Content Log

Symbiosis of Cloud and On-Premise Enterprises

Symbiosis: One is free to move, the other is not. But they both need each other. 

Eventually we will see computing as a utility like electricity that will be consumed on demand. I also believe that cloud infrastructure providers will ultimately be able to undercut the cost advantages and carbon footprint of the data centers of even the largest companies. Just not yet.

As Gartner’s 2012 Predicts, Cloud Computing dated December 8, 2011:

"The perceived (and real) risks to the technical reliability, integrity and security of applications and data that are entrusted to cloud providers hold back organizations' initiatives."

For many CIOs, we as an industry still need to overcome security issues, build trust from the IT organization, ensure open exchange of information, and even negotiate treaties on the rights of information domicile and ownership.

However, there are benefits to using the cloud and even the public cloud starting today that can transcend these issues. There are several use cases that require a cloud platform, particularly in the context of content and collaboration, that would not be possible or at least very difficult today. The first is when sharing information between companies, such as those that are currently described as an extranet, only easier to set up. The second is when information is public anyway and the efficiencies of cloud make distributing this information more efficient as well. The third is where the risk or cost of hacking or intrusion is low compared to a relatively high cost of operating computing resources internally. The fourth is when the need to provide information externally, particularly for the purposes of accessing in mobile environments, outweighs the relative risk of exposure of that information.

Business to Business Collaboration

Credit: Confederation of Indian Industry, Jan 2011

Business-to-Business Collaboration through IT systems has always been difficult when any one side of the collaboration is responsible for the infrastructure. Trying to get the IT organization in a large corporation, even a technology vendor, to set up an external system that is accessible from outside the firewall is nearly impossible—not from a technology perspective, but from an administrative perspective. And there is no way that the IT organization is providing a VPN.

This often leads to the default means for collaboration, which is email. I have been involved in enough standards and board meetings to recognize this is a real problem for even the big IT vendors. Perhaps this can be done with Private Cloud instances outside the firewall, but that again would require thinly stretched IT resources. Yet this needs to be done when two or more companies cooperate on development of products, joint bid offerings to customers or coordinated marketing campaigns. At the end of the collaboration, the results need to be owned by everyone, not just the one who set up the collaboration.

Public Information

Information that is public by default provides another opportunity to share in the cloud. When I first started broaching the subject of Cloud Computing with CIOs and IT departments, I was met with a bit of incredulity about why anyone would want to do this. However, the idea of putting information that was already or should be public in the Cloud didn't really meet much resistance. After all, this is what everyone is doing with web content, either in a DMZ or CDN and Cloud provides an excellent vehicle to manage that content. Marketing departments want to provide marketing material to potential customers and see that material as wasted as long as it is behind the firewall. Also some government agencies must provide certain information to the public by law. If it is going to be public anyway, putting it behind the firewall is only hiding that information.

Small, Medium and Underserved Organizations

Medium and small size organizations are likely to have an IT department that is swamped, if they have one at all. This is the situation we have for internal systems here at Alfresco, like HR and expenses. However, this situation is not limited to smaller companies as even large companies have their underserved departments with strained resources likely focused on core business processes. Many collaboration and content needs may not get met and it may be impossible to know what the impact will be.

Smaller companies are more likely take the risk of putting content in the cloud or with a SaaS vendor, but increasingly, it is becoming more acceptable for non-mission critical departments to also store information in the cloud or with a service. That is if that service can be shown to guarantee security.

Sometimes speed of execution outweighs the risk of exposure. Many on-demand projects or customer interactions require IT resources "Right Now!" or business will be lost. Limiting the time of exposure in the wild or public sphere may help, but if business demands immediate access and IT cannot provide that, then organizations will seek ways to make it happen.

The Mobile Worker

Finally, there is that nether world outside of the office, but still in the domain of the enterprise. Increasingly, we are doing more and more work outside of an office. Right at this moment, I am writing this in my home office, away from any distractions. I am often on the road working - in the air, in a hotel, in a convention center - on presentations, plans or reports, much of which I would just keep in the enterprise. A similar situation exists where workers are out in the field or at a customer site, where working outside the office is essential. Increasingly, this work is being done on tablets and mobile devices.

These are situations where you would want to have the mobile device or laptop be seen as an extension of the firewall. However, using VPN connections is not always practical and can create their own security concerns. If you could put and store the content and materials you need to get the job done in the cloud, you would not only make yourself more productive, you could raise the productivity of the entire organization. This of course assumes that the content is secure and perhaps available only for the duration of the task at hand. The value of the work should exceed the risk of exposing the content.

Content Symbiosis

There are many more situations where you wouldn't want to put content into the cloud. Any corporation that is regulated should consider documents and content under regulation and be stored on premise. Highly sensitive information such as board documents or legal documents should be maintained behind firewalls. I know of two very large corporations with very popular cloud services that are using Alfresco to store their documents behind the firewall for this reason. Records whose final disposition is managed and destruction guaranteed should be stored in a controlled environment. Mission-critical documents that must be absolutely accurate and must not be tampered with should also be considered behind the firewall.

However, these new use cases are so much easier in the cloud. They become the reason to start to move to the cloud and actually add value to the enterprise systems to which they are connected. As Gartner puts it:

"Users should plan for a gradual shift from on-premises IT architectures toward a hybrid model in which these architectures coexist and interoperate with public-cloud-based architectures. For most midsize to large user organizations, a shift to a totally public-cloud-based strategy will not happen during the next five years."

I have heard the term "Hybrid" used for this combination of In-the-Cloud and On-Premise enterprise structure. I prefer to use the term "Symbiosis" since these environments are very complementary and help maintain the health of each. The more symbiotic these systems are, the more effectively they will work. Just like symbiosis, the cloud and on-premise may be very different, but have evolved to derive mutual benefit. If you remember your high school biology, this is called Mutualism. From a content perspective, we can see how these use cases of on-demand content services, enabling mobile working and facilitating B2B collaboration can help the enterprise thrive. Likewise, the enterprise is the protector of information and the producer of content from internal processes.

Like any symbiotic relationship, these systems will reach a balance. As I said previously, I think it will be a long time before the cloud becomes a dominant component. However, equilibrium of 80/20 where 80 percent is in the enterprise and 20 percent is in the cloud could be something we see in the next few years. We are far from that equilibrium at the moment, but the signs are there. If we look at this as a symbiotic integration of systems, it's easier to see how we get there.

Our next lesson on Content Biology will be about “Content Osmosis”.

Content Monkey Predicts 2012

It's the last day of January, so I am not too late for predictions for the new year. Besides, it's my birthday and what a great time to predict the future. This year I am influenced by a book I received for Christmas, "Thinking Fast and Slow" by Nobel prize laureate Daniel Kahneman, from our one of investors, Accel Partners. Every year they send out a profound book to their portfolio companies and boy is this one potentially life changing.

I won't go into the book in detail, but one of the things that Kahneman, who is a psychologist and decision theorist, discusses is why experts are so bad at predicting the future. There are a few reasons including some things called the Theory-Induced Blindness, Optimistic Bias, Hindsight Bias and the Planning Fallacy among others. But put simply, experts just try to be too clever.

Kahneman referenced the 20-year study by Philip Tetlock at the University of Pennsylvania that studied 284 experts in economics and politics and 80,000 predictions. The experts were were asked to rate the probabilities of three alternative outcomes: the persistence of the status quo, more of something such as political freedom or economic growth, or less of that thing. As Kahneman states:

"The results were devastating. The experts performed worse than they would have if they had simply assigned equal probabilities to each of the three potential outcomes. In other words, people who spend their time, and earn their living, studying a particular topic produce poorer predictions than dart-throwing monkeys who would have distributed their choices evenly over the options. Even in the region they knew best, experts were not significantly better than nonspecialists."



Tania, the dart-throwing Content Monkey (attribution: Quixado on Flickr)

So there you have it, if we want to know what will happen in 2012, we need a dart-throwing Content Monkey to decide the future. All you analysts please take note, she (I asked her what sex she was) will _probably_ (and the operative word is probably) be more successful than you will be. Her name is Tania Majerus, see http://www.kleimo.com/random/name.cfm and I asked her a series of questions related to "either/or" answers or "less than, same as, more than" answers. I will add my "expert" analysis of the result, because Kahneman suggests that we humans need to think causally and will always look for a cause even when events are random. I swear these are the answers that "Tania" had generated.

Will the ECM market still exist by the end of the year?

Content Monkey says "Yes!"

I guess a market that is some $4 billion or so wouldn't disappear overnight, with a year being classified as overnight. There is some talk about it disappearing or perhaps being absorbed into the infrastructure or being merged with the social business sector. It may not be exciting, but it's still there and still very useful.

Will Mobile be the next big thing in Content Management?

Tania says "Yes!"

