.  While other vendors have taken their roots and made them an application on the ECM foundation, HP has kept RM as the foundation. This is fine for an Enterprise-class RM system, but not for an ECM system. Also, as of September, their field people did not even know what CMIS was.
• Composite Content Applications: Say goodbye to CEVAs (Content Enabled Vertical Applications), CCAs are here. While I’m not sold on the word “Composite”, I’m very happy to see the word “Vertical” removed.  Composite addresses the desire for mash-up applications with content, and the Restful services that vendors are throwing out there support this quite well. The term just seems to pass over the content-enabled aspect of some “integrations” where you are just managing the content in the ERP or CRM system.
• Hyland Software: My “favorite” mid-market ECM vendor is threatening to become a leader.  With a strong Healthcare foundation, Hyland has been moving forward steadily.  They, like Alfresco, have added a DoD 5015.2 certified RM solution and seem to be thinking about capturing larger fish. The one problem I see, their baseball freebies now have green threading which looks horrendous.
• SpringCM: The first SaaS ECM vendor to make the MQ is SpringCM.  With all of the cloud hype going on, I’m surprised that they only included one vendor here.  SpringCM is a great solution, but they have a while to go until they really have a complete offering.  RM is a no-show here, and I feel that is required. Even non-certified RM is better than none.  SpringCM needs to step their game up if they want to survive the eventual cloud offerings from the established vendors.
• WCM for Marketing: Gartner has acknowledged the trend of Marketing to have their own systems for the external website. Given the WCM offerings of most of the ECM vendors, I see this trend continuing.  I think CMIS will be key to getting these systems working together, which will reinforce the trend.

I think that is enough spare thoughts for now. Time to start working on the “Why do we still care about Gartner” post.

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.

Why is it that when I talk to people about “CMS”, they are almost always referring to Web Content Management? Seems to be a pretty narrow definition of the use of content. Along the same lines, many “Information Architects” that work with these “CMS” applications seem to be senior website designers. I’ve met Information Architects that I felt deserved the title, but they dealt with things beyond, though including, the web.  Enough of that, for now, on to the main course…

The second, is of course the slight to CMIS. That is the focus today. While I encourage criticism of CMIS as criticism is important for growth, I don’t want misconceptions to perpetuate themselves.

Sticks and Stones

I must say that I was a little disappointed with Kas’ post.  I was expecting a much more in-depth dissection of CMIS. It was mostly focused on nomenclature. In standards, the names of things are picked to be generic and in such a way that no one vendor looks to be the source of all.

That being said, the first observation is dead-on. Why does the CMIS standard have Document Objects and not Content Objects? Seems like a simple one-to-one mapping that should be there. It is just words, but words create the perception.  It is a valid criticism, but only semantically.

The next was folders. This is one that I tried to think through before CMIS was released for a side project. It is just a simple generic term. WCM systems may use other terms, but users of all systems understand folders from a hierarchical storage capability.

What’s more, if a repository supports the capability, CMIS allows for Document Objects to un-filed.  There is no need to throw everything into a folder at all.  This capability is defined by the combination of the repository and the object definition. Conversely, you can put documents in multiple folders, so you can store things however a supporting repository allows.

Beyond the Names

Did I mention that Kas correctly pointed out that WCM is NOT a supported use-case for CMIS. Check out slide 12 of John Newton’s AIIM presentation. Records Management and Digital Asset Management are also not use cases.  There are two things to note here…

The first is that the slide is titled Not This Time. The current iteration of CMIS is designed to reach quick agreement on a baseline standard. I have heard multiple players discuss the “next” version of CMIS. The scope is being kept manageable to get it out the door with basic functionality.  I know from talking to a few vendors that they are intensely interested in adding some of the use cases listed on the Not This Time slide.

The second is that just because they didn’t design it to support the use case doesn’t mean that the use cases listed can’t leverage CMIS. Looking at WCM specifically, there are lots of things that are standard in WCM systems that are not supported by CMIS. There are couple of things that are supported though.

