Web 2.0 is a crummy name -- patronising, cloying and irritating. It presupposes that there is a clear generation gap between the first set of web technologies and the second set, as if the latter had been distributed like manna from heaven. It attracts get-rich-quick jerks, gimmicky marketeers, serial startup merchants, venture capitalists, conference organisers, insta-pundits. Even, ahem, bloggers.

Whatever you might find to dislike about Web 2.0 though (and that capital ‘W’ as if it equated to God, the Queen or some such, is one of them) it is a very interesting concept indeed. Catch-all term that it is, it has become a useful shorthand for software that relies on the wisdom of crowds, peer review, user-generated content, hyper-interactivity, friendlier user interfaces. It has even transcended the web to become a familiar aspect of client-server software too. It’s like classical music: we might not all have the vocabulary to describe it, but we know it when it’s there and we know what we like.

Web 2.0 has changed the way we use the consumer web and even performed the miraculous job of reinvigorating somnolent software categories such as human resources systems. But its ultimate business home is in enterprise content management systems.

The dirty, dark secret of many ECMs is that they are woefully under-used and, when used, badly. Non-existent or generic tags, systems that wither on the vine, training sessions that failed to get users moving, new silos that replace the old silos... these are common problems and an indictment of the usability, or lack thereof, of many an ECM.

Web 2.0 (that cringe-worthy name again) gets around the problem with technology-light tricks that encourage the user to participate, vote and swap ideas, or at least not lose valuable documents. Little wonder that companies like Vignette, Documentum, Open Text and Alfresco are all sprinkling the fairy dust on their most recent programs.

It’s probably still a little early to know whether Web 2.0 (last time, I swear) is the elixir that fulfils ECM’s huge promise, but it is a phenomenon that fundamentally changes the usability and, to dig out an ancient term, user-friendliness of software. Some elements will pass by the wayside but supporters can already show that it is rewiritng the face of what were unwieldy, ugly programs. Now, if only we could think of a new name...

Open Text’s announcement this week that it will work with Microsoft to create services that sit on top of the latter’s SharePoint Server is a classic example of the realpolitik that currently characterises enterprise content management (ECM).

SharePoint has created a seismic shift in the category to the extent that ECM heavyweights realise that it makes more sense to make nice with the software giant than to try and stare it down. Open Text is not alone in realising this, and firms like Documentum, Interwoven, Vignette and others have done much the same. Fair enough, but the catch here is that Microsoft has a long history of turning the tables on its erstwhile partners.

The SharePoint strategy is straight out of the Microsoft playbook.

Step One: start out with a product that integrates with other Microsoft programs, and looks and feels just like them, even if it is a little rough around the edges.

Step Two: Create licensing that provides the illusion that the program is free or very low-cost.

Step Three: Get channel partners to work with the product in order to create traction.

Step Four: Adopt the marketing message that “this is [insert product cartegory name here] for the rest of us”.

Step Five: When traction has been gained, build up capabilities over subsequent versions to challenge, and usually beat, specialists.

Microsoft has pulled off this trick in server operating systems, systems management and many other areas. The likes of Open Text can argue for a while that SharePoint won’t scale, isn’t appropriate for certain verticals, doesn’t have top-end sophistication and so on. But when Microsoft enters a market it wants it all and software history is strewn with the names of companies that learned that the hard way.

I must admit that I was among those who thought that Yahoo would cave in, and sell out, to Microsoft. Having predicted a deal for some time, it’s human nature that I would want this pair to go ahead and combine. Now it looks like Yahoo will rebuff the world’s largest software company – at least for now, anyway.

Another prediction that I have been making for some months (OK, years) is that Open Text would sell out, with SAP quite likely to be the buyer. It hasn’t happened yet and, as another strong Open Text financial quarter goes by, you could argue that it’s becoming less likely to happen.

Let me say that even an eventual vindication of my forecasting powers is not enough for me to wish Open Text to join the rush to consolidate, and admit that there are good reasons for it to stay neutral. Some buyers will prefer a Switzerland of ECM that will not automatically try to push its own database, applications or other stack components.

Another reason is focus: Open Text has broadened its reach with deals of its own (Ixos, Hummingbird et al) but it is the one large-ish company that can still fit under the capacious umbrella branded ECM.

And, as long as Open Text stays away from the negotiating table, it can still market itself as a best-of-breed player in a sector dominated by one-stop-shops. A David surrounded by Goliaths, for the romantically minded.

That said, I still don’t buy the argument, well argued though it is in the is Big Men On Content blog, that Open Text is not attractive to a buyer because that would mean extensive duplication of assets. Modern business software deal-making, as evinced by Oracle’s capture of PeopleSoft, is largely about being able to monetise customer base rather than worrying about having too much code that was written to do the same stuff.

So I hope for the sake of competition in the ECM sector that Open Text stays solo, but I still think it more likely that a sale will come.

Briefly, as is its wont, fame beckoned for your blogger last week when he did a tour of duty at the BBC to talk about the likely effect of Microsoft’s bid to buy Yahoo.

There’s no need to go into deep details about that putative transaction here, although, if you’d like to see what I think, you could look here, here, here, here and here. No, what struck me most forcibly was the extent to which search had beaten its old enemy, the portal. At the Beeb, headlines suggested that Microsoft was buying a leading “search engine”. I must admit raising a quizzical eyebrow as it’s a long time since I heard the term used to describe a company.

And yet…

In the mid-1990s I edited a web site that shared office space with Yahoo UK. A manager there berated me for referring to Yahoo as a search engine. No, it was a gateway to the web -- a portal, no less, he insisted.

But the company that differentiated on search quality, Google, has been the winner so far on the internet. Having a string of great properties like Mail, Flickr, Delicious and Finance has helped prop up Yahoo in hits; Microsoft has had the tie-in to a massive brand and OS; but Google’s search has been the most powerful means of making hard cash.

There is a lesson here for all those web sites that don’t deliver the search results you wanted, and even for enterprise search and content management camps. At least for many ways to search and control data, unless you have an excellent core search capability, the other guy probably has a better product.

If you can’t beat ‘em, join 'em, goes the old dictum, and SAP could be joining forces with Alfresco to provide it with a missing component in its enterprise software stack.

SAP’s recent decision to help pump $9m into Alfresco coffers was an indicator that the ECM open-source startup company is highly thought of in Walldorf. Of course, the investment was made by investment arm SAP Ventures and does not commit the firms to working together but you don’t wave to be Gipsy Rose Lee to read a little into these tea leaves.

