The Enterprise Content Management Blog

Join Us At The Content Management Connection! Or,Here's Your Chance To Finally Blog.

  If you hadn't heard, we recently launched the Content Management Connection (CMC). It's, in our own words..

"..an online community for technology practitioners, software companies, and end users to share thoughts and ideas on the changing landscape of content management and collaboration."

 

Some of you will recognize the layout from your involvement in Social Media Today. It's built on the same platform, WordFrame, which if nothing else, is a damn good blog engine and aggregator.

And for the record, we're doing this kind of stuff because we're passionate about bringing people together and creating value from those interactions. 

So jump in if you'd like, we'd love to hear what you have to say.

Technorati Tags: content+management+connection,blog+neworks,social+networking,social+computing,blogs,online+communities

Brightidea.com Uses Social Networking To Drive Innovation

I spoke with Matthew Greeley, CEO of Brightidea.com, recently and came away impressed with its approach to delivering real value with Web 2.0 sizzle. It just released WebStorm 5.0, which uses social networking elements to capture information that companies can use to drive innovation.

You could think of it as a Facebook-like application with just the right amount of administrative flexibility to keep the IT guys happy.

A marquee client for BrightIdea.com is Cisco, which uses the platform to create custom portals that spark collaboration with customers, employees, or partners. According to Greeley, Cisco has seen impressive results using the platform, generating more than 700 ideas from almost 1,500 members in 100 countries. Try to do that with some Web-based surveys and polling widgets.

Greeley told me that many companies lack business focus when deploying a social computing strategy.

"Deploying generic social networks without a specific business objective is like putting up playgrounds at the office; it may be fun for a while, but don't expect it to improve the bottom line," said Greeley.

What I really like about Brightidea is how it has honed in on a particular business driver. By looking at how a company can manage innovation, Brightidea takes the best-of-breed approach instead of trying to be all things to all people. Greeley says once it perfects that piece, it can move on, driving deeper into the enterprise and affecting other more traditional areas of collaboration.

That focus should certainly give WebStorm 5.0 a leg up in the battles to provide social computing infrastructure to large corporations over the next few years.

Companies are finally realizing the more you can apply the fundamentals of Web 2.0 to specific business objectives, the better the chance at ROI.

Technorati Tags: brightidea,social+computing,ROI,social+networking,social+media,collaboration

BayNote Offering Brings Business Value To Social Search

The Long Tail, the now-famous reference to targeting customers that buy the hard-to-find or nonhit items, got a little shorter with the release of Baynote's Merchandizing and Editorial Console.

In an exclusive interview with InformationWeek, Baynote CEO Jack Jia demonstrated how companies like The Knot, US Appliance, and Education.com are using its new offering to tap the wisdom of the "invisible crowds" and deliver highly specialized content in real time.

"Leveraging crowd wisdom is especially important in content and product-rich long tail sites where manual merchandising and editorializing just isn't timely or cost effective," said Jia.

Jia's enthusiasm for what he calls "social search" is contagious, and with good reason. The young Bay Area company has quickly made a name for itself by taking an almost academic, if not scientific, approach to dealing with how to help customers engage Web users.

"We're really changing the paradigm of how a media or e-commerce site is run. Most of the time the community wisdom prevails, but in today's dynamic Web environments there are times when you may want to promote certain content to the top or even remove particular recommendations," said Jia.

In one example, Baynote described how US Appliance was able to quickly adjust its content and search results based on its users' true intent. The e-commerce company saw that most users were searching for "stoves" instead of "ranges." The internal Web team was able to not only quickly readjust which content to display, but it also gained valuable insight around complementary products its customers were interested in.

I was impressed with how easy it was to set up the business rules within the console (pictured below), something that Web marketers and overburdened content managers will certainly appreciate. The combination of Baynote's recommendation and affinity engine is powerful when you see it in action.

Baynote's product manager quickly demonstrated multiple e-commerce scenarios in a matter of minutes, altering search results and product descriptions on the fly, without any programming or back-end manipulation of databases or inventory systems. It's that type of flexibility that made the decision to partner with Baynote an easy one for wedding-oriented media company The Knot.

