Wiki in the Enterprise

April 23, 2008 @ 12:38 pm· Filed under Collaboration, Trends    || EMail This Post

Social Technologies like Blogs and Wikis which are already popular on the consumer Internet have steadily been making inroads to the other side of the firewall as well.  Everone from Large enterprise clients to small companies are already using these with varied success rate or are considering using these technologies/tools.

So if you are one of those considering implementing a wiki, it is important to understand all the aspects related to not only technology but also the impact a wiki can have in terms of organization and other “softer” issues. J. Boye, have just published a new research, Wiki in the Enterprise which will help you understand just that.

The report presents a balanced perspective on the benefits as well as challenges. For example, everyone knows that a wiki can help improve productivity when used as a centralized repository of common information and questions. However,  the report goes a step furthur and suggests what actually needs to be done to ensure this. There are best practices and recommendations for implementation as well as adoption. A project check list and another list of major wiki vendors are also quite handy to kick start your initiatives.

I would have loved to see some more details on different wiki vendors and how they compare with wiki offerings of other products (Portal, CMS). But may be that is a subject of another future report?

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Delivering Portal and CMS as Service Part 2

April 5, 2008 @ 11:12 pm· Filed under Enterprise Content Management, Portals, Trends, Web Content Management    || EMail This Post

Tenant Specific Content

Okay the next issue to be aware of is about how actually the content is stored. So let’s for the sake of simplicity assume the content is a “News Article” with fields like Headline, Byline and Body.

A very good article on issues related to multi tenant data architecture is here. This article explains data architecture in terms of databases, schemas and tables. The same architecture principles will also apply to a more generic CMS repository which may not be based on a database. The CMS can store the same content for multiple tenants in multiple ways. It can either have a completely independent repository for each tenant. It can also use the same repository for all the tenants but with some kind of logical partitioning. I think Alfresco uses this mechanism. And finally, it can use the same repository for all the tenants without any partitioning. In this case, Tenant -> Article ownership is identified by some other mechanism. A possible way is to have a field like tenant id (along with Headline, Byline and Body) that identifies the tenant.

Each of these mechanisms have their advantages, disadvantages and associated costs. There is a trade off between security and costs.

Administration

Apart from tenant specific administration (or Federated admin), the application needs to provide capabilities like:

  • Provisioning
  • Billing and Metering
  • Management, Monitoring and Reporting

So some kind of delegated administration and centralized management application is required that enables assigning administrators for individual portals (or applications) and then Monitoring (and managing) these individual portals.

There are also issues related to Tenant Specific Security. More about that later…

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Delivering Portal and CMS as Service

March 9, 2008 @ 6:44 pm· Filed under Enterprise Content Management, Portals, Trends    || EMail This Post

There are enough statistics floating around that show big numbers for Software as a Service (SaaS).  Many people are interested in experimenting with SaaS because of promised cost savings.

So what does it take to deliver a content application (your Portal, CMS etc) as a service? There is a very nice aricle on CMS Watch that explains various things associated with SaaS.

There are three major things that get impacted. They are related to:

  • Business Model: Ownership/Licensing of software and hardware, the fact that you can service the flat part of the bell curve (long tail?) and reduced costs among others
  • Technology: The application architecture and issues related to multi-tenancy
  • Operations: How is the service managed, monitored and administered and issues related to data center and infrastructure

In this series of posts, i’ll touch upon the Technology aspect as it relates to content technologies and will probably post about the other aspects in future posts.

The basic Technology issue is that how do you have an application - Portal, CMS that can serve multiple clients (Tenants) using same infrastructure (portal server, database, application server, content management system and so on). So if you are considering using services of a SaaS player, consider the following issues. Some of these are also valid if you were to develop an application that could serve multiple clients.

