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SAP in the ECM shadows

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Tue, 7 Oct 2008 08:46:00 -0400

To know what's really going on within a firm or the industry in which it operates you need to watch where the money is flowing.

In September money flowed in some interesting directions within the ECM sector. At Open Text it flowed out, as Chairman and CEO John Shakelton dumped almost all of his shareholdings. In contrast at NewGen in India it flowed in through a confirmed investment from SAP's venture arm (who already invest in open source ECM player Alfresco, among others).

Shakelton's move would seem to mimic those of senior management at FileNet prior to their acquisition by IBM. At the same time, SAP must make a long overdue move into ECM at some point.

In truth I do not know what these moves mean, and whether the common denominator of SAP is a coincidental one or not. In fact I will leave it to equities analysts such as my friend Paul Steep at Scotia Capital to figure it all out for us. But moves are clearly afoot, and we will continue to watch with interest to see how it all pans out.

CMIS - the new Lingua Franca of ECM?

kthomas@cmswatch.com(Kas Thomas) — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 12:29:00 -0400

It's often said that the great thing about industry standards is that there are so many of them. Now we have one more.

A short while ago, three of the biggest behemoths of content management (namely IBM, Microsoft, and EMC) announced a new standard... one that, if it does indeed become an accepted standard, is supposed do for the content-management world what ODBC and SQL did for the database world. (We've heard that one before, but keep reading anyway.)

The Content Management Interoperability Services specification (soon to be submitted to OASIS) is a set of protocols, exposed via REST and Web Services definitions, for platform-independent interchange of repository content. Using CMIS-defined HTTP calls, you will be able to do standard CRUD operations (create, read, update, delete) against any compliant repository, regardless of the underlying repository architecture.

Notably, CMIS leverages the Atom Publishing Protocol in its REST model (and indeed requires compliant repositories to honor APP, although they can optionally honor additional transfer representations, such as JSON). SOAP is written into the spec as well, for what that's worth.

The press releases around CMIS are loud and proud, trumpeting the spec's ability to enable platform-agnostic content mashups, easier cross-silo federation, rapid application development made possible by a common API, cleaner abstraction of content and content services from application logic, and so on.

We've heard these sorts of claims made before, of course. Proponents of the Java Content Repositories spec (originally JSR 170; now JSR 283) pushed JCR using exactly the same selling points. In fact, with just one exception, the originators of CMIS (IBM, EMC, Open Text, Oracle, SAP, Alfresco, and Microsoft) were the proponents of JCR: They were all, except for Microsoft, on the JSR 283 Expert Committee (and still are).

JCR achieved relatively little traction in the WCM and ECM worlds, though. Why should we expect CMIS to fare any better? After all, if JCR (with the same promoters as CMIS) floundered, why won't CMIS?

The answer could turn out to be quite simple. As I noted in an earlier blog, the main impediment to widespread adoption of JCR has always been the 'J': the dependency on Java. The whole world doesn't run on Java; therefore it was never realistic to think the world would embrace JCR. (Certainly Microsoft was never going to advance a Java standard.)

With CMIS (which is superficially quite similar to JCR and Apache Sling), there is no 'J' in the way. Does that mean CMIS will automatically enjoy the sort of uptake JCR never achieved? Of course not. There are many other potential obstacles to adoption, and even if the standard does gain traction, it's always possible for specific implementations to conflict in unexpected ways or be extended in nonstandard directions (as Microsoft tends to do with standards that it initially gets behind, but later hijacks or subverts in some way).

A short while before he posted his official reaction on dev.day.com, I asked JCR Spec Lead David Nuescheler (of Day Software) what he thought about the seeming collision between JCR (and Sling) and CMIS. His response was that just as the HTTP spec doesn't compete with the Java Servlet spec, JCR does not compete with CMIS. He sees no conflict. In fact, he welcomes the arrival of a high-level content protocol that transcends any one programming language. It's a net win for everybody.

