Collaboration and Content Strategies Blog

Things IT Can Do to Get Through the Downturn

Blogger: Guy Creese

Yesterday the U.S. Congress failed to pass the "bailout" bill and the Dow plunged 778 points. Given those events, it's fair to say that IT managers everywhere are going to be asked today, "OK, what can you do to help us [Company X] get through this downturn?" Although every company's response will be different, CCS (and Burton Group at large) started posing that question at the beginning of this year. We saw the economic storms brewing and figured now was the time to revise our coverage to look at "save money/get more productive" strategies. Everybody always wants to save money; the question is whether those strategies are viable or just knee jerk reactions that make things worse.

Reports that came out of that viewpoint are:

• Google Apps in the Enterprise: A Promotion-Enhancing or Career-Limiting Move for Enterprise Architects? -- An updated version of the 2007 report on Google Apps Premier Edition. The Conclusion notes, "Google has caught the attention of enterprises with its inexpensive Google Apps Premier Edition (GAPE) product: available at $50 per user per year. However, the seductive price can spell trouble for enterprise architects and their companies if they don’t do their homework: the solution’s rudimentary feature set means that large enterprises need to pick carefully and implement slowly."
• Open Source Communication, Collaboration, and Content Management: Cutting Edge Innovation, Low-Cost Imitation, or Both? -- The first paragraph of the report's conclusion: "Open source communication, collaboration, and content management (3C) solutions are beginning to offer the combination of cutting-edge capabilities and lower operating costs. While immature in some ways (e.g., providing minimal training and documentation), they are enterprise grade in other ways, such as being highly scalable."
• SaaS Implementation Survey: Where, When, and How to Use SaaS -- A survey done in conjunction with Ziff Davis Enterprise that looks at enterprise experiences with SaaS. The high-level takeaway is, "Burton Group found that a majority of organizations have had a positive experience with SaaS, with many experiencing significant financial benefits. But organizations will have a better SaaS experience if they control the risk that is in IT’s purview, mitigate the risk in the vendor’s hands, and validate the remaining risks that the business must accept."
• Software as a Service Enterprise E-mail: Get Ready to Go Beyond the Grind -- The report notes, "SaaS e-mail is an opportunity for IT organizations to get away from the e-mail operations grind and focus their attention and money on higher-level applications that offer competitive advantage."

And we aren't stopping there. This quarter I'm writing a report on alternatives to Microsoft Office (e.g., Corel WordPerfect Suite, Google Apps, IBM Lotus Symphony, OpenOffice.org, Sun StarOffice, ThinkFree, and Zoho). Microsoft competitors such as Google, IBM, and Sun have saved millions of dollars in license fees by diminishing their use of Microsoft Office; the question is whether it makes sense for large enterprises who don't have a Microsoft axe to grind to make the move as well.

Finally, if you're interested in a relevant document that looks beyond the CCS horizon, I suggest you take a look at Gearhead's Guide to a Down Economy.

More on the Top 5 Trends for NextGen Authoring

Blogger: Craig Roth

I had a request in my posting on the top 5 NextGen authoring trends for some more explanation of these trends.  I mostly wanted to set up the context for these trends - where they come from and how they relate to traditional forms of authoring.  But I'm happy to elaborate with an elevator pitch on each of them to show where I'm coming from in my research.  So, if you don't mind riding up the elevator 5 times with me, here goes:

Collaborative authoring

Content is increasingly being created in a collaborative fashion, with multiple commenters and sometimes multiple authors for a given document.  Perhaps a fallacy was that there ever were authors working alone. Document creation has always been social and what is happening now is that increased collaborative capabilities and web 2.0 heightened awareness of social work are feeding back to the way in which documents are authored. 

Content reuse

Few business documents start with a blank page and even fewer finish without having copped at least a few pieces from prior documents.  But despite the prevalence of content reuse, organizations have mostly muddled through using copy/paste or by saving existing, similar documents under a new name and hollowing them out.  As with programming, creating reusable content takes discipline in componentization, tagging, and storage that can be difficult to instill in authors.  However, more comprehensive content reuse approaches are becoming feasible for the average author, decreasing the time needed to create documents while increasing consistency between them.