• Relationships: An explicit, binary, directional, non-invasive, and typed relationship between a Source Object and a Target Object. This includes the ability of an object to reference itself.  With the typing, many  relationships can be utilized, depending on the underlying repository.
• Policies: An administrative policy that can be enforced by a repository, such as an Access Control List (ACL) or a retention management policy. Those are two examples, but any policy that the underlying repository designates in their CMIS implementation would work.  While Retention Policies is the usage that I am most excited about, there is no reason it couldn’t be leveraged for other functions.

Compound documents aren’t explicitly supported, but I see the foundation for it already in the specification.  I am hopeful that it will be fully supported in 2.0.

The point is that we are dealing with more than just simple CRUD here.

One Last Point…

Kas mentions the relational model used by CMIS and the resultant CMIS-SQL language based upon SQL-92.  It is a valid point, but it is important to note that the Query component is, itself, an overlay on the CMIS Object Model. The 0.61 specification says:

The relational view of a CMIS repository consists of a collection of virtual tables that are defined on top of the CMIS data model. This relational view is used for query purposes only.

In this relational view a Virtual Table is implicitly defined for each queryable Object-Type defined in the repository. (Non-queryable Object-Types are NOT exposed through this Relational View.)

I’m not sure what alternative approaches that should be used that would work across multiple repositories.  I would love to hear approaches and how they could be applied to all repositories that might support CMIS.

Before we get to Vignette, lets look at the news itself.

Interwoven and Autonomy

Alan Pelz-Sharpe over at CMS Watch covers this aspect very well in his first take.  My thoughts when I heard immediately the news was focused on Meridio and Interwoven living together.  As you may, or may not know, Meridio is probably the leading Records Management solution for SharePoint and they were acquired by Autonomy back in 2007.  I’ve talked to a few clients about implementing Records Management for SharePoint, and there are three basic options:

• Use SharePoint’s RM Tookit: It is a toolkit and was released 8 months after SharePoint was DoD 5015.2 certified.  Enough said.
• Use Meridio: A SharePoint focused tool.  The only concerns I ever had was using it for non-SharePoint data.  On the 19th they announced a working integration with SAP, so that alleviates some of that initial concern.
• Use another ECM platform: Solid option, but more expensive than the others, at least from a license standpoint.

Now enter Interwoven into the Autonomy family.  What will Autonomy do?  Will they merge the products or just make them all work together?  The former is better, but Alan seems to doubt Autonomy’s ability, or desire, to take that approach.  The latter approach will start creating a large amount of chaos among their sales people.  I can already tell you that when I talked to them at this past fall’s AIIM seminar that Meridio wasn’t in the forefront of Autonomy’s brain.

This bears watching as it will impact the future of RM in the SharePoint world.

Has the Music Stopped?

My first thought is no.  HP is still out there.  After acquiring Tower Software, HP could use Vignette for WCM.  Vignette’s technology isn’t bad (though stagnating), but they have been just all over the place on their marketing message.  The question is whether or not they want to enter the WCM space or are content with basic ECM and RM.  They could just implement the CMIS standard for their back-end and let WCM vendors leverage their repository.

The other possibility is, of course, Open Text.  They like to buy everything.  They already have RedDot, but that doesn’t mean anything with Open Text.  They haven’t really brought RedDot tightly into the fold, so maybe they would be willing.

Vignette is losing market value at a fair clip.  They are under $200 million in market cap and I’m sure that they would be an easy pickup for either Open Text or HP at far below Interwoven’s $775 million.  It is entirely possible that neither will take a flier on Vignette and either some unidentified suitor will step up or Vignette will be left out in the cold.

If someone is going to buy Vignette, I would expect it to happen in the next few months.  After that, I’m not sure what will be left.  There may not be enough brain power left at Vignette at this point to make them worth buying.  Time will tell.

Grab the popcorn and let’s watch the show.

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.