I tend to agree. Here's hoping IBM, EMC, Microsoft, and the others will follow Alfresco's early lead and actually implement CMIS rather than (as they did with JCR) just issue press releases about it.

The ECM Suites Report 2009 released today

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 00:07:00 -0400

Today I'm proud to announce the release of the 2009 edition of The ECM Suites Report. Expanded out to over 400 pages, I believe this constitutes the most comprehensive ECM product evaluation report of its kind. In this edition we have added some new vendors, dropped some old, and revised all 30 product reviews.

This churn reflects a vibrant and extremely healthy global ECM market. As we note in today's press release, there probably has never been a better time for buyers, with a wide range of strong products to chose from, especially in the mid market.

If there is one thing in particular this latest research has shown us, it is that SharePoint did not (as many predicted) kill the ECM market, but rather the ECM market has embraced SharePoint -- and we are all the better for it.

Of course there are some stinkers out there, and as buyer you need to exercise caution, but we hope the advice, critiques, and "insider" detail we provide in this report will help mitigate your risks.

As always, if you're a subscription customer, you'll automatically receive your copy shortly.

Bam, WAM, thank you, DAM!

tregli@cmswatch.com(Theresa Regli) — Wed, 9 Jul 2008 15:36:00 -0400

Late last month I had the pleasure of attending the Henry Stewart Digital Asset Management Symposium in London, UK, where I presented a summary of our research recently published in The Digital & Media Asset Management Report 2008. It was interesting to contrast this event with Henry Stewart's other recent DAM event, in New York City, held in early May. While many of the challenges faced by digital asset managers on both sides of the Atlantic are similar, few vendors find success on both continents. Though most of the vendors in our report claim customers "worldwide," a true presence (meaning more than a sales person) beyond the headquarters is usually lacking -- oftentimes, the software is simply pushed by resellers abroad, with minimal success.

Unlike last year, Canadian vendors North Plains and Nstein had their footprint on the London show floor, while Artesia ( who was there last year) was notably missing. Otherwise, ADAM, Vyre and other smaller UK and Europe-based vendors continued to fulfill the need of their local markets, and look to expand. As I noted along with my colleague Alan at Internet World UK back in April, there's no shortage of small to medium-sized WCM vendors doing well in the UK market, either, and many have yet to venture even into continental Europe. For every vendor that's acquired an gobbled up, two or three new ones seem to emerge, fulfilling ever more specific micro-niches. Perhaps the "Go Local" trend isn't just about food anymore, but technology suppliers as well.

But talk in the conference rooms was more about the business challenges of broadcasters, designers, marketers, and publishers than it was about the tools and vendors themselves. What echoed most frequently at both conferences was the idea of DAM not just as an asset repository, but a set of workflows leading to an end product (be it a brochure, catalog, or 60-minute broadcast). Each step along the workflow should add value, be it metadata enrichment or some artistic or editorial improvement. And yet, as we've pointed out before, most tools fall short of allowing licensees to truly automate and expedite the often complex publishing processes required by typical DAM scenarios.

It's in this spirit that Chris Glynne, who recently started his own consultancy called Bold Visions, pitched the concept of WAM, or Workflow Asset Management. While the last thing we all need is another acronym, if we're going to take DAM beyond the concept of a digital library, focusing on workflow, and the automation of steps along the typical DAM path is one key way of making that happen.

Digital asset managers asked me a lot of questions about non-pure-play DAM vendors' DAM capabilities. From Alfresco to Microsoft to Oracle, conference delegates wanted to know if they really needed a pure-play DAM tool if they already had SharePoint or Oracle's UCM. That question is not easily answered without delving deeper and understanding your needs and business scenarios. Do you have digital assets that are larger than 5 MB? Do your assets require you to manage both individual and composite assets, such as an product image, and then a brochure where the image might be used, and subsequently a 250-page product catalog where it might be applied as well? Do you need to manage and use the same asset at various resolutions, for both the Web and print? Then SharePoint sure as heck won't do the trick, and you'd be stretching other non-DAM-specific tools. Specialized DAM vendors raison d'être is to fulfill needs like these.

