Archive for the ‘ecm’ Category

Another clue about Oracle’s attitude toward Web Content Management

Tuesday, May 4th, 2010

By now most industry analysts have grown skeptical of Oracle’s commitment to web content management (WCM). Those analysts that are still in denial are either too focused on the document management side of enterprise content management (ECM) to even care or they are on Oracle’s payroll. The writing has been on the wall for a while now. Before Oracle bought it, Stellent had (in my opinion) the best WCM functionality of any of the document-oriented ECM products. They were miles ahead of EMC/Documentum and IBM/FileNet. Stellent was even edging past traditional WCM products like Vignette and Interwoven who were neglecting WCM to concentrate on their ECM offering. The Stellent acquisition happened right before the release of a new version that introduced big WCM improvements. After the acquisition, Stellent got dumped into the “Fusion Middleware” (AKA “Neither Database nor ERP”) division which was a clear sign that Oracle didn’t want to spend too much time understanding what it bought.

The reason why Oracle bought Stellent is pretty clear. For readers who are not CMS historians, many years ago Stellent bought a company called “Inso” which developed the filters that could convert documents into different formats. Microsoft has Inso to thank for breaking WordPerfect’s and Lotus 123’s holds on their respective markets. Because of OEM’ed Inso technology, an MS Word user could open a WordPerfect document. Stellent used the acquired Inso technology to lead the market in word-processing-to-web functionality. More than with any other ECM product, a Stellent UCM user could realistically use MS Word to maintain a structured web asset. Oracle’s plan for Stellent was to use those filters to help its document repository story. At the time, Oracle was pitching its “ECM-light” vision that positioned its database as a step up from a file system for storing documents. The database could store metadata and provided a search interface that could list documents in different ways. Inso filters helped parse documents for better indexing and also introduced a capability for exporting into different formats. Plus the Stellent user interface was a big improvement over anything that Oracle could cook up (no, knowledge workers do not want to work in SQLPlus).

Wow, that was some rant. But why I am talking about that now? Well, I was just listening to an NPR Environment podcast that was underwritten by Oracle (thanks Oracle, BTW). When reading the Oracle underwriter statement, the presenter instructed listeners to “visit www.oracle.com/ironman2 to learn more.” Now we all know that Oracle is a big company and are probably too busy to create marketing landing pages for all of their different advertising campaigns (no matter how easy it is to do). You can make the old “cobbler’s son” excuse. But in this era where the premium WCM vendors are selling on “interactive marketing” and “engagement” functionality wouldn’t you think that Oracle would make an effort? Wouldn’t it be helpful to know whether traffic was coming from an NPR or Iron Man 2 advertising spot? Ironically, I seem to remember A/B testing, marketing landing pages, and reporting functionality were all part of that mid-acquisition Stellent version. Apparently the Oracle marketing team seems not to have discovered it.

My Enterprise Text Editor

Tuesday, March 16th, 2010

The Productive Programmer (Theory in Practice (O’Reilly)) is a useful book of how to use your computer more efficiently. One of the several tips that I have adopted is to use one text editor (in my case, TextMate) for all text oriented work. The idea behind this is that when you work in one tool, you get to know it really well and can take advantage of all its nifty time saving features. Most software users, however, only use a tiny fraction of the useful features supported by the software.

I had gradually been moving in this direction for a while. At first, I just used a text editor to program in dynamic languages (Javascript, Python, PHP, Perl, SQL), do HTML/XML markup, and edit large data files. About 6 months ago, I got so fed up with Eclipse’s clunkiness that I started to write Java in TextMate. Since reading the chapter in the book, though, I have started to use TextMate as a blogging tool. This was a big step for me because I was quite happy with Red Sweater’s MarsEdit software. Yes I know that MarsEdit gives you the option to edit posts in TextMate but I decided to go all in. I have not yet been able to get TextMate hooked up as my email editor. I always thought programmers that did everything in EMACS were silly. But since making the change, I have found a lot of powerful keyboard shortcuts and macros. My one hold-out is that I still use Oxygen for editing my DocBook documents.

My successful experience caused me to question whether there was any merit to the “One CMS to rule them all” ECM (Enterprise Content Management) vision that I have been battling over the past 7 years (a battle that I won, by the way, but I am not gloating). Would there be any benefit of having a knowledge worker getting to be a true expert in one tool? Then I came to senses and realized two key differences:

  • Web Content Management is about managing semi-structured data, Enterprise Content Management is about managing metadata. A WCMS primarily helps a user edit and and assemble reusable, structured content. In a document-oriented ECM system, most of the documents are binary files that are edited using tools like MS Word. These ECM systems are used primarily for creating metadata, organizing, and managing permissions. Furthermore, most people organize their documents on a file system metaphor. Web content organization tends to be much more fluid and rule based. Your website is not a file system. You will fail at web content management if you think that a website is a bunch of MS Word documents saved as HTML. Because there is so little functional overlap, one tool doesn’t make sense.
  • CMS users don’t define them selves as CMS users. Programmers, at least the good ones, care about their craft and take pride in how they work. They read books and blogs to continually hone their skills. They love their tools and treasure knowledge of obscure little tricks. Good designers tend to be the same way. Your average content contributor may be similarly inspired about their profession, but if they are, they don’t usually consider using a computer program as part of that quest. For them the computer software is a necessary evil. They are looking for intuitive tools that require no learning. They tend not to invest the time to achieve expertise. If I were to equate using a computer to driving a car, the average computer user drives around in 1st gear or reverse all day long. They discover a way to get the car to move and then leave it at that.

There is a direct relationship between specialization and intuitiveness of software. When the software designer knows exactly what the user will use the software for, he can be very explicit in the user interface. For example, when creating a blogging tool, the software designer can put in a big button that says “CREATE BLOG ENTRY.” A designer of a more generalized, multi-functional tool requires more compromise and negotiation with the user. The user needs to learn how to access lots of basic capabilities and string them together to get the result that he wants. Just look at the UNIX command line and piping together commands. TextMate is a little of both, the designer of TextMate knows that the user is going to want to enter text and save files. That is why the program opens with a big area to type in. But the designer doesn’t know whether the user will be wanting to post this block of text to a blog or compile the text into executable software or hundreds of other options. This is why those functions need to be buried under cryptic key sequences like “control-command-p” (that’s post to blog) or “command-r” (that is compile and run). If a CMS was written for someone that wanted to be a CMS expert, it would probably look something like a command line Sabre terminal. And this is why all purpose tools fail for content managers.

WCM needs a new name. Or, perhaps, an old one.

Friday, December 18th, 2009

This 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.

ECM Interview with Jean Marie Pascal

Tuesday, January 20th, 2009

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!

Nuxeo Web Engine

Friday, July 11th, 2008

Nuxeo 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, 2008

Alfresco 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, 2006

John 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, 2006

And 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, 2006

CMS 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, 2006

Charlie 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.