Aug 02, 2005
eZ systems just announced an extension for eZ publish that will support the OASIS Open Document Standard. The OpenDocument standard was approved in May 2005 and establishes an XML based format for office type applications (word processor, spreadsheet, etc.) that will increase the accessibility and re-usability of documents used within the enterprise. Read more here and here. OpenDocument is very close to the format developed by Open Office and, I think, is the missing link between the way we work today and our vision of a content managed world of re-usable, highly structured assets. Of course, this all depends on Microsoft's cooperation on adopting this or some structured XML format (promised with the next release of Office).
The eZ publish OpenDocument Extension accepts files in OpenDocument, Microsoft Word, and RTF and uses a WebDAV interface to upload documents via drag and drop. From eZ publish, content can be automatically exported into the OpenDocument format using OpenOffice templates.
I have had a lot of conversations about Open Office recently. The key issue is "what's the point." My view is that OpenOffice could turn into the preferred authoring interface used by open source and proprietary content management systems. This would put them at the level of Microsoft which is integrating Office with several of their server side technologies (like MCMS and SharePoint) to create a collaborative workspace using desktop applications. Of course, Microsoft has a huge advantage in market share and you just can't sell a product without at least a claim of MS Office support these days. But if enough CMS vendors start to support OpenOffice (and they have an interest in doing so because they compete with Microsoft on the CMS side), the office software market could get interesting again.
Jul 19, 2005
The latest issue of Intranet Journal has a good article on CM Professionals. If you want to learn how to be successful with content management, not just about the tools; I strongly recommend joining.
Jul 17, 2005
The OpenCMS Project recently officially released version 6.0.0 of OpenCMS. Version 6 has been in beta for some time and I have been waiting for the official "gold" release. Some of the new features that 6.0 introduces:
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In-site editing. This is where users with edit permissions are able to edit content directly on the presentation side of the site, rather than just through the management interface. If you have read some of my other mail and blog posts, you may know that I have mixed feelings about this design. On the plus side, it makes the system more intuitive because users are able to edit the site directly. On the negative side, this kind of feature reduces the potential for reuse and more dynamic presentation logic.
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New content types. This is a huge improvement over the last version. Version 5.x only had one content type: pages. This leads to unstructured content and poor separation of content and layout reducing the potential to reuse.
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Full text search of attachments (MS Word)
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Improved permissioning
OpenCMS the most mature and polished of the Java based open source CMS. With this release, OpenCMS improves its versatility and increases its potential as an enterprise ready CMS.
Jul 08, 2005
My Cutter IT Journal article "From Enterprise Content Management to Effective Content Management" is now posted on the Optaros website. I am interested in your comments/reactions. Please send them to sgottlieb at optaros.com.
Jul 01, 2005
Tony Byrne, of CMS Watch fame, just posted an excellent article on 5 common pitfalls encountered in a technology selection. People who have been through a number of these selections (from either the customer or vendor side) will recognize many of these issues.
I absolutely agree with Tony's point about becoming slaves to spreadsheets and the recommendation to consider more qualitative methods to examine the suitability of software (Pitfall #2). I also agree that the vendor that you work with is every bit as important as the feature/function/price of the product (Pitfall #4).
The most powerful technology selection technique you can leverage is talking to other users of the technology. Try to find other organizations that have similar business needs (not feature needs) and learn about their experiences with the technology and the support organization behind it. You will learn more this way than you will from hours of product demos and brochure reading.
Open source is not the only kind of software that has user communities. Commercial software has them too. Some vendors try to get in the way of customers (and prospects) learning from each other. Others encourage it. In fact, for some commercial software, customer forums are the most effective way of getting support. No matter what your software choice, use the community. If you can't/don't, you will suffer alone.
Jun 29, 2005
Following up on an earlier post. When a company starts thinking about contributing back to an open source project, it is best to have a policy that set ground rules for contribution. Here is ours.