It's certainly early days, but with the spread of "Bring Your Own Device", users are certainly challenging IT and the organization to accommodate these mobil devices. Smart phones first and then iPads are starting to create their own demands on the usage of content. I see that OpenText has some sort of offering that bridges mobile devices to internal content management systems. It's not exactly a Cloud offering, but I can assume that other ECM vendors will follow suit.

Will Cloud be the biggest influence in Content Management?

CM says "Yes!"

I guess it is only natural to assume this given the high degree of interest in various surveys of CIOs. We have CEO saying that they "must get into the Cloud" whether they know what that means or not. Flexibility is the clear driver more than cost advantage. The largest corporations say that they can better deals on their own systems than they can from Amazon, but they can add machines on demand. The big question is whether it will be private or public clouds that will have the influence on Content Management. However, I'm not really sure what I would have said if the result was no.

Will companies start to put content into public cloud offerings?

CM says "No!"

If the answer was yes to this one, I would have rationalized this as they are doing this whether they know it or not. People are putting stuff into DropBox and Box whether the IT department and management knows it or not. Still I think we are still a bit away from resolution of a few security issues before companies consciously put content into the Cloud. An AIIM survey last year said that only 6% of corporations are even using a corporate cloud, but that 30% would consider using a public cloud in the future. This may be ignoring the informal usage on the file sharing services.

Will "Big Data" really have an impact on Content Management?

Tania says "No!"

This was one of the big predictions of Real Story Group  and Lubor Ptacek at OpenText. To be fair, Lubor said that "Big Data" in general would be the hype of the year, but that no one knows what that really means. RSG has aggregated their analyst predictions, presumably to avoid the failing pundit syndrome, and make Big Data sound like business intelligence. When I think Big Data, I think Map-Reduce and Key/Value pairs in extremely parallel processing a la Google and Hadoop. IBM sees the former as the future and I would think the latter. Still Tania says "Who care?"

Will Open Source market share in Content Management grow, remain the same or shrink?

Tania says "Grow!"

Whew! I wonder what I would have said if Tania had said shrink? I know Alfresco is growing and quite rapidly. I know that a lot of Drupal and Joomla is eating the commercial vendors lunch. But I can't comment on how other commercial vendors are doing. Still, good call Tania! Sorry, Lubor - did you consider that Cloud and Open Source go hand-in-hand and that most of the Cloud runs on Open Source?

Will EMC sell off Documentum?

CM says "Yes!"

There have been interesting rumors over the last year about Documentum. At this point, I can probably count on one hand the number of people I know who are still there. Interesting to see a number of the engineers going off to Salesforce. I had heard a rumor that SAP was considering buying without a lot of substance. I had also heard a very interesting rumor that a strategic acquisition by Autonomy that they had referenced in their earnings call where related to Documentum. That made sense prior to the HP acquisition. Now, you have to be wondering if EMC is thinking more about the potential drives they could be selling more than the prospects of their dwindling ECM brand.

Will SAP enter the ECM market?

CM says "No!"

I'm not sure if SAP would consider whether Tania is right or not. This is an adjacent market that SAP has been reselling OpenText for a while. Could they consider, once again, whether to purchase OpenText? SAP is also building out a cloud solution and CMIS is part of the cloud solution. Even so, they have said it before and will probably say it again that they are not interested in entering this market. And of course, they are using Alfresco in their enterprise.

Will HP grow, shrink or maintain the size of Autonomy?

CM says "Shrink!"

I would consider encouraging Tania to throw this dart again. When you go to the autonomy.com website, it hardly seems like anything is different. That would call for at least a "Maintain". I can see Meg Whitman investing in the service, but she could consider undoing yet another decision of the hapless Leo Apotheke. Autonomy's cloud offering has been somewhat murky from the financial analysts' perspective in terms of what it actually constitutes. However, it may add a bit of Cloud pizazz to HP's line up and it's not likely given the sunk costs of acquisition. Still Kahneman in the book suggests that sunk costs should not be considered in any rational economic decision and that companies are usually very good at removing CEOs who use "mental accounting" to avoid losing sunk costs. Meg's job is to avoid that mental accounting.

Will we see more consolidation in Content Management?

Tania says "No!"

There has been a lot over the last 10 years and perhaps we are seeing an equilibrium of the old guard of enterprise software. This prediction may fly in the face of a Documentum sell-off. I could also see OpenText folding into a larger software portfolio. But monkey says...

Will SharePoint market share in Content Management grow, shrink or remain the same?

Tania says "Shrink!"

Sorry, I can't see this and I can't explain it away. Sure, growth will slow and the Microsoft brand being tarnished by some bad handling of consumer products. But Microsoft Office is still the main game in office software for a long time to come and it's going to be natural for Microsoft to hook in SharePoint as part of the deal as well as SharePoint driving Office sales.

Will OpenText's market share grow, shrink or remain the same?

CM says "Shrink!"

I am going to be accused of being biased of even acknowledging this answer. I personally say "Remain", but we'll see.

Will those anti-Documentum ads that Oracle are producing actually work?

CM says "Yes!"

These ads really piss me off. Sure we compete against Documentum as well, but I can tell you that 8-Track tapes were well and truly dead when we started Documentum. Kids these days probably think we were all living in black and white and called each other "Man!" And can you tell me that Stellent's architecture is really that more advanced than Documentum when they were started within 5 years of each other 20 years ago. Anybody could get great results if they use an Exadata. Just give us a machine and we'll show you.

Updated Bonus Question: Will 2012 be the Year of CMIS?

Monkey says "Yes!"

I guess I have been taking CMIS for granted, otherwise why wouldn't I have asked this question in the first place. It has come a long way over the last several years. Apache Chemistry has made it possible for so many to implement it and Chemistry also means that the lighter weight JSON bindings (think brower plug-ins or mobile apps) can connect so much easier. As the Cloud becomes more important, what better standard to have to connect to content than one that was designed for that purpose and has so many systems like SharePoint, FileNet and OpenText supporting it.

Finally

My final prediction, is my personal one, which is these predictions will beat the others that are out there and that they will have around a 50/50 chance of being accurate at the end. Unfortunately, I won't be able to take credit.

 

Alfresco launches new Activiti Business Process Management Initiative

Today Alfresco launched a new open source project, Activiti Business Process Management Suite along with the Spring Source division of VMware, Signavio and Camunda. We are also very pleased that Tom Baeyens, project founder of JBPM and BPM expert, has joined Alfresco along with his fellow architect Joram Barrez. They bring a wealth of business process experience to a clean slate to build a next generation BPM system that will be licensed under the Apache 2.0 license. This combination can have profound implications for both the business process and content management spaces.

Tom Baeyens 

Activiti emerged from our desire to have an Apache-licensed BPM engine. Although we were quite happy with the jBPM engine, it's LGPL license was preventing us from OEM's Alfresco to larger software companies that were concerned about any open source license with the letter G in it. It's irrelevant that they shouldn't be concerned about it, we intended to take care of it. It's understandable that RedHat did not want to change its license, but our business needs dictated that we needed to find an alternative.

At the same time, Tom also felt that jBPM should be Apache licensed, but for different reasons. The OMG was making strong progress toward BPMN 2.0 as not just a modeling language, but adding execution semantics to create a language that could be used both for design and for execution. He felt that with the primary design vendors using this tool, the time was right for an Apache-licensed BPM engine. An Apache-license could take the BPM system to where BPM was needed, which was everywhere!

After a very short discussion, Tom and Joram joined Alfresco just a couple of months ago and they are already ready to put out their first alpha version of the Activiti BPM engine. They have both been working on this so long, they can create an engine from scratch in their sleep. However, the blank slate has allowed them to think about some of the issues that weren't even around when jBPM was created. For instance, how can you use NOSQL and eventual consistency to create an engine that can scale into the Cloud? What kind of role can scripting through JSR 223 play to enable the use of languages other than Java, such as Groovy, JRuby or JavaScript? How can you create open touch points to content management through CMIS and the OpenCMIS API in Apache Chemistry?

By answering these questions, Activiti is addressing the requirements of business process management for new applications. The Activiti engine as small as a few classes that are embedded in your application or as big as an internet and consumer scale engagement server. Applications that wouldn't have even considered a large scale, stand alone workflow server because of cost and complexity will now be able to freely embed a business process engine. However, new Cloud applications

In Activiti, we don't only have a BPM engine. There is a complete suite with the engine including a designer from Signavio, user tools and control consoles. Signavio had already been working with BPMN 2.0 and had an MIT license for their designer. Although they have working relationships with other ECM vendors, they are quite happy to work with the wider open source community. Their browser-based and AJAX approach to BPM design will make process design more accessible to non-developer business analysts. This approach and the future proofing and lock-in removal of the BPMN 2.0 standard may be one of the most revolutionary aspects of the Activiti project.