Some close to SAP say that the German giant was looking for an ECM strategic purchase in the days when Shai Agassi had power. Open Text was the company most often linked back then and a deal would have made a ton of sense as the pair had worked together before on many projects. It would also have had the effect of potentially weakening Oracle, before the database giant went out and bought Stellent and BEA to give itself a full house of ECM products.

Alfresco might well be the hottest property among new ECM companies. The company has plenty of managerial experience and engineering talent from old-world ECM but has none of the legacy code and is free to explore potential of the latest tools. Its approach of building systems by layers of web services, rather than through software breeze blocks, might well fit with SAP’s NetWeaver strategy.

I spoke to Alfresco chief marketing officer Ian Howells after the investment was announced and he was keen to reiterate that Alfresco’s plan is to IPO rather than sell out. The big vision is to build a “world-class” software company and there are rich pickings to be had among smaller companies and those happy to serve themselves rather than follow the ancient enterprise path of consulting-led engagements and long negotiating cycles.

Good for him and Alfresco, but that shouldn’t preclude the company from working closely with SAP so that when enterprise applications owners come to look at content management again, there is a good fit between this pair.

I don’t know if the earth moved for you last Thursday but it was a pretty crazy day as merger and acquisition activity once again wrecked the old-look competitive landscape.

Sun’s deal to buy open-source database outfit MySQL probably eclipsed the much larger agreement for Oracle to buy BEA Systems in terms of media attention. It wasn’t a good day for anybody else to get a moment in the media spotlight so lots of us missed another significant purchase, that of Captovation by, that man again, Oracle.

All these deals have some significance for ECM. MySQL is the database of choice in LAMP stack deployments and a regular partner for open-source content management systems. BEA is best known for other middleware-related technologies but it also has strong portal capabilities.  Captovation adds another, relatively small element to Oracle’s ECM equation through document capture and imaging.

Confused by Oracle’s if-it-moves-buy-it strategy? You will be if it’s your job to explain to bosses what’s going on at the company. Oracle now has a full house (and more) of portals, document imaging programs, ECM system and developer capabilities, as well as CRM, business apps and integration tools. Its roadmap already looked like the M25 on a bad day, and with the BEA and Captovation contracts in place, things aren’t going to get any easier.

This is a very obvious period to ask for some face time with your Oracle rep, but give it a while yet. After all, the Redwood Shores executives will have to explain to themselves, and then their managers and staff, how having this pot pourri of technologies is going to help user organisations. You can't argue with Oracle's ability to extract stock value from its acquisitions but the jury is still out on whether it is doing anything for the people who bought the software.

Merger and acquisition activity has been the name of the game in enterprise content management for the last few years so it was no great surprise to see EMC adding to its content management and archiving division with an $85m agreement to buy Document Sciences in the dog days between Christmas and New Year.

However, whereas a lot of the buying and selling in ECM has been about consolidation, this is a “tuck-in” deal, meaning that it is a purchase EMC can easily afford, of a company that adds incrementally to its portfolio rather than changing the face of its strategy. That said, I think it’s indicative of the direction in which ECM is heading.

Documents Sciences’ Xpression suite helps firms automate document output and communications. If you want to create contracts, marketing correspondence or company policies, its software can help. More importantly, it has pre-built hooks into ECM software, as well as ERP and CRM programs, so output management is not a silo but an integrated part of your business infrastructure.

A lot of ECM 1.0 has been about taking a belt-and-braces approach to content. It has sprung from the “save everything” and “keep the CEO out of jail” period of post-Enron paranoia. The Document Sciences deal is a reminder that making use of that stored content through automated business processes should be the raison d’etre of ECM. A fully-functional ECM system is a system for saving time by creating a single, intelligent repository of content that can be reused and repurposed in many ways.

ECM shouldn’t be a glorified storage dump and it’s good to see EMC recognise this.

Civil servants are reeling in the wake of the horrific news that CDs containing the records of Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC) database have been lost, and the futher news of DVLA data being lost. The full cost to tax paying members of the public may not be fully realised for years to come.

This debacle is not only an example of incredibly poor information management, but also a sign of a wider problem in the UK, that you get what you pay for. Or in this case you don't get what you pay for. 

Information management is, or rather was, at the heart of British life. Travel to former colonies like India or Australia and they'll gladly inform you of the regimented behaviour towards information that led to government structures that have served the sub-continent and prison colony well to date. Yet, those standards have dropped.

An IWR reporter remarked as we debated the issue, how come information of this value was so easy to simply download and burn to a CD?  Technology preventing such blunders is not new and is a basic function of many information management systems.

Revelations of the missing information came a day after a report on the BBC's Today programme that the Driving Standards Agency and vehicle licensing body the DVLA employees take on average three weeks sick leave a year. Missing information and low staff moral are examples of a civil service that is poorly funded and poorly managed.

It is too easy to wag the finger of blame at civil servants, when in truth a much wider debate needs to take place.  As tax payers and child benefit recipients we are angry and worried, as information professionals we are dumbfounded that such lapses could have occurred.  What of our role as citizens?  Since the 1980s we've wanted a John Lewis service, but only paid Tesco value brand prices.  If you want John Lewis quality, you pay John Lewis prices.  On the high street this modus operandi fits well with the public, as they choose when they want quality and when they want to increase their spending. So why is it that we expect our state services to manage high level information on a low level budget?

This needs to be a debate about our society and its values, literally, as well as an improvement in information management.

With 2007 all but put to bed, a lot of people are looking forward to 2008 with not a little trepidation. And the cause of that fear is the prospect of a decline in the macro economy.

I'n no economist and have healthy scepticism for many self-proclaimed experts, but there is a lot of consistency in terms of the impact on IT buying. Down markets can be very healthy for technology buyers and very disuptive on the incumbents. In the early 1990s, for example, companies like Microsoft, Dell and Oracle were able to win chunks of market share as firms looked to take advantage of the move to client/server architectures, and shift away from mainframes.

In the wake of the dot-com collapse, software-as-a-service companies such as Salesforce.com took advantage of the squeeze on capex spending by offering subscription-based pricing that let firms get projects up and running very quickly.

In ECM, it's pretty obvious that firms offering low-cost, fast-deployment options stand to prosper if the economy struggles. That could be good news for SharePoint, Alfresco and companies offering freebie tools such as IBM Yahoo OmniFind and Microsoft's Search Server.

It's not every day an email starts like this:

PDF files have essentially become the standard within the business community because of the need for a protected file. However, the software is useless if users need to edit the document in any way.

