Many vendors have successfuly decoupled search from ECM. Many people have been asking for decoupling of other features as well. I’ve written on CMS Watch on what I think about this.
James McGovern had made some observations about a related post that I had written some time back. Here’s my take on some of those:
Should CMS should control BPM or BPM should control ECM? Doesn’t this require that both ECM and BPM products support industry standards to allow them to be embedded? If so, whom do you feel is best positioned to kick off the creation of such standards?
I think it will vary. I wouldn’t call it as one controlling the other but one of them will certainly be primary and the other one be secondary. If its a content heavy application and BPM refers to document driven processes then I would think CMS will be primary. However, if its a transactional application like an employee intranet where there are processes for say, employee reimbursement, employee travel and so on, I think BPM will be primary. For any of such decoupling to work, standards will play an important role. So if a CMS has to allow a decoupled version management or decoupled BPM then along with the CMS, the version management systems or the BPM also have to adhere to standards. I would think that large vendors who have presence in multiple areas would be best positioned to create standards. Obviously they would need a buyin form smaller niche players, industry and users.
Anything wrong with Subversion or ClearCase?
Not at all. When I mentioned CVS and VSS, I was only giving examples. This is not a complete list and others are okay too 
Is this integration dynamic where all historical content is pulled from the version control system in real-time or simply check-in, check-out?
Hmm..okay there are two areas of version management in a CMS. One is the content (website, documents, images etc) and the other is the code that is used for development or customization of CMS. So for example, it could be XML files that define content types or templates that define how the site will look like. I was referring to versioning of code when I wrote about integration with external version management software. For content, I am perfectly happy to be versioned within the CMS. It is debatable though if code should also be considered as content and managed by CMS (CMS managing itself) but that is a topic for another post.
What’s wrong with the way portal products integrate with CMS products? If the portal has its own security model separate and distinct from CMS, how should they work together?
It really depends on how tightly the Portal and CMS are integrated. Actually I have been working on a longer article about CMS and Portal integration. I will share a link with you once that is done.
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