 

Activiti Process Modeler

Our intention is submit the Activiti engine to the Apache Foundation. We have another new employee, Nick Burch, who is the lead for Apache POI http://poi.apache.org/ and will help guide us through the Apache process. Nick has already been instrumental in moving the OpenCMIS project into Apache Chemistry. We shall provide support for Activiti when it is used in conjunction with the Alfresco engine, but do so in a style that is consistent with an Apache project. We also intend to continue support for jBPM for our Alfresco Enterprise customers as well as connections to other process engines, but Activiti will become the default BPM engine for Alfresco.

Activiti is available as Alpha now at the Activiti web site. Screenshots are also available. We are looking at General Availability at the end of the year. We are looking to incorporate Activiti into Alfresco in a release at the end of 2010.

We hope to see more people involved in Activiti. This is as much a good thing for our open source competitors as it is for us. With a common set of interfaces around CMIS and OpenCMIS, this will allow all of us, including those built upon PHP, to share common workflow capabilities and tools. Who couldn't be happy with that? :-)

There have already been a couple of interesting blogs from:

 

• Tom Baeyens, Alfresco Creates Activiti
• Matt Aslett, Alfresco’s new Activiti en route to Apache
• Sandy Kemsley, Open Source BPM with Alfresco’s Activiti

 

 

8 ECM Predictions for 2010

At the recent AIIM Board Meeting that I attended this month, AIIM President John Mancini asked us to blog using the number 8. Why 8? Because no one else is using that number and AIIM can brand around it. So what better way to start than with my 8 predictions for ECM and Open Source - emphasis on the former. I found that I had a lot more that I could have written, so I cheated and added two more on section 7+1 and section 8+1 for a total of 10. Still, I didn't get around to my thoughts on Apple, mobile, Google, Google Wave, New Applications, Mergers and Acquisitions, etc. Since I have to go home and I am the last one in the office, this will have to do! I know it's a lot, but I have been doing a lot of thinking lately.

In no particular order...

1. Economy's affect on ECM.

Nothing affects the ECM industry more than the economy for good or bad. Any sudden downturn has an immediate effect on practically all enterprise software spending regardless of the payback. Until the consequences of the downturn are understood, financial controllers will hold off on purchases above a certain amount. Generally bad for large enterprise purchases. On the flip side, a recovery can and has been an excellent opportunity for ECM as automation is often a better investment than bringing on the old hires that you let go. Middling growth leads to middling results.

The prognosis for the economy is not entirely clear right now. Most recessions endure a double dip, although this one was so sharp it may have washed out most of the bad stuff that a double dip gets rid of. There is a great deal of uncertainty for both downside and upside opportunity in the economy and know one knows for sure what will happen. Most leading indicators are good, but a similar situation arose a couple of years after the 1929 crash and the economy dropped again in the mid-30s. If it gets bad, it can very, very bad as over-stretched governments have very little room for maneuvre. In addition, Tim Geithner has said that prospects for increased employment will not be great in 2010.

My guess is that economic recovery will continue and this could be a good year for ECM and enterprise software in general. Regulation is up, corporate purchasing is up, optimism is up. Content management will be an easier sell than most as investment for the future with less risk than hiring. I'd put the probability at 60-70% for good conditions for ECM. Downside is that is still a pretty risky environment. As the Boy Scouts say, "Be Prepared!"

Having said all that, government will be a growth area for ECM in 2010. Stimulus packages will kick in and new regulations will emerge to put yet more content pressure on organizations. This is one of the reasons we invested so heavily in Compliance, Governance and Records Management in 2009.

2. ECM in the developing world.

Growth in Asia, particularly India and China, is obviously outpacing Europe and North America. While the developed world spent, the developing world saved with more reserves for investment in infrastructure and IT. Even eastern Europe is doing better than expected because of lower debt. Could the developing world be a major growth area for ECM. Pressure on space and skyrocketing real estate prices in rapidly developing urban areas means that digitization of information can be a valuable tool for freeing up space. ECM is ready for the developing world.

If I were a traditional software vendor, I wouldn't count on this for revenue though. These guys got to where they are by being cheap and bargaining ruthlessly. This is no place for a traditional enterprise software sales person. Also, the size and scope of the developing world means that traditional distribution channels won't work and relationship selling can take forever to develop. And it is not just software that is feeling this - so do hardware manufacturers, manufacturing equipment makers, even medical device manufacturers.

I think this is an area where open source will absolutely shine. Internet distribution and download is a much more effective way of getting software to people, but will probably develop new models of monetization. We're seeing a lot of activity in India as an example, but demand is going to come in the form of developer support rather than traditional licenses, particularly in various outsourcing houses. Microsoft too will benefit from the extensive reach of its indirect distribution channels, although the software pirates may benefit as much, if not more.

3. SharePoint in 2010.

You have to hand it to Microsoft; they seem to have scared the bejesus out of the traditional ECM vendors. They have all seemed to rolled over and played dead in the wake of SharePoint 2007. Either that or they have just buried their heads in the sand in complete denial. To claim that SharePoint is not really ECM is ignoring the messages that are coming from the podium of Microsoft conferences. Most seem to say - "Oh we support SharePoint, we offer archiving, records management, etc." Yeah, but who owns the data? SharePoint is not just a front end to your system. It is becoming the platform for knowledge worker applications.

This is probably a make or break year for the ECM industry. If you are an ECM vendor, beware the ever tighter integration with office, better web support, new records management, and claims to better scalability and administration. Still, it is not invulnerable. Microsoft has chosen not to address its fundamental architectural flaw of storing content in the database and it is still an exclusively Microsoft-centric platform. Forget whatever database, operating system, language, browser you have - you better get used to SQL-Server, .NET, Windows, IE and don't forget Silverlight. If the traditional vendors can't battle the crap out of that, then they deserve to lose. The next 12 months will be critical during the transition to SharePoint 2010.

4. The E in ECM.

The whole idea of Enterprise software in the 21st century seems anachronistic. The term Enterprise really only took hold in the 90s in order to describe systems that were able to scale beyond the department. It meant big, powerful, flexible, but it also meant big, clunky and expensive. As Web 2.0 sites with their cheap (read free), simple, but scalable platforms scaled to millions of users in a matter of months, the whole idea of only being able to support thousands of users and take years to implement became ludicrous. Being Enterprise meaning you can support your heavyweight infrastructure of other Enterprise parts also seems less interesting when you consider that the largest databases on the planet run on MySQL using a concept called Sharding.

Support the Enterprise concept if you want, but Brand Enterprise has lost a lot of its value. And while we are at it, so is Management. In a world of wikis, blogs, Facebook and Google, a strictly controlled environment is destined to be locked up in a closet with just a couple of people using it. It's not that control is not valuable, but you need to really consider what would really happen if information were freed up. Transparency and tracking are more valuable tools today than locks, keys and authorization slips. Leave those to the information that really, really needs it. However, the Content in ECM will be more important than ever as more and more of it gets created at an exponential rate. Best to guide it rather than restrain it.

So what replaces Enterprise Content Management? I don't know, but my guess is that we start to find out in 2010. it might even have a new name by December. Hint: I wouldn't jump to the conclusion it is Social Software. Also see Application vs. Platform below.

For the sake of readability of the rest of my predictions though, I am going to stick with ECM.

5. WCM and ECM.

What a funny relationship these two have. ECM was born in the early 90s out of document management. WCM was born in the late 90s because ECM couldn't get out of document management. The in 1999 and the early 2000's (Noughties here in the UK - what do you call them?), both ECM and WCM decided that they were in the same business and started buying up each others capabilities and then jury rigging the architectures together. The logic went that both sides were managing content, they had repositories and their way of handing content was better. From a pure dollar perspective, that one didn't play out as well for the WCM vendors. The largest players from that time, Vignette and Interwoven, are now subsumed by OpenText and Autonomy.

Still WCM didn't do too badly in 2009. The web site is the store front of the 21st century. And most apps are web apps and most web apps are web sites, at least as far as the user is concerned. Companies still invested in branding and applications for customers as a way to weather the recession. Because of the plethora of web sites, styles and characteristics, there seems to be a plethora of WCM vendors as well. It must be the most fragmented industry that I have ever seen in the enterprise software space. Due to these characteristics and the fractious nature of WCM, if you see a WCM vendor and an ECM vendor in the same account, often it means that somebody shouldn't be there.

However, I think WCM should play a very important role for and in ECM and hopefully this will become clearer in 2010. ECM as repositories of trusted information predominantly deliver their content via a web interface. If its up to the end user, it would be the web site that they are using. If web applications are presented as web sites, are content rich and want to dynamically deliver content to end users, then the marriage of WCM and ECM makes a lot of sense. This is why Alfresco is investing in its WCM to work well with the Spring Java Framework - to help build web applications that are web sites and provide dynamic content and repository services for content-rich applications.

