The Enterprise Content Management Blog

The Enterprise 2.0 View From OpenText Executive Chairman Tom Jenkins

I'm three days into the enterprise 2.0 show and it's a bit of an overload so far.
As I entered the exhibit hall, one peer commented on the number of traditional or dare I say, enterprise 1.0 companies on hand. What did you expect? Like it or not, that's where the majority of corporate data resides. In my one on one session with OpenText's Tom Jenkins I wanted to dig a little deeper and explore that reality. And for the record, I have about 7 pages of notes from our discussion, so expect more later.

Jenkins comes across as confident as he describes the Canadian companies' place in the enterprise 2.0 world.

If you're thinking of aligning with OpenText for e2.0, Jenkins says his pitch is that "we'll make it safe and we have the 1.0 scars to be able to pull it off."

Twenty years of battle scars in software puts Jenkins in a good position to have a discourse around enterprise 2.0. He argues that companies need to have  a better perception of the risk and reward involved when jumping into the Web 2.0 world.We spoke about corporations' propensity to want to go off and experiment, something Jenkins described as "rogue developments"

The other interesting notion was even though online communities are emerging, traditional enterprise repositories and applications still contain a lot of the "water" Jenkins describes as being needed to create the internal water cooler. I asked him how he's positioning OpenText in the Mashup space, referring to the desire for early adopters (for now) to mix up and integrate applications with a nice GUI on top.

He says OpenText will evolve its Virtual Object Repositories allowing for users to see traditional line of business (LOB) apps in whatever GUI they like. Users can expose apps or services in Outlook, SAP, or any other IT-supported system.

Jenkins was adamant that many social networks will fail because of the lack of governance and well thought out strategies. He gave the example of someone posting how to engineer an airplane engine on YouTube. If that airplane goes down after heeding your rich media (video) advice, you're in a heap of trouble. Welcome to Web 2.0.

Technorati tags: open+text, ECM, enterprise+2.0, tom+jenkins, enterprise+software

Oracle's Vince Casarez Is Confident About Enterprise 2.0's Arrival

Enterprise 2.0 is here folks. If you're here in Boston for the conference, you're obviously already a big believer. And if you're oracle customer, you might already be well down the enterprise 2.0 path.

I caught up with Oracle VP and enterprise 2.0 evangelist Vince Casarez recently to get the scoop on how the world's largest software company is ideally positioned to help customers transition to enterprise 2.0, a term describing the tools and processes companies are adopting to drive better collaboration among finicky knowledge workers. He says that while the enterprise 2.0 space is maturing rapidly, companies are figuring out that enterprise 1.0 fundamentals still apply.

"We think it makes more sense to inject best-of-breed Web 2.0 capabilities into your enterprise application environments," said Casarez.

He says knowledge workers are more likely to adopt new ways of sharing information when they have a sense of familiarity or connectedness to existing applications or workflows. He's got a point. An overused example of that comes from Oracle's arch rival Microsoft. Think of all the applications that have lived and died by the Microsoft Outlook sword. Fact is, if you can thrive in the ecosystem of an existing enterprise application, you'll get a chance to live, or be adopted, as the saying goes in software.

With Oracle's line of business (LOB) applications so prevalent, does that mean all of its customers will adopt its software to join the e2.0 ranks? Of course not. There will always be customers that gravitate to the start-ups, hoping to get a few months of added capability tacked on to spur time-to-market and and potentially cut costs. After the best-of-breed sparkle fades however, most companies will come to the realization that enterprise 1.0 never really left us.

Things like IT governance, compliance pressures and vendor viability will rear their collective heads just as they always do. Couple that with the fact that CIOs are now realizing they can look to existing infrastructure to satisfy enterprise 2.0 requirements and you have a compelling business case to look to an Oracle.

"Large enterprises have invested millions of dollars in existing applications, not to mention the training that goes along with having to ensure large-scale adoption of that infrastructure," added Casarez.

I also asked Casarez about the enterprise 2.0 activity within its channel of solution providers and integrators.

"We're seeing some very sophisticated enterprise 2.0 use cases start to emerge from our channel partners.It's clear our customers have moved past the experimental phases of enterprise 2.0," he said.

