After Autonomy/Interwoven and Oracle/Sun news, here comes the third big news of the year.

If Unilever can have multiple soaps and GM can have multiple car models, why can’t a Content Management vendor have multiple products? OT’s acquisition of Vignette points to this increasing “commoditization” of Content Management marketplace.

There may be a lot of overlaps in products across OT and Vignette but we all know that one size does not fit all and so why not have different products for different scenarios, different price points, different technology stacks and different requirements?  OT now has multiple options for Document Management, DAM, WCM etc plus a bonus portal server that they lacked before. They had a portal integration kit (PIK) that exposed LiveLink’s functionality as portlets that could be deployed on some of the portal servers (but not VAP and Sun as far as I know).

There’s some good analysis here and here.

On a side note, I think people who worked closely with Vignette knew it coming. A colleague of mine told me this:

One Singapore based vignette customer we were talking to  suddenly went quiet and our sales guy spotted him meeting OpenText. Another one who we were talking to, suddenly decided not to continue with Vignette and decided to migrate to Day communiqué. A senior person in Vignette Singapore joined OpenText about 2-3 months back – and was not replaced. There were many other signs in the way Vignette was handling people and partnerships that showed something is on.

I always considered Interwoven, Vignette and Fatwire (Open Market, Divine and FutureTense before that) as the leaders and pioneers in pure play Web Content space. With Interwoven and Vignette gone, what does this mean for the WCM marketplace? An end of the era?

Oracle announced it will acquire Sun.

Another big Portal/Content Management vendor is now an infrastructure vendor. Sometimes I wonder if  everything will soon become an appliance – you buy a Solaris box and it will come bundled not only with the OS (obviously) but also with WebCenter (or one of the numerous Oracle Portal type products), Content Server and so on. IBM, EMC and Microsoft can do this already in some sense.

Sun had open sourced its entire JES or Java ES (Java Enterprise System) sometime back and more recently dropped the JES Portal Server in favor of a partnership with Liferay. The result was WebSynergy, Sun’s branded portal based on Liferay’s codebase. It is not clear how Oracle will continue this partnership and frankly  they already have too many portal kind of offerings to continue with this. However, I think Liferay has a strong offering (and recently opened a new office in India) and will continue to be a good open source alternative whether or not Oracle continues this partnership.

The other component of JES that might have some relevant features is probably Sun Java Communications Suite which has features for collaboration  – things like calendar, messaging, Instant messenger as well as support for mobile communications. Some of these could be good additions to Oracle’s Fusion.

On a different note though, Janus had this to say on twitter:

Oracle buys sun – now Oracle has 5 enterprise portals! a new commercial for Larry: 5 out of 12 most significant portals are powered by ORCL

In spite of that, they had to resort to static pages!?

Okay so another year comes to an end and while we welcome the new year, here’s a look at some of the themes (in a random order) of the year gone by that might have an impact on the Content Technologies next year.

Verticalized Applications

Content Management Systems as horizontal solutions have been there for long and most known vendors provide similar features. The industry however is asking for more domain specific solutions built on standard CMS repositories. Based on this demand and the fact that this provides a differentiation to CMS vendors, I hope to see more and more domain or vertical specific solutions like Loan Origination, Claims Processing and other similar solutions/accelerators from many CMS vendors. Also, with the slowdown in economy, it is easier to sell a domain solution than a pure horizontal solution.

Portal and Content Consolidation

Many enterprises struggle with multitude of applications doing overlapping functionality. Organizations have multiple CMS repositories and many portals. This often leads to duplication of content varied user experience and huge costs. Because of huge cost pressures, many organizations have been considering consolidation of their content applications.

This will lead to following benefits:

• Reduced Hardware Infrastructure as you don’t need those 5 different ECM repositories
• Reduced employee costs as you do not need skilled people across 5 different portal servers
• Standardized processes and hence increased productivity
• Reduced employee training costs
• Unified User Experience
• Reduced Integration, Maintenance and Support Costs

I believe this could be a very important way to reduce and control costs as well as bringing in some standardization. So many organizations would start focused initiatives to consolidate their existing applications.

