CMS Watch Trends and Features

Now more than ever, reading is not believing

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Tue, 13 May 2008 00:06:00 -0400

As a content producer, it has been fascinating to watch the evolution of channels where technology suppliers talk to technology customers -- the trade press and industry conferences in particular.

Take conferences. In the go-go 1990s, prospective speakers were busy making money, and conference organizers (of which there were many!) aggressively courted panelists and often paid them to speak. During the last recession, most conferences stopped paying speakers (except for keynotes and training). In fact, in many venues the pendulum has shifted towards pay-to-play, and you see more exhibitors on conference panels than ever. Not surprisingly, when this happens the quality suffers apace.

The trade press has not been immune from this trend either. Still, I was shocked last week when a UK-based IT publication asked one of our analysts to pay the publisher to run an article that the magazine itself had solicited. This was not a "sponsored white paper," but a regular article in a regular trade publication. Everyone knows the 4th Estate has fallen on hard times, but I didn't realize it was that bad, and in any case one would hope that basic ethics don't get lost amid shifting business models.

I think these trends reflect a broader phenomenon: There is more marketing money than ever chasing finite buyer attention. You see it at conferences that are longer on exhibitors than attendees. And webpages that are longer on ads than content. We've written previously on the substantial conflicts of interest baked into traditional analyst industry models.

What does all this mean for you the customer? It means you need to be more skeptical than ever. At some level you already knew that, but it's possible that your colleagues helping you to make technology choices do not. That's why you need to hard-wire careful, hands-on testing into any software procurement. Surely, there are products and vendors out there that really could offer a good fit for your needs. But in the end, experience really is the best selector.

We think doing proper advance homework is essential, or we wouldn't sell evaluation reports for a living. But now more than ever, you need to trust your own judgments. Base those judgments more on actions than words.

Facebook: Not just a toy...

jgingras@cmswatch.com(Jarrod Gingras) — Mon, 12 May 2008 11:26:00 -0400

Over the last few years, many people (including us) have asked whether or not Facebook can be used as a enterprise intranet. Many have dismissed this notion by stating that Facebook is really just a time-wasting toy. While that question continues to be debated in enterprises across the globe, there is no question that Facebook has caught the attention of the big boys -- namely Google and Microsoft.

We have been hearing of Facebook as a drain on Google resources for some time. When asked about the biggest challenge to Google's success, one Google employee we talked to indicated that it was the loss of talent to nearby Facebook. It's not surprising that employees would be attracted to move down the street from Mountain View to Palo Alto to find a similar collegiate, yet pre-IPO, culture; but now the defections are becoming more senior, and more strategic. Facebook's COO, VP of Global Communications, Director of Business Development, Director of Platform Product Marketing are all ex-Google employees.

In the midst of Facebook's talent threat to Google, the company has also piqued the interest of Microsoft as a way to challenge Google themselves. As Prescient Digital Media's Toby Ward points out, Microsoft may look to Facebook's platform as a way to tap into the hosted enterprise tool market where Google has found success.

I agree with Toby that the Facebook platform certainly has a ways to go to truly compete head to head with Google's current offerings, but Microsoft's interest should indicate that Facebook has some major strategic value. The platform, the 70 million users, and the ever-growing ex-Google experience, are all assets that would strengthen Microsoft's arsenal in these early stages of a possible showdown between Microsoft and Google. Clearly, Facebook is much more than just a toy.

Next week, I will be moderating a panel discussion on this and other Facebook in the Enterprise questions at the Enterprise3 conference in San Diego. The panel will be comprised of the previously mentioned President of Prescient Digital Media, Toby Ward; Serena Software's VP of Communications, Kyle Arteaga; and the Senior Director of Optaros Labs at Optaros, John Eckman. Please join us for what should be a very lively discussion.

DAM: Always the bridesmaid, never the bride?

tregli@cmswatch.com(Theresa Regli) — Mon, 12 May 2008 01:00:00 -0400

As the Henry Stewart DAM Conference kicks off in New York City today, CMS Watch has quite a bit to say about the state of the DAM industry, based on our research for the recently released Digital Asset Management Report 2008.

As we discuss in our press release, despite the continued "on-the-cusp" feel of the DAM industry, it has yet to explode. And, frankly, we question if it ever will. DAM's growth has been more like that of a trusty, stable bond investment than a late-'90s software stock. All the better, perhaps, if DAM grows slowly but surely, even if it's a bit in the shadows.