The company's VP of e-commerce, Kristin Savilia, described how her team was able to "pin" the results of a much-needed search result to the top of its site after it realized the particular product wasn't being found by shoppers. According to Savilia, that type of procedure would have taken at least two weeks to accomplish using its typical IT timeline. Savilia added The Knot now generates significantly higher average order value through Baynote recommendations.

I really like the direction Baynote's headed with its road map, particularly the attention to the user experience and flexibility it brings to managing complex and content-rich Web sites. Jia tells InformationWeek consistently that "the more you know someone, the harder they are to predict."

My prediction? Jia and company will be harder to catch over the next 12 to 18 months if its recent release is a sign of things to come.

 

Technorati Tags: baynote,social+search,crowdsourcing,kjack+jia,analytics,eCommerce,user+generated+content

Alfresco's Social Computing Slant Shows ECM's Evolution

I had an interesting discussion with John Newton, the co-founder of Alfresco, recently. I'm a little star-struck by this guy. It's hard to get much higher on the food chain when you look at Newton's credentials. Not only did he co-found Documentum, he's also less than five years into the launch of Alfresco, arguably one of the biggest disrupters to appear on the enterprise software radar in years.

We've covered Alfresco before, and each time I come away thinking I'd like to classify them as something other than an open source ECM company. It's hard to explain. Maybe it's because Newton makes everything sound so damn easy when he talks about enterprise content management. And when's the last time you heard the words "easy" and "ECM" in the same sentence? But, back to their classification for a moment.

Newton and company have the usual check-boxes for ECM, but have managed to separate themselves from ECM's shadowed legacy of big, unwieldy repositories and tough implementations. Perhaps it's because of its mashup-centric approach to looking at content or how it describes knowledge worker applications of the future. Whatever the case, I want to put them somewhere in the middle of Web platform providers and collaboration vendors. The point is, you need to have both those qualities if you intend to peg yourself as a player in the enterprise content space.

"ECM has a penetration of less than 10% and the demand for content is very high. The old model that ECM has to be a suite is obsolete, " said Newton.

If you take into account the way information increasingly lives inside and outside the firewall, ECM becomes even more complex. Companies now have to figure out how to consume and create content in both environments, something Newton says Alfresco accomplishes by adopting a "content-as-service" approach. He argues that most enterprises lay out their palette of required services based on the need to create content. The focal point shouldn't be centered so much on the ECM suite, he argues. It has more to do with looking at "how the Web browser can help knowledge workers do their jobs."

And that's where the mashup mentality comes into play. Alfresco is smart enough to realize that the needs of tomorrow's enterprise will be heavily tied to its ability to create and consume content in real-time, regardless of platform, place, or device. Browser-based mashups will ultimately be one of the ways to empower that type of manageability and manipulation of content. John described it as simply asking, "what are the Web applications people want to use"?

But don't forget about the collaborative life of that content. It needs to live on your intranet, your corporate Facebook group, or perhaps within your partner's forum or Wiki. Mashups play perfectly in those scenarios. While Facebook-ing the enterprise is out of most vendors' comfort zones, Newton thinks the key is giving that capability to users and letting them create the next-generation of social software applications.

While that may be too progressive for some enterprises to stomach, it does highlight the trend of diminishing "command and control" mentalities. If you deter newer ways of collaborating, you're digging your own grave with "here lies a content dinosaur" as the epitaph.

"Content services should just be accessible wherever knowledge workers are. We shouldn't be forcing workers to go into these ECM suites. In our view, collaboration spans far more than ECM."

I'm betting Alfresco's legacy won't have anything to do with being an ECM suite.

First posted on InformationWeek's Content Management Blog.

Technorati Tags: mashups,information+week,enterprise+content+management,facebook,social+software,alfresco,john+newton

MindTouch Puts The Enterprise In 2.0

It's not often you hear terms like application integration and IT governance from companies building their businesses on Web 2.0 underpinnings such as blogs, wikis, and RSS. So I was somewhat surprised to be smacked in the face with just that from Aaron Fulkerson, the tech-talking co-founder and CEO of MindTouch, a company that wants to be the "tissue" that helps enterprises connect all those disparate systems.