If you've followed any of Oracles' web 2.0 moves over the last year, you know that customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation are two areas ripe with current pilots and early implementations.On the CRM front, its move to create more social CRM capabilities has drawn some praise from industry observers and it (CRM) seems to a breeding ground for a lot of enterprise 2.0 pure plays.

Its dThree implementation has been a showcase for Oracle on the marketing services front. I spoke to dThree a while back and saw what the right web  2.0 "injection", as Casarez says, can do to sometimes stale marketing platforms. dThree layered just the right amount of social computing features to its marketing platform, built from the ground up using things like Oracle WebCenter and Fusion middleware.

Who says the enterprise software guys are just enterprise 2.0 window dressing.

Technorati tags: oracle, enterprise 2.0, e2.0, dthree, social+computing, vince cesarez, oracle+webcenter, oracle+fusion

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

Too Many Vendors Or Not Enough Innovation?

One of our contacts in the PR world sent over some thoughts after reading our continuing discussion about why content management companies fail. His remarks might not be terribly surprising for those of you that live and breathe content management, but they warrant a re-visit.

He got me thinking about an often-overlooked characteristic of the content management sector: the sheer saturation of vendors and solutions.

As he put it, "I think, from even just a pure economic perspective, the No. 1 reason a content management company will go out of business is because there's not enough room for all of them."

And why is that? Is it because of our propensity to view any company that touches content or manages data as a content management vendor? Or is it a classic case of the vendors' desires to be all things to all people? It's really a combination of both. It's just too easy to pass up a sales opportunity for companies that he says are "just trying to stay afloat."

That brings up the notion of innovation. If content management companies are just keeping their heads up above water, how can they think freely about what the next customer needs? And throw in the fact that the space has several publicly traded pure-plays along with what he described as the big dogs (Microsoft, IBM, EMC) and you have a sector on a quest for real differentiation.

The publicist to the CM stars also mentioned how tough it is to predict a long-term view of the industry, citing things like open source, SharePoint, and consolidation as potential speed bumps to growth and innovation. Open source has to be the one that looms the largest. As Alfresco's co-founder told me this week, "Open source is the only distribution model that can compete with Microsoft's distribution model."

Perhaps some of the CM vendors should take a page from the less-entrenched software companies building the knowledge worker apps of tomorrow. It's not just R&D tunnel vision and loads of cash that allow companies like Alfresco, Jive, and MindTouch to do what they do. It has more to do with taking a fresh look at your market and how you need to serve your customers. You see, Jen in Finance doesn't want another big repository that she has to search. She doesn't want to cut and paste content from different applications. She wants to mashup up her own content and she wants it to live and breathe in her own workspace.

I liked the way Jive's Sam Lawrence attacked the innovation thread earlier this week. He sent me his take on how enterprise software's heavyweights could eventually be overtaken by social software's up-and-comers.

This has obviously been debated ad nauseam, but the perfect storm of open source, cloud computing, and Web 2.0 certainly makes for interesting speculation.

The disruption he mentions already is being felt by CM vendors everywhere. When will it drive the innovation needed?

Technorati Tags: content+management,WCM,web+2.0,enterprise+2.0,mindtouch,jive+software,alfresco

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)

Are Microsoft and IBM Your Future Social Media Vendors?

2008 will no doubt be a telling year in the corporate social media and Web 2.0 space. And if this CIO Insight story is any indication, the race will again pit David v. Goliath. But what's different this time around? Will the Web 2.0 shakeout be any different than all the other enterprise software battles?

What happens in 2008?

Here's some thoughts:

• The incumbent enterprise software vendors have the edge in total dollars spent in 2008 as they give away what Web 2.0 functionality they have.
  
• Pure-play social media and Web 2.0 vendors get out of the gate faster because their platforms are easier to stitch together -- the gap shortens in late 2008 as acquisitions are made.
  
• Bigger vendors will provide the underlying architecture and deep integration to existing apps.
  
• Enterprises will learn that mixing and matching Web 2.0 technologies with existing apps provides real value - advantage upstarts.
  
• Pure-play social media vendors will quickly evolve their alliance strategies -- the lines of coexistence or competition will be blurred.
  
• Enterprise software vendors will go wide while smaller vendors go deep. In other words, the small guys will do one or two things really well and the big boys will do a lot of stuff kind of well.
  
• Vertical expertise will take precedence very soon. Advantage: enterprise software vendors.
  