Oh ho ho (he says, seasonally), does this mean the sender has a way to edit pdfs undetectably? This I must see. The software is called deskUNPDF Professional and it comes from Docudesk. It promises to:

convert PDFs into Word documents, view data in XML-format, or convert the files into HTML for a web presentation

It actually throws the result out in a huge variety of standard formats including images, csv and Sony Reader's lrf.

The danger appears to be that you could 'round trip' a pdf by exporting to word or an image file, fiddle around a bit and then print to pdf using one of the many pdf writers around.

Fortunately for people trying to protect their pdfs, the exercise proved less than satisfactory. Forgeries are evident. So the real value of the software is that you can move a pdf into another format.

Below, I've round-tripped an image page and a text page from the World Wildlife Fund's "Sustainability at the speed of light". It is utterly evident that I've been up to no good. And that, I believe, should be proclaimed as a valuable feature of the software.

Here's the original and the pdf output going via Word:

It's shrunk and there's a bit of textual overlap. The Word export has strange column breaks and the different text blocks appear to be in the wrong sequence when editing.

In honour of the Kit Kat tv commercial where the pandas roller-skate when the cameraman's not looking, I thought I'd do a bit of panda substitution using the GIMP.

I didn't add the speed streaks (and I cannot repeat the phenomenon) but they do look rather nice. However, even had my panda been better executed, this is clearly no way to forge a pdf.

Bear in mind that a lot of pdfs are protected by copyright and you need to be sure you're not going to land yourself in hot water by republishing. (Hopefully my snippets aren't going to get me into trouble.)

Over at CMS Watch, Tony Byrne mentions that he has heard the term “risk of incarceration” being used by reps as a spin on the older and somewhat more traditional meaning of ROI, “return on investment”. That shouldn’t surprise you too much on at least two counts.

First, enterprise content management (ECM) companies have become accustomed to pitching content management as a tool to “keep the CEO out of jail” by providing an audit trail of programs, files, messages and their associated creation, viewing, editing and other interactions. The selling spiel says: “Remember Enron? You don’t want to end up like that so you’d better have a good document management and retention strategy. Oh and if you were scared by Sarbanes-Oxley, there’s a ton more of that stuff coming down the line.”

Second, the company Byrne says he heard using the term was IBM, the company that was the originator, of course, of selling “fear, uncertainty and doubt”.

As I said at the top, I’m not at all surprised but if sarcasm is the lowest form of wit, then this is certainly among the lower echelons of effective sales and marketing. It gets an instant reaction but you might struggle to sell it twice –- as many firms are finding out the hard way.

For the last five years, ECM vendors have been touting regulatory compliance and reputation risk as threats to business. This was a crude but effective weapon in the down market after the dot-com collapse but, having made fortunes from scaring the bejeezus out of firms, the sales guys could really do with a hose down and a fresh approach.

The IWR American Psychological Association Information Professional of the Year award has been announced and went, deservedly to Brian Kelly, UK Web Focus for the UKOLN organisation.

The award is judged by a panel of previous winners and the IWR editorial team. As editor of IWR when I judge the award I look for an individual who is pushing the limits of information, technology and making the role of the information professional as far as possible and making it an exciting role.  When looking through the final results I could see that the other judges felt the same way and Brian was an excellent choice.

Brian's role is a national Web co-ordinator, an advisory post funded by the educational body JISC and the Museums, Library and Archives Council (MLA).

In this role Brian is looking at the web as central resource for learning and research in higher education and is looking at ways to make the web a successful resource, which is a challenging role, because the web is still very young and is constantly changing. This can be seen with the recent changes dubbed Web 2.0, therefore Brian is going to be pretty busy for some time to come.

Based at the University of Bath, I know from information professionals I have dealt with in the academic sector that he is very well respected and his thoughts are often the basis for great debate within the industry. Linked to this is his blog, which is one of the most popular blogs in the sector.

I hope all IWR readers will join me in congratulating Brian for an award very much well deserved. 

Jimmy Wales, chairman of Wikipedia was the keynote speech of Online Information 2007 with a presentation Web 2.0 in action: Free culture & community on the move.

Starts with Britannica editor Charles van Doren 1962, who said the encyclopaedia should be radical, but Wales claims they have been anything but.

Small showing of hands for those that have edited, although Wales believes it’s a good showing, "but not as many as college kids".

I consider us to be the Red Cross of information, he says as he describes its charitable status. Have 10 full time staff and will spend about $2 to 3 million this year, which is tiny compared to the major publishers. Vast majority of the money is from small donations, which he likes because its grass routes and not dependent on advertisers.

Wales talks about the desire to extend the languages that are in use on Wikipedia, including Hindi and Afrikaans.

Wiki is free in the sense of GNU, its free to copy, modify and distribute.

Shows a video of his travels to India and how he learnt that the local communities want to use the English version, as the English language is a route out of poverty. His organisation has been out to South Africa teaching students how to edit Wikipedia. "One of the things we have learnt is that if you can get five to 10 editors working together, it can make a great difference." These groups make progress and then they look towards outreach and who they can include. Hence the organisation has set up an academy to find the founding editors. It has begun in India, with 10-20,000 articles a month being put together by academy organisations.

Wikia is his next subject, a separate organisation with 66 languages, including a 67th, Klingon. Wales goes on to demonstrate using Google search results for Muppets and how the top result is the official site, but the rest of the results are from web based conversation, ie Wikipedia pages, forums and fan sites. He demonstrates an article on the Ford motor company and how on Muppet Wiki site, there is an article on Muppet Ford ads and how this demonstrates this level of information would never have been available before.

The search engine is a political statement, in a small P sense, Wales says. The proprietary software of the main players is a mystery in that people have no control of the accountability. The Wikia search will publish its algorithm.

Wales believes that the trust of social networks and setting up trusted networks can be utilised in search. .

On the role of collaboration, he asks the audience to imagine that they are designing a restaurants, discussing the idea that we trust the people around us, we don't put people in cages in restaurants because they will be using knives.
The wiki philosophy is to allow people to do good.

New research from Oracle and IDG suggests that firms are failing to capitalise on unstructured content. Well, with Stellent now added to its acquisitions mountain, Oracle would say that, wouldn’t it? But the data is interesting nonetheless.

According to the report, two-thirds of “senior IT decision makers” in Western Europe think they have the unstructured data issue managed, or are on the right tracks to cracking the problem. The flip side of that is that 60 per cent say they can’t make business decisions based on unstructured data because it is either too hard to find or because it is sitting among other, irrelevant data.

The average organisation surveyed had 4.28 ECMs in place (!) with many, unsurprisingly, seeking to consolidate. Oracle suggests that this “raises the question as to whether European organisations actually understand that unstructured content is an enterprise-wide issue that requires a strategic enterprise-wide solution”.