• The presentation seems to be acting on its own. Possessed even.
• Web 2.0 “aims to enhance creativity, information sharing, and most notably, collaboration among users.” (Too much quoting of wikipedia)
  • Rich user experience
  • User participation: one of the most important aspects (Agreed. I like the collective intelligence aspect of it)
  • Dynamic content
  • Metadata
  • Openness
  • Freedom
  • Collective intelligence by way of user participation
• More focus on Customer
  • Focus on introducing new brand experiences
  • Proliferation of creative content
• Internal drivers for Web 2.0 concepts in the Enterprise (Enterprise 2.0)
  • Support virtual teams
  • connect thought leaders
  • RSS feeds
• External drivers
  • Link partners and internal teams
  • Facilitate unstructured business processes
  • Promote self-service models
  • Allow partners/customers to help each other
  • Solicit feedback at all levels
  • Generate customer interest and loyalty
• Enterprise 2.0 (was beginning to wonder)
  • Will we get constructive feedback, or just rants?
    • Liability incurred from external posters
    • Compliance issues of the information posted (is it a record?)
  • Moderated wikis mitigate risks and control the message
  • Things should be driven by company objectives
  • The appearance of openness is critical, even if not 100% open (I like this presentation. He is sharing the reality of meeting company objectives by controlling the external interactions)
• Content Distribution Services is replacing Site Caching Services and will be bi-directional when desired. (This is important in order to capture the end-user content from the website and place it back in the repository for tracking, auditing, and compliance)
  • This information once collected can also be sent back to be thrown into a workflow and classified
• Dynamic Delivery Services delivers XML to a Web Server Runtime that will render the XML as HTML based upon the user interactions
• (Brian is refreshingly, brutally honest. He is now one of my favorite people. I wish there was time in this convention to talk to him more)
• Recommendations can help identify and reinforce an organization’s objectives
  • “Most popular downloads” could be filtered on the user profile
• Working on taking content collected on one web server and replicating it to other web servers
  • Discussion thread in US replicated to Asian server
  • Can have some review and approval before the stuff is replicated
• Use Content Transformation Services to “normalize” the format and metadata
• Tagging is taking prominence
  • In Web 2.0, the community decides what tags are best
  • in Enterprise 2.0, the organization needs to be able to prune some tags

Off to DFS Real World examples.

Disclaimer

All information in this post was gathered from the presenters and presentation. It does not reflect my opinion unless clearly indicated (Italics in parenthesis). Any errors are most likely from my misunderstanding a statement or imperfectly recording the information. Updates to correct information are reflected in red, but will not be otherwise indicated.

All statements about the future of EMC products and strategy are subject to change due to a large variety of factors.

This was prompted by a reading OpenText’s Enterprise 2.0 Content Management strategy. Note the placement of the 2.0. We’ll be getting back to that.

ECM 2.0, Coming Soon to an Enterprise Near You!

Well, if you look at my definition of the next generation of ECM, ECM 2.0 for fun, you’ll quickly see that we aren’t there yet. Even Bex chimes in on the Identity Management support in Oracle ECM and says that it isn’t there, yet. It is a great post and all concerns and issues there are true for Documentum as well.

Let’s take it as fact that all ECM systems are currently lacking in open support for Identity Management systems. Most can leverage external authentication, but fall short for external authorization.

Documentum can handle external groups, but not security policies. Those have to be created inside of Documentum using the external, or internally managed, groups. Documentum, like many systems, cache the external information for various performance reasons. That is fine, except that if something changes, you are out-of-date until the next synch job runs.

As if my critical eye wasn’t enough, EMC themselves aren’t at ECM 2.0 yet by their own reckoning. Way back at EMC World 2007, they defined their vision of ECM 2.0. They stated that D6 was just laying the foundation for ECM 2.0 and that it wouldn’t be realized until at least D6.5. That is this summer, so we can’t even evaluate it until then.

D6.5 will either be the Beta 2 release of ECM 2.0 or the “gold” release. It depends on who you ask and what is delivered.

ECM 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0, Not Even Related

Aside from the flashy 2.0 attached at the end, there is little relation as far as I am concerned. ECM as it currently stands can support Web 2.0 artifacts. Some user interfaces may need some updating, but the back-ends of almost all Content Management systems, Enterprise or not, can store any type of content. Being able to store a wiki isn’t that impressive. Sounds more like a new feature for either a Collaborative CEVA or a Web Content Management CEVA.