Open Source

Open Source Content Management and Portal solutions have matured quite a bit. Because of this and the fact that there is cost pressure on everyone, enterprises that would not even consider Open Source solutions are now more favorable towards them. They are becoming open to experimenting with technologies that are generally not considered *enterprisey*.  Many of the open source products are being tracked by waves and quadrants of major analysts and  that reflects a huge change. This is also good for the Open Source vendors because many enterprises use these analysts’ reports for shortlisting.  Many open source products have also released commercial versions and that is another reason that gives these vendors a foot hold within enterprises who did not want to use these citing lack of support options.

Another factor that encourages the use of Open Source products is that people want to quickly build “informal” applications which many commercial products can not do well. There are many popular Open Source (and free) products that do certain things much better.

Although, initial cost could reduce by using Open Source, organizations should carefully look at the impact over a longer horizon and should consider Open Source as another alternative in the market place. They should select Open Source based on overall fitment to their requirements and not just make a decision based on initial licensing cost.

Web 2.0

Widgets and Gadgets have been popular for quite sometime. Some products had gadgets much before portlet spec. I am sure many people have seen examples of counters, ad banners etc which are essentially widgets only. However, there is a considerable interest now in using these within the enterprises for more sophisticated portal like applications.

Currently, most social networking is horizontal – you become a member of a social network, I become one and we write scraps on each other. What next?  I believe Vertical Social Networking is becoming popular.  Some areas where we already see this or have potential are in the areas of Jobs, Real Estate and Classifieds. After all, It is easier to buy an old laptop from a contact’s contact rather than an unknown person who’s advertised in classifieds.

In order to reduce cost, many enterprises, especially those that require product support want to leverage the communities for customer support. They want people to help each other and come to their support only as a last resort. What this means is increasing use of tools that enable collaboration – wikis for example. Many enterprises are using these communities not just for support but also as a way to generate revenues.

Some organizations are also using web 2.0 as a means to Knowledge Management. Instead of regular process oriented KM which forces people to contribute, they want to use mechanisms that encourage people who in turn want to contribute. This is a huge shift – people don’t like contributing if they are forced to do it but are likely to contribute if they enjoy doing it. This also means a shift from “control and process” to “informality and accessibility”.

In spite of all this, I still think how to use Web 2.0 within the enterprise is still not very clear to many organizations and there is a huge scope for improvement. One of the reasons people cite is that workforce is used to applications that became successful on the consumer Internet and want to have same kind of experience for enterprise applications but they need to be very careful. Here’s a nice post by Vilas.

Alternate Delivery Models

There is more acceptance for SaaS based offerings. This is especially true for applications that are not business mission critical. Businesses are experimenting with SaaS based providers because this saves them dependence on their internal IT apart from other benefits like faster time to market, no capital expenditure, low risk and so on. Along with this,  alternate pricing models are also being looked at. Some examples are pay per document, pay per loan, pay per claim etc.

Standards

The portlet spec 2.0 or JSR 286 was released. Although the portlet standards (JSR 286 and JSR 168) have been relatively successful in terms of adoption and support, the content repository standard, JSR 170 has not been that popular. Meanwhile, vendors are collaborating on technologies that will help customers reuse existing investments. As an example, many vendors have come up with CMIS. Okay this is not a standard yet but is possibly in that direction. A standard like this is very much needed and hopefully CMIS will achieve what JSR-170/283 did not.

I would also hope that a standard emerges for Gadgets/Widgets.

Site Management and Personalization

Traditionally Content Management was decoupled from Site Management. However, marketing and business people now want more control and there is increasing convergence of Content Management and Site Management. This essentially means better user experience, rich and dynamic sites. This also means features like personalization are making a come back. This has also resulted because of cheap bandwidth and better client side technologies

Document Services

Document Composition and Generation is becoming part of mainstream ECM. There have been a few partnerships as well as mergers in this space. Related terms in this space are Document Output Management and Forms Management.

This was probably the last post of this year. Thanks for reading the blog and here’s wishing you a great year ahead.