I hope the mapping of the WCM industry becomes clearer as well for 2010. We believe our positioning of focusing on WCM for Java web applications, particularly Spring applications, means that we can work with other parts of the WCM industry, such as Drupal/Acquia, Joomla and others. In 2010, some other ECM vendors should just go ahead and get out of the WCM business and stick to the knitting. They should cooperate with, rather than compete with the WCM vendors. I think CMIS will make this a lot easier.

6. The Cloud and ECM.

As my colleague Ian Howells has pointed out, the buzz around Cloud is many times more intense in Silicon Valley as it is outside. And it is a level of buzz that feels like the Web in mid 1990s that was not felt outside the valley. Could we be seeing the start of a huge land rush that we did in 1995? There is a lot of commonality with the experimentation, trials and shear enthusiasm.

The economics of the Cloud seem almost no brainers. Two years ago, the cost of running systems in the cloud were 1/3 the cost of on premise. Now according to "Above the Clouds", a report from the University of California on Cloud Computing, the cost is about 1/5 to 1/7. I know it is a stretch to say that if this trend continues we can see computing at 10% and ultimately 1% the cost of on premise, but this is what I believe. The reason is that we are only just beginning to see the industrial scale of Cloud facilities come on line that have enormous buying power, very cheap energy, and nearly free cooling being in cold climates or near cold rivers. The ever increasing bandwidth available means that location of computing is less and less relevant. There are still lots of obstacle to be overcome, particularly in perception of security and reliability as well as real legal issues of data domicile. But the implications of 100X compute power for the same cost as in house is enormous and unknowable.

A lot of people have predicted that 2010 is the year of the cloud. I think that 2010 will be the start of ECM in the Cloud. Steve Ballmer at the SharePoint conference in October made a big point of talking about SharePoint in the Microsoft Cloud. We have been and will be doing a lot of work in using the elastic power of the Cloud with the Alfresco platform. I expect that you will see other ECM platforms working in this area. I would also expect to see lots of open source in the Cloud. This can't be good for

7. CMIS.

I guess I have been talking about this longer and louder than anyone else out there, so you wouldn't be surprised to see me say I think CMIS will have a significant impact in 2010. In the past two years, I have learned a lot about the standards process, particularly OASIS, and I have learned not to be so optimistic when lots of players are involved, no matter how motivated. But I can see the end is near to getting CMIS 1.0 to an official standard in the Spring 2010. It will not be long before the ECM vendors have their implementations out. But I have also seen portal vendors also building portlets as well to integrate with the ECM systems. I would really be surprised if these aren't out by the end of 2010 and already having an impact.

CMIS is both and an opportunity and a threat for traditional ECM vendors. It is a threat because it provides SharePoint in particular an opportunity to ease users out of those traditional platforms and into SharePoint. SharePoint being a value player at the low end will naturally try to gobble up ECM low end implementations. It is an opportunity for a number of different reasons. This is a chance for the larger vendors to consolidate the small holdings of the lesser or defunct competitors. It means that ISVs and system integrators will be able to reuse solutions from other vendors and apply them to other ECM vendors solutions.  More solutions will mean more money spent on ECM as it solves real business problems, thus making a bigger ECM pie. This in turn will create more solutions. All this played out with the standardization of the DBMS market and there is no reason to expect that it won't in the ECM market.

Whenever I talk to anyone about integrating with Alfresco, I suggest that they integrate using CMIS. CMIS is very rich and usually good enough to do what they need to do store, access and search content. When the integration is done, it works not just with Alfresco, but any CMIS-enabled repository. We have done this with Drupal, Joomla and Confluence in the last year. Expect lots of early integrations in 2010, particularly with portals. We see lots of Liferay used in conjunction with Alfresco and I would encourage portlets developed by customers to be done with CMIS as an example. Expect CMIS to be on tenders, RFIs and RFPs. Finally, you may see the first companies being formed around CMIS and content applications.

7+1. Content Platform vs. Content Application.

I once had a bizarre conversation with Gartner about what constituted "Visionary" in ECM. The answer is that you buy into their vision of CEVAs (Content Enabled Vertical Applications) and have lots of them. Hmmm - visionary means you buy into someone else's vision? But then I asked why SharePoint was considered visionary when they didn't invest in CEVAs. The answer was because of all the interest from their clients in SharePoint as a platform. Hmmm - so you are visionary buying into their vision unless you are Microsoft. Now I understand that CEVAs are gone and replaced or "rebranded" as Composite Content Applications. Does this align with being a provider of CEVAs or being a platform that allows others to create applications?

My belief is that we are seeing a natural swing that has pervaded content management from the very beginning. Is content management an application or a platform? Is it middleware or a fundamental subsystem? A lot of this has to do with how you create, capture and use content. Some of the process of content management is so generic that it makes sense to have an application to perform specific tasks. However, many so called out-of-the-box solutions are so heavily customized that it really is more a platform than an application. Delivery and consumption of content via the web can either be an applet, gadget, portlet, web part or an entirely new piece of HTML/JavaScript/Java/.NET piece of coding.

Content management was never like an ERP or CRM system - plop it in, conform your business processes to that system and configure the rest. Content management was in many ways something closer to a database. Sure it has a rich domain model, but ultimately customers want to use it for all sorts of different applications. They want to write queries, build relationships, define business processes and create rich and elaborate user interfaces, particularly for the web and web sites. The better way to look at it is, that some "CEVAs" may be considered applets that are part of a larger application or business process. ECM systems should make those applets work independently as portlets where they can be provided in context. Capture and consumption can really come from anywhere, so provide the APIs that can provide the content access and manipulation required in the language and development environment of the application that needs the content. The reality is that applications need content as much as they need data in a database, so let's give them the same sort of tools that they have with databases. If portions of the application can be packaged as applets, that is part of the job done, but not all of it.

Three trends will get us to think about ECM as platform more than application in 2010. First, CMIS as a platform-style API will get us to think of ECM and repositories as a platform. CMIS will highlight the areas where we need to build and extend applications by initially system integrators creating solutions with CMIS that will be portable to other ECM systems. Second, the desire to build mash-up applications as a result of experience with Web 2.0 will encourage developers to be pragmatic about pulling in the right tools, including ECM into mashed up or Composite applications. The ECM system is not necessarily to going to be the locus of the Composite application, the web site may. From this perspective the ECM system will be perceived as a platform in support of the web site or web application. Finally, the 5 parts service to 1 part product cost ratio (plus or minus) that has been around since the early days of ECM can not endure in our cost conscious times. If we stop pretending it is a whole app and provide the tools that developers need to pull together the whole app in a fraction of the time, particularly with Web 2.0-style scripting over hard core coding, everyone will benefit.

This is not a massive swing of the pendulum, but it is heading in the clear direction of platform. This is where we are thinking. This is also where Microsoft is thinking based upon comments from Steve Ballmer at the SharePoint 2009 conference.

8. Open Source makes strange bedfellows.

We go into 2010 as what a lot of open source experts have described us as the largest private open source company and cash generative to boot. Not bad going as we celebrate our 5th anniversary in January. In those 5 years, we have learned a lot about the politics, business and religion of open source and it has been absolutely fascinating and fun.  We have had to think about licensing, pricing, subscriptions, alliances, packaging, downloads, new marketing models, confrontations and who are friends and enemies are. Throw a recession in there as well and it makes for interesting times.

As time has passed and we think about how we can apply the open source model, we have focused more on our core competence - Content Services and Content Repository. The more CMIS has become real, the more we can cooperate with others with out locking either party in. Thus we can move away from competition with many players and become best of breed in content services. This has allowed us to more work with a Drupal or a Liferay when in the past there may have been overlap in our product sets. CMIS opens up even more opportunities to work with others as well. Working with others creates a stronger and multiplicative network effect.

Because open source stands parallel to other stacks and encourages others to integrate, particularly through contributions. This opens up alliances that may not require integration work because it has been done by others. We didn't have to build the integration to Kofax or SAP and you will see more integrations in early 2010. Portals - open source or closed - have always worked hand in hand with content management, while not necessarily encroaching on each other's space - SharePoint excepted. These types of integrations in turn allow us to work with other vendors that may need to bolster part of their product set and not feel threatened. Expect to see more integrations and alliances between open source vendors and closed source vendors in 2010.

This is not new for open source. MySQL and JBoss have worked with many non-open source vendors and bolstered their capabilities. In 2010, this will take on a new significance though. The Cloud is requiring many vendors to bolster their product sets for new models of demand and elasticity. The growth and threat of SharePoint and Microsoft product sets can make some products seem incomplete. As we see in the next section, Social software and content management can be very complementary. The ease with which it is now possible to pull together an entire stack of software means that a lot of that stack may be open source and present some really interesting offerings in 2010.

8+1. Social Software and ECM.