ECM systems can support Enterprise 2.0. It is the interfaces that need to be updated. Clearspace, from Jive, supports Enterprise 2.0 activities. Infovark, once released, will support Enterprise 2.0 activities. Neither are ECM systems or based upon them. I bet that I could take Documentum 5.2.5 and use it as a back-end for content for Clearspace. It may take a little development, but it could be done and nobody will EVER confuse that old version of Documentum with ECM 2.0.

OpenText is updating their user interface. That’s it! Big deal. If they have to make a lot of changes to their back-end to make this work, then they are in worse shape than I ever imagined.

Everyone, Look Outside the Traditional 2.0 Box! (Traditional 2.0? Funny.) ECM 2.0 is the next generation of Enterprise Content Management. It is not a slave to any other technology. It is a servant for the emerging Enterprise Architectures in the SOA world. It isn’t dependent on Web Services or REST. It is dependent on an undefined SOA Standard.

Look, databases have ODBC and JDBC. ECM needs an equivalent. CEVA providers shouldn’t have to write different interfaces to interact to different systems. They need one interface and ECM system will then only need one interface. Then we can get back to features and not pick a vendor because they are at least average in everything that we need.

Jed Cawthorne gets it. Billy Cripe gets it. Lee Dallas is getting it. Do YOU get it? If not, tell me why and I’ll see what I can do to help you along. Please chime in and share your thoughts. I’d love to hear from someone at EMC like Cornelia, Craig, Mark, Chuck, or someone new.

Before I dive in, I want to thank Rob Garrett of Portal Solutions, LLC for answering my questions and being, or at least appearing, honest regarding the ability of SharePoint to provide Web Content Management. He shared areas that weren’t perfect and agreed with me on some of the limitation issues with SharePoint when dealing with large enterprises. If I had to deploy a public facing website with SharePoint, I’d bring him on board to help out.

Of course, I’d probably never use SharePoint for such a purpose.

The Architecture and Features

To use SharePoint for a website, you need the full featured Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) and not the free SharePoint Services. In general you would setup a SharePoint Farm, consisting of one database server/cluster, multiple SharePoint/Web servers, and some sort of load balancer in the front.

Inside of this environment, your Site is the website. When you create a site, there appeared to be three templates specific for publishing. Only one really reflects WCM practices, and that is the one with Workflow, which allows for content to be approved before publishing (a required WCM feature in my book).

Each sub-site that you create in your site, create a level in your URL. Take the link for this post. The first sub-site would be “2008″, the second “03″ and so on. One of the sub-sites by default is Search, which provides advanced search functionality.

All content is stored in Document Libraries, such as Pages, Images, and Documents. The top-level site also has libraries for page layouts and style sheets. Content itself can have, and needs to have, several pieces of metadata to support publishing. The Content types are hierarchical in nature, so you can define the base structure and have sub-types with specific pieces of data. This concept should be familiar to some of you.

There is a lot I’m not covering here to keep it “short”, some of which is outlined in the presentation. Many things I am passing over features which I consider “standard” in WCM systems that SharePoint supports. If you have questions about specific things, feel free to send me a comment.

As for cost, it does actually compare favorably with some of the big-time WCM players. Outside of the obvious Windows and SQL Servers for infrastructure, a public facing site will need approximately $60,000 (price subject to change) for an Enterprise license for MOSS 2007 to allow the world to access the site anonymously. This is in addition to any named users within the actually Enterprise that need to use SharePoint to either work on the Web Content or collaborate internally.

The Catch(es)

Rob provided the following definition of Web Content Management. He also said that he had never implemented a non-SharePoint WCM system, which is important when trying to compare level-of-efforts.

A web content management system is a content management system with additional features to ease the tasks required to publish web content to web sites.

By that definition, SharePoint does not provide WCM (I view web sites as broader than SharePoint). It is a portal. It can work like a WCM system to publish content to that portal, but the actual web site is just SharePoint. Just like any portal software, when you deploy the content, you are deploying it to another SharePoint Site Farm. You will need three, at least, SharePoint Site Farms. One for Development, Staging, and Production.