A new trend that I am seeing these days is emergence of gadgets (widgets, dashlets, blocklets) and mashups. These basically provide a quick and dirty way to create portal *like* applications. They are light weight and less expensive as compared to your typical portal servers.

iGoogle is probably the biggest example of their success on the consumer internet. For usage within the enterprise, IBM has a Mashups as well as a Widget platform. You develop components using widget factory which is based on portlet factory (erstwhile Bowstreet) and deploy them on the platform that runs on the embedded Websphere application server. Kapow Technologies and quite a few other vendors (including my company) also have a similar offering. Apache’s Shindig is an open source implementation of Open Social and Google’s gadget specification and lets you build iGoogle type applications.

Many customers are considering these for building their next generation of web properties. Many of them have been asking about Google’s and Yahoo’s offerings as well for their usage within the enterprise. The biggest reason is probably the fact that small applications can be relatively quickly built  and mashed up at the client side using light weight technologies based on Web Oriented Architecture (WOA) like REST, RSS etc instead of more involved server side technologies.  A widget can be written in many ways (java, ruby, php,…)  but  a J2EE portal’s portlet is *generally* written in JAVA and that gives more flexibility for bringing in or integrating with non java applications. So potentially, different technologies can co-exist and their functionality exposed via a uniform web interface. You can also integrate a gadget which is actually hosted by a 3rd part provider (like Google) within your environment.

Many Portal servers have been offering the ability to include Google gadgets within the portal server. So essentially they provide a gadget portlet using which you can integrate gadgets. IBM and Liferay both have this capability.

So will these replace portal technologies? I don’t think that is going to happen in the near future and the reason for that is the fact that portal ecosystem is much more evolved and matured as compared to gadgets/widgets. There are certain standards (e.g., JSR 286) that govern the portal world (at least the java portal world) and most portals support that. There are no standards yet in the gadget/widget world and if you really want to use, say a Google gadget within your environment, there would be non trivial issues to take care of. So for example, how do you do an inter gadget communication between your gadget and that hosted by a 3rd party provider? Even though a portlet and a gadget can co-exist within the portal server, getting your portlet to send an event (or talk to a gadget) is a different matter that needs to be addressed (okay -  Google and IBM have cooperated on IBM portlet Google gadget communication but it is still a non-standard way). IBM is working on a specification called iwidget but i do not think any other vendor supports that as yet. Similarly, Google also has a gadget specification.

There are also other issues related to integration with back end applications and more sophisticated personalization that need to be addressed. Till these are addressed, i think both have a place in targeting specific scenarios.

Two vendors released their commercial offerings based on very popular open source products. Earlier this month, Acquia released commercial Drupal which is a collection of popular 3rd party applications packaged with Drupal to extend its social publishing capabilities.

Liferay also followed and released an enterprise edition of its Portal product. The enterprise edition will be a commercially supported version of its free standard edition. This release also came with a newly done website as well as a new offering called Social Office (to be released soon) which extends Liferay’s collaboration features.

A major reason that hinders Open Source product usage especially among enterprises has been lack of commercial support. If a bank’s loan origination system is down, they wouldn’t be too happy to depend solely on community support! Alfresco already had this model and now with Acquia and Liferay having announced it, I think enterprises will increasingly consider open source products as viable options. After all, they will get benefits of Open Source and Community along with the promise of commercial grade support at lower price points. This also gives them the comfort that there is seriousness behind the product and not just a hobby-ist’s effort.

So even after acquiring Stellent, BEA (including AquaLogic) and having multiple portal type applications of its own, Oracle decided to migrate their blogs to Movable Type from UserLand.

If a product stack seems to have everything, it still might not have specific functionality that you might require. Read more here

When I read about this here, I initially thought that it’s yet another incarnation of what Fatwire used to call Integration Centre. But then I noticed that as part of this platform, they have included an EMC Documentum connector with plans of more such connectors.

I recently heard about an Alfreco Drupal case study  and from my blog’s access logs, I’ve noticed people searching for “Filenet Drupal” and “Documentum Joomla” integration. There are numerous cases of “Sharepoint + Documentum” as well.