We'll blog more on the themes from our report, and this week's conference, in the coming days.

SEO: furthering the case for better content hygiene

tregli@cmswatch.com(Theresa Regli) — Fri, 9 May 2008 16:12:00 -0400

The worlds of SEO and enterprise search are not as far apart as you might think. Let me explain. Along with my colleague Alan, I had the pleasure of attending the upbeat Internet World UK conference earlier this month in London. What I enjoy most about attending such large, diverse events is going to sessions about technologies related to, but not directly about, the technologies I cover -- and so I found myself attending numerous sessions on SEO, or Search Engine Optimization.

Though there was an inquisitive crowd present for my talk, the topic I spoke about -- enterprise search -- is much lower on the totem pole for e-marketers (the principal attendees at this event) than SEO. A few showed up, in fact, wanting to better understand the nuances of website search vs. enterprise search vs. SEO. Are there universal things we can do to simultaneously improve all things, I was asked? Indeed. Despite the differences in searching the web, searching within your enterprise, and making your own website more findable by search engines, many of the same best practices apply.

As readers of The Enterprise Search Report know, good content hygiene is essential to good search results. Consistent content structure, metadata, and simple things like clear and meaningful document titles all help search engines work better -- be they the public (e.g., Google) website, or enterprise kind. But in most cases, content managers don't know where to start with their clean-up: it's an often overwhelming task. As such, content clean-up continues to get cast aside ("too much work"), and search technology vendors make it seem that much less important when they promote technology as the panacea to content woes. Don't believe it for a second.

A few more tidbits from the event:

These days, 80% of e-commerce transactions start with a web search, says Dan Cohen, Head of SEO for MSN UK.
The #1 hindrance to SEO is poor content and code (which also highly contributes to poor web and intranet search results)
Creating clear, topic-related content "hubs" on your web site is the next most important thing for SEO
As readers of our Web Analytics Report know, analytics should be a core part of your e-marketing pie, to get a clear picture of what your customers are looking for and where they're getting stuck.

Bottom line: cleaning up your content can improve your website search results and your Google ranking.

Imaging - the most important element of ECM?

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Fri, 9 May 2008 15:49:00 -0400

As an "Enterprise-focused" content management analyst, I am asked two basic questions on a regular basis. The first (which I shan't speak of further here) is "what about SharePoint?" The second is, "what about imaging?"

At many conferences, and regularly via e-mail, people ask me about imaging in the context of ECM. Imaging is the the major cost that most projects either forget about or dramatically under budget for. Partly this is due to the fact that during the buying process it's all too easy to get caught up in the flurry of believing that every file will soon be digital. Even though paper is clearly here to stay.

So before you fall into that trap let me offer you a few words of advice. Firstly, dealing with the "backfile" of paper documents may well be the most costly and difficult part of your entire ECM project. Though you almost certainly do not need to capture and convert all the paper, the very task of identifying what is important to convert and what is not, is labor intensive in its own right. Secondly, the scanner is the least of your concerns. The cost and complexity of capture do lie not in hardware. Rather, your bigger expense will come in the form or software -- software that processes the captured image, indexes it, and puts it through quality controls, and (in many cases) extracts data elements and instigates workflows. Thirdly, recognize that capture and imaging will likely always be a part of the ECM process; you can try to eliminate it, but you will likely fail. So address it early on.

To many customers, particularly IT buyers, Imaging and Capture seem dull and uninteresting. It's not sexy like WCM or DAM are supposed, yet it is typically much higher cost, and typically more of a challenge to install, test, run and support. On the other hand, imaging is also where almost immediate process change and potential cost savings can be seen and calculated.

Imaging remains big business, which is why the likes of Oracle, IBM and EMC are so serious about developing these capabilities. It's why web oriented firms like Vignette cling hard to their (acquired) imaging legacy solutions, it's why specialists like Hyland and Laserfiche continue to thrive in turbulent markets.

And it's why you the buyer should prioritize imaging budgets and concerns early in your project and procurement process. Remember at core ECM systems typically consist of 3 core subsystems: library services, imaging, and workflow. Those are the same 3 core technology blocks that existed in the earliest document management systems, and it is those core technologies that continue to dominate the market, regardless of SharePoint.

Maria, why is your portal so mean to me?

