Jean Marie Pascal, from Going to an OpenSource ECM World recently interviewed me about my thoughts on ECM and Open Source. JM has also done interviews with Jeff Potts from Optaros, Eric Barroca from Nuxeo, and Nancy Garrity from Alfresco. All of the interviews are rich with information about ECM and the unique perspectives of each of these individuals. Great idea Jean Marie!
Archive for the ‘ecm’ Category
ECM Interview with Jean Marie Pascal
Tuesday, January 20th, 2009Nuxeo Web Engine
Friday, July 11th, 2008Nuxeo just announced the first official release of their WebEngine. I have been hearing updates about this project for a while and have been meaning to check it out. From glancing through the slides, WebEngine seems very similar to Apache Sling and has many of the things that I like about Sling: a RESTful interface and a lightweight, content-centric programming model. In WebEngine templates are written in FreeMarker and you can script in your choice of Groovy, Python, Ruby, Javascript and other languages (thanks to JSR 223) which provides a scripting interface for Java applications). I am looking forward to playing around with WebEngine. In my past experiences with Nuxeo applications, I found them to be well engineered.
If you are new to Nuxeo, they have a legitimate claim to being the first open source ECM company. Their primary geographic focus is in France and they are less well known in the US. Nuxeo’s original ECM product (which combined Document Management, Collaboration, and Web Content Management) was written on the Zope platform. In 2006, they ported their product (then called CPS for Collaborative Portal Server) to a Java stack (using JBoss Seam). Long time readers of this blog may remember me being skeptical of whether they could pull it off. It turns out that they did a great job with the migration and have been aggressively pushing the platform forward.
Like, Alfresco, Nuxeo’s experience and customer base leans towards the document management side of ECM. Web content management is a newer focus that is (I think) well timed as more companies are looking for ways to rapidly build internally and externally facing content centric web applications.
Alfresco and E2CM
Friday, May 16th, 2008Alfresco has been tearing up the newswire recently with announcements and interviews related to their evolved vision that incorporates an Enterprise 2.0 style mash-up/social approach to Enterprise Content Management. For lack of a better term, lets call it Enterprise 2.0 Content Management or E2CM (a new term! you heard it here first).
Unlike the old ECM that was all about monolithic applications to support large, structured, and formal business processes (like check processing or FDA approval), E2CM supports the small, informal, ad-hoc interactions that the average knowledge worker engages in every day. With its flexible, open, and extensible architecture, Alfresco is well suited as a foundation for building and integrating with all sorts of simple tools that facilitate sharing, collaboration, and community.
My only concern is that Alfresco is priced high as a framework for building custom applications. To get the Enterprise Edition (required for support and access to certified integrators), you will probably be looking at an annual subscription fee of well over $60K. In the age of free frameworks, that is pretty steep. However, when you look at Documentum and FileNet licensing, it doesn’t look bad at all. I guess it all depends on where you are coming from.
All this attention to E2CM (when you come up with a new term, you need to use it aLOT) may be at the expense of the traditional WCM functionality in which Alfresco has lagged. It takes too much customization to build a simple, semi-dynamic website on Alfresco. View the source on most of the certified integration partner websites and you will see that they are running on WCM platforms like Joomla!, Plone, and Drupal. Also, two very senior people from the WCM team (the architect and lead developer that came over from Interwoven) have left. Fortunately for Alfresco, they put in place the core infrastructure like the dependency management, deployment, and virtualization. There is also a good start on some UI improvements that will work towards market parity.
It remains to be seen whether Alfresco sees traditional WCM as being a market they want to pursue. Given the competitiveness and price pressure in the market, I understand why they would not want to. Their advantages as a framework for assembling and integrating E2CM applications outweigh their strengths as a turnkey WCM business application and it makes sense for Alfresco to play to their strengths.
John Newton on the Commoditization of ECM
Tuesday, September 12th, 2006John Newton’s blog post on the commoditization of ECM was so good that I nearly stood up and clapped when I finished reading it. In this article, John talks about how ECM has become commoditized – not to the point where the business problems are easily solved but rather to the point where growth is flat and differentiation is vendor size rather than functionality. As with most commoditized markets open source brings an opportunity to put in infrastructure that provides basic services at reduced cost so that resources are available to invest in integration and deployment.
Alfresco is not afraid of the fact that “size matters” in this mature market with EMC, IBM and Microsoft dominating. He believes that open source gives Alfresco an advantage over the heavyweights because of reduced product development and marketing costs and faster innovation cycles. It is interesting to hear Alfresco talk about open source because they are both consumer and producer of open source and they benefit from both sides. As a consumer, they were able to quickly build their product using best of breed open source components from external projects that they can collaborate and partner with (just like any enterprise can). As a producer they are able to have a longer, more cost-effective reach because their software is freely downloadable: “Open source is therefore able to go farther and broader than even Microsoft to places that commercial software has not been to before, especially Enterprise Content Management.”