Living documents

Business documents have always been subject to an iterative, open process.  "Living documents" that are continually under construction and go through more iterations are increasingly common and intentional.  Document production is a moving target in many cases, with quick changes required before and after initial publication.  Rather than publishing a "final" document, authors are using wiki-like tools to create content that can be improved incrementally while still maintaining a single version of truth for the reader. 

Freshness preference

Content publication involves an implicit balance between speed/freshness and readability/accuracy.  We are moving from an era when transaction costs for correcting or updating content were high to one in which content can be quickly fixed and readers can be quickly notified (if they need notification at all).  This has shifted the balance towards freshness, and encouraged the use of technologies such as blogs and XML syndication.

Dangerous findability

Other NextGen trends point to an explosion of content in its many forms; this is the one trend that's holding it back.  Quickly published and discarded thoughts, early iterations of documents, rogue wiki and blog postings, and inadequately protected sensitive content have long (perhaps infinite) lives and lay in wait to later embarrass or legally implicate the authors and all those around them.  This causes some organizations and authors to avoid NextGen content creation.  Fear is greatest around the rapidly produced, informal sorts of content that evade traditional records management processes of classification and control.

Note: This is a cross-posting from the KnowledgeForward blog.

The growing impact of free webmail on enterprise e-mail

Blogger: Larry Cannell

A recent report from the Pew Internet and American Life Project entitled "Use of Cloud Computing Applications and Services" found, not surprisingly, that the most popular cloud computing service is webmail. What I found the most interesting is:

1. How popular webmail is compared to other cloud services. There’s a significant gap between webmail and the second most popular service (online photo storage).
2. The differing levels of use across age groups. The survey reported that 77% of respondents age 18-29 use webmail services but only 44% of those age 50-64.fs

These findings indicate an accelerating swing in attitudes toward e-mail that enterprises are surely starting to see.

It’s interesting to note that many (perhaps most) people in the youngest age group (18-29) never experienced an e-mail environment other than webmail. To them e-mail = webmail. It’s simple: I sign up, I send e-mail.

If only providing enterprise e-mail was that simple. Keeping e-mail flowing is tough work, more work than is apparent to most users. Directories have to be up to date, shared calendars and meeting scheduling aren’t trivial, plus there’s dealing with spam, and so forth.

This is a clear no-win situation for IT. E-mail is expected to be easy but the reality is quite different. This is the basis for our Burton Group report “Software as a Service Enterprise E-Mail: Get Ready to Go Beyond the Grind.”

Given this huge disparity between expectations and reality, it’s no wonder that some big names are jumping into the enterprise e-mail market with SaaS offerings. These include: Cisco, Google, IBM, Microsoft, and Yahoo!.

Although some may only see SaaS as a convenience, the approach can also remove barriers that previously held competitors back in a software-in-a-box world. For one, implementation risk shifts from IT to service provider. For example, an enterprise that is adverse to implementing PostPath (as an alternative to Exchange Server) might be willing to have Cisco take that risk and provide a Exchange-compatible service (presumably for less cost). And delivering it as SaaS means its inexpensive to try.

Lastly, this new e-mail market will be very competitive because enterprises budget a lot of money to provide e-mail and most of it is not being spent on software. That is the revenue up for grabs here and it is MUCH more than just software licenses and maintenance.

Bill Pray is right when he says the "E-Mail Market is Getting Interesting Again."

Cisco Announces Definitive Agreement to Acquire Jabber

This is a bold move by Cisco (given it's commitment to SIP) to expand industry thinking around presence as well as expanding its thinking around real-time applications given the type of development capabilities made possible with XMPP. 

So suddenly, I see both Avaya and Cisco as the new thought-leaders when it comes to presence.

Microsoft and IBM are locked into yesterday's view of presence and where it needs to go.

Question: What will Avaya do since they OEM'd their XMPP capability based on Jabber's platform.

The solution will show up first in the WebEx world (e.g., Media Tone Network, WebEx Connect) and then follow with an on-premises implementation.

Federation will emerge as well between the cloud/SaaS world and on-premises implementations.