I'll share more leanings from these two DAM events as the summer continues; feel free to email me with any DAM or MAM questions you may have as well, as we continue our research into this fast-changing technology.

Adobe and Alfresco

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 08:37:00 -0400

It's been a while since there was a big product announcement in the ECM world, but today's announcement by Adobe that they will be embedding Alfresco into their LiveCycle Enterprise Suite will doubtless garner a few headlines. Alfresco, the UK-based open source ECM company, has certainly done a great job of marketing themselves since their launch a couple of years back, stealing some limelight from more established and much bigger vendors such as Interwoven, Vignette, and Open Text.

The question we have to ask is whether this announcement is another marketing triumph, or whether it suggests something more substantial.

First off is the fact that it is a real OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) deal, and the technology will actually get embedded into the Adobe offering, so it is more than simply a paper partnership.

But let's think about what the Adobe offering is and why we do not currently evaluate it in our ECM Suites Report. Adobe LiveCycle Enterprise Suite is a product set built upon the acquisition of Acellio in 2002 (better known as "Jetform"). Though the user interface and underlying codebase may have changed a bit, the principle of this product remains the same: automating simple, usually forms-based, processes. The product excels as a point solution particularly in Government, where a form needs to be issued to the public, and the capture and subsequent business process needs to be automated quickly.

In theory the Alfresco repository adds some true ECM capabilities at the back end of the Adobe product set. Also the Alfresco solution will add some "Web 2.0" capabilities to Adobe, as Alfresco supports Adobe Flex. So in theory, the LiveCycle solution could be extended to build more complex applications rather than basic forms routing.

On a corporate note the OEM deal is intriguing, since of course Alfresco is a minnow compared to Adobe, and there are close connections between the executive teams. For example the Senior Vice President of this particular Adobe Business unit is none other than Rob Tarkoff, a close friend and ex-Documentum colleague of Alfresco CTO John Newton. Could Adobe be planning to acquire Alfresco? Who knows? But if the OEM is successful, an acquisition might appeal to both firms, if less so to Alfresco's current customer base.

In short then, it's an intriguing announcement, and we will be looking at demonstrations of the technology in practice later today as well as testing it out more thoroughly over the coming months. Like us, you should treat this new product arrangement with real caution until it has been thoroughly tested by customers. That is not a a slight against either firm, but an announcement is just that and no more. Time is always the true test.

Is Facebook in the Enterprise an Oxymoron?

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 18:02:00 -0500

Facebook is all the rage -- and consequently bringing Enterprise 2.0 to the fore. Is it time to revisit your Intranet platform? CMS Watch founder Tony Byrne looks at Facebook's benefits and demerits and concludes that your IT department could learn some important lessons about balancing employee enablement and control over information...

Zealotry of the Apostate?

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 13:48:00 -0500

At the Gilbane Conference keynote today, execs from ECM vendors Alfresco, Oracle, IBM, and Adobe focussed on -- perhaps inevitably -- Enterprise 2.0. The overall gist was: enterprises should focus on sharing information rather than just controlling it.

Well of course that's true. But it's always been true. So I couldn't help feeling a sense of irony inasmuch as each of those vendors were proponents of the kind of über-centralized infrastructures and enterprisey controls that they are now telling those very same customers are no longer cool. It was just a year ago when these same guys were going on about Sarbanes-Oxley.

And even today, they are sending mixed messages. Twice in recent months I've heard an IBM enterprise content management (ECM) rep describe ROI as "Risk of Incarceration." Fear-based selling anyone? Oracle's new Stellent step-child is moving away from its Web CMS roots to do more heavyweight document and records management. Adobe acts like AJAX doesn't exist. Alfresco built a very complicated and rather user-unfriendly development framework that only a Java systems architect could love.