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Fri, 9 May 2008 08:46:00 -0400

A CMS Watch customer implementing Liferay Portal sent me this screenshot below. On the whole, the implementation is going well enough, but the abrupt tone of some of the error messages is turning off early community testers.

Of course, cryptic and even rude error messages are famously the bane of many software applications, and at least the Liferay messages include the magic word "please" after telling you that you screwed up. Thing is, when the software in question serves developers, the vendor gets a lot of direct blowback, but when the software serves business users, there is typically an intermediary at the customer who suffers first.

For example, behind every portal project lies the portal project manager. Let's say her name is Maria. Maria may be leading a Liferay (or IBM, or Oracle, or Jetspeed or whatever) implementation, but end users don't know and probably don't care which tool is getting deployed. To them, it's Maria's portal. And they will ask, "Maria, why is your portal so mean to me?"

Maria will of course try to make the error messages friendlier and more meaningful. But her developers explain that this part of the portal remains undocumented, and the messages appear to be system generated. That's not a good answer, because even though the codebase is open source, Maria has been around the block enough to know that sending her developers off on a wild goose chase to track down, modify, and recompile some part of the platform is asking for trouble later. So, Maria appeals to the original portal developers and the broader community, but doesn't get a satisfactory reply. Fixing error messages joins the to-do list for Maria's Portal, version two.

Of course, the very same set of events could have transpired if Maria's firm had gone with a commercial portal product, but somehow I think that certain open source projects are particularly vulnerable here -- especially those where contributors get their props and cred for the features they develop, rather than the usability they engender.

As Enteprise Portals Report readers know, Liferay the company (center of Liferay the open source project) pretty much falls into that category. Liferay is a somewhat distractable and hyperkinetic firm that seems rather more interested in putting out cool modules than debugging them. Again: I know many commercial vendors with the same profile. As always, test first, and ye shall find...

Routing around potholes in the DAM road

kthomas@cmswatch.com(Kas Thomas) — Thu, 8 May 2008 08:07:00 -0400

In an earlier post, prompted by my recent involvement as co-lead analyst (with Theresa Regli) on The Digital & Media Asset Management Report 2008, I commented on a few areas in which DAM and MAM vendors seem to have mastered some content management principles that Web CMS vendors (who tend, by and large, to be a bit younger than their DAM counterparts) perhaps shouldn't have to reinvent or discover on their own. Things like capturing metadata on every item that goes into a repository, and storing that metadata as tables in a relational database where the data can easily be queried, mined, and managed.

DAM vendors may have gotten some important things right, but in certain areas there's a great deal of catch-up left to do. I'll comment briefly on a couple of those areas: workflow and reporting. Bear in mind, these remarks don't apply to every vendor; there are exceptions.

One area where DAM offerings tend (surprisingly often) to come up short, out of the box, is workflow. In speaking with DAM licensees, I found this to be one of the most frequently voiced complaints. ("We liked everything but their workflow system.") What's particularly striking about this shortcoming is that asset management tends to be more process-intensive, while most web publishing scenarios only require relatively simple approval workflows.

Nevertheless, Web CMS vendors seem to have figured out that the process of making content consumable is indeed a process that sometimes needs to accommodate well understood flow-control rules, actors with definite roles, time-out and retry policies, logging, error-handling, and at least some degree of administrative oversight (so that in-progress workflows can be monitored and obsolete or orphaned workflow instances can be killed). More fundamentally, a workflow is something that can be modeled. Most DAM offerings have no real understanding of that.

Much of what masquerades as workflow in the DAM world is simply e-mail-based reminder routing (with no real state management). There's seldom any formal support for fan-out, fan-in, role-based delegation, retry policies, quorum constraints, escalation, or rollback. DAM customers who need something more robust than simple e-mail chaining typically find themselves having to integrate a third-party workflow solution, or else build a custom solution. Either way, it means significant added cost.

Meanwhile, reporting and auditing facilities also remain incredibly weak in many DAM products. (Of course, as Web CMS Report readers know, quite a few WCMS offerings are guilty here too.) You would think that a product that comes with a versioning subsystem would offer file check-out history views, but even that kind of rudimentary reporting capability is frequently missing from DAM systems. Likewise, "auditing" often turns out to be nothing more than event-logging. The ability to dump log data to an Excel file frequently gets touted as a "convenience" -- sorry folks: it's not.