That’s a dodgy conclusion. The proliferation of ECMs (and ERPs, databases, BI systems etc) might be better accounted for by the crazy growth patterns and the pace of change in modern technology-driven business. When Oracle itself came along with client/server databases, few smart companies said “sorry, we’ve already standardised on DB2 on the mainframe”.

One other data point is worth examination: 63 per cent of European enterprises “consider email as the primary source for managing unstructured content, with 86 per cent admitting that email is used as the primary source for sharing content”.

That’s refreshingly open but it’s not as “surprising” as Oracle suggests that email is often a vehicle for decision making. The fact that many of us use email as out primary means not only of communications but also for knowledge management, contact information and much else is as much an indictment of ECM usability as anything else.

This research is clearly Oracle positioning itself as the company capable of making ECM palatable for mainstream businesses who are dissatisfied by the big incumbents. Fair enough, the more ECM matters get an airing the better.

But it also suggests to me that ECM is still in its infancy. Alfresco’s John Newton is fitting ECM with social networking integrations to reflect his belief that ECM users will move from being 10 per cent of the orgainsation to over half of users. This Oracle data backs up the hunch that ECM might have to change fast to fit in with the way users want to work, rather than asking users to adapt to what software designers say is right.

You hear about organisations such as BT and the BBC adopting Facebook as the place to hang out and connect. A friend in the BBC told me they were all "addicted" to Facebook. Perhaps she should be told not to use that particular word at her next performance appraisal.

JP Rangaswami, MD of BT Design, is hugely in favour of Facebook because it creates a formality and permanence around conversations which were once the province of the water cooler. He can see what's really going on rather than have to believe what the org chart tells him. He also likes the idea that the infrastructure to run Facebook is external to BT and therefore someone else's problem.

As you know, many other companies are terrified of letting their staff loose on such social networks and actually ban them, despite the fact that many staff are familiar with them and use them elsewhere in their lives.

Software vendors either want to create their own equivalent in order to keep control or they reluctantly allow Facebook into a a sidepanel of their main applications. They probably don't want to give too much functionality away in case it undermines their business model. I wouldn't like to hazard a guess at what Microsoft is up to with its shareholding in Facebook.

But then along comes enterprise content management company Alfresco with the idea that it will not only accept Facebook, it will cheerfully integrate it into the company's repertoire. It allows registered users to publish and share documents and other information in a controlled, secure and auditable environment.

In case you've not heard of Alfresco, it started a few years ago with the intention of being a free Documentum but five times faster and ten times cheaper. The apparent conflict between 'free' and 'cheaper' is that anyone can download and run the software for free, but if they want support they can jolly well pay for it.

Since then, it has fully embraced the social networking world, blurring the boundaries between front office and back and putting content production and consumption into the hands of the many rather than the specialised few.

Company founder John Newton is a panellist at the Online Information conference next Thursday at 11:30. The debate will be about the death of proprietary content management. Wishful thinking? Or are these guys onto something?

There's a famous Bob Dylan press conference of the 1960s where a hapless journalist asks the young singer to define his music "for people like me who are well over 40". Dylan, for it is he, answers that it can defined as music "for people who are well under 40". As a member of the fifth-decade club myself, I can empathise with the old hack -- my ancient critical faculties don't stretch to understanding the Facebook phenomenon.

What I can understand is that Facebook and other popular social networks have tremendous reach, and, therefore, offer tremendous opportunities and, by logical extension, carry an equal degree of risk. Enter Alfresco and its announcement that it is integrating with Facebook. I'm not too sure that this wasn't in part a clever PR stunt that exploits the fascination with the website du jour but it makes complete sense for ECM firms to be applying their management tools to content that is exposed on sites like Facebook.

As even the most conservative companies recognise that exposing content to blogs, wikis, podcasts social networks and other formats will be a necessary part of their futures, that content will need to be managed. The ECM system should become the preferred alternative to piecemeal alternatives to managing content and companies that neglect to protect that content will be in trouble.

Having said that, I'm not convinced that Forrester's Kyle McNabb is right to suggest that this is the end of ECM as we know it. Large companies will be among the last to adopt the latest social media, but that is no excuse for ECM firms not to build in necessary controls ahead of demand.

Lorcan Dempsey has worked for JISC and libraries on both sides of the Irish Sea and the Atlantic. As a member of the National Information Standards Organisation, his blog on networked information and digital libraries is well followed.

Q Who are you?
A I work in Dublin, Ohio, was born in Dublin, Ireland, and spent a long time in between in the UK. I am lucky to have what I believe to be one of the most interesting jobs in the library world. I am responsible for the programmes and research area within OCLC (Online Computer Library Center). I also help shape OCLC strategic direction.

Q Where can we find your blog?
A http://orweblog.oclc.org

Q Describe your blog?
A I say that it is about “libraries, networks and services”. I suppose that over time it has become more general. At first it had more of a technical slant; now it ranges more widely. I tend to talk about how networks are reconfiguring library services and I have some recurrent threads. These include:

Making data work harder.
We invest a lot in bibliographic data and need to use it more imaginatively in our systems and services.
Moving to the network level.
No single website is the sole focus of a user’s attention. The network is the focus of attention. And a major part of our network use revolves around significant network-level services ­ Amazon, Google, IMDB, and so on. These match supply and demand in efficient ways. The real message of Web 2.0 is the emergence of this pattern of service: data hubs with strong gravitational pull generated through network effects.
Being in the flow.
The focus of attention has shifted from website to workflow. The network is not so much about finding things as getting things done, and we have increasingly rich support for “networkflow”. We may construct our personal digital identities around services in the browser or on the network (RSS aggregators, social networking sites, bookmarks, etc), and we use prefabricated workflows (course management system, customer relationship management system, and so on).

Q How long have you been blogging?
A Almost four years.

Q What started you blogging?
A After I arrived in OCLC I tended to send out a lot of emails. A colleague suggested that a blog might be a better model.

Q Do you comment on other blogs and what is the value of it?
A The comments on some blogs seem more important than on others.

Q What are the blogs in your sector that you trust?
A I keep a wide range of feeds in my aggregator and will focus on different ones from time to time. Again, I tend to be more interested in “voice” or those from whom I can learn something. From a library point of view, I look at Caveat Lector (http://cavlec.yarinareth.net) and ACRLog (www.acrlblog.org).

Alma Swan’s new blog, OptimalScholarship (http://optimalscholarship.blogspot.com) and eFoundations (http://efoundations.typepad.com) from Andy Powell and Pete Johnston, are informative and provocative. I find PlanetCode4Lib (http://planet.code4lib.org) an efficient and useful way of keeping up with a range of stuff.