Given XMPP's use within the government and financial sectors, this move will also help Cisco expand its customer relationships with those organizations.

SAN JOSE, CA -- 09/19/08 -- Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) today announced its intent to acquire privately held Jabber, Inc., a provider of presence and messaging software. Based in Denver, Jabber will work with Cisco to enhance the existing presence and messaging functions of Cisco's Collaboration portfolio.

The acquisition will enable Cisco to embed presence and messaging services "in the network" and provide rich aggregation capabilities to users through both on-premise and on-demand solutions, across multiple platforms including Cisco WebEx® Connect and Cisco Unified Communications.

"Enterprise organizations want an extensible presence and messaging platform that can integrate with business process applications and easily adapt to their changing needs," said Doug Dennerline, Cisco senior vice president, Collaboration Software Group. "With the acquisition of Jabber, we will be able to extend the reach of our current instant messaging service and expand the capabilities of our collaboration platform. Our intention is to be the interoperability benchmark in the collaboration space."

Jabber provides a carrier-grade, best-in-class presence and messaging platform. Jabber's technology leverages open standards to provide a highly scalable architecture that supports the aggregation of presence information across different devices, users and applications. The technology also enables collaboration across many different presence systems such as Microsoft Office Communications Server, IBM Sametime, AOL AIM, Google and Yahoo!. Jabber's platform leads the market in system robustness, scalability, extensibility and global distribution.

The Jabber acquisition exemplifies Cisco's "build, buy and partner" innovation strategy to move quickly into new markets and capture key market transitions. In addition to internal software innovations, Cisco actively employs investments in, and acquisitions of, other companies to support its software strategy; recent purchases include industry leaders WebEx, IronPort, Securent and PostPath.

Cisco Announces Definitive Agreement to Acquire Jabber

Top 5 Trends for NextGen Authoring

Blogger: Craig Roth

I’ve been researching trends in next-generation (NextGen) content authoring since the spring and I just ran across a fun blast from the past. It’s a review of the very first version of Microsoft Word for Windows in Software Magazine. The article quotes Bill Gates saying that Microsoft Word is "the word processor designed for the 1990s".  Now, here we are within sight of the 2010s and the 13th version of Microsoft Office, and the question that comes to my mind is this: are we still using the word processor of the 1990s? Or more accurately, are we still caught in the paradigm of the tools of the 1990s (word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, email), even though needs for collaboration, reuse, living documents, and quicker authoring cycles have evolved?

Well, from the title of this post you can guess I think there is something more: NextGen authoring.  The core authoring suite has certainly evolved and will continue to play a major part in the lives of information workers.  But I have identified several trends that point out how much further these tools have to go and how valuable some categories outside the core suite can be. The trends are:

• Collaborative authoring
• Content reuse
• Living documents
• Freshness preference
• Dangerous findability

To a large extent, organizations haven't tackled these needs head-on because they are not a pain point. Indeed, they have become a numb point. Authors have become used to clumsy workarounds such as e-mailing files around for comment, creating a new request for proposal by copying an old one then hollowing it out, or click-and-dragging sections of slides from one presentation into a starter template to generate a new presentation (thereby leaving multiple fragmented versions of slides scattered and out of sync across enterprise file stores). They are so used to this by now they don't generally think of tools to make this better.

But some information workers have decided not to sit waiting for the organization to give them new tools. They've applied new methods of collaborating, finding, and reusing content with existing productivity suites, collaborative workspaces, and web conferencing. They've also begun using tools that have evolved along with NextGen authoring needs such as wikis, blogs, XML authoring, mind mapping, concept mapping, and note management. These tools have proven that authors don't mind authoring collaboratively, in small chunks, and doing a little bit of metatagging if it gets them something in return.  And once authors are primed for granular reuse, the standard productivity suite can evolve into something much more useful than Bill Gates could have conceived when praising that first Windows word processor in 1990.

Five Reasons the Enterprise Messaging / E-Mail Market is Getting Interesting Again

Blogger:  Bill Pray

    

1.       Choice – For years Microsoft and IBM have dominated this market with Exchange and Notes, with Novell and Oracle holding onto a small share of loyal customers. With Google, Yahoo! (Zimbra) and Cisco (recently announced the PostPath acquisition) all pushing into the market, enterprises have some options to consider. Novell and Oracle both have major releases scheduled before end of the year also. Choice and competition are good for a mature market because they will foster lower prices and innovation.