In drawing parallels with other infrastructure markets, John points out the relational database software and the Java application server markets. Both of these matured into their present state of a massive consolidation of the commercial market accompanied by real opportunities for open source vendors as demonstrated by the success of MySQL, JBoss, and RedHat.
Great blog. I encourage you to read it if you have not already done so.
IBM agrees to buy FileNet for $1.6 bln
Thursday, August 10th, 2006And the mergers and acquisitions continue…. As analysts have been saying for months, infrastructure companies are buying up the content management pure plays and calling ECM infrastructure. IBM recently announced that they are buying FileNet. That leaves Vignette, Stellent and Interwoven, and BroadVision for companies like Sun, HP, RedHat, Novell, etc. to fight over. I don’t know who is going to pair with who but if I had to guess…
- Sun buys Vignette
- Novell buys BroadVision
- Red Hat buys Alfresco
- HP buys Interwoven who buys Stellent
- Google makes them all irrelevant
One size fits none
Wednesday, May 10th, 2006CMS Watch recently referenced Martin White’s EContent Article further disproving the one size fits all vision for content management. It seems the pragmatic “best of breed” approach has beaten the industry sanctioned, monolithic ECM message in almost Gandhi-like fashion (“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”) and no one really believes that one CMS implementation can serve everyone. Even if a single CMS product could do it all, customizations and configurations to benefit one group would spoil it for other groups trying to do different things.
So where is the discussion going to go? I think the interesting problems are: a) how to optimize a technology (and process) to solve a finite set of business problems really well; and b) how to share content across a heterogeneous content environment. These are harder, more interesting, problems. Problems that are solved with continuous, incremental improvement and focus on the user – not big bang silver bullets that are more likely to blow up in your face than hit a target.
Nice wrap up of the Gilbane Conference
Tuesday, May 2nd, 2006Charlie Wood has a nice summary of the Spring 2006 Gilbane Conference in San Francisco. I was at the conference too and I am sorry that I didn’t get to meet Charlie because I really like his blog. One thing that Charlie described that I definitely felt this year was the sea change away from ECM as a monolithic solution and toward a model of inter-connected task specific content applications. I couldn’t agree more. This is my fourth Gilbane conference and the trend has been remarkable. Back in November 2004, I noted how the analysts were decidedly split on whether anyone was delivering on the one size fits all ECM vision. Then in Fall 2005, there were fewer people willing to stand by the monolithic ECM vision. This year, I heard several people say that people had over-bought content management solutions and were having difficulty adopting them due to complexity and poor usability. This year, there was much more emphasis on lighter weight, targeted, viral technologies such as blogs and wikis that are actually doing what the big software vendors have been failing to do: enable communication and collaboration with as little impedance as possible.
Alfresco goes all open source
Tuesday, May 2nd, 2006If you have read my comments on Alfresco, you probably noticed me mention that Alfresco is not all open source. In fact, I have said the “E” of their ECM was closed source because the features that an enterprise would need (LDAP integration, group based permissioning, etc.) were only available in the for-pay version.
Alfresco’s recent announcement shows a change in their licensing model which makes the entire code base open source (licensed under the MPL). The Enterprise and Community versions will have the same functionality but only the Enterprise version will be certified. The Community version will be more oriented toward research and development and undergo less QA. This is similar to the relationship between Fedora and Red Hat Linux Enterprise Linux.
It is unclear what the difference in quality and reliability between these two versions will be. Alfresco strongly urges anyone using the software for non-experimental purposes to use the Enterprise version but says the Community version is a great low risk way to try the software and see if it works within your enterprise. This sounds a little like the ShareWare model but it does give companies the choice to release themselves from paying the Enterprise subscription if they feel like they are not getting the value out of it. The absence of lock-in is certainly a big benefit. Who knows, maybe some other company will step up and specialize in supporting the Community version. Open source is all about choices.
Another potential benefit of this move is that it may give a developer community a chance to grow around Alfresco. Before the licensing change, there was little incentive for an independent developer to contribute code if it could wind up in the for pay version. If a developer community does take root, the community version could become a viable option for enterprises in much the same way that there are many production servers running Fedora and openSUSE.
I think that this was a necessary step for Alfresco and I am glad that they did it. The only challenge is how their marketing department will create messaging around the difference. How will they encourage people to buy the Enterprise version without derogating the Community version?