Q What good things have happened to you that could only have happened because of your blogging?
A I have always contributed to the professional literature. But I find that blogging is quite liberating: it is much easier to write blog entries than longer pieces. It has made me write more quickly and to think about short communications.

Q Which blogs do you read just for fun?
A I look at John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 (http://memex.naughtons.org) and William Gibson’s blog (www.williamgibsonbooks.com/blog/blog.asp), and the pictures in YarnStorm (http://yarnstorm.blogs.com) make me smile.

The rise of enterprise content management over the last five years has seen the entry of giants into a segment once characterised by names only a specialist would have recognised.

Microsoft has made its play with an in-house approach that has delivered the hugely successful SharePoint. IBM has also done a lot of work behind the scenes with content management services, but admitted the need for more when it announced the acquisition of FileNet in 2006. Similarly, Oracle got a fair way down the line, tying in services with its database, but then acquired Stellent last year for its customers and deeper domain knowledge.

These were decent strategies that were characteristic of the seasoned companies that delivered them but perhaps the least convincing strategy came from EMC. The company had made its name as the Switzerland of storage, being an independent company that was not tied to servers in the way rivals IBM, HP and Sun were. EMC was pretty much a pure hardware company until it acquired Documentum in 2003, although it had signalled its intent by agreeing to buy storage software giant Legato Systems just months earlier.

EMC justified itself by saying storage needed intelligent software if companies were to automate the protection of files. Then, in a move that again puzzled many onlookers, EMC acquired VMware and said storage and server virtualisation needed to converge. Plenty of people scratched chins and wondered if EMC was imagining synergies that were invisible to the rest of us.

Today, with unstructured data continuing to grow at a bewildering speed, with compliance mandates showing no sign of letting up, with ECM and storage infrastructure walking in lockstep, and with VMware shaping up as the biggest hypergrowth company in technology since Google, nobody is criticising EMC’s strategy. Proof, if ever it were needed, that lateral thinking can work wonders.

Some football fans critisicse David Beckham because "all he can do" is cross the ball. All Microsoft can do, in some pundits' books, is take market sectors that were once the domain of specialists charging pricey tariffs, and make them available to all. Today, Microsoft began to do that to enterprise search.

This might be looked back on as a rather momentous day in search as Microsoft's Search Server announcement is likely to change the rules of engagement in the field. The most notable points of the announcement that make it such a disruptive move are:

One, neither the freebie product nor the free product, Search Server Express, has a ceiling on number of searchable documents.

Two, neither the paid-for nor the freebie SKU requires a dedicated server.

Three, there are out-of-the-box connectors to FileNet, Documentum and Lotus Notes.

Four, this is a pure search move that does not lean on SharePoint, Microsoft's smash-hit entry into ECM.

Five, and this might well be the biggest factor, this is Microsoft, so the brand and ability to integrate with other key infrastructure will be huge plus factors for many buyers.

The net effect of the move will be to put pressure on Google's search appliances and IBM's OmniFind but Microsoft will not stop there and it is already talking about Office '14', the next major release, packing in high-end features. Autonomy made a very smart move in buying Zantaz, investing in video search and in other moves that have taken it away from basic enterprise search, which is showing every sign of being commoditised.

Google has done a sound job and IBM made a bold move in introducing its free version of OmniFind last year but the Microsoft manoeuvre is a major land grab. We still need to see the product and pricing details but if rivals are feeling afraid, we can understand their fear.

Anybody who has been watching the TV adapatation of Fanny Hill recently will recognise that  hopping between beds can be the fastest way to win friends and influence people. In enterprise software, that truth has long been recognised, hence Open Text's announcement that it is cosying up to Microsoft by opening up a development office in Redmond,  home, of course, to the world's largest software company.

In a statement, Open Text said: "Our relationship with Microsoft is founded on customers' need for complementary ECM solutions that blend the strengths of Microsoft and Open Text, bringing the power of Microsoft's productivity tools and ubiquitous presence on the desktop, together with our ECM solutions and vertical-market expertise."

Quite so, but the problem for Open Text is that everybody has the same idea and Microsoft's bed is very crowded these days. Everybody wants to gain a lever from Microsoft's ubiquity by integrating its software with key programs and by copying its look and feel. This has been Software Marketing & Development 101 ever since companies such as Corel and Micrografx saw there was business to be had in building applications for Windows.

A secondary driver is the fact that Microsoft is eating the lunch of ECM companies, thanks to the remarkable success of SharePoint. Firms like Documentum are reduced to hoping that firms use SharePoint at the front-end and their "grown-up" products at the back end. This, they hope, is the new realpolitik, although even this compomise might be delusional.

In ECM, you can't spit without hitting a company that claims to be in cahoots with Steve Ballmer's men. Many claim to have "special" relationships, for example in developing for certain vertical industries. It's no secret that these companies care about Microsoft more than Microsoft cares about them. The only time that will change will be the day Microsoft decides it needs to buy one of these companies. Then, at last, there really will be a special bedfellow.

With all the excitement over mega-mergers and corporate governance mandates, some of the smaller companies in enterprise content management probably haven't had their fair share of publicity in the past few years. That's certainly true of Nuxeo, which remains one of the best-kept secrets in ECM.

Why so quiet? Well, Nuxeo has its roots in France and, in part, you can blame the media (OK, people like me) obsession with north American companies and the ups and downs of firms with huge revenue streams. In part, it's also probably because Nuxeo's platform is built on open source and open-source outfits tend to do things by stealth. Anyhow, whether it likes it or not, Nuxeo is due some attention.

The company has just released an update to its core Java-based ECM, adding a couple of features such as new search capabilities and stronger data import/export, but the real story about Nuxeo is its customer base that  reads like a Who's Who?  of French business and government.  The company has a London office and is striving to go beyond its local market -- it's worth getting to know.

Oracle's enterprise content management has been a long time a-coming but, with the Stellent acquisiiton done and a new release of Universal Records Management under the famous red logo, the pieces are finally falling into place.

I'm still a little puzzled over where Orac;e's organic efforts have ended up. The company was leaking plenty of information about a  move into ECM well before the Stellent announcement with the project originally dubbed Tsunami, but never made a big splash into the sector. The acquisition of Stellent was something of a surprise given how much work Oracle had done internally, and also because of the releatively small scale of the purchase.