 

2.       SaaS – The primary reason Google, Yahoo! and Cisco are interesting is that they are Software as a Service offerings for e-mail. Both Microsoft and IBM have similar offerings in the works. The SaaS model gives enterprise a new delivery model to consider. Larry Cannel covers this in depth in a recently published report that Burton Group customers can access here.  In addition, Burton Group customers can read the results and analysis by Craig Roth of recent Burton Group / Ziff Davis survey on SaaS here.   Also, Jack Santos goes in depth on IT strategy, SaaS, and Google in the document found here.

 

3.       Social Software – The social software evolution is taking e-mail back to its roots as an asynchronous communication method and providing interesting new ways for e-mail to fulfill this role in larger collaboration systems or platforms.

         

4.       Mashups – The interface for e-mail is becoming interesting again with mashups.  Check out any of these six solutions to see what I mean:  Zenbe, Orgoo, Fuser, TopicR, Goowy, and Jubii.  These have been labeled by some as e-mail aggregators, but many of the features delivered demonstrate that there is much more than e-mail aggregation going on here.  Perhaps one of the most interesting mashups that is still in the “playing with the idea” stage is Adobe’s Genesis project.

 

5.       Legal Decisions – As I have previously blogged, the courts continue to delve into defining e-mail’s legal status through decisions that present challenges to users and enterprises alike. Compliance and e-discovery are becoming “block and tackle” e-mail issues that need to be addressed by enterprises, with the courts continuing to add complexity through new legal decisions. 

Note:  This is a cross-posting from the Le Collaborateur blog.

More Thoughts On Social Presence

Blogger: Mike Gotta

There were two notable comments to my earlier post (and cross-post) on the concept of social presence and the role (or non-role) of UC vendors.

Blair brings up a direct concern (security) and an indirect concern (surveillance). Both are credible issues. Any social presence platform would clearly need to include a policy management component that would integrate with security and identity management systems within an enterprise to support authentication, authorization and related demands (e.g. logging, audit, archival, and records management). An enterprise would require the capability to impose certain policies on a social presence platform to satisfy governance, risk, compliance or other demands. Additionally, any such system would have to have a permission model with access controls that enable people to manage their own “presence”. But I don’t see this as any more of a roadblock than what we expect from other tools – not just those related to UC but also those related to social software in general (e.g., e-mail, calendar, blog and wiki platforms). So while a valid comment, it applies equally to existing tools almost universally. In fact, I point out the need for such functionality in a recent most on microblogging within the enterprise. To be clear – yes – any social presence platform will need to be secure, integrate with existing infrastructure, and support some type of federation model for interoperability with the external world.

The inferred point regarding surveillance is more interesting and properly points out the social dynamics involved as we share “lifestreams” of information about ourselves as we go about our activities. In a blog entry posted in April of this year (Participatory Surveillance: Co-mingling Intimacy & Exposure), there are pro and con arguments that are equally valid concerning how people interact in a mediated public space. Some people will feel very comfortable while others will become rather nervous as they are “followed” by people they may not know – even if they are other employees. Such a concern reinforces the need for controls that allow users to limit their visibility, to filter what they share or to even block someone from tracking them. But – other people and groups may find such capabilities quite valuable in terms of improving shared situational awareness and enabling people to self-synchronize with the conversations or activities of others. There’s no right or wrong – just the need for a social presence platform to include controls that each person can customize how much or how little they wish to expose.

The last point regarding “business presence” vs. “social presence” I believe is more of a contrived debate. The term “social” is often inappropriately equated to “play” or to “waste of time”. Organizations will tell me “we’re pursuing corporate social networking” or “we prefer to user the term ‘professional networking’ rather than social networking”. I don’t mind if people want to label something differently but to a great extent “it is what it is – no matter what we call it”.

What is “business presence”? Are we going to limit presence only to the meta-data status of someone (on the phone, in a meeting, etc)? Is business presence going to be limited to some set of formal states?