This clearly shows that Site Management and Content Management are increasingly becoming niche disciplines. Site Management is more about managing the end user experience while Content Management is more about the back end efficiencies. Business people need more control in the way the content is delivered to the end users – they want the look and feel to be flexible, want the ability to run campaigns, add functionality (Polls, Voting etc) and this trend seems to be catching up. The ease of use and simplicity that Site Management focused products like Drupal provide to create end user applications is simply not matched by more heavy weight products like Documentum and FileNet. Alfresco, though is trying to make improvements in this area.

There are obvious overlaps but vendors are also using these terms to  differentiate from competition in this crowded market. So for example, Fatwire does not sell Content Management, it instead sells what it calls ”Web Experience Management”.

From Fatwire’s perspective, I think it’s a good move.  Instead of trying to build Document Management features, they are building connecters to Documentum (and possibly others) and targeting to become the site management software of choice. They already have strong WCM capabilities and  features like Blogs and Wikis, some of which came as a result of Infostoria acquisition.

If you ever wanted to have a web presence for yourself or your business, there was never any dearth of choices. There are many service providers which let you create web sites quickly using templates and wizards. Google Sites, Google Pages, Yahoo/Tripod/Geocities all let you create such web sites. However, if you wanted to create a site that could be viewed on a PDA or mobile, it was not that easy. You either needed specialized products or at the very minimum had to create a different template (or theme) that was optimized for mobile delivery.

Volantis now brings its well regarded Mobility Server (which it had open sourced recently) to power Ubik.com, a service that enables individuals and small businesses create sites for mobiles just like they are used to creating web sites. Volantis has a device library of more than 5100 devices and as a result, the site that is created is automatically “adapted” for viewing on a wide variety of handsets.

Once you create an account, you will be given a choice of many themes and templates. Unlike similar services for web, a template here is actually more than just about look & feel – it is actually a sample starter site with pre-built pages that can be used as a starting point for your site. While you are creating the site, you can do a mobile preview as well. It also provides the ability to upload images and multimedia files using MMS and/or email. When you are ready, the site can be published at http://sitename.ubik.net.

I also see that if there is a hyperlink to another page which itself is not on this site, it automatically tries to adapt it for mobile display. This probably means that there is a way to convert external, existing sites to be proxied via this service for mobile delivery. However, I was not able to find a straight forward way. I assume it requires the external site to have its output in some specified format (xdime?) but then i’m not sure.

This is a beta version and i’m hoping they will add some more useful features in future:

1. The site I create is only a mobile site. So I actually still need to create another one for the web using one of the other services. I would think that it should be easy to create a site for web and mobiles using ubik.com.
2. Ability to use my own domain name
3. Some dynamic templates would be very useful. Right now, I can only create a static site. As an example, a blogging template would be very nice to have.

Services such as these will indeed help in making the mobile internet much more popular. Now every one will be able to create a mobile site (and hopefully applications as well).

Drupal is one of the rare platforms for building social publishing applications that is built on top of a rather decent WCM platform. It has a  strong foundation with a very flexible taxonomy system which along with thousands of 3rd party modules enables you to assemble social publishing applications.

However, these modules could be your biggest problem as well because many times, module upgrades do not keep pace with Drupal upgrades. There are around 4000 modules listed on Drupal and there are modules for doing many things – integration, collaboration, content, community, commerce and so on.

Read more about this on my post at CMS Watch.

If you have a site or blog and you wanted to make it a community site, your options were limited. Building features like invite a friend, social networking and collaboration was not trivial and involves writing your own applications – this may or may not be supported by the hosting provider unless you were using something like Drupal.

The situation is set to change with Google announcing its Friend Connect service. Like all other Google products, this too is in Beta (and preview release) and has a long wait list. This service will let you implement social features on your website without having to worry about coding and you will be able to invite friends from other popular social networking sites.

Facebook and MySpace had also earlier announced similar initiatives.

And there is focus on social computing else where too. With it’s version 5.0, Liferay also announced enhanced collaboration and social computing features. These include portlets with improved functionality for Blogs, Wikis, Discussion Forums, a chat client, polls and other such features. All of these are based on the same underlying functionality for tagging, commenting, rating etc., which is very similar to Drupal. What this basically means is that irrespective of whether you are creating a blog post or a new article, you can use uniform features for categorization, rating and RSS.

Now it’s easier than ever to have your own Facebook .