So, the other evening a colleague asked me how you would describe to a user where the ECMS ends and the enterprise portal starts, or vice versa.
Well if your a techie, its easy, get out the systems diagrams and say "well this is the Documentum ECMS and this is the AquaLogic portal". Of course connecting the two things in the diagram might be some JSR168 portlets which provide access to ECMS content........
But in reality its not that easy is it ? Especially if you take a non-techie, information management centric viewpoint. The AIIM definition of ECM includes: "technologies used to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver content".
So in this case a portal (with a small ''p' - as in 'portal software' see the Wikipedia definition) can be just one of many delivery mechanisms, with JS168 or WSRP 'portlets', Microsoft's 'web parts' or other technologies being used to surface content. However it truly never is that easy. Most (if not all ?) enterprise portal software frameworks offer integrated web publishing tools, and many offer an integrated 'document management' facility e.g. BEA Aqualogic, IBM WebSphere, and if I may offer a personal opinion, is this not what MS MOSS 2007 really is ? A portal with built in lightweight document management, but of course 'portal' is what Sharepoint (oops, MOSS) is good at even though they took the word out of its title, which is why EMC, OpenText and others are all rushing to 'work with' MOSS.
Personaly I really like BEA AquaLogic's 'Knowledge Directory' which can display a 'folder structure' in the portal, which in reality is just links to many possible repositories (file servers, ECMS etc). Anyway, in the future Service Oriented Architecture world, your ECMS of choice should just provide 'content services' to your presentation layer of choice.
Meanwhile, the Alfresco team are pushing the boundaries with their standards based open source ECMS now having an integration with Facebook (as well as more 'conventional' portals). Just 'google' for "Facebook and Intranet" to get into that whole conversation, and you will see the 'enterprise 2.0' connection.
Just to swing back to the 'enterprise 2.0 / ECM 2.0' meme before signing off on this one, the delivery mechanism I would like to see a lot more off, especially as 'out of the box' functionality is RSS (I think Alfresco might be ahead on this). If you can surface not just the 'content centric collaboration' elements such as discussions, subscriptions etc, but also XML content, saved search results etc then your getting to the place where you can use iGoogle, Pageflakes and so on as the 'portal' for your SaaS ECM service......... phew, a lot to think about there....... :-)
Thursday, 13 December 2007
ECM and the Green IT agenda
A fairly topical posting whilst the worlds leaders row about carbon targets at their meeting, but just about everything I read (and there is a lot of it about right now) about 'green' IT is about the data centre. Now this is logical when you think about it, its where the majority of the power is consumed by the servers, storage and the cooling systems.
However, where are the big ECM vendors ? Surely ECM, or rather Information Management in general could have a big impact on 'greening' our IT. For example, Records Management is as much about 'destruction' of information as it is about 'retention', so doing good RM means less storage required, less spinning disks, less electricity etc etc
Same with using the functions of an ECM to de-duplicate content, and on a more general front, the improvements in 'findability' should prevent people from having to re-invent the wheel and thus generate a whole bunch of content / information that is not really needed.
So, good information management is not just about compliance, it can help you be a good corporate citizen by aiding in your efforts to reduce your carbon foot print, and that has to be good for all of us !
However, where are the big ECM vendors ? Surely ECM, or rather Information Management in general could have a big impact on 'greening' our IT. For example, Records Management is as much about 'destruction' of information as it is about 'retention', so doing good RM means less storage required, less spinning disks, less electricity etc etc
Same with using the functions of an ECM to de-duplicate content, and on a more general front, the improvements in 'findability' should prevent people from having to re-invent the wheel and thus generate a whole bunch of content / information that is not really needed.
So, good information management is not just about compliance, it can help you be a good corporate citizen by aiding in your efforts to reduce your carbon foot print, and that has to be good for all of us !
Sunday, 9 December 2007
Online Information 2007 - Updated
So, its taken my all week to get round to posting, but wednesday and thursday I attended Online Information 2007 at Olympia in London. I would have liked to have been there on tuesday for Jimmy Wales packed out Keynote, but had some thing important to do at work :-(
However tuesdays Intranet strand was very interesting, with David Gurteen starting off with 'KM 2.0' and how the social networking tools are going to bring 'real' KM this time around. Look for his video's on "what is knowledge management" by searching under that term on YouTube and Google Video. David has put his slide up on Slideshare.net for us.