What are "corporate/professional networks"? Relationships are hugely influenced by underlying social constructs. Our desire to understand the social aspects of how work gets done and how people leverage informal connections has been a long-sough goal of those involved in knowledge management, organizational development, learning and other initiatives related to community-building.

We should drop the notion that there are not social aspects to business. Artificial labels are necessary at times (i.e., business presence, corporate or professional networking). However we should acknowledge that work is a social environment and we need to catalyze those social dynamics to support business strategies that help drive growth and innovation.

Comment from earlier cross-post

Mike:

I totally agree with you and I agree that social networking and UC and presence are all tied in together (I love your term social presence). I do have a concern about mixing social presence with business presence. Do I want my calendar information and status information available to someone who follows me because they want to hear what I have to say about UC, for example? And security can be an issue as well - people can know when I'm out of the country on a family vacation, meaning there's no one home guarding the house, except my cute little dog which they can see pictures of on my social networking sites. So I agree with the concept, but feel that it will require lots of rules, permissions, security settings, etc. that we have to think about.

Blair Pleasant
President and Principal Analyst, COMMfusion LLC Co-Founder, UCStrategies.com

Dave felt that I was perhaps too hard on UC vendors. I disagree. Clearly federation is a challenge - especially intranet federation. And yes, we can move the food around on the plate and do a better job with the current presence model. But the bigger problem is "that vision thing". Once large vendors get to a point where they have a product in the market for some time (IBM), or are building a product that targets a given market that they have long sought to enter (Microsoft), there is reluctance to push the reset button and take a fresh approach if that approach impacts the existing product. UC-presence will continue down its current trajectory (remember, I'm not saying that UC-presence is not valuable - just that it is limited and can only be advanced so far).

Other vendors (Cisco, Jabber) also seem entrenched in this narrow view of "presence". If a vendor wanted to disrupt the status-quo, I would imagine that delivering a social presence platform might be an interesting way to open up new dialogs with business and IT decision makers and get some media attention as well. It will be interesting to see if a project associated with SAP (called "ESME", which stands for "Enterprise Social Messaging Experiment") gains traction in this regard. 

What UC vendors should find the strength to admit (and Avaya is the first one to arrive at this point) is: (1) presence is much broader than how UC has defined it, (2) presence needs to be an independent capability with open interfaces to a variety of different applications, (3) SIMPLE has become an inappropriate standard for the next generation of presence, and (4) social networking trends are foreshadowing where presence needs to go.

I expect IBM and Microsoft are going to protect their current investments, will try to position "rich presence" as defined within the UC world as actually being "social" and come up with tactical ways to bridge it to social networking trends. Right now, neither is offering a "vision" of presence beyond the products they wish to sell. I expect Microsoft to continue to limit integration and interoperability of its proprietary "rich presence" services with other vendors. IBM will play better with others - but it's still about Sametime and not a step towards social presence as I see it evolving.

I would hope that UC vendors are getting ideas from folks like Attensa, NewsGator,  RSSBus or Gnip; leveraging work being done at Project Rome or Apache Abdera - and learning how to exploit microformats as well. These are some of the core elements I feel are necessary to deliver a social presence platform that works with existing UC platforms but is not tied down by the presence baggage of those systems.

Comment from earlier post

Excellent points!

Perhaps you were a tad too hard on UC vendors for doin' a what comes natural in using UC-centric presence models. Application-specific presence isn't the cardinal sin - lack of (presence and other) federation is the real problem.

Presence information is valuable and adding custom presence states that are appropriate for specific applications can add great value to a solution.

For example, for UC applications, it might be useful to have presence states that differentiate between speaking on the phone handset versus the speaker. This distinction is useful because more care must be taken speaking on a call that is being broadcast over a speaker. But if this custom presence state doesn't follow open standards and can't be published to other systems, its utility becomes vanishingly small.

It is gauche to design closed-system communications offerings (and social networking services, collaboration applications, etc.) which can only work for people within the walled garden system.

Once enough of the market understands how useful presence is, systems with non-standard, unfederated presence models will have to get with the program, or be left behind.