There are a couple of quick takeaways here for prospective DAM (and WCM) licensees. First, don't confuse team-based collaboration (no matter how cleverly supported) with workflow. If you need to be able to model what you're doing and launch auditable instances of it, you need bona fide workflow support. Decide up front whether that's what you in fact need, and if so, don't let a demo-god convince you that an ad hoc notification system with "approval" written all over it constitutes workflow.

Likewise, understand that event logging is not synonymous with auditing and reporting (any more than data is the same thing as information). Consider your reporting and auditing needs in the context of your workflow needs; security requirements; the "turnover" characteristics of your content (and user population); and corporate accountability (governance) requirements. Also consider the degree to which you might need real-time monitoring capability in addition to offline or time-shifted reporting.

When it comes to workflow and reporting, don't assume that the basic functionality that should be in a product will be in it. In the DAM world, that's all too often not the case, and you'll need to budget for it.

Those are just a couple of quick thoughts. For a much more detailed discussion of these (and other) issues, with an in-depth look at how some of the best-known DAM and MAM vendors address (or fail to address) these points in their currently shipping offerings, be sure to consult The Digital & Media Asset Management Report 2008. You can find a free sample here.

Coremetrics releases ad hoc analysis functionality

philkemelor@pkwc.com(Phil Kemelor) — Thu, 8 May 2008 06:14:00 -0400

The recently concluded eMetrics Summit was somewhat quiet on the vendor front except for the Coremetrics announcement of its Spring 2008 release featuring ad hoc query functionality in its new offering, "Explore."

This now gives Coremetrics a competitive offering to Omniture Discover and WebTrends Market Intelligence.

More advanced users of Coremetrics will likely be pleased. As Web Analytics Report readers know, one of the major pain points among customers seeking deeper-dive analysis was needing to go through account managers to run custom queries and potentially have to wait a long time to get results. If Explore works as billed, it will mitigate that problem.

I've always thought that Coremetrics did a decent job at creating out-of-the-box reports that address the needs of marketers and less sophisticated analysts. While they have lagged their competitors in offering a strong ad-hoc analysis tool, another way of looking at it could be that they have been tracking their customers learning curve more accurately...and now they believe there is enough analytics maturity among their client base to actually use a deeper analytics tool.

If this is the case, it represents a different approach than what has often characterized web analytics..."a build it and they will be sold" strategy that provides tools that are too sophisticated and challenging for the customer base to use effectively. As you review web analytics software -- as you would any technology -- make sure not to over-buy something you don't know how to use.

Innovations in Digital Asset Management, Circa 2008

info@databasepublish.com (Joseph Bachana) — Wed, 7 May 2008 15:51:00 -0400

The Digital Asset Management (DAM) marketplace doesn't receive a lot of attention, but DPCI's Joseph Bachana argues that some very interesting developments are transpiring. The problem is, no single vendor has a lock on how to combine all these innovations into a comprehensive offering...

Announcing The Digital & Media Asset Management Report 2008

tregli@cmswatch.com(Theresa Regli) — Wed, 7 May 2008 08:34:00 -0400

I'm thrilled to announce the launch of The Digital & Media Asset Management Report 2008. While we've followed DAM and blogged quite a bit about DAM and MAM (Media Asset Management) over our 7-year history, this report represents our first comprehensive comparative evaluation of 18 DAM tools, and our first aggregation of DAM and MAM best practices.

Subscribers, you'll be getting your copy shortly; others can download a free sample here.

For several evaluations of major enterprise DAM vendors (Open Text's Artesia, Interwoven's MediaBin, EMC's Documentum Digital Asset Manager, and the IBM FileNet / Ancept Media Server pairing), we built on the foundational DAM research in our ECM Suites Report 2008. We then looked at several pure-play DAM vendors, including ClearStory, North Plains, Canto, WAVE, Widen, and ADAM. You can see the full list of vendors covered here.

As always, the core of our research centers on talking with customers, the real everyday users of DAM systems. Our goal is to cut through the marketing hype and report people's real-world experience with the tools, and help you, the buyer and implementer, understand which tools are most appropriate for which situations. As with all the technologies we cover, the DAM industry has seen many failed or abandoned investments because of poor product selection or implementation practices. We want you to go into your product selection and implementation with full knowledge of a product's strengths and weaknesses.