Next up was Sam Marshall of Clearbox Consulting. Sam addressed the potential enterprise audiences, categorising them as, 'advocates', 'cautioners' or 'Sceptics'. Sam side he would put his slides up by I don't see them yet (hint hint) but I liked his summary point: "Intranet 2.0 is about getting niche information to niche consumers" {of that information}.
UPDATE: Sam left a comment below with a link to his slides:
http://www.clearboxconsulting.co.uk/Intranets_and_Web_2_0_Sam_Marshall_v1_0.pdf
Helen Day on behalf of the Intranet Benchmarking Forum and Mark Morrell of BT did a good double act, with Helen presenting on generic findings from IBF studies, and Mark giving specifics on how the technologies are used at BT. Interestingly BT have gone for RSS big style and they are also one of the organisations to have a Wikipedia style online corporate encylopedia. They have 600 authorative articles in the system, so we are right back to David and social KM.......
On wednesday it was enterprise search before taking part in an a panel discussion on Open Source CMS. Boy, did I feel unworthy when compared to the luminaries sat beside me ! The panel was chaired by Theresa Regli of CMS Watch, who set us up with some excellent thought provoking questions. She was followed by John Newton, co-founder of Documentum, and founder of Alfresco. John is always an entertaining presenter and he touched on the fact that UK Government just does not seem to get Open Source (especially compared to other EU countries). Next up was Alex of Alkacon in Germany, the founder of OpenCMS. So why was I there, well the OU is the biggest user in the world of the Moodle open source Virtual Learning Environment (and I believe also currently the biggest Moodle development house !) so we know a thing or two about open source, and of course we used a 'mixed' environment, with closed source software too (we use the first of Mr Newtons products, not the latest.....).
The panel was fun, with some excellent questions from the floor and thus some interesting discussion. Of course no one would go for Theresa's deliberately provocative suggestion that open source CMS would replace proprietary CMS completely and entirely. But John reckons it will be a close thing within ten years, whilst Alex would contend that in the WCMS space, open source will take over as the majority of installations much sooner.
However tuesdays Intranet strand was very interesting, with David Gurteen starting off with 'KM 2.0' and how the social networking tools are going to bring 'real' KM this time around. Look for his video's on "what is knowledge management" by searching under that term on YouTube and Google Video. David has put his slide up on Slideshare.net for us.
Next up was Sam Marshall of Clearbox Consulting. Sam addressed the potential enterprise audiences, categorising them as, 'advocates', 'cautioners' or 'Sceptics'. Sam side he would put his slides up by I don't see them yet (hint hint) but I liked his summary point: "Intranet 2.0 is about getting niche information to niche consumers" {of that information}.
UPDATE: Sam left a comment below with a link to his slides:
http://www.clearboxconsulting.co.uk/Intranets_and_Web_2_0_Sam_Marshall_v1_0.pdf
Helen Day on behalf of the Intranet Benchmarking Forum and Mark Morrell of BT did a good double act, with Helen presenting on generic findings from IBF studies, and Mark giving specifics on how the technologies are used at BT. Interestingly BT have gone for RSS big style and they are also one of the organisations to have a Wikipedia style online corporate encylopedia. They have 600 authorative articles in the system, so we are right back to David and social KM.......
On wednesday it was enterprise search before taking part in an a panel discussion on Open Source CMS. Boy, did I feel unworthy when compared to the luminaries sat beside me ! The panel was chaired by Theresa Regli of CMS Watch, who set us up with some excellent thought provoking questions. She was followed by John Newton, co-founder of Documentum, and founder of Alfresco. John is always an entertaining presenter and he touched on the fact that UK Government just does not seem to get Open Source (especially compared to other EU countries). Next up was Alex of Alkacon in Germany, the founder of OpenCMS. So why was I there, well the OU is the biggest user in the world of the Moodle open source Virtual Learning Environment (and I believe also currently the biggest Moodle development house !) so we know a thing or two about open source, and of course we used a 'mixed' environment, with closed source software too (we use the first of Mr Newtons products, not the latest.....).
The panel was fun, with some excellent questions from the floor and thus some interesting discussion. Of course no one would go for Theresa's deliberately provocative suggestion that open source CMS would replace proprietary CMS completely and entirely. But John reckons it will be a close thing within ten years, whilst Alex would contend that in the WCMS space, open source will take over as the majority of installations much sooner.
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