Dave

Disclosure: I'm employed by Jabber, Inc., a company that has so much belief in the Power of Presence(R) that the phrase is our company tagline and a registered trademark.

Dave Uhlir
Jabber, Inc.

Three Scenarios That Would Force a Market Rethink

Blogger: Guy Creese

We're in a pretty wild time here in the collaboration, communication, and content market. For example, content management has gotten a new lease on life thanks to Microsoft SharePoint, Google Apps has everyone rethinking how to deliver productivity suites, and Cisco has decided it wants to do hosted e-mail. With that in mind, here are some possible scenarios that will further disrupt this market. (Note: these are all possible; whether they will occur I have no idea. However, part of an analyst's job is to play "what if" games as a way to think through market dynamics.)

Microsoft offers Word, Excel, and PowerPoint over the web: I had a reporter e-mail me this rumor yesterday. It's not that farfetched; Microsoft certainly knows that its software-based Office suite is under attack by SaaS players such as Google, ThinkFree, and Zoho. The gotcha with most of the current SaaS-based challengers is that they can't match the feature richness of Office. The challengers, of course, pass that off as a plus--"You don't need all that stuff, it just complicates your world"--but try and tell that to a financial analyst who depends on all sorts of arcane features within Excel.

Given that reality, if Microsoft goes this route I would not be surprised if it builds the web-based version in Silverlight. Something similar to this has been done before--last year, Virtual Ubiquity was showing a gorgeous word processor built in Flash that put all Ajax-based word processors to shame. Adobe bought Virtual Ubiquity towards the end of last year, and that move wouldn't have been lost on Microsoft. If Microsoft does build a Silverlight version of Office, it will have a credible answer to Google Apps (assuming that Microsoft matches or beats Google's $50 per user per year pricing, which is a big if, given Microsoft's penchant to squeeze its customers for money) and basically wreck any dreams of Adobe to move into the productivity apps space.

Cisco buys Yahoo!, sells the ad business to Microsoft: Cisco's recent purchase of PostPath is a signal that Cisco is going after the Exchange hosting business. Cisco already offered a SaaS-based e-mail system, since it bought WebEx and inherited WebEx Web Office. However, Cisco wanted more than that--it wanted a SaaS-based e-mail system that would work with an Outlook client. Hence its purchase of PostPath.

SaaS solutions require a major hosting infrastructure. One quick way to grow that would be for Cisco to buy Yahoo!. Then Cisco could turn around and sell the ad part of the business to Microsoft. Microsoft gets the ad business it wants, Google has to worry about Microsoft more, and Cisco's collaboration strategy gets a shot in the arm.  

Google buys Salesforce.com: Frustrated at its slow penetration of the enterprise market, Google finally says, "Enough!" and buys Salesforce.com as a way to gain expertise in developing for and selling into the enterprise market. With that, Google hosts even more corporate information on its servers (sending privacy advocates into a tizzy), improves the probability that Google Apps will eventually be adopted by enterprises, and increases its threat to Microsoft.

As I said before, I'm not sure any of these scenarios will come true, but they do highlight that, at this point, anything could happen.

Call For Opinions: Office Productivity Suites and Next Generation Authoring Needs

Blogger: Craig Roth

Guy Creese and I are working on research about desktop authoring for enterprise information workers and would like to hear from anyone who wants to discuss what their organization is doing about current and future authoring needs.

I've attached the blurbs about our upcoming papers below, but I'll sum it up as saying that Guy's document is about whether alternatives to Office (like Google Apps or IBM Symphony) are now feasible.  Mine is about whether the core office suite as we know it (spreadsheet + word processor + presentation) is really sufficient at all for the emerging needs of content authors who work collaboratively, want to reuse content in more granular components, value freshness over accuracy, and want to develop "living" documents that continue to evolve over time.

Have you been struggling with these issues?  Are you re-evaluating the content creation tools you're providing to information workers in your organization?  Do you have a story to tell about a proof-of-concept or successful/unsuccessful attempt to use an alternate productivity suite or provide tools that support next-gen authoring (like mind mapping, wikis, or note management)?  If so, please send me an email at craig dot roth at burtongroup dot com.

