Random Thoughts on Portals and Content Management

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.

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Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) is a new standard that (from the spec)

… will define a domain model and set of bindings, such as Web Service and REST/Atom that can be used by applications to work with one or more Content Management repositories/systems.

This spec  will soon be submitted to OASIS. It has participation from IBM, EMC, Microsoft, Open Text, Oracle, SAP and Open Source Alfresco.

Around the time when JSR 170 was released, I had written that many products have proprietary repositories and it might not be trivial for them to re-architect those to be JCR compliant. This seems to be an important consideration of this spec and thus CMIS is designed to be an abstraction over existing systems. So it does not require the products to make any major changes to their  architecture. It does not even try to make it mandatory to expose ALL features via CMIS.

There is also a recognition of the fact that many organizations indeed have multiple ECM systems and it is going to remain like that. So it might not be possible for everyone to consider migration and/or consolidation to a common repository.

Above all, it has support from Microsoft. And with a focus on REST, HTTP, ATOM it has that distinct feel of web 2.0, content mashups and so on.

So what does it mean for JCR? I’d like to believe what Kas Thomas has written on CMS Watch based on his interaction with David Nuescheler. In fact, the first ever draft implementation of CMIS is based on a JCR (Alfresco)! However, buyers of new ECM systems will now be less enthusiastic about the “support for JSR 170 tick mark” in their RFPs and that will mean reduced pressure on product vendors to support the JCR standard.

Also there is something that i’m trying to figure out and i’m hoping the experts can point me to something. All the diagrams, including the one here show how this spec aims to improve interoperability among different ECM systems by having an application that can access any CMS. However, doesn’t interoperability also mean interaction between the participating CMSs as well - for example, if CMIS enabled EMC Documentum and FileNet are involved and i check out a document in Documentum, the FileNet users will also see that document checked out. Or does this use case not make any sense? We have seen a lot of scenarios where a customer has multiple ECM systems and they want this ability via a common interface.

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McKinsey released the results of a global survey on the use of Web 2.0 by enterprises. This is an interesting report with some good analysis and data. Some points that I found interesting are:

1. McKinsey included Web services as one of the Web 2.0 tools along with Blogs, RSS, Wikis and others. Sure, Web services could form an important component of a Web 2.0 initiative but I don’t think it is a Web 2.0 tool itself like Blogs and RSS. 
2. Blogs, RSS and Wikis have seen considerable increase in usage from last year. Podcasts’ usage has also increased moderately whereas Peer-to-peer and Mash-ups’ usage has actually declined from previous year. Social Networking usage has more or less remained at the same level.
3. Web services usage has also reduced considerably. I think this is rather surprising. Shouldn’t companies be using more of web services now?
4. There’s some good analysis based on regional differences. For example, the usage of tools differ across regions. The regions across which analysis has been done are Europe, India, North America, China and Asia-Pac. India and China are considered as separate regions and for those people who are skeptical about the potential of this region, this is a good data point.
5. Tools usage varies across regions. Social Networking is more popular in North America as compared to APAC, China and India. Similarly Blogs are more popular in India and APAC as compared to other Geos. Video sharing and Podcasts are most popular in India! I am actually stumped by this- I would have thought that Video sharing etc would be more popular in North America and Europe which have better bandwidth and connectivity.

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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

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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.

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