So while the ECM vendor talking heads get excited about their new religion, their companies are actually praying to different gods when it comes to selling enterprise information management on the ground.

Plone: What's in a name...

info@jboye.dk(Janus Boye) — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 08:15:00 -0400

Earlier this month at the annual Plone Conference 2007, the consulting firm "Plone Solutions" announced it would change its name to "Jarn." Plone Solutions / Jarn has been among the most experienced Plone system integrators, in particular since one of its founders was also a founder of Plone.

So why change such an esteemed name? The company cites "commitment to the community, to the Plone Foundation, and to a fair and open marketplace around Plone." This certainly makes sense and is a smart community-relations move, but still a step that many other open source firms have not taken, e.g., Alfresco, Magnolia, or eXo. If you're an Alfresco (the tool) integrator, it kind of sucks to compete against Alfresco (the company).

So I think avoiding having a commercial firm by the same name represents an important measure of a true community-oriented project. Remember that the community around your product of choice can make a significant difference to your project, in particular for open source tools.

Open Source ECM continues to grow

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Sun, 19 Aug 2007 11:38:00 -0400

South African open source ECM developer Knowledge Tree recently announced that their package has seen more than 380,000 downloads. Of course, veterans of open source projects will concede that downloads doth not a production implementation make. However, Knowledge Tree has sold the commercial version of the tool to such clients such as Bank of Scotland and the European Space Agency. Doubtless one of the appeals of the package is that it's written in PHP -- common enough among Web CMS tools, but quite rare for a document management platform.

It seems amazing that just a few years back there were no credible open source ECM vendors, and now we have at least three vibrant offerings, Nuxeo, Knowledge Tree and Alfresco, with more emerging. Throw into this the ECM-in-a-Box offering from InfoGrid, and the array of SaaS offerings hitting the market and one has to conclude that buyers' choices have never been wider. The ECM marketplace clearly remains far from mature.

Scalability the Terracotta Way

kthomas@cmswatch.com(Kas Thomas) — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 06:23:00 -0400

One of the theoretical advantages of Java-based Portals and Content Management applications is the ability to cluster servers for better performance. But the reality is that clustering is a black art that few vendors and implementation teams really ever seem to master adequately. So it comes as a (welcome) surprise to learn of an open-source technology that delivers many (if not most) of the things customers want here, but in surprisingly quick, painless fashion, at low cost, with no need to recompile code or stay up nights learning about disturbing-sounding concepts like "STONITH" (shoot the other node in the head).

The technology in question is called Terracotta, and it works by clustering the Java Virtual Machine in such a way that even a participating JVM itself doesn't know that it has been enlisted in a coordinated effort of any kind. Through a clever bit of boot-time dependency injection, Terracotta patches a handful of core JVM memory-management bytecode instructions, achieving transparent virtualization across any number of enlisted VMs, under the control of a Terracotta server that lives in "aspect space." The Java memory model is not altered. Application code does not have to handle locks any differently or follow any special APIs, or even know that it's been clustered. Have I lost you here? Think of it this way: Instead of implementing special cluster services at the application level using product-specific APIs, Terracotta clusters the Java heap itself, underneath your applications.

It all sounds like science fiction until you try the tutorials, read the white papers and technical literature, and examine the long list of integration efforts (listed on the Terracotta website) involving other Java-based modules like Apache Lucene.

One of the more intriguing integration efforts thus far has been Geert Bevin's recent quest to achieve heretofore unknown levels of scalability and performance with the open-source Web CMS package, Drupal. Drupal is actually written in PHP, but in this case runs on Caucho's Quercus (a Java implementation of PHP), leveraging Terracotta in the cache layer. As Web CMS Report readers know, Drupal is a collaboration-intensive CMS solution of the "let's cache everything in the database" variety -- with difficult scalability problems to match. Bevin's system is highly experimental at this point, but it hints at what people might be able to accomplish with the technology.

