Linking collaborative content creation to web publishing

Complicated title eh ?

Well this post stems from both yesterdays Oracle tech session and from a conversation I had at CMF2006 in Arhus with James Robertson of Two Step Designs (Sydney, Australia), so its quite a complicated story to start with !

In his workshop session at the conference James was lamenting that sometimes fail because they get overly complex, often because of trying to use a single platform for everything, instead of using the right tool for the right job. If you have never spotted James slides on Slideshare.net or seen his sessions, he suggests intranets are used for four main purposes:

• Content

• Communication

• Collaboration

• Activities
  

His point was that you don't need a single system or even a single platform to do all these things, but that it makes much more sense to use the right tool for the right job. So, you might provide publishing facilities, news and interactive 'eForms' via a WCMS, but if collaboration is a big thing for you, then you should buy a specialist collaboration system such as EMC eRoom or Lotus Quickr etc

He also suggested he had never seen a nice, full end to end integrated system where users could collaborate around content in the collaboration system, but then easily send it through the workflow to be published on an intranet site via the WCMS (including if necessary, linking to documents from and EDRMS). I think James was also suggesting (and I am sure he will jump in and correct me if I am wrong) that he is not a big fan of the big "ECM suites" (back to right tool for the right job ?).

Anyway after I got back to the UK, and the Open University, I got to thinking that we could have created such a setup with our full set of EMC products, but that it would have needed some custom code written to glue it all together. My 'design' if you like, would have people working on collaborative authoring in an eRoom, drop the resultant content item into a 'linked folder' – (which is a folder in which the content really resides in the main Documentum ECMS repository). From there it could be workflowed into the Documentum Web Publisher sub-system and published to the required site on the intranet. Like I say with the version 5.25 / 5.3 products we had at the time, this certainly would not have been 'out of the box' and no body, but no body I talked to back then had a very good opinion of Web Publisher as a WCMS.

However, EMC put quite a bit of effort into improving Documentum version 6 (D6) Web Publisher, and of course they were going to rebuild eRoom as .Net based web services oriented interface on top of the D6 repository. Moving along to where we are now with the D6.5 product set and we are talking about Web Publisher based blogs and wikis and eRoom is going to be replaced by CentreStage (ex-codename Magellan).

So could we be getting towards the seamless 'suite' based intranet, which does allow the use of the right tool for the right job, but by providing all the relevant tools built up from the same underlying platform ? Well not 'all' the tools, but the collaboration and content management ones, with any other application you like being surfaced via portlets in a portal ???

So, are Oracle already there ?

At the demo yesterday we saw collaboration via an enterprise portal (WebCentre Interaction – aka ALUI) with blogs and wikis etc built on the WebCentre Services infrastructure, passing content into the UCM repository (Stellent) and publishing it out via the UCM WCM module (which could also have been Oracle portal or WebLogic portal based external sites). As I said yesterday, I always had a high opinion of Stellents technology (and their web publishing was way better than Documentum) and I was also a big fan of BEA Aqualogic (Plumbtree). < Please note I may come back and edit this post, but putting links to all the Oracle products above, but tonight all the said links are sooooo slow, I can't be bothered to wait ! >

So it all looked good and pretty seamless in the demo – I guess the only thing that might put James off would be the price – lets face it, buying this is not going to be cheap....... OK possibly a sweeping statement, but lets face it, your probably going to need an 'enterprise class' budget ! But then I have always said that ECM should be treat as a major infrastructure investment, not as a 'point solution' application buy.

Oracle E2.0 Tech Briefing

This morning I got to attend an excellent briefing session at the Oracle office in Mississauga (only a 30 minute bus ride from my house !). It was the Enterprise 2.0 Tech Session, and it was very informative.

The first session or 'keynote' (if you can really call it that for such a small session) was an overview of, and positioning of Oracles product sets in the Enterprise 2.0 context. This was great for me perosnally because I have to admit to not having put a lot of effort into keeping up with their moves in this area since they gobbled up BEA. A lot of this session included references to McKinsey and AIIM Market IQ reports on E2.0, to Wikinomics, the long tail etc It was also noted that there is a major push within Oracle to embed E2.0 principles, features and functionality in all product sets, across the Fusion middleware, the traditional RDBMS and even the CRM and ERP applications suites.

Session 2 got a lot more into the product road map and the technical details.