Should you buy social software from your ECM vendor asked CMS Watch. Conclusion was maybe not. I personally think that social software will be a category in itself with vendors whose core competency will be social software. Just like any web site could have been Facebook, they weren't because they didn't concentrate on that. A lot of social networking centers on content-centric networking - discussing, arguing and collaborating on content. However, it doesn't necessarily mean that the social platform will own that content. Look at all the YouTube video that show up in social networking sites.

I do think that ECM vendors should concentrate on Content Collaboration - the act of working together to create and manage content, but that in and of itself is not Social Computing. It's about sharing ideas and content in the context of a common problem and it should be presented as such. This collaboration could benefit from more focused social computing platforms, such as instant messaging, on-line conferencing, activity feeds a la Facebook, walls, wikis, blogs and forums. By concentrating on providing content services for those platforms, we are creating a win-win situation. More than that, we are focusing on what we are good at - Content Services. These Social Computing or Networking platform usually have only the most rudimentary content services, which make for very complementary products.

SharePoint has a lot to do with why this question would even come up. For lack of anything else to use in the enterprise, people are trying to build these types of solutions. However, what was once labeled as collaboration in SharePoint is now Social Computing, but the reality of it is that it is generally still content collaboration. At least that is what most customers use it for. This may or may not become a stretch too far for SharePoint, but it is one that we are not going to try. I didn't always feel like this and felt that we had a big opportunity in Social Computing. But as we progress the company, we have more to offer integrating with others and sticking to our core. We can get more from others that do the same.

CMIS one year on - soon in public review

Autumn marks the new school year, business year and CMIS year

It's that time again. Autumn and the new school year and we are about to take another major step with CMIS, the Content Management Interoperability Services proposed standard at OASIS, and we will be that much closer to having CMIS become an official standard. As of today, a majority of the technical committee has voted to put the CMIS specification to public review with zero no votes.

I was recently reminded that I wrote about the public introduction of CMIS around the same time last year. This was the time that IBM, Microsoft and EMC decided it was time to announce the Content Management Interoperability Services that they started October 2006 and release it to OASIS to become an official standard. At that time Alfresco was fortunate enough to have been involved in the process for the previous year before joining the original three, along with Open Text, BEA and SAP. For the year before that, IBM, Microsoft and EMC broke away from AIIM iECM committee to speed up a process that itself had been going since Autumn 2005. Much of the groundwork was laid with iECM and the parallel, but Java-focused JSR-283 committee. All in all, this will not be a fly-by-night standard, but a standard that has been carefully deliberated, considered and grounded in real world use cases.

This last year has seen the number of vendors participating increase substantially with plenty of beneficial results. We have had a few face to face meetings that have triggered some great collaboration in a very competitive industry. The number of eyes looking at the spec has increased, but so have the minds contributing new ideas and expertise. SAP presented real world requirements that needed security in the form of ACLs, so something that we had been willing to punt on before, we added in. Microsoft, IBM, SAP and other owners of search engines participated in a working group to define APIs to get changes to a repository to keep search indexing up to date. Also, Day and Nuxeo set up an Apache project to share Java API and SPI components along with Gabriele Columbro from Alfresco and our friends at SourceSense. David Caruana, Alfresco's chief architect, contributed interfaces to handle renditions and specifically thumbnail previews.

More importantly, committee members were building real life implementations of the specification at each stage to really test its implementability and completeness. As Ethan Gur-esh from Microsoft once said, "I relish the fact that CMIS is retrospective." It can work with existing repositories, not be overly prescriptive, but still describe a powerful content application platform. Regular plug-fests ensured that the systems interoperated with each other. This alone distinguishes it from all other content management standardization initiatives - real life integration matching the current state of the specification. Dave Caruana's Java test harness, now in Chemistry, provided a tool for other vendors to test the completeness of their server implementations.

Developers started creating new applications based upon the early specs, such as CMIS Spaces and CMIS Explorer, which tested its usability as a platform interface for content-centric applications. CMIS's initial focus on real-life use cases has so far paid off as the level of functionality seems to match new applications being built and existing applications integrate content management capability, such as Drupal, Joomla and Confluence have with Alfresco through CMIS. I certainly encouraged anyone who wanted to integrate with Alfresco to do so using CMIS.

Today, unless some catastrophic event occurs, CMIS will go into public review. This is the last step in OASIS before becoming an official standard. As the process is laid out, it could take a maximum of 6 months for completion of the step and CMIS becoming a standard. It also means that only typos and minor corrections will change in the spec, currently at version 0.7. The determination of the spec leads, David Choy from EMC as Chairman and Al Brown from IBM and Ethan Gur-esh from Microsoft as Editors, has ensured that we got to this point and they have done an excellent job marshalling the process along. Everyone on the committee seems determined to see this to as speedy a completion as possible. It seems likely that CMIS will become a standard in the first quarter of 2010. I can't see anything getting in the way of this other than the US government disapproving or Google, whichever is more powerful. All the rest of the major players backing the standard. (Craig Randall, formerly of EMC Documentum, just popped up at the last call representing Adobe.)

Being the eternal optimist, I have very high hopes for CMIS, but I believe I have reason to be optimistic. I have seen it before first hand with SQL. Without vendor lock-in, it will now be possible to build content-rich applications that can run against many different systems. Customers will be able to move content from repository to another. It will be much easier to find stuff in random repositories without having to build multiple connectors. As the breadth of applications and utilities becomes available against these repositories, usage and deployment of content repositories will become more widespread and grow a much bigger pie for all vendors. As Alan Pelz-Sharpe reports in CMS Watch, CMIS is already gaining traction in 15% of AIIM members before it has reached standard status.

I'm really looking forward to this new year!

CMIS Face to Face at Microsoft in Redmond

Dave Caruana and I just finished participating the in the first Face to Face of the OASIS CMIS Technical Committee here in Redmond, WA. Companies participating in person were IBM, Oracle, EMC, Alfresco, Exalead, OpenText, SAP, Day, Nuxeo, Dennis Hamilton (representing himself), and of course, Microsoft. Gary Gershon, Julian Reshke from Greenbytes and Betsy Fanning from AIIM participated by phone. (Sorry if I missed anyone.) Virtually everyone in the Enterprise Content Management market. The tone of the meeting was very cooperative and collaborative. David Choy from EMC is the chair of the committee and did a good job of staying neutral on the issues. Al Brown from IBM/FileNet is the secretary for the bindings and Ethan Gur-esh from Microsoft is the secretary for the data model. All three did an excellent job keeping things on track and discussing all the open issues. Most of us have all worked together before in both the JCR meetings and iECM meetings and that made collaboration a lot easier. Dennis and I even go back to ODMA and DMA - over 15 years ago.

(BTW, I micro-blogged what was going on Twitter. CMIS Tweets are below. You can follow me on http://twitter.com/johnnewton)

The CMIS effort so far has been use case driven with the main use cases being collaborative content management, integration into portals, mashups and search. There are a number of use cases that explicitly out of scope, such as records management and web content management. Some use cases lie in between where the main application may not be addressed, but we want to allow developers to create applications that may access the information that may be created by other out-of-scope applications. An example that we discussed a lot was records management. We don't want CMIS to be so complex that you can build a records management system, but you may want to access records information for the purposes of eDiscovery.

These use cases that are in-scope seem to be clear and compelling enough that we all agreed that we urgently want to get CMIS to market to get people building these applications. Although this was one of the last thing that we discussed, it is the most impressive outcome of the meeting. There was so much agreement and consensus in the meeting that we all felt it is important to meet the deadline of having CMIS complete before the end of the year. David Choy did a great job outlining the OASIS process and what must be done. The bureaucracy (and I mean that in the nicest possible way) of the OASIS process is such that the minimum time that it takes to get from public review to standard is 6 months. So we all agreed a timeline that would get this done. This means that the spec will be ready for public review by the end of Spring. That's a mean feat, but all agreed doable with few obstacles in the way. It also means that the 0.5 spec going into the OASIS process was pretty solid.

That doesn't mean that there wasn't plenty to discuss. It was a three day event after all and we used it all up. The most controversial issues were around security and what is truly RESTful. The Security proposal was presented by SAP who have a real need to secure documents consistently with the SAP system. This was an excellent use case and provided a real-world example from which to work and focused on Access Control Lists. Most of us have been involved in round and round discussions on security and I'm not quite sure how we got to a general consensus. We are not quite done, but we all seem to have a great deal of agreement. A subcommittee will work on this some more. I had proposed a more abstract Policy interface prior to OASIS submission based upon work that we have done in iECM and JSR-283. After discussing this with David Pitfield of Oracle, I think we need to think about that one some more. (Sorry James McGovern, but XACML was shot down in flames. For the reasons why, please see this IBM article on implementing ACLs with XACML and look how horrible ACLs look. http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-xacml/)

David Nuescheler, who is the chair of the JSR-283 committee and CTO of Day Software, presented a couple of discussions in collaboration with Julian Reschke. Julian is also on the WebDAV committee and brings a unique perspective. David presented some of the thoughts that originated with Roy Fielding, also from Day, on whether the REST binding is really RESTful. Although there are arguments to not call the Atom Pub protocol REST bindings, we all felt it was important to communicate our intentions toward REST. In the end, we will call the protocol support RESTful Atom Pub bindings or something like that. David suggested perhaps exploring protocols other than Atom Pub, such as WebDAV. Apparently, these were ruled out quite a while ago and there are already WebDAV standards bodies. Decision is to continue with Atom Pub. Julian, who also seems to know HTTP extremely well, logged many issues around how CMIS uses / abuses HTTP and most of his recommendations are being incorporated into the spec.

