Telligent was proud to be one of the sponsors of the
BlogWell conference last week in Chicago. If you missed it,
we blogged four of the sessions below. Let us know if you
have questions, we’re happy to provide additional information.
A few weeks back I ran across Gist, a SaaS-based service that pulls in your data from things like LinkedIn, Outlook and GMail to dynamically deliver a personalized “dossier” of your contacts. Everything from ticker-driven company news to your contact’s Twitter feed can be incorporated, giving you some real depth as you reach out or re-connect.
I'll be using Gist over the next few weeks to compile some industry analysis for use at Telligent, so stay tuned for additional thoughts. And if you’ve got a few minutes, you can listen to some quick thoughts I recorded in the podcast below.
.NET Content Management company Sitecore sent me news last week about its growing partner channel. It announced it has more than 300 certified Sitecore partners worldwide using its content management and portal tools to grow their businesses.
“Partnering with Sitecore allows me to recommend, without reservation, a solution fitting the needs of our clients, whether it’s an organization that has a legal database with twenty thousand sites or a small nonprofit with a single website,” said Trevor Bezdek, Vice President at The Revere Group. “The technology, excellent training programs and customer and partner support have allowed us to meet a variety of client requirements and system challenges. And Sitecore has been a great partner as our team has quadrupled across our offices nationwide.”
The expanded Sitecore partner program now combines comprehensive training courses, sales support and an extensive developer community, with a 20% increase in related personnel in the US in the fourth Quarter of 2008.
Sitecore also announced the opening of a major training facility in San Francisco and expanded certification offerings to provide partners with additional competencies in Sitecore products. Certified Sitecore developers now number more than 2500 worldwide.
Jeff Cram, Managing Director of ISITE Design, recently implemented Sitecore for a large life sciences corporation with offices in more than 40 countries. “Sitecore’s flexibility fit our client’s needs extremely well,” stated Cram. “The Sitecore-driven platform has driven immediate results by significantly decreasing the time and money it takes to deploy new sites. It was built to eventually support more than 100 individual websites.”
You can learn more about Sitecore’s partner program here.
A fair amount has been written about ECM and SaaS (Software as a Service) recently, particularly focusing upon whether ECM is well suited to the on demand environment and if businesses can depend upon on-demand ECM providers. I think the second part of this discussion is curious. If customers are confident their client data is safe with a SaaS CRM vendor like Salesforce.com then, all things being equal what makes other types of data, like documents, more or less at risk? Obviously the management at Salesforce.com didn’t think there was a much different model when they decided to acquire online document management vendor, Koral last year.
In fairness, Salesforce has succeeded in CRM where customers historically had not been provided with adequate solutions or were so dissatisfied with their existing CRM software they were willing to overlook the switching costs.
The Salesforce service’s ease of use and generally superior performance was enough to get many businesses to overcome their fears of SaaS as well. So, is ECM different? Possibly. While this is just a hypothesis, I would guess that the methods organizations use to manage their documents differ more significantly than how they manage their respective sales processes.
While larger organizations may employ common taxonomies to govern how they store documents, this is often in response to industry standard practices or government regulations, such as those designed to help monitor the drug discovery process like the FDA’s CFR 21 Part 11.
Small and medium sized organizations not directly engaged with government organizations are less likely to follow standard document storage and archiving methods. Instead, these companies develop their own best practices specifically suited to their environment and often management’s general familiarity and comfort with technology as a whole.
While these document storage practices may not be ideal, many have probably lasted for years, some becoming more automated than others, with each process becoming more different from the next. Unlike the largest organizations which embraced ECM a decade ago or more, smaller companies could not afford the legions of consultants and technicians required to update and migrate their document management processes to a networked model, much less the Web.
As a result, their document-centric business processes remain an odd mixture of paper-based and electronic exchanges with the latter mostly relying upon email as a notifications and document transport method.
So, what does all this have to do with cloud computing and ECM today? A lot or a little, depending upon how you want to look at it of course. As I stated in my last post, the more warmware built into a business process, the less likely it will easily migrate to another environment, including the web. Obviously, the more unique the process is the less likely a common cloud or SaaS solution will be able to address it.
Remember, one of the defining advantages of cloud computing is the aggregation and sharing of resources like computing, delivery and storage across a large and diverse customer population. It’s difficult for cloud applications to be common if they also must address multiple unique requirements while remaining universally accessible and easy to use.
Time and experience will undoubtedly help to overcome these issues. I imagine a future someday where automated widgets (or applets?) will help to transform and migrate even obscure business processes to the cloud with little intervention or planning. Ok, maybe my glasses are a little too rosy. In the meantime, its probably more realistic to expect that the most common elements of cloud computing, such as storage and collaboration can be leveraged to benefit existing business processes back on the ground.
What could this look like? Just imagine all of your business’ client solicitation, upgrade and service notices that you created in your favorite desktop programs are now stored in the cloud. Basic ECM functions ensure that complete version histories are maintained and backed up to keep your IT and legal staff happy. Clients are automatically notified of payment schedules using the cloud’s calendaring service and can instantly review their account status via a secure log-in through the cloud portal.
What’s new about that, you say? Just consider that none of this process required migrating your data from one application environment to another. There is no new software to learn, no consultants to pay, nothing. In fact, you can easily trick existing desktop applications into storing data in the cloud and begin developing scenarios like I just described using technologies that are available today.
If you’re interested to learn how, check in with my blog in a few days and I will share the details.
SDL Tridion's PR firm sent this to me last week and I couldn't resist -- they obviously know me well enough to realize what I like to publish.
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Web sites that are attractive but have no real substance – the “bimbos” of the Web world – are the most frustrating on line experience according to research carried out by SDL Tridion.
The top 5 online frustrations, as revealed by the research are:
1. Pop up ads: Like acne or ex-boyfriends – always appear at the wrong time and difficult to get rid of, 78 percent of respondents voted this the most frustrating aspect of the web.
2. Long intros you can’t click out of: Too much irrelevant information that wastes time; 56 percent of respondents were irked the most by this.
3. Hitting ‘back’ and losing all your information: Too much like hard work – 53 percent of people were driven to distraction when they had to repeat inputting their details.
4. Downloading new applications: Web sites are too flashy sometimes. If all you want is information, having to spend minutes downloading the latest version of an application to watch a video or read a document bothers 50 percent of people.
5. Asking for personal details: Why do you need to fill in your life story to get an answer out of some companies? 49 percent of people found this nosy neighbor attitude annoying.
“A company’s Web site is often the first thing visible to people when doing an on line search. First impressions count and all “fluff” and no content drives Web site users mad,” commented Erik Aeyelts Averink, president at SDL Tridion. “Don’t push customers away and annoy them for no reason.”
Also infuriating people are moving graphics that are difficult to click on (40 percent), a site without the usual options like contact us or about us (48 percent) and irrelevant information on overcrowded homepages (39 percent).
“These elements aren’t just annoying; they make up the Web site from hell,” continued Erik Aeyelts Averink. “Companies need to ensure they aren’t alienating Web users.
The Internet is often the first port of call for research and a Web site deserves the same time and effort spent on other marketing materials. If companies continue in this way they will lose not only customers, but their reputation.”
Here, Here.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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