Now, it's time for Oracle to front up in ECM and do a better job than it has done so far in explaining where it sits against the likes of EMC-Documentum, IBM-FileNet and Open Text. So far, the talk has been of baking in ECM into Oracle's Fusion middleware. Sage heads will doubtless nod along but to me this is as clear as gravy. Sure, it makes sense that Oracle's ECM tools hook up with other programs from the vendor but information managers need a better perspective on how Oracle will support the product on platforms that are rivals to Oracle in other sectors.

They also need to hear about product development plans, service and support, Oracle's view on emerging standards, and all the other components that make the ECM world go round.

For some time now, Oracle  has spent more time acquiring than explaining. Its desire for scale is understandable at a time when supplier rationalisation is on many IT departments' agendas but the remarkable merger-and-acquisition rip the firm has pursued needs to be backed up with a little more beef.

This is particulalry the case with ECM and not just because this is virgin turf for Larry Ellison's company. Some watchers will have you belive that the sector is just another bunch of code to be folded into the enterprise software broth. It's not. Those who work most closely with ECM tools are often not techies but people with long experience of archiving and librarian skills. These are people who value a close relationship with the supplier more closely than users of most other elements.

They don't need hand-holding or puppy love as some vendors seem to think, but they do want to feel they have the attention of their supplier. Oracle needs to recognise that if it is seriously seeking to conquer another enterprise kingdom.

At a major international publishing event like the Frankfurt Book Fair the bright lights of trade publishing and all its household star names could easily drown out the academic and scientific publishers. But this has not been the case.

Talk at the event, in all circles, is about books and technology, in particular search and eBook readers. On both subjects the specialist publishers are leading the way and the trade publishers salute them.

Amazon and Sony were expected to steal the show with their eBook readers, they are instead conspiquous in their absence, but that has not stopped publishers and technology providers from talking about the devices and their potential.

I was particularly interested in a conversation I had with sceintific, technical and medical publishers WIley where they hinted that they and other specialists may get involved in driving the adoption of eBook readers. Could we see the eBook reader adopt a similar model to the mobile phone where users sign up to a subscription service, content of a particular kind in this case, and in return they get a sleek and sexy device? Its certainly worked for the mobile industry, which now resembled the car world with its emphasis on styling and marketing.

But such a move could also be a blind alley, as one expert said to me, these devices don't support the interlinking and interactivity that content users are currently enjoying with the web.

During the fair Google, Ingram Digital Group and Amazon have all used the scientific and academic publishers as case study beacons for just what can be done with books on the web.

Geographically the Far East is the leading adopter as its markets radically develop according to Mark Carden, Ingram senior vp.

Perhaps Amazon spread rumours of a possible launch to see if there was real interest, well if the level of conversation we've heard is anything to go by, the eBook reader is in demand.

Two recent moves make it highly likely that SAP will be come the latest enterprise software giant to join the enterprise content management sector.

First, SAP itself said it would spend 4.8 billion euros to acquire Business Objects, a leader in another area of software that is seeing rapid change, that of business intelligence. The size of the deal shows that the German giant is prepared to revise its previous strategy of only making "tuck-in" deals that supplement existing capabilities.

Second, its old sparring partner Oracle announced Universal Records Management 10g Release 3, an upgrade that, as Mike Davis of Ovum notes, marks a milestone in the company's growing interest in content management generally, and records management specifically.

For both SAP and Oracle, growth will come from  winning larger shares of customers' budgets, and that means extending capabilities. The pair are engaged in a tit-for-tat struggle to win the hearts and minds of buyers. Moving into ECM is a blindingly obvious next step for SAP and it probably does not have the luxury of time to develop its own capabilities.

So expect SAP to make a move to acquire a company in the space -- and don't bet against it being a long-term partner such as Open Text.

The news that the BSI is to pursue standardisation in enterprise content management (ECM) brings to mind the old joke that standards are such a good idea, and that´s why there are so many of them for the same thing.

OK, so it´s not the greatest joke in the world but it underlines the ancient problem that conflicting standards, and poorly adopted standards, can create as many problems as they seek to solve. There are already solid standards for document management in particular, and for some poor souls whose job it is to ride the waves of compliance rules and regulations, it can very often seem that there are far too many.

On the other hand, ECM vendors have often been guilty of lock-in tactics either through complexities of licensing, the imposed difficulties of learning and unlearning some programs, or through an unwillingness to abide by the basic underpinnings provided by markup languages and other core systems.

Anything that makes it easier to swap between ECMs is surely a victory for the purchaser. However, it requires aleap of faith to imagine that vendors with plenty to lose will suddenly adhere to a flat-earth principle that lets all rivals be created equal. What may happen is that smaller vendors, including open-source ones, adopt standards in the hope of unseating veteran incumbents. That, it can generally be agreed, is A Good Thing but experience tells me not to imagine many buyers wanting to spend too much time tracking the minutiae of which vendors are operating on a level playing field and whuch are playing fast and loose.

Two stories caught my eye on the excellent Techmeme site this morning: EMC’s acquisition of Mozy, a developer of online storage, and Google’s decision to spruce up its GMail service.

Anybody possessing a passing acquaintance with software trends would have found it hard to miss the ongoing move from disk-based software to web-based programs that has been going on for over  a decade now. As that prolonged timeline suggests, changes in software usage tend to be evolutionary and spread out rather than revolutionary and overnight, but these two news items suggest the way that, for many areas of computing at least, the corporate server and even the local hard drive are becoming redundant.

EMC has plenty to lose if the business datacentre server starts to fade. The acquisition of Mozy, one of many startups that offers storage as a service, suggests EMC recognises that if anybody is taking its traditional business away, it might as well be EMC itself.

For many companies, online storage makes a lot of sense. You don’t hire storage admins, you don’t buy a ton of disks and tape, and you don’t have spikiness on the balance sheet.

As for online storage, GMail started out as a consumer-orientated service but edged into corporate activities because for many it represented a superior way to do business. I still prefer Yahoo Mail but GMail changed the face of freemail because it was the first to dish out large amounts of storage at no cost.

Now many of us use freemail services in preference to the business standard because we find it easier to access and that it frequently offers better security, performance, usability and resources than our employers are willing to provide.

For content management, the advantage of having files and mail available on the web is that we can use standard web services and tools to manipulate data. However, nearly all business users still have some dependency on local storage because of reasons such as latency or rules and regulations on the location of data.

Despite this, many startups are now effectively running their whole businesses on tools such as Google Apps and Salesforce.com. I strongly suspect that many other firms only haven’t moved because of inertia or the threat to status quo in terms of IT, procurement and other staffing.

Salesforce.com has hardly put a step wrong in its short history, transforming the CRM and sales force automation space, becoming the toastmaster for on-demand software, and creating the model for transparency. It's fast-growing and even loved by customers. And now it’s heading for enterprise content management.