David also raised the issue of reference implementations. In the end, we all agreed that we are all making progress on our own implementations and that a reference implementation wasn't necessary. There was interest and probably continues to be interest in an open Test Compliance Kit (TCK), but we all agreed that a clearer spec should be the primary point of reference rather than a TCK. It may be up to us, the open source vendors, to come up with a TCK. We have already created both a Java and .NET test harness to test CMIS access. Even Microsoft said that if you need a free CMIS test platform, you can get Alfresco. :-)

As the spec has developed, we have all been prototyping our implementations. The early implementors (Alfresco, EMC, IBM, Microsoft, OpenText, Oracle and SAP - in alphabetical order :-)) participated in an interoperability session or "plug-fest" at a Redmond interop lab in August prior to making the spec public. And it worked! It is a real testament to the fact that this is becoming a real standard. In other words, it works. This is part of the reason that there is not as much demand for a reference implementation. It is also part of the reason that it continues to develop and have such momentum. By working with each other to test each others implementations, we are discovering what needs to be tweaked in our software and what needs to be fixed in the spec. Another interop session is planned sometime around AIIM as well as a demo that the AIIM conference is organizing and sponsoring.

In addition, we were able to demonstrate our integrations with CMIS. IBM showed Quickr accessing CMIS. Day showed a prototype that they are working on that sits on Jackrabbit. Dave showed some new components that we are working on with Share and the Joomla and Drupal integrations with Alfresco using CMIS. Microsoft and EMC had shown their integrations in previous interop sessions.

There were a few other issues that we discussed. OpenText presented hierarchical properties. I presented a proposal on how to deal with Aspects or Mixins. A little more than half the systems represented, some like Oracle and IBM had more than one, support some notion similar to Aspects - think of them as data type plug-ins. The vendors that have broad search requirements had a great deal of interest in Universal Search (really a new use case) and want to see access to change logs to simplify indexing new or changed documents in ECM systems. However, I think we all agree that we don't want any of these to hold up a 1.0 of the specification and getting CMIS out to market.

CMIS has momentum. It will be a real specification. We all seem to agree on what we want and what our customers need. Companies are implementing it. IBM, EMC and Alfresco have released 0.5 implementations. Microsoft can't talk about what they are doing, but they will. (They would probably have to kill me if I knew exactly what they are doing. ;-)) It could be more and it can probably be better, but CMIS that is out there and implemented will be better than the perfect spec coming out much later.

Microsoft were gracious hosts and provided with good facilities and food. (Just replace the projector bulb. :-)) Thanks very much Ethan!

If you are interested, CMIS Tweets follow:

• Discussing CMIS use cases: Collab Content Mgmt, Portals, Mashups, Search
• Open use case issues: Observation, tagging, data dict., better REST bindings - less verbose
• Can't use MSN Messenger inside of Microsoft on their guest network. Bizarre.
• Going thru introductions, including favorite color. (Hmm.) Should note that SAP and OpenText are also here.
• Interesting discussion on reference implementation. Decision that Tech Committee will not implement ref impl.
• TC agrees that we need well documented test cases. Lots of interest in a Test Compat Kit.
• Show and tell coming up. Day and Lotus.
• Tomorrow will be REST design (with input from Roy Fielding via David Nuescheler), schema design and various issues.
• Now discussing REST issues. David Nuescheler is bringing up the issues first raised by Roy Fielding who first described REST.
• Discussed REST at length. Staying with Atom Pub, but will look at browser-based Javascript libraries.
• Gary Gershon is reviewing the SOAP bindings for CMIS.
• David Nuescheler: "There is no such thing as a REST binding. REST is an architecture."
• It is very difficult to concentrate on the minutiae of SOAP web services. (zzzzzz)
• Ethan (MSFT) now discussing unified search.
• Long discussion on universal search and relationship to observation. Universal search indexing looks like a MUST. Obs is SHOULD.
• Dave Caruana is demonstrating Alfresco SURF and CMIS.
• Dave Caruana just demonstrated Joomla and Drupal integrated with Alfresco thru CMIS.
• Just got caught out. I'm supposed to talk about data dictionaries and I don't remember what the issue was. :( Jet Lag!
• Long discussion on ACLs proposed by SAP. No appetite for XACML. Sorry James McGovern. Keeping it very simple.
• I was very surprised at Microsoft's interest in content crawling and Universal Search. Lumped into Observation discussion y'day.
• Just finished presenting how to do Mixins / Aspects in CMIS. Some want to model as related objects. How would you do it?
• Just finished OpenText proposal on "Hierarchical Properties"
• Question on the table - What do we need to do to finish the proposal?
• After lunch, group photo! Courtesy of Dennis Hamilton.
• Now batching.
• Discussing timeline for CMIS and flowcharted process. We are remarkably close! But min 6 months.
• Let me clarify. Get to public review in under 6 months.
• Closing out most open issues on spec from the Technical Committee.
• Would love to see Adobe here.
• Successful CMIS face to face complete! :-)

What Jeff Teper Said at AIIM

It has been two weeks since AIIM and I promised to write up something on the keynote presentation by Jeff Teper, Corporate Vice President for Microsoft Sharepoint. However, I have spent a good chunk of time thinking about the presentation so that I could give a more thoughtful commentary. Since Microsoft is out to disrupt the ECM market, all ECM vendors should care what Jeff and others at Microsoft think.

The title of the presentation was From BI to Blogs and Workflow to Wikis - Enabling Governance and Empowerment. I have the presentation from the AIIM website. I suppose if you want a copy you can email Jeff to get it. If you post a comment or send me an email, I will see what I can do. The title indicates that there is a natural tension between traditional enterprise systems such as business intelligence and ECM and the new generation of content tools such as Blogs and Wikis. This is an interesting observation and the two sets of technologies are rarely juxtaposed against each other. Without ever mentioning “Web 2.0”, Jeff was capturing some of the elements of Web 2.0 and their implications on the enterprise.

In my blog on AIIM, I had originally chastised Jeff for taking a very partisan approach to a keynote address. Looking at the slides, at least in the beginning his presentation had a very neutral perspective to the issues facing corporations. Looking at my notes that I took that captured both what he was saying as well as what was on the screen provided a much different outlook. This presentation was clearly about Sharepoint and where Microsoft was aiming Sharepoint. Although it was a sales pitch for Sharepoint, I nonetheless found it interesting and an important introduction to some of the missing concepts in Enterprise Content Management. Russ Stalters said that he found nothing new in this presentation, but I found new insights into Microsoft’s positioning of Sharepoint. Russ probably gets invited to more Sharepoint events than I ever would. However, I found new messages that I had not seen in other Sharepoint literature that is publicly available.

Governance vs. Empowerment

The major premise of the presentation is that enterprises need to balance governance, a control of information, with empowerment, the free flow of ideas and collaboration between employees, teams,  departments, other enterprises and customers. Identifying the regimes of control in execution-driven organizations as being able meet new regulatory and risk control, he contrasts this with innovation-driven organizations (“like Microsoft” as Jeff mentioned) that empower their employees by allowing them to make their own decisions and provide the technology to do so. Islands of information were also preventing cooperation and collaboration. By providing a “Best of Both” approach, enterprises can meet the financial and legal risk associated with information out of control with the need to innovate to meet the new challenges of internet-based competition, closer partnerships in design, and attracting and retaining talent from a new, web-enabled generation of employees. Microsoft served as a good example of what corporations are up against and he used Microsoft as case studies for many of these examples.

He stated that a new set of technology enablers has made it possible to meet the needs of providing a best-of-both solution. Hardware and software are increasing in functionality with 64-bit computing coming on line and multi-core processors in ordinary desktops. Web-based innovation and changes in user experience have brought new forms of collaboration, searching and shopping (although Microsoft hasn’t exactly been one of the leaders in this area.). Interoperability through web services and XML makes it possible to connect disparate systems together.

It is at this point he provides the new playing field in which to position Sharepoint. Two dimensions outline this playing field with Governance on the Y axis and Empowerment on the X axis. High on Governance, but low on Empowerment are the enterprise software technologies of data warehouses, ECM and portals. High on Empowerment, but low on Governance are the desktop applications of spreadsheets, group and personal databases, and intranets. If only someone would provide the best of both these capabilities, that would be the next generation productivity platform. By balancing both, a platform can provide governance through policy controls, rights management, auditing and controlled architecture along with the empowerment of self-service, better UI, role delegation and pervasive collaboration.