My fellow DAM analyst Kas Thomas and I will blog a lot more about DAM and MAM in the coming months. We both had a great time putting this report together, as it's a rather fun and sexy technology. We also hope to see you at the Henry Stewart DAM Symposium in New York City next week; my Wednesday tutorial, "Sorting Out the Content Technology Marketplace," will present an overview of this new research, along with some of our latest ECM and WCM findings, as well.

Reinventing the Java application server

kthomas@cmswatch.com(Kas Thomas) — Tue, 6 May 2008 13:03:00 -0400

Just when you thought the Java application server market was pretty well saturated (if not in actual decline), along comes a brand new entrant with familiar-sounding promises of "lighter, faster, easier." What's doubly ironic is that this new contender comes from the very folks who've done so much (intentionally or not) to make "Java appserver" a bad name in recent years. I'm talking about the people at SpringSource (purveyors of the celebrated Spring Framework).

The newly announced SpringSource Application Platform is (according to its creators) "a completely module-based Java application server that is designed to run enterprise Java applications and Spring-powered applications with a new degree of flexibility and reliability." Spring geeks will recognize it as the long-awaited integration of Spring with OSGi.

Source: www.springsource.com

OSGi, by way of background, is a fairly mature specification (dating to 1999) encompassing a dynamic component model in which Java classes are deployed as bundles, which are in turn registered as services within the OSGi execution environment. The OSGi framework provides automatic versioning, dependency resolution, and secure "find and bind" functionality such that bundles can discover and safely call the right versions of each other. (Think of it as a kind of SOA microcosm inside a running JVM.)

The real value-add of OSGi comes in terms of lifecycle management of classes, cleaner isolation of code, and more thoroughgoing code reuse. With OSGi, there's no need for every deployed web app to hide its own copy of xalan.jar (or whatever) under WEB-INF, as so often happens on J2EE appservers. A bundle gets exposed once, and the various apps that need to use that code can do so without getting caught in classloader hell.

More interesting is that bundles can be hot-swapped without breaking any running apps. You can update part of an app (just the bundles that need updating) without disturbing the rest of the app or having to bounce the server.

There are other benefits as well, but efficient code reuse and the ability to hot-swap code modules are core to what OSGi is about. Which may explain why WebSphere, WebLogic, JBoss, Jonas, and others are moving to (or already have moved to) OSGi-based architectures.

What (if anything) makes SpringSource Application Platform better than any of the other OSGi-enabled app servers? On a purely technical level, SSAP tends to expose low-level OSGi internals more directly, for developers who want programmatic access to OSGi-based magic. (Other appservers tend to hide OSGi's innards.) Also, SSAP is more flexible with regard to deployment options. And (oh yes), it uses Spring.

Still, there's a down side to all the wonderfulness. New programming patterns are in play with OSGi (representing a new learning curve for developers), and overall complexity has not gone down; it has merely been shifted around. Also, some people are put off by the project's GPLv3 license. (Spring itself will continue to use the Apache license, however.)

Our take? The OSGi-powered SpringSource Application Platform represents an important paradigm shift, one that has the potential to revitalize Java EE development (much as Spring itself did when it debuted on the first day of Spring in 2004). How? By raising expectations around code reuse, serviceability, reliability, remote management, hot upgrades that don't break anything, version-based conflict resolution, and other difficult issues that (frankly) have long needed solving in order for Java EE development to go to the next level.

For people who implement, customize, maintain, upgrade, and/or administer Java-based content management systems, the potential payoffs of OSGi are many. Note that the WCMS vendors best positioned (in theory, at least) to benefit from the new paradigm are those already using Spring, such as Alfresco, CoreMedia, Enonic, and Hannon Hill. Mind you, it's not a given that any vendor currently using Spring will migrate to the SpringSource Application Platform. But it's definitely something to watch for. We'll be following the situation closely; and we intend to let you know what "develops."

Mediasurface for sale?

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Tue, 6 May 2008 00:32:00 -0400

I've been hearing various rumors recently about mid-market Web CMS vendors up for sale. If true, you could imagine all sort of marketplace shifts (both good and bad) causing ownership stakes to start moving. Certainly one toolset in play is Serena Collage. Almost all these vendors are privately traded, so such rumors are...just that.

But one WCM vendor, UK-based Mediasurface, trades publicly (on the "alternative investment market" of LSX), and quietly had to explain a recent stock bump. I say "quietly" because we only got wind via an investor-blogger, who first mentioned a company communication (pdf) -- a statement that remains more or less hidden in the investor-relations area of the Mediasurface website. In the short memo, Mediasurface "...notes the recent share price and announces that it has received a preliminary approach, which may or may not lead to an offer for the Company."