Salesforce said earlier this week that its next quarterly release will mark its entry into the ECM sector. CEO Marc Benioff referred specifically to Documentum and Microsoft SharePoint for what he suggested was a failing model of how to do ECM. His plan is to take web consumer technologies and apply them to content management so that a person searching for a file could view it by criteria such as ‘most comments’, ‘most popular’ or ‘most recently viewed’, for example.

As Benioff noted, this is straight out of the YouTube playbook and the move has a certain attractive simplicity. However, I’m not overly confident that Salesforce will have the same effect on ECM that it has had on CRM.

Despite Benioff’s characteristic denigration of Microsoft, SharePoint has already shown that you can have an attractive front-end for managing content, while companies like Documentum have a ton of solid experience at the more complex end of the ECM spectrum.

Salesforce's vision of a pure browser-based view of an enterprise’s assets will necessarily be incomplete even if one were to accept his implicit belief that document users will be happy to apply ratings they way they do on the latest music videos.

Salesforce’s content push might offer up an attractive alternative to search software, or for managing information culled from sales or service calls, but that will only take the firm part of the way to a true ECM system.

A report from the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA) in the USA shows that fair use of copyrighted material is beneficial to the national economy. According to the CCIA industries that can use material under the terms of fair use earned  $4.5 trillion, which adds more weight to the arguments of the Free Our Data campaign from newspaper The Guardian.

Free Our Data wants information held by the government, and therefore paid for by tax payers, to be made freely available so that organisations can use it.

Amongst the organisations using fair use terms that have benefited the US national economy are media organisations, education sector and software developers. 

Industries bound by copyright control with no fair use aspect contributed just $1.3 trillion to the US economy.

Fair use under US copyright law is described as being the use and copying of copyright protected material to comment upon, criticise or parody. Examples include summaries and quotes from medical articles for news, use of media content for teaching or the use of copyright protected material as evidence in a court case.

The Guardian Free Our Data campaign, run by its Technology supplement argues, rightly, that information collected by the Highways Agency, the UK Hydrographic Office and Ordnance Survey should be made available to organisations in the UK without being encumbered by clunky copyright restrictions. Although designated as trading funds, these three organisations receive almost 50% of their income from the public sector, which means taxpayers pay for it. Access to this data is charged for and as a result, organisations are turning to Google Maps for mapping information rather than using information they have already paid for through their business rates.

IWR supports the Free Our Data campaign because we are passionate about online information and want to see the UK remain a leader in information provision and we want to see British information professionals continuing to manipulate information in innovate ways that is beneficial to their user community.

Earlier this week PaidContent.org launched its UK and European information service at a swanky Scottish bar in, err, London.  IWR went along and once underneath the deer antler chandelier it was as if a time and space wormhole had opened up and we were transported back to 1999 and they heady dot com boom.

The zeitgeist was unmistakable, young trendy professionals in Chris Evans glasses, sharp suits, bright shirts and an excitable level of conversation about "content" and "funding". It was uncanny. The headache's from the launch parties of Boo.com, Handbag.com and anything you like .com have only just cleared at the IWR Editor's desk and all of a sudden I get the feeling that it is all about to happen again.

The last web boom rapidly replaced CD-Rom in the professional information space and for those of us commentating on it for the traditional information sector, we were regularly told our days were numbered and the geeks would inherit the earth. In many ways everything has changed, yet also, nothing has changed.  Jimmy Wales and Wikipedia are significant changes, but despite falling ad revenues, the stalwarts of information still remain kings of the jungle.

Interestingly at this party, fund toting entrepreneurs didn't make the same mistake of predicting the demise of traditional information providers; instead I heard many conversations about partnerships, relationships and hosts. Kewego, just one of the bright (complete with lime green logo) Web 2.0 start ups present talked of the importance of the "content owners" and rattled off the names of respected information providers. The general feeling I left with is that if we are about to start partying again, but the difference is not that the new players think they have all the answers and will replace our libraries, publishing houses and research departments, instead they see themselves as a component and supplier.

Widgets is a term used widely in the blog world and already newspaper groups are adding widgets to their online portfolios. The next information wave appears to be about a wealth of new ("funded" and partying) companies offering to add their widget to your information. For information professionals this means understanding what a widget is, what it offers your users and negotiating a good deal for all parties involved.

The always-excellent CMS Watch has an interesting article on benchmarking portals.

The author, Janus Boye, makes the valid point that benchmarking has to be seen in the context of what the portal is intended to do. This might seem an obvious point but it underlines how slippery even empirical data can be in the wrong hands.

We’re all familiar with the phrase about lies, damn lies and statistics (although nobody is quite sure who coined it) but I’ve always preferred the less popular one about those who use statistics the way a a drunkard uses a lamp post -– more for support than illumination.

In many fields of computing, benchmarking is broken. In server microprocessors, companies like Intel, AMD, IBM and Sun can make merry with numbers but they don’t mean much, at least not without a ton of accompanying explanation. The fault is not so much with the design of the simulations themselves or their accuracy, but with the multiple, and often mutually contradictory, nature of the metrics being applied. For example, in servers, some buyers will want raw performance, some energy efficiency, and an increasing number will want the perfect virtualisation host.

Too often, benchmarks are cited to impress even though the numbers are meaningless. As my old history teacher used to say, if you can’t blind them with science, baffle them with bullshit. However, used properly, benchmarks offer short cut to finding valid, independent insights.

When benchmarking an ECM, CMS or other system, the temptation will always be to impress the person who is asking. If the FD wants to see ROI, the person who bought the system will try to find a way to show ROI.

One thing that would help buyers is a little help from the vendors. Assistance in measurement tools based on specific criteria would help buyers offer up proof points for not just ROI but usability, service improvements and other factors.

So far, that assistance has been limited. I wonder if some vendors are a little coy of providing tools that might produce answers they don’t like. 

After a period in the doldrums, Open Text is looking like a hot company again.

Shares in the Canadian firm shot up 25 percent late last week on the back of outstanding financial results with licence growth up sharply and overall quarterly revenue up from $105.2m a year ago to $175.2m. That’s a remarkable rise for a sector that some say is slowing and is often characterised as being full of veterans under threat from Microsoft and other menaces.

Some experts said the stock jump was in part because investors are looking for safe havens in a market that is deemed to be rebounding, unlike the financial services sector that is taking a hammering. Certainly, IT bellwethers such as Intel, Microsoft and Cisco are also up although none so much as Open Text.