You cannot deploy it outside of SharePoint. Well, you can, but it was made pretty clear that it is challenging, difficult, and not worth the effort.

There are also issues to deploying large-scale changes to a website. There is some issue that Microsoft basically punts on when it arises, telling customers that they should just blow away the old site and publish fresh. Not what I would call ideal. My solution, which Rob concurred with, was to setup a second Production Site Farm, deploy the revamped site there, and then change the DNS setting when ready. Ready for more servers? This could be done without double the servers, but it shouldn’t require even one.

Content Deployment was reportedly one of the last things that Microsoft added onto SharePoint to support WCM. It shows.

As for the WYSIWYG editing feature, it is buried in the list of metadata attributes for a piece of content. So while it is there, it isn’t great and be cumbersome to locate. We saw this feature live and I wasn’t impressed. Many other systems that offer comparable WYSIWYG editors (not the even better in-context editing) have the images and text on a page separate from the metadata. Logically, this makes sense as one is data about the content while the other IS the content.

There was also some discussion about it being not overly simple to edit Page Layouts. They are basically ASP.NET pages, so if you have the tools/capabilities to do that, you can do the layouts. I can’t really speak to the whole topic, but I suspect that you will need a developer type to assist your web designer in getting the layouts put together. This challenge doesn’t sound overly different from transforming any portal software into a website that doesn’t look and feel like a portal.

For More Information

Check out these sites for live sites that use SharePoint. The first two where done by Portal Solutions. You can find more, like the other three, at this list of SharePoint Public Sites.

• Conservation International
• Avendra
• Choose Chicago (The Official Visitors Site for Chicago)
• Western Australia Tourism Site
• Microsoft (sub-site English, sub-site US)

Seriously, Microsoft continues to push SharePoint 2007 for Web Content Management. I’m sure it can be done, but it seems a bad fit. SharePoint’s primary weakness, in my opinion, is the inability to scale for the large Enterprise. Now imagine managing a large website. There are two options here:

1. Host on SharePoint. Bad. Beyond bad. The security and scalability issues are challenging on a good day.
2. Store an manage on SharePoint and publish out. Definitely not out-of-the-box. At a minimum, a WCM system should be able to handle this.

It appears that I’m not the only person that thinks that SharePoint isn’t a good fit for WCM. Janus Boye over at CMS Watch shared a couple of stories from some Danish companies that wanted to use SharePoint for WCM. They couldn’t find anyone that would do is for them, and one of them even asked Microsoft directly. The closest they got was one that offered to do it on SharePoint 2003!

The Big Show

Next month, March 26, I’ll be attending a Web Content Mavens event in downtown DC where a partner, referred by Microsoft, will be talking about using SharePoint for Web Content Management. I’ll be there to see the spin and to see how it might actually work. If you are in the DC area, you can sign-up and attend. It is a free event and you can meet a lot of people that live in the web world. I know I’ll be bringing some of my people there.

If I am in a good mood, or just stunned, I’ll hold my tough questions for after the presentations. Time will tell.

X-Hive, the Product

I learned all about X-Hive. I learned that it is fast and can handle all sorts of large XML documents. I learned the the target customers are those looking for Dynamic Content. I learned that they support lots of XML standards. I learned more about the S1000D standard than I ever wanted to know.

Favorite relevant example: A car manual. The manual is my car is generic and has information on really cool options that I don’t have. With this solution, I go online, enter my VIN and/or my options, and from there I get sent, or can download, a personalized copy of the manual. It covers all of my features and ONLY my features. If I have the UK version of a vehicle, it notes that the steering wheel is on the wrong side.

I learned that the enemy is Mark Logic. This wasn’t just a casual observation. Pretty much every time the need to state how X-Hive beat, was beating, was countering, or any other competitive action was mentioned, it was aimed at Mark Logic. If half of what I heard was true, I’d never buy Mark Logic and buy X-Hive instead.

Of course, those Mark Logic guys will say that EMC will destroy X-Hive over time. They may also be cheaper. However, aside from one project that is debating moving from an open source solution, Berkeley DB, I’m more concerned about the future in the Documentum product suite.

