Answer to the ECM 2.0 question

Well I now know that at least someone is reading me.... :-)

James McGovern, who's Enteprise Architecture blog is one of the resources who's feed I track on my PageFlakes site, has answered my question on what ECM 2.0 might look like:

"Jed Cawthorne asks what ECM 2.0 will look like. I am of the belief that it will look no different than ECM 1.0. Security will still be weak. There will be no interoperability and vendors in this space still will create horrific WSDL. 2.0 in the ECM world will be more of a branding exercise than a value proposition."

After a long early morning meeting with our Head of Enterprise Architecture about portals, I needed cheering up, so initialy I had a little chortle at Jame's cycncism, but upon reflection, its simply not funny. Both James and Laurence have posted plenty recently on ECM standards, SOA etc and I think its sad (but true) that James is basically calling out the vendors on this one. But lets face it, a lot of the value proposition of ECM 1.0 has been a little heavy on the hype, and a little lacking in substance - I am not saying good DM, RM, WCM etc products and implementations don't exist out there, but when your trying to do integrated, infrastructure level ECM to provide broadly scoped / wide scale Information Lifecycle Management (for lack of a better term) you better take the vendor marketing with a pinch of salt.