Enterprise

Jon Marks, a technical analyst from the United Kingdom, posted an interesting article last week on his blog.  In the post, The CMS Word on the Tweet, he discusses the difficulty of finding "his world" on Twitter when seeking conversations centered around content management system.  Jon even uses CMSReport.com's CMS Focus as an example for showing what he observes as a large divide between open source Web content management systems and propriety enterprise software.  A divide that many of us may already recognize but haven't quite put into words like Jon has.

To the Big Wide World (which includes Twitter, and all the sites I’ve mentioned above), CMS means “Free Open Source CMS with Low Cost of Ownership”. The commercial Open Source CMS solutions don’t make the cut either. Four of the five Open Source CMS products reviewed by CMS Watch (Drupal, Joomla!, Plone CMS and TYPO3) live in both worlds. Open CMS doesn’t as my feeling is it is a bit too complex. Alfresco, DotNetNuke and ez Publish made one of the lists above, but don’t really feature in the Tweetosphere.

I inhabit a world populated by analysts, commercial vendors, systems integrators, large agencies and other such creatures. I don’t believe we pay much attention to the other world until a product jumps the gap. And it seems difficult for a product that isn’t Java or Microsoft based to make it in to My World.

Jon asked me via Twitter to let him know what I thought of his article.  I think Jon has done an excellent job of identifying the dichotomy found within CMS.  It does seem that the enterprise often takes an approach to content management that differs greatly from open source projects.  The approaches differ so much that the parties involved often end up defining what is a CMS in two different ways.  The only thing I would like to comment on is that I unfortunately live on a third, yet unidentified, world that the other two worlds don't fully understand.

Long time readers should already know that I'm a big fan of Andrew McAfee.  Andrew McAfee is the Associate Professor at Harvard Business School that is widely credited for coining the phrase “Enterprise 2.0”.  With all the traveling I did in January and February, I haven't had much chance to visit some of my favorite blog sites.  To my surprise, Andrew McAfee recently moved his blog from the business school's CMS over to his own domain and his new site looks great!

Dries Buytaert announced on his blog that a set of Drupal modules are available for integrating Drupal with Alfresco.

Alfresco and Optaros, in conjunction with Acquia, have made available a set of Drupal modules that integrate Drupal with Alfresco using the CMIS APIs. See the CMIS module and the CMIS Alfresco module on drupal.org.

A recent article in ComputerWorld discusses observations made by a Denmark-based analyst regarding wikis in the enterprise.  The analyst points out that wiki technology alone won't deliver if the organization cannot overcome obstacles in its own culture as well as the lack of true content management in a wiki.

One issue is the hype surrounding wikis or the blind faith with which they are approached, said Jespersen. "People often look to Wikipedia as a free form where everyone is contributing, and why could we not do the same with our organization?," she said, having observed wikis entering the scene to compensate for an intranet that has fallen to the wayside. But, she said, technology alone won't resolve that issue.

Jespersen lists three myths surrounding wiki implementation that might make some organizations rethink the expectations they've built around their platform.

The three myths given about wikis in the enterprise are:

1. Myth One: Wikis will motivate employees to contribute content.
2. Myth Two: Employees know how to contribute.
3. Myth Three: Wikis will always provide the information employees need.

Myth three is of special interest to me. The analyst points out that although search is a selling point for wikis...the search capability found in wikis are often not as good as those found in content management systems.  She goes on to explain that given there is little structure built into wikis, "it is difficult to
structure this information to make it findable the next day even."

Make no mistake, Wikis provide an organization with a fantastic tool for employee's in an organization to learn how to collaborate.  I believe organizations often underestimate the paradigm shift needed in their own culture for their employees to properly contribute to a centralized knowledge base.  Wikis and other social publishing tools have proven to be a valuable tool for the collaboration component needed in information systems.  However, eventually wikis fall short of what a more well rounded content management system can provide an organization.

Away from this blog, I've been putting a lot of energy into how best to work with social software in larger organizations (Enterprise 2.0) behind the firewall.  My professional attention has been shifting away from using Web content management systems, social publishing systems, and other collaboration tools on the Internet.  I really think the next big advancements and challenges for web technologies will not be on the World Wide Web,
but the less explored intranet ran by medium and larger size organizations.

In one form or another, I've been involved on both sides of the firewall in my organization. Ten years ago it was a huge challenge for
organizations and businesses to figure out how best to utilize the Internet to meet their business needs. As challenging as I saw the Internet for my own organization, I'm convinced there are greater challenges on the intranet side of the house.  For the most part, we all can see what the others are doing with their Internet Web servers, but few of us get to see what other organizations do with Enterprise 2.0 behind their own firewalls.

Andrew Conry-Murray has written a good article in InformationWeek about the integration of collaboration software with enterprise content management.  The article is titled, A New Approach To Collaboration And Enterprise Content Management. The article focuses specifically on Microsoft's Sharepoint and Alfresco's Share being utilized with or sometimes replacing the traditional ECM products.

 

ECM products like Documentum have come a long way from their origins moving certain content through specific business processes, such as loan origination or check processing. This is still their primary role, but ECM vendors are broadening their scope to help companies manage new content types and encourage collaboration. Where does that leave your choices?

 

Companies will always have a mishmash of content repositories to deal with, so it makes sense to build a software layer that can reach into all them to apply uniform policies

 

I have only one complaint about the article, the article is poorly titled.  The process and workflows being described are not a new approach for enterprises, but rather an ongoing approach for bringing collaboration tools into an enterprise's content management system.

Many of us had originally thought that bringing Enterprise 2.0 into our organizations would be as easy as installing software on the server.  What we're finding is that for many of our workers, collaboration of content within an organization sometimes requires signficant changes to our business culture.  New ideas and new approaches are always welcomed.  However if you really want to see true collaboration in the enterprise, it is not always new approaches that are needed but a recommitment to the Enterprise 2.0 projects you started months ago.

It has been a long time since I had anything to report about eGroupWare, an enterprise groupware package.  It also doesn't help that I haven't used the software for about a year.  However, eGroupWare 1.6 Final was released last week giving us some new news.

New additions and improvements in eGroupWare 1.6 include:

A recent blog post from Sarah Parez tries to answer some "want-to-know" questions on the upcoming Microsoft Office Web Applications.  With software as a service becoming more popular, Google has quickly become a competitor of Microsoft's Office Suite with its Google Docs. Microsoft is aggressively fighting back by making its Office software available via the Web browser.

"Our prediction, though proved to be correct though in another sense, inasmuch as the push to sell SharePoint as a replacement to ECM systems has to a large degree stopped — a good thing for buyers, for in that direction lay serious disappointment.

The fact is that buyers typically do not replace systems, be they ECM or otherwise. The growth in the data mountain and the ever-changing demands to the business mean that IT adds to and attempts to enhance what is already there, rather than rip and replace."

John Newton, Alfresco, posted a well written article on the business changes Web 2.0 will continue to the enterprise.  I not only liked what he had to say about the strength of social publishing tools for knowledge sharing within a company, but also Web 2.0's strength to blend required knowledge available both inside and outside the organization.