This next generation productivity platform, of course in Microsoft’s opinion, would be Sharepoint and “other products that you can find on the show floor.” I buy the distinction between governance and empowerment, but I believe it is more of a single continuum between governance and empowerment in a single dimension. Why this is important is that the reason we have governance and empowerment has a lot to do with what type of content, what application, context and who in the enterprise is being addressed and not simply at technology trade-off. There are times where governance is essential and times where empowerment can only be handled through laissez faire policies, but the overlap is not as big as he suggests. What is more common is that there are clear interfaces between these activities that prevent contamination of the other.

Microsoft’s Sharepoint Strategy?

Once a best of both is achieved, then a strategy of creating a connected organization, building a holistic information management experience, and investing in a strong vendor ecosystem will yield a “Strategy for Success”. Jeff used the example of a consumer products company that went with a best of breed strategy and met issues of interoperability and challenges to make their information infrastructure work. He emphasized the importance of holistic solutions that link everything together. What he implied was that all the important systems were Microsoft systems.

I didn’t quite get this transition and its connection to the best of both other than Microsoft says so. However, this looks like a reasonable strategy for customer, but more importantly for Microsoft. It is probably Microsoft’s strategy for success in competing against two major forces and laying them against this playing field. On the Governance side are the traditional enterprise vendors, in particular the ECM vendors. On the other end is open source who originated the empowerment tools of the wiki and blogs. Microsoft can add 1 plus 1 and yield 3 by combining these capabilities and leverage their strengths of enterprise pervasiveness, a broader platform, and a strong ecosystem to beat the competition.

The Connected Organization plays to Microsoft’s strengths of going where Windows is and to connect islands of information. Because of Sharepoint’s price point relative to the major ECM vendors, it has gone piecemeal into many organizations and with Sharepoint 2007, there is a strong emphasis on search and portals as the means to aggregate and federate the organization. Jeff presented a chart that linked different lines of business and connected them to the people in those organizations, which is a major theme of Sharepoint 2007.

It was at this point that I expected to hear what I hoped I would get out of this presentation - a definition of what is Sharepoint 2007. One of my most Googled blogs is What the Heck is Sharepoint 2007, which goes to show that a lot of other people are wondering the same thing. We even see eWeek’s Mary Jo Foley frustrated in finding a definition for Sharepoint and potentially sees it as the next operating system.

What is Sharepoint 2007?

What came up was a slide titled “Holistic Information Management”. To the left was the familiar wheel of six technologies: Collaboration, Portal, Search, Content Management, Business Process, and Business Intelligence. However, this time the circle included the words “Experience Management Platform” in the center. So is Sharepoint Holistic Information Management or is it an Experience Management Platform? Neither of these terms is in common usage in IT shops nor would I say that IT managers are seeking either. This must be frustrating for Microsoft that they have not been able to articulate what Sharepoint is nor can they associate it with a specific market that the industry can rally around. It’s not quite as simple as addressing the operating system, database or CRM markets as they have in the past.

It’s worth pausing for a moment to reflect on both terms Holistic Information Management and Experience Management Platform. When Jeff spoke about the platform being holistic, he mentioned issues around interoperability and security. By thinking holistically and integrating with other systems, the experience can be seamless for the end user. Perhaps I was too busy trying to take in what was being said in this slide, but I don’t recall anything being said about Experience Management. A quick search of all of Microsoft.com doesn’t produce any results either against search.microsoft.com or Google against link:microsoft.com. Maybe I am reading too much into this, but at the core this could one of two things. It could be management of the user experience where new UIs are presented in the six different technologies. Nah! It could be managing experience as a synonym for knowledge. My assumption has been that Sharepoint is a knowledge worker platform for creating applications incorporating all the technologies that would normally get folded into a portal to support knowledge workers.

Why this is important is it gives us a clue on what Microsoft thinks Sharepoint is, how comprehensive it is, and where it will get targeted. Equally important, it says what Sharepoint is not - you wouldn’t build an ERP system on top of it. (Would you?) This picture of six technologies expands the notion of content applications beyond the vision of the ECM vendors. It is also a platform that provides insights and access to other systems that can affect content. In other words, it is holistic from the users’ perspective in serving up information to knowledge workers. Ironically, nothing is said about the new empowerment technologies here. Sticking to the same picture that is probably about a year old, with new position of wikis and blogs, the thrust of the first half the presentation is lost. However, I would expect to see more of this type of positioning in the near future.

After positioning the technology, Jeff handed over to Arpan Shah, Group Product Manager, for a demo. Probably because this is AIIM, the demo was very document management focused. However, the demo started with Wikis and Blogs to show the empowerment of end users to add content. In my mind Wikis are associated more with simplified link management rather than formatting, but it was the latter that Arpan emphasized. Blogs were straight forward enough and show what that might mean in an enterprise environment. The rest focused on more document oriented activities like the construction of corporate PowerPoint presentations from Sharepoint, linkage from Office, the creation of a team website, and the set up of basic workflows. Arpan showed Outlook as the off line tools for accessing and syncing documents to and from Sharepoint. The core differentiation from the other ECM vendors that Arpan demonstrated was Office integration and the new media types of wikis and blogs.

Microsoft Ecosystem vs. ECM

Jeff then resumed by displaying the Microsoft ecosystem and customer base. There were a couple of advertisements of customer stories at Starbucks and Miami Dade County Schools as well as the logos of every major company in the world. This should obviously make any ECM vendor concerned. It is for that reason that Microsoft showed that it is working with vendors like EMC, OpenText, Vignette and Interwoven, probably to encourage others to hop on the Sharepoint bandwagon. This is otherwise known as embrace and extend.

Jeff very prominently displayed a collaboration between EMC and Sharepoint from October 2006. An agreement to cooperate that allows Documentum to fit within the Sharepoint hooks of Office and Sharepoint portal to access Documentum more easily. He then presented a collaboration with OpenText where OpenText is building solutions on top of Sharepoint combining Sharepoint empowerment with OpenText expertise in regulated documents. Jeff then made a slip of the tongue about how vendors such as Documentum and OpenText can build solutions on Sharepoint. I’m sure that EMC sees the opportunity for Sharepoint to build applications on top of Documentum.

Microsoft’s strategy seems to be still in formulation, but their objectives are not. Jeff Raikes has said that Sharepoint is one of the fastest growing products Microsoft has ever had and expects Sharepoint to do about $1B in revenue in 2008. Much of that revenue comes not from the portal or BI market but from a zero sum game against the ECM market where revenues are richest. They are changing the game by expanding out a platform that encompasses all the technologies that are useful in building solutions for knowledge worker solutions in enterprises. As my colleague Ian Howells pointed out that Microsoft has five main approaches to marketing: a drag race, platform play, stealth play, best-of-both play and a high-low play. In general, Sharepoint seems to be a platform play, but with a best-of-both twist with the both being ECM vendors on one end and open source collaboration tools on the other.

There are many things that I have to admire about Microsoft’s ambition. It is large and grand. Like many other Microsoft products, they have got a lot of things right in version 3 of Sharepoint. However, there are many things of which I don’t think as highly. Sharepoint got here because closed APIs in Microsoft Office allowed them exclusive access to repository functions from Office into Sharepoint. With Office owning 90% of the Office Suite market after shutting out Lotus and WordPerfect with its Windows monopoly, they are now using the Office monopoly to extend control into the repository market. They used the power of the Windows distribution channels to get free Sharepoint Services in more places than it would naturally. Although they imitate a lot of features of ECM vendors, they are unable to articulate what exactly they have created or innovated despite making public their plans for quite some time. Their choice to focus on an entirely Microsoft stack maybe in their interests, but not for those who have invested in Java, LAMP, Unix or other stacks.

We are tracking Microsoft because they are smart people and what they say and do matters in Enterprise Content Management. However, they are asking you to make an investment in a Holistic Information Architecture that covers a wide variety of functionality, including ECM. Yet they have had a difficult time articulating exactly what this platform is and where it might be applied. They don’t even use the term Enterprise Content Management, yet here they were presenting in the largest conference devoted to that topic referring to other ECM vendors building on their repository. Just as they are coming to market with Sharepoint 2007, new Web 2.0 techniques are becoming hot and they need to be seen addressing these. There vision is simultaneously comprehensive and vague in its target. Given that their product lifecycles are measure in many years, it is important know where they are going and they have just not made that clear in this presentation.

