Decided that instead of hearing about how an ECM system can make a social computing system more robust, that I would listen to Sean Baird tell me something that might help me do my job as a consultant on a daily basis. As cool as Enterprise 2.0 is, scanning is still important for organizations on a day-to-day basis.
Information
Enterprise Content Management 2.0, Still in Beta
The Big Men on Content, Lee to be precise, recently joined the ECM 2.0 discussion, stating that they are going to wait for EMC’s sp2 before they jump on-board. That could be a long wait. After all, we are still in Beta as far as I am concerned.
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.
Web-Centric Content Management
For the past few months, I have been popping in on the Infovark blog. For those that aren’t aware, they are creating an application for the Enterprise 2.0 world. From reading their various posts you can get a fair idea of what they are creating, at least conceptually. I’m not going to go into that, as I may be off and you should check the site out if you are that interested.
What made me decide to comment was their conceptual approach to managing content. It is refreshing and clean. I’m not sure how it will work in the wild in many corporate environments. There are a lot of details that I don’t know yet, so I’ll be optimistic.
ECM Design Patterns
Recently, the EMC Developer Network has started posting some “Design Patterns”. I use the term loosely to mirror their terminology. Each “pattern” is really just a quick description of the problem and two approaches to solve the problem. It is all very high level.
Before I get any further, kudos to them for actually taking the time to begin developing these “patterns”, starting last fall. There is a definite need, and their choices for the first two are ones that are encountered quite frequently, at least by myself. All I am doing here is offering some feedback, most of which I have already shared.
Tower Falls to HP
A couple of weeks ago, the Big Men were speculating on potential buyers for OpenText. I opined that maybe HP would be looking to enter the market to compete with EMC. It was a brilliant piece of insight for all the wrong reasons. Right buyer, wrong target.
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.
SharePoint for Web Content Management, The Movie
A month ago I invited people to attend the Washington, DC Web Content Mavens meeting for March to hear a Microsoft partner explain how SharePoint could be used for Web Content Management. Well, that day was yesterday then you missed a great presentation.
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.
ECM Job Security
I lot of things have fallen through the cracks the last few weeks while I have been busy with family and work obligations. One of those was mentioning the updated version of The Expanding Digital Universe. CMS Watch helped remind me when I was catching up on their posts.
This report, written by IDC and commissioned by EMC, basically says that there is more information out there than we thought and that it is being created at a faster pace than estimated. The amount of information from 2006 to 2011 will increase by a scale of magnitude. At that rate, by my calculations, we’ll hit 1 Yottabyte around the year 2025.
ECM: A Working Definition for the Next Generation
A while back I talked about how the current definitions of Enterprise Content Management left a lot to be desired. They don’t accurately describe the reality of what ECM systems need to accomplish in today’s environment. They are also boring and lack a soul.
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.
Social Media and Knowledge Management
Run for the hills! I just dragged the on again, off again, term of the year, Knowledge Management (KM). For those of you newer to the space, KM has made an appearance every few years and then been torn apart by end-users as the latest KM solution failed to live-up to its promise.
Well, KM is back, but under a disguise. Enterprise 2.0, using the Social Media on Web 2.0 in the business world, enables Knowledge Management. When I took my adventure through Chuck’s Journey, it was like a light bulb clicking on in my head. All of this Social Media tech solves some of the key issues that have plagued KM systems.
SharePoint for Web Content Management
Before continuing, I’ll pause to let the laughter die down. Done yet? Don’t worry, I’ll wait…
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:
- Host on SharePoint. Bad. Beyond bad. The security and scalability issues are challenging on a good day.
- 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!
Word of Pie 