In recent years Mediasurface has grown -- a bit haphazardly we thought -- via acquisition, but evidently failed to control costs, and a surprise announcement (pdf) of losses late last year sent the stock tumbling from around 25p to languish at about 5p per share, at least until this latest courtship. You can track the stock price here.

If consummated, a match with "a UK company that does not compete directly with Mediasurface" might not be a bad thing for the vendor's customers. Like direct competitor Tridion (sold to SDL earlier this year), Mediasurface has global ambitions, and sometimes global reach, but struggled a bit beyond its regional base. As Web CMS Report 2008 readers know, Mediasurface's flagship Morello product suffers from a rather dated back-end, but the company has innovated enough on features to keep it interesting even for larger buyers. Things may start to get even more interesting soon.

Budget time: How much should I set aside for software licenses?

info@jboye.dk(Janus Boye) — Sat, 3 May 2008 17:14:00 -0400

When budget-building time comes up, many technology customers face the interesting question of how much money to put aside for new software licenses. Even without looking at specific vendors, you might have to tell your manager some ballpark figure for expected license costs.

As an analyst I'm frequently asked about license prices. A recent interesting discussion among peers challenged my views and provided helpful feedback that might assist you in arriving at the right numbers in today's marketplace:

List prices aside, buyers can presently obtain significant discounts on enterprise portals and on Web CMS tools. This may be caused by the increased SharePoint infiltration. A commentary in February on big software discounts and recent numbers from Vignette seems to confirm this trend. SharePoint licensing for websites is the exception that proves the rule. In general if the Web CMS comes from an ECM vendor, it will be more expensive -- potentially way more expensive

With enterprise search at the high end, the reverse is true. The marketplace is seeing strong demand at the moment. Many enterprise-tier search offerings come only as a bundled offering, so there is little list pricing to benchmark against. Deals quickly run into the millions of Euros in large, global, and complex enterprises.

Among the huge array of mid-market vendors across different content technologies -- many them local/regional in footprint -- you can typically find solutions that meet the needs of even organization-wide deployments in most enterprises, but at a factor of five (or more) cheaper than the higher-end solutions

If you are willing to serve as a reference client or appear on the customer list -- or better within a press release -- this is very valuable for the vendor and should help you to get significant discounts. (And of course as you look to evaluate vendors and they provide such testimonials, you should also understand how this game is played.)

Remember that enterprise deals entail complex negotiation and pricing models that ultimately boil down to what the salesperson thinks you can afford. Perhaps needless to say, but still: Implementation costs are higher than licensing costs and open source projects are not necessarily cheaper just because you might save licensing costs.

Thanks to Alan Pelz-Sharpe, Apoorv Durga, James Robertson and Martin White.

So you say you want collaboration?

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Fri, 2 May 2008 15:22:00 -0400

Everybody wants improved collaboration, but how, and towards what end? Or as we asked quite intently in our SharePoint Report 2008, what kind of collaboration?

Those questions came to mind during Martin White's keynote at the Intracom 2008 conference (which was quite vibrant, btw) in Québec, PQ, Canada earlier this week.

Martin's keynote offered many gems, including several cautions about social software in multilingual environments. Most social software applications assume the primacy (and at some level even the replacement) of written communication over oral. This of course raises all sorts of cultural issues, but perhaps more importantly: non-native speakers who may comfortably listen and speak in a second or third tongue may not feel proficient enough to write in a foreign language. Of course, sometimes the opposite is true. But the broader point -- that electronic collaboration systems can redistribute interaction patterns in a potentially random way -- still stands.

The part of the keynote that particularly interested me was Martin's description of different kinds of teams: communities of practice; formal workgroups; project-specific teams; informal networks. Each has its own rhythms and needs.

And what are those teams actually doing? Well, there are different types of collaborative tasks, ranging from problem-solving, resource-sharing, status-tracking, and quite a bit more.

This analysis might seem obvious, but I think is terribly important, because it gets to the heart of collaboration / social software when that technology assumes the broader mantle of "Enterprise 2.0." At an enterprise level (and beyond) you will find quite diverse collaboration and networking requirements. The smart enterprise invests in finding out what its employees' really need, and will actually use, before investing heavily in new tools.