The real reason Open Text is suddenly so popular is that it is performing. The company said the integration of Hummingbird and work on bolstering its partner channel had gone well. Good for Open Text, a straight-talking company that tends to keep marketing BS down to a minimum and sometimes pays a price for its modesty.

Becoming a $1bn-revenue company still looks a long way off but the shooting stock price might at last put to bed (for a short while, anyway) the argument that as the biggest of the last remaining big ECM firms not owned by an IT giant, Open Text will soon be swallowed up by an SAP or other behemoth.

Open Text's performance is probably also a reminder that hard-won domain knowledge still has value and that veterans of the sector won't be displaced without a battle.

The Trades Union Congress (TUC) has warned Facebook users to be careful and for employers not to sack workers for using the social networking tool in work time.

The TUC has written a guide on acceptable Facebook usage in the workplace in response to growing unease from organisations that Facebook is reducing productivity in the workplace. Facebook has become popular for social and professional networking.

Staff across the UK have already faced discipline or sackings because of the overuse of Facebook at work. Daily newspaper The Guardian reports that employees of Kent county council have been sacked.

With 3.5 million registered users in the UK the TUC describes Facebook as an accident waiting to happen. "Simply cracking down on the use of new web tools like Facebook is not a sensible solution to a problem, which in only going to get bigger," said Brendan Barber, General Secretary of the TUC. Instead he advises, "It is better to invest a little time in working out sensible conduct guidelines, so that there don't need to be any nasty surprises for staff and employees."

These are a set of good suggestions, so far IWR has not come across any figures which show how much work time and productivity has been lost to Facebook, but we have heard anecdotal evidence of sales being lost and workers spending considerable amounts of work time within social networks.

Policing social networks will be hard. IWR and many titles have promoted them as useful tools in the information landscape. Unlike games or even YouTube, it is difficult to see where using Facebook is purely for pleasure and where is a useful corporate tool. Add into the confusion the fact that many managers are using these tools to communicate with their teams both about corporate and social issues and the blur gets even fuzzier.

Ultimately, it will have to come from the top down within the organisation. Managers should be involved with these tools in order to garner the best from them, but they should also set the parameters for staff's usage and enforce it, before UK Plc is ground to halt by a winter of disreputable content.

One of the not-so-secret secrets of Microsoft’s rocket ride of the 1990s was its understanding that success in commercial software almost always goes hand in hand with a nexus of links to ISVs, channel partners, hardware makers, consulting firms and so on.

The firm is at it again with the release of software developer kits for SharePoint Server 2007 and SharePoint Services 3.0, replete with Microsoft’s usual “how to” wizards, templates and demystification guides.

It’s not surprising to see how well SharePoint is doing at the moment. It integrates with other key Microsoft infrastructure, it’s (relatively) cheap and it lets you do most of the things that you would want to do with an ECM system.

What does it lack? Having spoken to a number of experts for an upcoming article in Information World Review on SharePoint, I would say:

Attention to bespoke features for vertical markets and associated rules and regulations

Clear licence terms and conditions

Control tools that can prevent SharePoint growing everywhere in the organisation at the cost of manageability

Integration with latest Microsoft developer tools

What else is missing in SharePoint and what doesn’t work? I’d like to hear, so drop in a comment or get in touch by email.

Incidentally, lest anybody in the green-font brigade suggest I’m selling ads for Microsoft, let me link to a good post by Matt Asay on Microsoft’s paid-for research into why SharePoint is better value than open-source ECMs. Asay is right. This sort of paranoia does the company no favours.

And finally, a song about over-zealous SharePoint users. Oh yes, things have got to that point.

There’s not too much new under the sun but Open Text came up with an interesting spin on the need for ECM last week. In a press release, the firm suggested that with many baby-boomers approaching retirement, there comes a parallel increase in risk of loss of business knowledge.

OK, so it’s not an entirely new insight. I’ve heard of the baby-boomer issue applied several times with reference to mainframe and other datacentre stalwart systems that depend on one guru who holds all the keys, knows where skeletons are buried and is the single source of all the know-how to keep the wheels turning.

You could also quibble and say that with changes in attitudes to careers and retirement, the twilight of the baby-boomers probably isn’t a phenomenon that will strike hard outside certain areas such as the public sector where switching between employers is not so common.

But where Open Text is surely right on the money is in suggesting the effects of this brain drain where “a big chunk of knowledge, context and process know-how walks out the door with newly retired staff”.

I had a horrible feeling that Open Text’s answer to this problem would be to buy more of its software but, to be fair, it suggests some practical advice such as:

the setting up of mentoring programmes

creating groups where retiring records professionals work with HR, IT and corporate legal executives to protect knowledge assets

moving away from paper processes that are anathema to the new generation of professionals

To a lot of you out there, this is just common sense but basic knowledge management and succession planning are all too often honoured in the breach.

For me, however, the big issue here is that of the “bastard operator”: the selfish employee who owns a domain and won’t share knowledge because it weakens a personal fiefdom. Any stories of how to handle this type would be worth sharing -– providing you’re willing to share the knowledge, of course…

A new Gartner report suggests that while the software-as-a-service trend is rapidly adding enterprise applications support, the ECM sector has so far been largely insulated from the trend.

Gartner highlights this disconnect, saying that:

“In ECM and search, SaaS adoption is in the range of one percent to two percent of total software spending. Within e-learning and web conferencing, SaaS accounts for more than 60 percent and 70 percent of total market revenue.”

Of course, there are a few good reasons for this delta in uptake. ECM software is bought in large part to get a grip on documents located behind the corporate firewall. Web conferencing is a blindingly obvious candidate for subscription-based hosted services. Indeed, firms such as WebEx were making their millions before they decided to ride on the bandwagon and describe themselves as SaaS or on-demand players. Well, that’s fashion, folks -- and an optimistic view of how markets might view your stock.

However, I’d be surprised if ECM didn’t get more traction in SaaS. As companies, and regulators, get more comfortable with internal documents being exposed in secure online silos, SaaS becomes a plausible alternative to in-house deployments. It’s probably going to be a phenomenon that applies to smaller outfits initially but it will be worth watching to see who goes on from storing emails in the cloud and takes the leap to business documents.

Another SaaS scenario that might apply to ECM is a hybrid format where software stays behind the firewall but customers pay vendors for services to monitor and backup systems. In this way, firms might gain a better understanding of what's happening to their ECM investments, who is using the tools, who isn't, what issues are causing problems, and so on.

ECM vendors have a bad rap for usabilty and ease of deployment. If SaaS companies can help firms get started and keep on using content management, they won’t be stuck at one or two percent market share for much longer.