When Collaboration is an Emergency

Tsunami, Earthquake, Hurricane, Flood - everyone’s nightmare disaster can also create the biggest challenges in collaboration and employing information technology. The same Communications of the ACM that had the 7 Habits article had a whole series of articles on Emergency Management Systems.  Surprisingly, the techniques that are required to cope with the flood of information in case of disaster don’t seem all that different from those required by business today. The Indonesian Tsunami and Hurricane Katrina taught the whole planet about the need to invest in preparedness and reaction capabilities regardless of how poor or how rich we are.

One article I found particularly interesting was The Human and Computer as a Team in Emergency Management Information Systems. In fact, nothing in this article seemed to be limited what is required in a disaster, but what is necessary for coping with daily business pressure and information overload. The primary process of coping with a disaster is Build the Picture, Understand the Picture, and Change the Picture in a Goal-Oriented Fashion. Sounds like good business strategy to me.

The article talks about the people who are involved in the command, control, and analysis for emergencies that are built on trust of others who also are working in 14-24 hour shifts knowing that mistakes can cost lives and immediate action is essential. As if describing the persona in a use case, these workers:

• Feel they are exercising control
• Have total focus on the problem at hand and ignore all that is not relevant
• Improvise with unconventional solutions to appraise information and formulate decisions
• Enjoy the challenge and curiosity of the effort
• Are highly motivated due to the critical nature of the problem

This sounds like a typical Silicon Valley start-up or anyone else in a highly competitive field where people enjoy what they are doing. The design of the emergency response system then creates challenges that are not a typical of other collaborative systems in a highly reactive environment:

• Obtain accurate and timely perceptions of reality through communication structures that track and facilitate open exchange of information
• Enhance focus without interruption and require minimum effort to carry out a task
• Encourage creativity and improvisation of both the individual and the team

In disaster management systems under development, the emergency manager has the following tools at hand:

• Information prioritization - rules to prioritize situational information defined by context
• Decision support and modeling tools - impact analysis and support for decision execution
• Representation of a common operating picture - visualization of what is happening and where resources are open to everyone

Wouldn’t it be great to have a system like this in any business? It requires a good understanding though of the participation of the people and computers. What is each good at and what is each bad at? People are good at:

• Perceiving patterns
• Improvising flexible procedures
• Exercising judgment
• Inductive reasoning
• Detecting small changes by sight and sound
• Storing large amounts of information for long periods of time and recalling facts at the right time

Machines are good at:

• Responding quickly to control signals
• Applying great force smoothly and precisely (like landing a 747)
• Repetitive, routine tasks such as monitoring
• Handling highly complex operations and multi-tasking
• Deductive reasoning and computation
• Storing information briefly

In other articles, there were extending these systems to use community participation using open source and mashup to collect information not just from officials but the public at large. Those that were prepared for the Tsunami were often ready because they were alerted by mobile phones. The internet can also play an important role in collecting intelligence. After all, the internet was originally designed to withstand thermo-nuclear war and breakdowns in individual communication links. Here are some examples of mashups for accessing and collecting information:

Automation and collaboration have a role in emergency management. Just as triage methods were invented in time of war and moved on to ordinary civil use, emergency systems can probably help teach us what is important in collaboration and process automation. The primary lesson that the Human and Computer as a Team article conveys is that we ignore the human role at our peril and that the computer supports people and helps build trust between people by increasing trust in the information that they are sharing.

Take AIIM on Security

I am off to the AIIM (Association for Information and Image Management) Conference in Boston right now. This is perhaps the largest Enterprise Content Management conference there is. I will be speaking tomorrow on Web 2.0 and ECM with Wilson D’Souza of MIT. Looking through the agenda of the conference, I was looking for sessions on security.

James McGovern has constantly asked me and other ECM vendors to solve security issues for ECM using the standards that have already been developed for web services, such as XACML. Looking at the agenda at AIIM, it doesn’t look like the vendors are taking it quite as seriously as James. James is an enterprise architect and his role is to look at stuff like this.

Trying to address security in some of the standards groups such as AIIM’s iECM initiative and JSR-283, the successor to JSR-170, has been politically tricky. It is difficult to figure out what a common view of security is given all of the different models of security such as Access Control List, Role-based Security and Policy-based Security used in Records Management, let alone all the different vendors’ implementations of each. However, looking at this problem going forward, without addressing and standardizing security, we are creating huge barriers to interoperability and not meeting the requirements of new models of interaction on the internet.

In looking at how new Web 2.0 companies are starting to mash-up and integrate different services, it is hard to see how we can extend these capabilities into  more secure and sensitive services such as eCommerce or bringing these services into the enterprise without a common notion of identity, role, entitlements or membership. As vendors, we either address these issues or, like so many time before, they will be addressed for us by others on the internet and we will be forced to catch up.

I have been doing some background thinking on this and here are some important points that I think ECM vendors need to consider:

• Common identity. There needs to be a common way of addressing identity between different services whether those services are in the enterprise or outside. As we start to bring customers and partners into the process of serving themselves or helping us design new products and services, we can’t just rely on internal directory services. OpenID is the only standard that I am aware of that provides a neutral way of identifying users and is not dependent on any single vendor.
• Common Models for Rights Management. The big, looming problem in content is the fact that huge numbers of users are adding, accessing or updating an even larger number of pieces of content. This calls for a model that controls content through definition of context such as time, location, metadata or role. XACML could very well fit this model. However, users need to understand this model as they set up the controls on the content.
• Distributed Directory Services. Identity is not sufficient for determining roles or entitlements. There needs to be a more open way of integrating multiple directories without revealing sensitive information. This is the same problem we are trying to solve for content and directories need the same mechanism to define access.
• Mashup Frameworks for Security. Mashups, the integration of different systems at the browser level, represent the fastest-growing and easiest mechanism to weld systems together. Almost all mashups have no notion of security and only work on public systems. In addition, they introduce security holes that require code running on other systems since JavaScript security features in browsers prevent parts in a web page from executing between two domains. Google has introduced a mechanism for Gdata and other mashable components to execute code. This type of mechanism needs to be standardized and a model of trusted sources needs to be integrated.
• Search and Security.  As search becomes increasingly federated, such as through the OpenSearch API, managing identity and entitlements on content becomes very problematic. The search sources should filter out any content to which the user doesn’t have access. However, that requires some cooperation with the software that is doing the aggregating and the content sources. ECM systems will probably control the most sensitive information, but this will need to be aggregated with public sources as well to create effective search applications for the enterprise.

Help the process by asking your vendor how they expect to address these types of security concerns. If you are at AIIM, bring the issue in relevant sessions. I don’t have all the answers nor does any vendor. People in the middle of this problem like James can help by bringing up their use cases. If we start asking the questions, then perhaps we can collaboratively answer the questions and solve this problem. If you think standardizing this is hard, try imagining building next generation systems without standardizing these security needs.

Add Salesforce.com to the Enterprise Content Management List

Today, Salesforce.com announced that they will be getting into the ECM business by acquiring Koral, one of our neighbors here in Maidenhead. Some of the guys there are our friends and we wish them luck in this new turn in the ECM market. They scored a real coup showing up at Demo last year and it obviously got the attention of Salesforce. The system has not been around long, but they have added some interesting Web 2.0 twists. It is focused on document management and was born out of the efforts of BuildOnLine, a specialist online content management provider for the construction industry that has recently merged to create CTSpace.

This is a significant shift for both Salesforce.com and for the ECM market. As we all know, although most of the Fortune 1000 have ECM, penetration into those accounts can generally figured in single digit percentages and practically non-existent in smaller organizations. Increasingly, ECM will be delivered either as a software or physical appliance or as software as a service in a utility like form. Smaller enterprises or organizations that have generic content management requirements will find this service useful. This will allow Salesforce to leverage its brand and start with the sales organizations. It also give Salesforce a means to expand its business beyond the sales and marketing organization. It also further validates the Software as a Service model for simple utility functions.

Although everyone is looking for simplicity, not everyone will be looking for a utility-like approach to ECM. It is up to the ECM vendors to simplify the installation and set up process to make it as easy as flipping a switch, but keeping the content inside. Organizations that are not comfortable putting their documents outside the firewall, such as financial services and government organizations are more likely to look for an internal system. Also, as the BuildOnLine guys found out, once you move to the area of specialist content applications, the sale gets much harder and configuring systems becomes even worse.  Records management, engineering applications and specialist publishing applications fall into this category. It will be entirely up to each organization which makes sense for them.

Software as a Service is a model that Salesforce.com didn't invent, but has become its biggest proponent and greatest success story. This acquisition will raise the profile of SaaS as a model for ECM. Salesforce will not be alone in delivering content management services as others are developing their solutions with systems like Documentum and Alfresco. Likewise, Microsoft is taking Sharepoint on-line with the Office Live offering. Other companies are now looking at providing an SaaS model for web content management and collaborative content management as well. No doubt we will be seeing feature by feature comparisons between these various solutions soon. Depending on the breadth of functionality, integration with internal systems and scope outside of sales and marketing content, we will see how Salesforce does.