Content Management - UK vs. US

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Fri, 2 May 2008 08:55:00 -0400

On a flight back to Boston from London yesterday I took a little time to digest what I had observed during the past week in the UK. It was an odd week really, and somewhat disconcerting as the contrast between the US and the UK was quite stark.

First, it must be said that there was no sign of a recession or downturn in the content management industry in the UK. The doom and gloom we hear daily from all and sundry in North America is not echoed across the Atlantic. Far from it. People across the board that we met talked of project growth, and vendors boast of business improving quarter on quarter. Of course, part of this could be that I was attending a web-oriented conference, and WCM has remained frothy around the globe, in this recession as in the past. But still, the mood in London was unusually upbeat.

Second, it seems clear that the vendor landscape and the channel landscape is becoming ever more regional. Of the 300 plus vendors at Internetworld, only a small fraction were from North America. In the past North American vendors dominated events, but not any more.

Third, there is a real appetite for governance and strategy consulting in the UK. Buyers appear to be aware that content technologies change business practices, that content needs to be managed...and that software cannot do that for you.

Fourth, the need to create multilingual sites and manage multilingual content is far more acute in the UK and continental Europe than the US. Be that Hindi, Gujarati, or Punjabi in the UK -- or French, German, and Italian in Switzerland -- the skills to do this are honed, the solutions found, and the workflows better understood.

I don't really know why there is such a stark difference between the two markets. It's not new really, it was evident in 2007 and 2006, but it appears to be getting more acute and the divisions widening at a faster pace. One factor is probably an overall more positive and optimistic economy in the UK, but there are other industry-specific things to consider.

Very high-speed internet access in Britain is typically faster and more widespread than in the US. Many homes in the UK have faster connections than typical SMEs in the US (8mbps is common in UK homes). Greater bandwidth has allowed companies to exploit rich media and more complex websites more effectively than their US peers. There is greater advancement of 3G cellular phone technologies, and interactive television services, and these have provided a welcome challenge to content developers and publishers to exploit.

Greater adoption of standards across the EU have by definition fostered greater interconnectivity at the network, device, and delivery levels - and have also provided more suitable benchmarks to purchase against. Take for instance the MOREQ 2 specification for records management, a standard that is both practical and designed for general usage, as opposed to DOD 5015 that is a somewhat over-engineered military specification. Consider also the universal adoption of shared cellular networks, and device portability across providers -- as opposed to the confusion of competing networks and proprietary devices in the US.

At the procurement level, one can also see slower buying cycles and greater attention to vendor intangibles the UK paying off in the long run. Historically, (though there are many exceptions) purchasers of technology in Europe have taken longer to come to decisions, but then also stick with their chosen technology supplier for much longer than their US counterparts. It means that there is time to develop, test, and really get to know a product over time - and ultimately to use it to its maximum potential.

Of course all is not rosy in the UK. Big customers still get ripped off by big vendors; projects crash and burn, and all the problems we know about here in the US are encountered regularly there too. But there is certainly something to be learned from the UK's experiences. If you are in the process of buying Content Technology you should of course always ask for and follow through on customer references. It might well be a good idea to ask for specific UK references to be provided. Particularly if you have multi-lingual, governance, or mobile web issues to address. It may well be that they can give you better insights than colleagues in the US.

Recessions come and go, and economics is like political polling; since it is the most inexact of sciences, the experts usually get it wrong. However, we are in the midst of gloomy times here in America, and rather than get envious of our friends across the Atlantic, we can potentially turn the gloomy times to our benefit.

uPortal 3: The long wait is over for a major release

info@jboye.dk(Janus Boye) — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 17:32:00 -0400

When JA-SIG announced Version 3.0 of uPortal in mid-April, it marked the ending of a very long development cycle for the higher education enterprise portal. The initial milestone was announced way back in April 2005, and since then the small development team has continued work on the new major release.

Version 3.0 is mainly a technology release, but also ships with a fresher user interface and updated default content for better demonstrations. On the technology side the product now has improved portlet support (ready for JSR 286), a new unified caching framework as well as it has migrated to using the Spring development framework.

As readers of the Enterprise Portals Report know, uPortal is comparatively feature-thin, and its platform-like complexity sometimes comes as a surprise to developers expecting a simpler product. To facilitate the upgrade for existing adopters, uPortal ships with a wide set of import/export scripts, but as always make sure to test carefully before taking the plunge...