Content Management vendors, and CMIS

This posting is really just a link post, no thoughtful analysis here.......

My old mate Laurence has an excellent CMIS update posting on his Word of Pie blog. He has been involved in CMIS development on behalf of AIIM, and this summary piece is well worth reading: Looking at CMIS 1.0, thinking of 2.0

On the same subjectbut with a different twist Alan at CMS Watch posted "Three reasons to list CMIS in your Document Management RFP" having written some really big ECM / EDRM RFI's and RFP's I have to agree with his logic, including this nascent yet to be fully ratified standard can still help keep your selected vendors 'honest' !

On a different subject, but still with CMS Watch, they have updated their graphical representation of the information management / content management industry and the various vendors:

As I used to live just 40 mins north of London (England, not Ontario) I really like the 'tube' metaphor (yes, we call the London Underground the 'tube' not the Metro or the Subway - Subway is a sandwich shop!). If you want a higher resolution PDF copy for printing head on over to the CMS Watch site here: Technology Vendor Map.

New WCM training

If you have not picked up on it yet, my friends at CMS Watch have released new WCM training. Its a 4.5 hour (half day) online (elearning ?) variant of Tony Byrne's very successful half day workshop which he has been doing at conferences for years. Go take a look at:
http://www.cmswatch.com/Education/WCM/

It has prompted me to start a discussion in the WCM group on InformationZen, a group I started as the AIIM guys seemed to miss out WCM in their initial setup of groups, as to whether we need an AIIM WCM certificate, similar to their other offerings, with WCM Practioner, WCM Specialist and WCM Master certifications.

Personally I think we do, at least having staff with some good training behind them may stop organizations from forcing a very square Sharepoint peg, into a very round WCMS hole.

More excellent Sharepoint research

Wow, do you think Microsoft ever really thought it, or hoped it would be this disruptive, every where you turn clients are looking at it, or wondering what to do with it once they have it !

Which begets a lot of blogging, comment and serious research. In the later category J.Boye the vendor neutral consulting team out of Aarhus, Denmark have released a nice little piece of research addressing a specific use case: Sharepoint for public web sites.

In my previous employment I have hired Janus Boye and I consider that he really knows his stuff. He is the lead author on the CMS Watch Enteprise Portals report too, but as well as that background expertise, he and his colleague Dorthe Jespersen have interviewed several Sharepoint exerts and consultants, but more importantly 30 organisations in Europe, Asia and North America that are actually using the product. The following is the briefest outline of the table of contents, with major sections on:

• Sharepoint in the organisation
• Why Sharepoint 2007 for public websites ?
• What happens during the project
• What happens after implementation.

Now of course I have read the whole thing from end to end, and would recommend it to you if your looking to employ Sharepoint in this scenario, and if I were to cut and paste the good bits into my blog, Janus would not get your money from buying the report, so I will tease you with a snippet, which personally sums it all up for me, especially in light of a discussions we have with a clients these days. So, from the executive summary:

"Unfortunately many organisations do not carefully consider whether the product is the best match for their web requirements, many not taking the time to review alternatives. There are good reasons for the popularity of Sharepoint, but it is certainly not as safe and risk free as many like to think."

They go onto suggest that Sharepiont is 'consistently evaluated for current and future requirements' as it is not just an automatic fit. This by the way, should be your 'mantra' whatever scenario your thinking of using Sharepoint for.

This echoes my opinion on the subject matter, that there can only ever be 'one ring to role them all' in Middle Earth, not in enteprise IT (and look at the trouble that one caused for hobbits et al) Sharepoint is undoubtedly good for many things in many scenarios, but it is no panacea, and it really should not be treated as an automatic fit for any requirement - do you home work, but don't let Microsoft marketing help you with it. In the words of Run DMC "don't believe the hype"

So, after fitting Sharepoint, Lord of the Rings and rap music into a single posting;

Go here for the report 'Best Practices for Using SharePoint for Public Websites - A Business Person's Guide' on the J.Boye website (a snip at a mere 135 Euros !)

More on Sharepoint - updated 23rd June

I am just waiting for an American Idol remake of the soul classic 'War' - lets all sing now "Sharepiont, good god, what is it good for, absolutely nothing, sing it again......."

Of course, thats patently not fair, and Microsofts Sharepoint technologies are good for many things ! However I thought today's posting by Shawn Shell over on CMS Watch was particularily interesting. Shawn is the principal author of CMS Watches 'The Sharepoint Report' - a damn good read by the way, and thoroughly recommended. Toby Ward and I have written an article on the report which is on the Prescient site here.

whats interesting about his post; "Is Sharepoint the end of (portal) history" is the fact that the whole post, which I am not going to repeat or paraphrase here, is focused on Sharepoint as a portal. Now my colleagues and I at Prescient Digital Media, are in the same place as Shawn, who is the owner of his own Sharepoint consultancy Consejo, and the rest of the CMS Watch team, when he says that every which way you turn, clients have already picked the platform. Now I am on the record here as saying that MS should never have dropped the 'P' word from the title to turn it into MOSS, and that actually a portal platform is what MOSS really is, with 'add on' WCM, document management and now lightweight records management too. But once a portal, always a portal...........

