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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