In the meantime, other content technologies that take advantage of well-known Java subsystems like Hibernate, Tomcat, Resin, EHCache, Quartz, and so on have the most to gain by exploring Terracotta as a fast path to scalability. Individual subsystems can be tested against Terracotta separately, to find sweet spots.

It will be interesting to see how long it takes mainline ECM and Portal players (particularly those that rely heavily on Java-based infrastructure components) to include Terracotta in their "supported product configurations." I would expect the Alfrescos and Liferays of the world to stay out in front of the situation. Purveyors of complex proprietary solutions might miss the boat.

Scalability always has been (and probably always will be) the Achilles' heel of all the technologies we cover. I'll be watching to see how other communities adapt Terracotta-like notions to other well-known virtual machines (e.g., .NET). Anyone at www.mono-project.com listening?

True ECM for Salesforce.com?

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 20:34:00 -0400

The story begins with Computer Associates (CA), who spun off its Ingres line into a separate, open source project. Ingres is now teaming up with open source ECM provider Alfresco. The Ingres "Icebreaker" product (linux + database stack) will offer an ECM option provided via Alfresco. That's good for Alfresco, who charges a pretty penny for support. But of interest also is the fact that Ingres is working with BI/Analytics firm Jaspersoft to incorporate a software bundle to complement Salesforce.com. The hosted CRM giant recently announced its intention to join into the ECM market by offering collaborative document management for its clientele. But true transaction-scale ECM via Alfresco/Ingress could also make a powerful option to deal with content resources and workflows that intersect the process of managing customer relationships. It's a thought....a two tier ECM offering from Salesforce.com -- basic for general office collaboration - extended for high volume critical needs.

Enterprise Content Management Marketplace: Opportunities and Risks

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 15:09:00 -0400

Buyers looking at strategic ECM investments can find product research from CMS Watch and other analyst firms, but, Alan Pelz-Sharpe argues, you need to look beyond the tools to the vendors themselves. And here, Alan finds that some of the biggest and well-known vendors are undergoing substantial change right now, at some near-term risk for their customers...

Alfresco releases WCM module

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Fri, 29 Sep 2006 17:41:00 -0400

After luring away several Interwoven staffers earlier this year, open source ECM vendor Alfresco has beta-released a long-awaited Web CMS module. I haven't seen it yet, but it will be interesting to see how a platform that is long on repository-oriented services will deal with the particularities of web publishing in general, and customer expectations for web site management in particular. If you end up using Alfresco for web content management, I'd love to hear how it turns out.

Alfresco to add WCM to ECM

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Mon, 13 Feb 2006 17:33:00 -0500

In case you hadn't noticed, open-source content management vendor Alfresco has been preparing to expand its platform to cover Web content management. After a noisy launch where the company politely dismissed open-source Web CMS efforts in favor of its more document-centric approach, Alfresco leadership seems to have had a change of heart, or maybe their funders have? In any case, Alfresco has recruited former Interwoven wünderkind Kevin Cochrane to lead the WCM effort.

A review of Alfresco

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Thu, 1 Sep 2005 10:16:00 -0400

I recently reviewed open-source ECM project "Alfresco" in a short KMWorld article. On the whole, Alfresco's release generated a bit more heat than light, but when anyone develops a serious open-source alternative to MS SharePoint, well, you just have to applaud.

Alfresco vs. Plone

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Fri, 16 Dec 2005 07:21:00 -0500

When Alfresco made a noisy launch earlier this year, the new project put some noses out of joint elsewhere in the open-source CM community by claiming the mantle of "first open-source ECM platform." In particular, some in the Plone community pointed out that Plone was frequently used in the wild for managing documents, not just HTML text. Well, along comes Seth Gottlieb with a typically detailed comparison of the 2 platforms. It turns out they each have some strengths (and weaknesses), and appear to be targeted at different use-cases.