  1. Different Portal for each Tenant: You need a completely different portal for each client. This basically means different look and feel, different set of users, different templates and so on. Some of the ways to handle this are:
    • Some portal servers like IBM websphere let you define virtual portals.A virtual portal essentially lets you create independent portals using the same instance of portal server. This ability is also there in Liferay. Alfresco’s upcoming version also lets you have multiple tenants.
    • Most portal servers let you define communities. Although this is not as good as a virtual portal when it comes to multi-tenancy, it could be used to create portals for different user communities each with their own look and feel as well as users.
    • In order for you to have a custom URL for each portal, you will need the ability to map portal server’s ugly URLs to more user friendly URLs. Some portal servers let you define custom URLs while others don’t and you would need to do some re-write magic to achieve this along with creating virtual hosts on the web server.
    • Since each portal will have it’s own presentation layer, you need the ability to manipulate the look and feel remotely because typically it will not be able to login to the console in this model. You should be able to change the theme, skin or whatever mechanism the portal provides via a web based interface.

 

Okay so it is getting longer than I expected. So i’ll split the issues and post them later.

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M&A everywhere

January 17, 2008 @ 4:56 pm· Filed under Enterprise Content Management, Portals, Trends    || EMail This Post

Oracle -> BEA

Oracle -> Captovation

Microsoft -> FAST

EMC -> Document Sciences

SAP -> Business Objects

IBM -> Cognos

SUN -> MySQL

Fatwire and Interwoven also acquired other smaller, niche players.

So what are the implications? Convergence? Less choice? Less innovation?  Blurring lines between competitors and partners? Alliance realignments? Less confusion in the marketplace (or is it more)? EMC is the only one among the bigger vendors that does not have a portal and middleware offering. So will they acquire another company?

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Goodbye 2007, Welcome 2008

December 30, 2007 @ 9:12 pm· Filed under Collaboration, Document Management, Enterprise Content Management, Open Source, Portals, Search, Trends, Web Content Management    || EMail This Post

2007 has been a good year for portal and content technologies. Here’s a summary of some themes that became popular and will probably be discussed in 2008 as well.

Web 2.0: There’s nothing new about it as we’ve been seeing the impact of web 2.0 for quite sometime now. What’s new is the fact that Web 2.0  is also increasingly becoming popular behind the firewalls.  Many products have incorporated web 2.0 features and they are not limited to support for AJAX  front-ends. Many portals already integrate with Google Gadgets, Alfresco announced integration with Facebook which itself is getting a lot of attention.

SaaS: Software as a Service has become quite popular in some technology horizontals like CRM. It has now started getting noticed in the CMS space as well. Interwoven and Fatwire entered the SaaS space by acquiring other companies whereas salesforce.com, an established SaaS vendor has also entered the ECM space. There are many existing vendors like Spring CM and Xythos. With salesforce.com getting into this space, along with indications of entry of more established ECM vendors, technology buyers will have another option.  

Standards: There have been a lot of discussions in blogosphere about standards or the lack thereof. Although, there are many benefits of following standards, there are often trade-offs to be made and it may not be that a “Standards approach is always better”. We must bring a balance between the two approaches as there are important trade-offs to be made. And i still think JSR-170 (or its next version JSR-283) have not been as popular as they should be.

Open Source: There has been an increased activity in the Open Source Portal and Content Management Products space. More and more people are using Open Source as a viable alternative to commercial products. In some scenarios, products like Alfresco, Magnolia, OpenCms and Liferay can give their commercial counterparts a serious run for their money.

Convergence: The lines between WCM, Portal, Web Analytics, Search etc are blurring. Many CIOs are asking for products that can do everything instead of buying multiple point solutions. However, more than technology, I think its the way an organization is structured which decides how easy or difficult is it to achieve convergence.

Google: We can’t complete this discussion without mentioning Google, can we? There are talks of a CMS by Google which already is an established player in associated areas of search, analytics, portal and collaboration.

Okay this was probably the last post of 2007. Here’s wishing you all a very happy new year.

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