ECM as Infrastructure
Friday, February 17th, 2006A couple of days ago, I listened to an AIIM webinar presented by Stellent and DocuLab’s Jeetu Patel. It has been a few months since I have listened to commercial ECM messaging and I have to admit that I was a little surprised. The key theme was ECM as Infrastructure. This concept is not new, Alan Pelz-Sharp nicely described the trend of Oracle, ECM, IBM, and Microsoft working their way into the content management market. The growth of several standards in content management (JSR 170, JSR 168, DocBook, and DITA…) shows that buyers now think the technology has reached a point where it is “good enough” and they will no longer stand for being locked into a single vendor’s technology stack. Now that the basic functionality is widely available, companies can now make more strategic choices about their technology portfolio.
What surprised me was that the message was sponsored and endorsed by Stellent, a pure-play content management company. Moving content management into an infrastructure play essentially commoditizes the space and makes it even more accessible to the big hardware/software vendors and, you guessed it, open source. This reminds me a little of ATG. They used to have one of the better Java web development platforms. They were one of the earlier companies to have a certified J2EE application server and they pushed the envelope on Java Server Pages with their tag libraries. We all know what happened after that. Java application servers became dominated by BEA and IBM then open source (Tomcat (really a servlet container but frequently used as a web application server), JBoss, JonAS, and Geronimo) so ATG got out of it. Their repository layer was no longer special thanks to open source object-relational mapping technologies like Hibernate and Castor. Their “Nucleus” architecture is no better than open source Inversion of Control frameworks like Spring. Now they just keep their customers with their personalization and commerce functionality. The customers that don’t use these features are drifting away from the technology. So will Stellent become a big infrastructure winner like BEA, IBM, and Oracle? Or will it suffer the same decline that ATG did?
Jeetu’s part of the talk was mainly about Service Oriented Architecture, which is also one of our practices. Our SOA practice lead, Adam Michelson has two excellent white papers (“Service Oriented Architecture and Open Source Solutions” and “Delivering Service Oriented Architecture”) that discuss how to leverage open source in service oriented architecture. One of the key aspects that Adam really understands and is able to eloquently communicate is that SOA is more than just installing an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). Success in SOA, like all previous generations of Enterprise Architecture, requires diligent planning and consideration for the organizational and political context. The technological plumbing is secondary. You just need to make sure that you are supporting the right standards, your components are reliable, and get into the right pricing model success (putting more applications on the bus) is not cost prohibitive. Adam also makes the point that it is difficult for a Service Oriented Architecture to cross divisional or P&L lines because of conflicting priorities and the inability to standardize. So maybe an enterprise-wide content infrastructure in a large company is unrealistic. I think Jeetu’s talk, while very good, under-emphasized these issues. Still, I think that there is a huge potential to establish some core content services at the divisional level – which is where most I.T. decisions are really made anyway.
Other good points in the talk:
- 80% of content is unstructured
- 90% of content is unmanaged
- This unstructured content grows at a rate of 36% per year.
Wow. I have to get to work!
WCM needs a new name. Or, perhaps, an old one.
Friday, December 18th, 2009This post was originally written as a comment on Jon Mark’s excellent post Visions of Jon: WCM is for Losers but it got out of hand and I suspect that it is too long for a comment so I am re publishing it here.
Thanks for the great post Jon! I have to agree with you that the term Web Content Management System is misleading because of its diverse focus on multiple publishing channels. You probably remember that in the old days (~1996), the term “CMS” was first used to describe products like Vignette and what are now called ECM systems were just called Document Management Systems, Records Management Systems, etc. When the big DMS vendors started to covet the term “content,” the (then) smaller WCM vendors had to slide over a bit and qualify their category with a “W.” Then some of them started to ruin themselves by trying to expand into document, management, records management, etc. – but that’s another story.
But enough about the Ghosts of Christmas Past… I agree with the point that a WCMS has multiple aspects. I would name three: a management tier to edit semi-structured content, a repository to store the semi-structured content, and a rendering tier to render the content. Usually the repository is more tightly coupled to the management tier so it is often tucked into the management application. In fact, the three components are often bundled for convenience.
In my mind, what sets WCM apart from the other forms of CMS is the C. I still think of Content as having more structure (and less embedded formatting) than what you typically find in an ECM repository. In the ECM world, the structured information is called metadata and is not considered part of the asset (a MS Office file that jumbles together information and presentation). A WCM asset needs to be rendered (given a format) to be useful to a consumer. This is why a WCMS needs a good rendering system.
Most ECM assets can just be downloaded but the range of formats they can take is limited. You can get a different file format (like a PDF) or a different scaling or cropping of an image but the output looks essentially the same. ECM has tricks to add structured information like metadata and embedded tags but that is going against the grain. WCM, which is inherently structured, knows what each of the different elements of an asset mean. I like to say that ECM is documents pretending to be content and WCM is content pretending to be documents. That is, ECM starts with a document and tries to pull information out of it while a WCM starts with structured information and renders it into a .html, .pdf, .xml, or any other kind of document.
So, at the end of it all, I would say that WCM should be renamed back to CM and ECM should be renamed to EDM: Enterprise Document Management.
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