Content Authoring in the Enterprise 2.0 Age
Analyst: Craig Roth
Content authoring technology, such as Microsoft Word and PowerPoint, was originally just a tool that enabled the authoring process. However, with functional enhancements in the basic productivity suite, increased interest in brainstorming and mind-mapping tools, and the emergence of Web 2.0 authoring tools, it is now apparent that technology is changing how we write and what we write, even though information workers may not always be conscious of its effect. In this overview Craig Roth, Service Director for Collaboration and Content Strategies, will describe how new content authoring, collaboration, aggregating, publishing, and searching technologies are impacting the writing process, and the challenges on the horizon for content authoring in the Enterprise 2.0 age.
Productivity Suite Proliferation: Alternatives to Microsoft Office
Analyst: Guy Creese
Microsoft Office has long dominated the productivity suite market. While it still "owns" the market, enterprises looking for a product for creating documents, spreadsheets, and presentations now have many alternatives to pick from. This overview from Research Director Guy Creese will look at software (e.g., WordPerfect, OpenOffice.org, and Lotus Symphony) and SaaS alternatives (e.g., Google Apps, Think Free, and Zoho) and discuss whether now is the time to heave out Microsoft Office and put something else in its place.

The Commoditization of Content Management?

Blogger: Larry Cannell

This morning content management vendors EMC, IBM, and Microsoft (with support from Alfresco, OpenText, Oracle, and SAP) announced they are jointly proposing a standard to enable interoperability among content management systems.  Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) is intended to provide standard methods for accessing content stored in repositories like Documentum, FileNet, or SharePoint. Details of the standard are just coming out. CMIS specifies a Common Domain Model as well as standard bindings for SOAP and REST-based services.

The most significant aspect of today's announcement is the size and breadth of the vendors voicing their support of the standard. Alfresco's John Newton blogged his enthusiastic support for CMIS while also announcing the availability of the last release of Alfresco Labs which provides a working demonstration of CMIS via their web scripts capability.

Many uses cases for CMIS come to mind. Here are just two I can think of:

• Content aggregation and mashup. For example, imagine pulling content from multiple repositories and mashing it together in innovative ways, perhaps a visualization based on common metadata or an analytical summary.
• Content publishing. For example, it may be possible to use a desktop word processor to publish content to any number of repositories without having to load a separate connector for each. Think of this as a new and improved WebDAV.

At first blush this new standard appears to compete with Java Content Repository (JCR, JSR-170/283) which also provides a standard content management API. But, JCR is (obviously) a Java standard and is not likely to receive support from Microsoft, a major backer of CMIS. In addition, CMIS comes with specifications for SOAP and REST bindings, something presently missing from JCR (although Apache Sling is emerging as a compelling REST-based interface for JCR). However, JCR does have a number of successful product implementations. Time will tell if CMIS supporters can claim the same level of success.

The challenge with assessing these type of announcements is the likelihood we will not see results for quite some time. The only available implementations of CMIS are proofs-of-concepts developed by the vendors for demonstration purposes (even Alfresco Labs is a beta release). The announcement implies that "provider" implementations (code that provides or serves content via CMIS) will be delivered by the vendor (EMC, IBM, Microsoft, and others). But, this code also could be provided by anyone (similar to what Day has done with JCR). In any case, there also has to be compelling consumer applications that accesses content via CMIS. So, it's kind of a chicken and egg scenario at this point.

For now, I suggest the following:

• Don't assume CMIS will become the de-facto standard until, well, it becomes the de-facto standard. The standard isn't ratified and there are no production implementations at this time. This is an important announcement but, although the array of vendors voicing support for this standard is impressive, actions will speak louder than PR.
• Stay focused on your requirements. Depending on your situation, other alternatives may suffice (even strengthen) and still others may emerge over time. JCR is very much alive and kicking (and Sling looks intriguing). In addition, methods used by an earlier release of Alfresco Labs, which demonstrated support of the MS-DWSS SharePoint protocol, might also be an alternative to explore. We may yet see other vendors and open source projects learn from Alfresco and support MS-DWSS or other SharePoint protocols which, by the way, has many content providers (SharePoint, soon Alfresco) and consumers (Microsoft Office 2007/2003) already in production deployment.