We all know that Oracle have done a lot of said 'gobbling up' via acquisiton and merger activity, and in the ECM and portals space, I really liked Stellants content management offerings and was also a fan of BEA AquaLogic on the portal front. So it was great to see some of the integration efforts, and I know understand that alot of BEA's technology appears to have gone into Oracle's WebCentre product set. Very interestingly AquaLogic User Interaction (where do they come up with these names) or ALUI for short, has become WebCenter Interaction and is being pitched as the 'easy to implement' or 'out of the box' portal solution, while both Oracle Portal and WebLogic are being pitched as the developer frameworks on which to build your highly customised, purpose built environment (WebLogic for the big, high transaction customer facing sites, and Oracle Portal for the enterprise intranet market ??).

This to me is cool, as there was a lot of conjecture that ALUI would become the poor relation, but actually Oracle has taken a lot of the very well received and critiqued BEA web services 'middle ware' plus the ALUI tools like 'Pathways, Ensemble and Pages' which were all designed to enable 'business users' to develop mashups, simple data access applications and to add content rating and tagging. Anyway, I digress......

The full WebCentre 11g product set will be available next year, but not dates yet.

The third and final session majored on the use of Oracle Universal Content Management (UCM - the products previously known as Stellent) to manager web sites in an E2.o context. Lots of mentions of Information Rights Management (IRM) technology for securing information shared with partners and the 'communities' you might be involved in, largely for meeting 'brand protection' requirements. The session also had details on the digital asset management functionality available in UCM, although to be honest, I did not see anything new that I have not seen in many previous Stellant demo's.

Whilst I think I may post again on what I learnt today, I will finish off this posting with a link to a video we were shown this morning: Enterprise 2.0 User experience

Oh yeah, you should also check out Billy Cripes Fusion ECM E2.0 and ECM blog.

More discussion on Sharepoint Strengths and weaknesses

So it all started last night with some comments on Pie's posting ref the release of Documentum 6.5 - the comments / discussion included the new CentreStage (AKA the project codenamed Magellan) and moved onto where it all fits in with MS Sharepoint (MOSS 2007 to be accurate).

Then this morning, I noticed and followed a few links. The first was to an article by John Fontana on Network World entitled: "Microsoft Sharepoint Popularity comes with issues"

John has some lovely qoutes from Burton Group VP and Research Director Guy Creese:
"Recognize that a really good SharePoint installation is as much organization as it is technology, be clear what you are expecting from SharePoint -- it might be exactly what you need. But in some cases, SharePoint as shipped can leave huge holes." - Yay, what I have been saying here for some time, but of course it probably holds a lot more weight coming from Guy :-)

There is also a link to a nice table on the strengths and weaknesses of Sharepoint about two thirds of the way down the first page, but overall the artilce hooks into the discussion on what exactly Sharepoint is good at, and where it fits into an organisation, and my view on this if you have not read it before is simply that MOSS 2007 is a portal framework, with added bits (similar to Plumbtree/BEA/Oracle Aqualogic, or IBM WebSphere).

One of the links from a comment posted to the Network World story is to posting by Charlie Bess on the EDS blogs site, entitled: "Whats Sharepoint anyway?"

Charlie makes a good point about watching your use of language when discussing Sharepoint, because as we have dicsussed before, its more than one product ! But he finally comes down to the point that, like many of MS offerings, the bottom line is that Sharepoint is a tool kit, it may not do what you want out of the box, but spend enough time and money on it, and it will probably fulfill your requirements however complex.

Of course for many that is the issue, the 'jack of all trades and master of none' product is not great at everything in its basic 'out of the box' configuration, however once you have opened said box, it becomes a bit like Pandora's and MS have you hooked on Web Parts and .Net and other, dare I say it 'non-standards based' technologies. OK - don't flame me, I am sure .Net conforms to some standards and Web Parts are supposed to be WSRP etc etc, but you get the point, MS have you hooked into their technology stack (which may or may not be a bad thing, I am not addressing that point).

My bottom line and I have said it enough times before, Sharepoint is not a single product panacea for all problems, look at it, inspect it, see what it does, but make your decsion firmly based on wether or not it solves your busines requirements (be that out of the box, or with loads of development !) especially if your requirements are for a Portal server with add on document and records management, or limited web content management and some built in document centric collaboration tools.