I spoke with Fulkerson about MindTouch's platform (Deki Wiki) and how it's managing to penetrate the hallowed firewalls of corporate America, making friends with both IT and business users along the way.

My first thought was why isn't everybody doing this stuff? For starters, it's because creating scalable Web architectures isn't for the faint of heart. Fulkerson says the founders' backgrounds in distributed systems helps it deliver on the promise of easy-to-use interfaces and IT-friendly integration.

And it appears their sweat is paying off. According to him, Deki Wiki downloads on Sourceforge.net number more than 3,000 a day; something he says plays a big part in driving the "mad adoption" rates. But don't discount MindTouch as a fluffy Web 2.0 open source play. Companies like FedEx (NYSE: FDX), Siemens, Gannett, and other Fortune 500 clients have adopted its platform to deliver mashups, tie together applications, and deploy new collaborative capabilities across broad user bases.

So how is MindTouch making friends with both business and IT? For IT, the pitch is simple; make their lives easier by empowering them to add governance not just over the wiki, but over all of their applications. In that sense, Deki Wiki, says Fulkerson, becomes not only an integration layer but a common user interface across different applications. The heavy emphasis on integration is a calculated move by MindTouch, one it knows will not only pique the interest of CTOs across the land, but put it head-to-head with middleware heavyweights such as BEA Systems and IBM (NYSE: IBM).

"We're working with a major life sciences organization with more than 700K Web pages. They were going with BEA, but instead chose Deki Wiki. They're now writing all their custom code on top of our platform," said Fulkerson. As far as Big Blue, Fulkerson is confident that MindTouch has some breathing room as it continues to build out its social enterprise platform.

"IBM has a proof of concept similar to what we're doing, but we think we're at least 2 years ahead of anybody else in the space," added Fulkerson.

The other side of the social enterprise equation involves the user experience. I asked Fulkerson how MindTouch manages to appease business users.

"We're allowing customers to add this 2.0 social layer to existing enterprise applications. That adds a tremendous amount of value to the organization because users can interact with applications much easier through common interfaces and processes," he said.

Fulkerson compared its Web-friendly approach to integrating applications and mashups to more common ways Web users access services like Flickr and YouTube.

"Our architecture is made up of heterogeneous Web services with a PHP presentation layer," he explained. What Fulkerson describes is a theme I'm seeing related to how Web strategies are shifting these days. Service-oriented architecture is moving to Web-oriented architecture and SOAP and other Web protocols are being supplanted by the fast-appearing REST approach.

MindTouch's savvy in both of those areas, Web-oriented architecture and REST, enable it to help enterprise clients see external systems and internal data stores like you or I view our images stored on Flickr.

"The problem we're solving goes way past a wiki," said Fulkerson.

I couldn't have said it better myself.

Cross-posted on InformationWeek's Content Management Blog.

Technorati tags: mindtouch, WOA, wikis, enterprise+2.0, social+enterprise+platforms, enterprise+social+computing, enterprise+social+media, enterprise+content, aaron+fulkerson, information+week

I'm Blogging at Information Week

Just in case you think The ECM Blog has become just a glorified link site, I wanted to let you know I've also started blogging for Information Week. So if you're inclined, I'd love to welcome you over there for content management (and information management) news and commentary.

Now, if you're a vendor, make your PR pros earn their money by sending along story ideas and vendor news. If you're a client and want to get some pub on your company and your team, you can also drop me a line.

Here's some of my latest posts..and as always, thanks for reading.

• Top 5 Content Management Trends For 2008
  
• Oracle’s BEA Acquisition Makes Things Interesting
  
• Oracle Captures A Key Component To Its ECM Strategy
  
• Clickability Clicks On All Cylinders
  
• How Web 2.0 Affects Content Management
  
• IBM Hints At FileNet 2.0
  
• Open Source Funding Signals CMS Shakeup
  
• Engineering Content Management For A Web 2.0 World
  
• Are Enterprises Finally Waking Up To RSS?
  
• SaaS Trendwatching With Clickability
  

Technorati tags: information+week, content+management, information+management, cmp+media, information+week+blogs, dearing+group

 
Explore The Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Network (a FeedBurner Network)