However I also agree with Shawn's diagnosis, that even if MS were to give it away (which it almost does depending on your enterprise license agreement), MOSS will never be free, because like all portal frameworks, it needs a lot of work to implement, to get it do exactly what you want it to.

In the end though I can't answer one question - why does the whole world seemed to have rolled over to have its belly tickled ? I expect vendors to fight againts MOSS in their specific target markets, but why aren't more enterprises IT departments looking to alternatives ??

If you have a perspective on this, please do comment.

Updated 23rd of June - please click on comments below to see insightful comments from Martin White and Janus Boye - "I am not worthy" Wayne and Garth might chant........

The right tool for the right (WCMS) job - updated

Updated: Please see click on comments below, where James responds with a very good point

A number of noted experts have started conversations on a similar topic, but from different angles recently; namely how well certain products fit, or could fit, in a web content management scenario.

Dan Keldsen of AIIM, started by asking a question on LinkedIn, ref use of Microsofts MOSS2007 or WSS (i.e. Sharepoint technologies) for external web sites. Although there are definately some good and 'large' sites out there, with many people responding to Dan's question with examples, there are others who note that Sharepoint is a platform, an that said platforms strongest point is not web content management.

In a similar vein Seth Gottlieb noted that the WCM scenario is not Alfresco's strong point, and James Robertson responded with a comment about Alfresco being one of the products with a 'document management' oriented viewpoint, and thats one reason why it may never be great at WCM.

Both Seth and James point to 'integration', so for example on the open source front Alfresco has integrations with Drupal and the Liferay portal, whilst on the MS front, I have recently been researching CMS's vendors who have MOSS or WSS integrations.

So it seems to me, that as is often the case in enterprise software, whilst 'platforms' might be a key piece of infrastructure in your enterprise architecture, you should not attempt to shove that square peg into the round hole just because your 'platform' vendor tells you round holes are a good thing ! Whilst the devil is always in the detail, and in some scenarios there will be benefits to limiting the proliferation of software, quite often it is about finding the right tool to do the right job, and ensure that everything fits together and plays together nicely. Which is a nice way to end with a pointer to Pie's latest piece on ECM standards...........

Enteprise Search - its not just the technology

I had a great chat with Martin White of Intranet Focus today, he rang me from the UK. We worked together on various elements of the intranet and search projects that were under my pervue at the Open University.

He debriefed me on the Enterprise Search Summit 2008 in New York, for which Martin gave the keynote. He later sent me his slides so I could have a read myself. Now Martin's knowledge on search is encylopedic, and we have had many chats on various elements of the subject and it turned out that we had similar opinions about search and ECM, i.e. that sorting out search problems or enteprise content management problems are as much about planning, governance and building teams of people to 'manage' the technology - bottom line, as per usual its all about people and not the shiny new software.

Martin puts emphasis in his presentation slides about building a team to manage your search, when I was presenting on the OU ECM programme I would always be sure to emphasise the size and breadth of the multi-disciplinary team brought together to implement the strategy. Martin has posted a summary of the conference and some of his thoughts here.

Now this also fits with Prescient Digital Media's advice on implementing or improving intranets, that there should be an emphasis on planning, governance and 'managing'. Indeed to push the theme even further Toby recently posted on the Intranetblog on the Pro's and Con's of Sharepoint, qouting Shawn Shell, the author of the new CMS Watch Sharepoint report. Shawn's advise on how to ensure success in deploying Sharepoint also focuses on what might be called 'soft' aspects of information systems project management.

OK, so non of this is 'rocket science' to me, Martin, Toby or Shawn, but if your a newly promoted IT guy (hey, I've been there !) who's been told to implement Sharepoint, or buy a new search engine, the change management, people management and information management (metadata, taxonomies, classification schema's, 'findability' etc) aspects might be a long way from the top of your task list ! When it comes down to it they may not be at the forefront of the CIO's thoughts either.......

Having been involved around the periphery of a big CRM programme, and having watched colleagues do data warehousing and BI etc, non of this is specific to 'unstructured data' - but, time for the blatant plug (!) if your doing ECM, Intranet, CMS or search projects, Prescient can help to ensure you have the right executive backing, the right governance structures and the right team in place to implement your projects.

Email Archiving and Management report from CMS Watch

OK, this is a must read report if your interested in managing email chaos ! I know, because I have read it already..... :-)

This is another exemplary piece of CMS Watch analysis, not just disecting some of the technology / products available in this space, but concentrating on what you need to know about archiving and managing email messaging, and most importantly, focusing on the possible fit between one of the available solutions and your own specific business requirements.

In my opinion this would be a good read for the 'C' level individual who does not need read the indepth analysis of each product, but does need some hand holding at the high level - the 'EAM' for dummies section, whilst at the same time, if your an experienced Exchange or Notes admin, there is still a lot here for you to get your teeth into.

Of course from a wider ECM / Information Management perspective, you might need to come at EAM from a records management or compliance angle too.

Lets face, when it comes down to it, most organisations are a long way from ECMS based content centric collaboration, full use of Instant Messaging or 'conversational media' such as blogs, email is the lowest common denominator and like all forms of digital content creation (across all media) the volumes just continue to grow and grow !