• Bigger vendors will sneak web 2.0 inside the enterprise. You'll get the content repository from IBM -- and it'll include publishing and subscription capabilities, AKA blog and RSS.
  
• Pure-plays will rely more heavily on 3rd-party services..similar to the early enterprise portal days and all those clunky content gadgets.

But don't count out the current crop of social media upstarts so fast, though. They can still can put their best enterprise foot forward when they have to. Below is Awareness Networks' (formerly iUpload) passage marketing to the deer-in-the-headlight IT decision-maker.

..if a corporation deploys separate tools for each form of social media (e.g., blogs, wikis, discussion groups, etc.) they will create disparate islands of information that later will have to be somehow integrated. A common approach to all forms of social media allows an organization to employ the most appropriate form of social media for each business need with the assurance of knowing that the content is re-purposable to any other form. In this mode, a user can generate content in one participation style (e.g., a blog) that later appears in another participation style (e.g., a wiki or a discussion group) . This maximizes the value of the user-generated content and avoids any silos of information.

What else do you see in the coming months?

Technorati Tags: enterprise+social+media, social+computing, awareness+networks, microsoft, web+2.0, enterprise+2.0, IBM

Enterprise 2.0 Is Not A Fad

 KPMG just released a paper titled, Enterprise 2.0: Fad or Future? Nice title, you almost had me. It's really comical to think a big consulting firm would even hint at the notion of a new set of  technologies being a fad. New technologies mean re-engineering, lots of heavy lifting, and lots of human resources, right? Not necessarily.

This enterprise is different than your father's enterprise. This one is lightweight, it's flexible, and it ignores long implementations. So why all the fuss over enterprise 2.0 and its older sibling Web 2.0?

Most analysts will tell you it's because this stuff is gonna  be big business -- and soon. The dollars set to pour into the so-called "Enterprise Social Software" market  is projected in 2011 to grow from US$ 226 million in 2007 to more than US$ 707 million.

It's interesting to see the big integrators putting on their best Gen X and Y impressions, all of sudden scrambling to be perceived as thought leaders. The reality is most big consulting firms will ride the enterprise coattails of the major software vendors, comfortably sitting back and cherry-picking the opportunities already seeded by vendors who've sprinkled bits and pieces of Web 2.0 throughout their platform.

For the record, I actually thought the paper was informative, especially the case studies from some of the big brands. What I couldn't figure out was why the social software categories were so light on content and were mainly geared towards the B2C side.

Download the full publication here.

Listen to the podcast (MP3, 7m48secs, 7.21MB)

Technorati Tags: KPMG, enterprise+2.0, e2.0, social+software, enterprise+social+software, social+media, social+computing, web+2.0

Still Not Convinced About RSS Behind The Firewall?

If you're not, take a look at a recent document I received from Scott Niesen, head marketer at Attensa. If you don't know Attensa, you're in for a treat. Their new feedreader tool sits nicely inside Outlook and brings a unique spin to feed reading via their "River of News" view and AttentionStream™ technology. 

 

Through ongoing analysis of AttentionStream™ data, including the time and frequency that feeds are accessed and articles read, deleted and ignored, Attensa displays feeds in a prioritized list based on the likelihood that they will be of interest to the reader. Subscriptions can be displayed in a "River of News" view that simulates a single news feed, regardless of how many RSS feeds

And Scott and I had a good exchange about sharing some of Attensa's inner RSS workings. When I told him I should just blog the whole document, he quickly fired back that "marketing is all about experiments and a little risk."

Well said.

 
Attensa Screenshot

Cross-posted on WOW Feed

Technorati Tags: Attensa, RSS, blogs, enterprise+RSS, tools, feedreaders, rss+readers

Enterprise 2.0 Rave Offers Readiness Survey

 If you want to get the ins and outs of Enterprise 2.0, jump over to the Enterprise 2.0 Rave and check out the program.The organizers have decided to host the event virtually (May 21-22) with webcasts featuring various roundtable discussions.You'll recognize most of the folks, even if you're just a casual observer of social media and Web 2.0.

They've also assembled an enterprise 2.0 readiness survey you can access here and plan to share the results during one of the sessions.

Technorati tags: enterprise+2.0, enterprise+2.0+rave, web+2.0, e2+0, tech+events, technology, business+2.0