You Will be Assimilated

I must say that it is nice to see an acquired architect excited about the future of his product. I took that as a positive sign. Their goal, I think by D6.5, is to have all XML content pulled out of the current store and placed in the new EMC Documentum XML Store (the X-Hive Database renamed). This will be embedded in the Content Server and viewed as a fourth storage component, adding to the existing database, index, and disk storage (for actual files).

Then the cool part was revealed. They are introducing a new product called Dynamic Publishing Services. Going beta this month and live later this quarter, assuming all goes well, this will deliver personalized content to users on the web. It is a nice enhancement that has been sorely missing. I know Vignette has this, and your average portal vendor, like BEA(now Oracle), does this all the time now. I’ve also wanted to do it in Documentum, but couldn’t.

Happy, Happy! Joy, Joy!

Now, it isn’t delivered and things can change. However, I can’t help but think that this was all pretty good news. Love for all you Web Content Management people out there.

Now they just have to execute.

This was, at the same time, one of the best, and most painful, conversations I have had in quite a while. On the one hand, it is good to have to occasional defend your convictions in order to make sure that they are still on solid ground. On the other hand, sometimes you want to hit your head into a wall when someone doesn’t get it. However, I can see why that opinion exists. The vendors and analysts are to blame.

Over Promising

For years, ECM has been defined as a strategic framework and technical architecture that supports all content types and formats over the entire content life cycle. See Gartner. To accomplish this, would-be ECM vendors bought missing Content Applications, built them, or both. This has led to many problems:

• Disparate Systems: One vendor can solve all your problems, if they can ever pick which acquired solution, or in OpenText’s case..solutions, best fits the clients need. All ECM vendors are guilty, including EMC with core Documentum and eRoom.
• Deteriorating Functionality: Over time, those acquired, or built, solutions fail to evolve at a comparable rate with the pure-play vendors. This is most likely due to a number of factors. One is from the inability of R&D dollars to keep up with the increasing number of solutions. Another is managing of platform changes required for one solution so that the other solutions aren’t adversely affected. eRoom, once a leader in collaboration, is stagnating. I still like it better than SharePoint, especially after recent travails (Don’t ask).
• Lack of Performance: Try as they might, the hardware and software haven’t been able to effectively scale fast enough. This problem is going away as computers get faster, but it isn’t gone. The problem can’t be solved like in the Data side of the world with a Data Warehouse. We have to actually design better, more efficient software.

No vendor can deliver top-notch solutions in every area, yet. There are a few that can deliver from good to excellent in every category, but that isn’t consistent with the best-of-breed approach. This was the point my opponent was trying to make. My contention was that just because no one single vendor could do it all that it wasn’t something of value to strive for attaining.

ECM + SOA = ECM 2.0

In my discussion, I was trying to explain the need for RM, BPM, Collaboration, DM, and WCM to all sit on the same platform. As I have discussed previously, the Content Applications should not be tied to an ECM platform. EMC is starting to take this approach with their Content Services for SharePoint. They’ll sell the platform and the integration to SharePoint, but not any end-user application.

Mark Lewis recently shared a new approach at this year’s Momentum Europe by developing frameworks for partners to build Content-Enabled Solutions upon. This has led to some mixed reviews. The gang over at BrilliantLeap even went so far as to wonder if this is the Emasculation of Documentum.

I don’t think it is, if EMC invests wisely. They are spending money on the platform and I feel that they are making solid progress in that direction. They are turning their existing Content Services products into DFS based interfaces. What they need to do is turn all of their interfaces into DFS based interfaces. They also need to work to get an ECM SOA standard in place in order to make sure that the DFS is aligned properly.

The platform feeds Content into the SOA world. The Content Applications reach into the SOA environment and pull the content out that they need. The vendors should be independent. ECM may not have been real, but ECM 2.0 has a chance to be everything that we need.

One last thing for EMC to do, invest in the solutions!!! Spend money to make eRoom part of the Web 2.0 world. Bring WCM and their publishing up-to-speed. Integrate X-Hive sooner, not later. EMC needs to go look at every solution’s visionary leaders and build to that. They need to do it yesterday.

If they don’t, someone else will.