Archive forDocument Management

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

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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EMC to acquire Document Sciences Corp

December 29, 2007 @ 11:52 am· Filed under Document Management, Enterprise Content Management

I have said before that ECM vendors should provide Document Composition features as this space is very closely related to content management.

The folks at EMC seem to agree. EMC ended the year with the news of acquiring Document Sciences. Doc Sciences’ xPression is a product that targets the Document Composition or Document Output Management (DPM) space.

For EMC, this provides a way to differentiate its content management offerings by adding document composition features to its suite. I don’t think any of the other big ECM vendors have this as yet and they will have to acquire/build these features to catch up. In return, Document Sciences gets a stronger company with a bigger sales force that will hopefully propel it to a leadership veposition in this space.

As with any other acquisition, a lot depends on how and when EMC integrates Documentum with xPression. However, I hope they will provide a better integration at least as an immediate benefit.

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Fatwire, SaaS and Web 2.0

November 2, 2007 @ 4:41 pm· Filed under Collaboration, Document Management, Portals, Web Content Management

In an earlier post about Fatwire, I’d written:

However, I wonder where are the other so called Web 2.0 features like blogs, wikis and so on?

I’d like to believe Fatwire noticed that :). They recently acquired Infostoria, which has offerings in this space. Infostoria also had a SaaS offering called zeegzaag.com offering hosted wikis. It will be interesting to see if Fatwire will integrate its flagship CMS Content Server as a hosted service using this new acquired platform?

One of the requirements for internal enterprise applications like Intranets is the capability to define workgroups (or spaces) where employees can collaborate, share and in general do light weight document management activities. Fatwire did not have any capabilities in this space and in document management but with this acquisition, it gets these capabilities as well.

Off course, how good the end result is obviously depends on when and how they integrate different products and what they do with overlapping functionality?

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Standards and Content LifeCycle

August 7, 2007 @ 8:33 pm· Filed under Document Management, Enterprise Content Management, Web Content Management

For a lot of organizations, the content lifecycle includes much more than what typical ECM systems have to offer. Consider this scenario of an insurance company that offers different insurance products (life, auto etc) to their customers. People go to the website, compare products and select the one that they want to buy. They then enter their details etc which is fed to the backend systems where based on profiles and information, a quote is generated and an offer is made. This is obviously a simple scenario and things are much more complex. Now consider the number of applications that are required for this:

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Flurry of Activity in the Open Source space

July 5, 2007 @ 10:59 pm· Filed under Document Management, Enterprise Content Management, Open Source, Portals, Product Reviews, Web Content Management

There has been an increased activity in the Open Source Portal and Content Management Products space. Many new versions have been released in recent times and there’s much more to follow. Joomla!, Alfresco, OpenCms, Liferay and JBoss all released their next versions.

Joomla! released their first ever version (although Beta). This was a completely re-written code base without any Mambo code.

Alfresco

Alfresco have released the Alfresco Community Release 2.1 (Release Candidate). This includes WCM RC 2.1 and Records Management RC 2.1 also. Some of the features useful for me and some observations are as follows:

  1. There’s a very nice integration with MS Word. So the users can work (create, edit, check-in, check-out, workflow, metadata, rules etc.) using the familiar desktop environment instead of logging in to a web interface. You basically map alfresco repository as a shared drive using CIFS or WebDav and then do all your activities from within word. Here’s the link.
  2. This is a good first step and I’m hoping the good folks at Alfresco will add more features.
    • A similar plugin for other desktop applications like Powerpoint and Excel
    • In the current shape, the plugin works by way of a pop up window. It would be much more user friendly if instead of that, there are options like “File -> Save to Alfresco” and “File -> Open from Alfresco” with the Word menu. That will make it even easier for business users for doing simple tasks like opening and saving. This can be achieved by mapping the alfresco repository as a shared drive but then that is different from actual word integration because you can’t really check-out or check-in.
    • Using this pop up mechanism, one can configure only single Alfresco repository. If there are multiple Alfresco installations, users will have to change these settings depending on which repository they are working on.
  3. The WCM has many new enhancements. There’s an option to do deployments to one or multiple servers from staging sand box. I think Alfresco and Magnolia are one of the few Open Source products that provide the ability to deploy content from one server to another. This provides the advantage of decoupling staging and delivery.
  4. There’s a Blog Publishing module. One could manage blog posts as content in Alfresco and then post to a WordPress or a TypePad blog.
  5. Another good feature is the ability to manage Translations and Documents in multiple languages.
  6. Alfresco WCM Website Framework (WSF) gives a website framework with sample forms for content entry, navigation, display templates and best practices. This can be used as a basis for building new websites and will hopefully improve time to market. This is very similar to TemplateOne sample by OpenCms. It would be good though if Alfresco could come up with a wizard or AMP based approach for configuring this sample site. Otherwise one needs to create 8 sample forms, configure display templates, configure workflows etc manually.

OpenCms

OpenCms also released version 7. In fact they also relaunched their site using OpenCms 7.0 and that’s a good way of proving how good it is. It has many new features like:

  1. An improved link management (BTW that is also there as beta functionality in Alfresco)
  2. WebDav access
  3. Ability to define relationships between different content items
  4. An improved security and permissioning system. You can now have delegated administration
  5. Usability improvements and use of Ajaxy features

Check this link for all the new enhancements. However, unlike Alfresco and Magnolia, OpenCms neither supports JSR 170 nor JSR 168.

Liferay

Liferay 4.3 was also released. Here’s the link to new features. The features I found useful for us are

  1. The ability to have the concept of staging and production environments. Typically requirements of these two environments are very different in terms of caching (you won’t cache content when authors are creating new content all the time), scalability and user groups.
  2. Liferay now provides the ability to host multiple portals on the same installation. This could be useful to provide an ASP or a hosted offering.
  3. Integration with Exchange, Eclipse and support for WebDav
  4. And yes, many new out of the box portlets apart from an already existing big list. Liferay has been supporting Google gadgets long before IBM and recently announced by Jboss too. There’s also this ability to use folksonomy style tags.

JBoss

JBoss announced release of JBoss Portal 2.6. There are some more details here.

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