Jun 29, 2005
The Content Wrangler has a posted some very interesting results from a survey on workflow. Some of the findings:
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Bottlenecks continue to be a problem in workflow and many respondents feel that better automation would improve matters
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The process is often hampered by people waiting on dependencies and then being rushed to complete their tasks.
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Finding and distributing the right version of an asset continues to be a problem. Particularly in environments that practice content reuse.
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On an unrelated note, many respondents never heard of some of the major CMS vendors. 26% never heard of Documentum.
Jun 27, 2005
Recently, I have come across a number of articles that made the point that you need to be careful of using GPL licensed code because you may have to contribute back your improvements. I wanted to clarify this assertion because, in most cases, it is simply not true. Still, even if you are not required to contribute back improvements to GPL licensed code, it may be in your best interest to do so but I will get to that later.
First a little on the GPL. The GPL, a.k.a. the GNU General Public License, is a product of the Free Software Foundation and it is considered the most restrictive of the many OSI Certified open source licenses. Many great open software applications including the Linux Kernel, are licensed under the GPL. Unlike some of the more laissez faire licenses, such as the BSD License, the GPL has a "viral clause" that says derivative works must be distributed under the same terms as the source work. So code based on GPL licensed code is GPL licensed.
Although this sounds scary, the "viral clause" is only triggered when the derivative work is distributed - as in sold or shared among a select group of entities. So if you extend Zope to add a new capability for your organization, and never share the code with anyone, you do not need to publish your improvement under the GPL rules. The trick is knowing what is considered distribution. Philip Albert wrote a great article in Linux Insider on this subject. Albert writes that sharing across certain corporate relationships, such as between subsidiaries or between a system's integrator and client, could be considered distribution. If you are working with a system's integrator on GPL code, you should be careful to structure the relationship as "work for hire." Otherwise, if you sharing the code with your consultants could be considered distribution.
Another factor is whether your code is a derived work or is considered a module or application that uses the GPL licensed application. Plugins and things of that nature are not considered derived work. In fact, software is often open sourced for the reason of expanding a market for non-open source software uses it. For example, SAP open sourced their database to make the value of ERP less about the database than the application sitting on top of the database. The Firefox browser phenomena is so interesting because it has the potential to create a market of extensions that work on the freely available browser.
I have talked about why you may not have to contribute back your improvements to GPL licensed code. Now, lets discuss why you may want to contribute back your improvements. You contribute code back when the competitive advantage of sole access is outweighed by the cost of maintaining it. When you contribute back, great things can happen. The code gets reviewed by really good programmers. The code becomes part of the core application so that you have less to worry about it when you upgrade. The contribution that you make also has the potential to grow into a new feature that would be useful to you. The application gets better and attracts more users which ensures its future.
Much has been written about strategies for using and contributing to open source. One of the more powerful models is Geoffrey Moore's distinction between "Core" and "Context" which he presented at OSBC 2005 in San Francisco. I have also found my colleague Stephe Walli's 2005 USENIX presentation Under the Hood: Open Source Business Models in Context to be helpful in understanding the benefits of using and contributing back to open source. The general gist behind these models is that a company has certain capabilities that give it a competitive advantage (Core) and a whole lot of other capabilities that it needs to keep the lights on or make the core stuff work (Context). That is not to say that the context stuff is not important. Companies need to pay their employees but having the best payroll system is not going to make one company a market leader.
Back to the world of content management. There are many content management features that are always context (storage) and many features that are frequently context (workflow) and occasionally there will be some features that are core (such as, perhaps, views of content that give new insight or knowledge). But, of course, it is the content that resides in the system which is really core to the company. Based on this breakdown, content management has high potential to attract cooperation and contributions from organizations that want solid systems and are not threatened by the prospect of their competitor having the same core capabilities.
Jun 24, 2005
I was catching up on my Gilbane reading and noticed an announcement that JSR 170, the specification for the Java Content Repository (JCR), has finally been approved. Thanks and congratulations to Day Software's David Nuescheler and the Apache Jackrabbit Team for pushing the JCR through this arduous process.
This news could not come at a better time for CMS owners and buyers who must be concerned with this latest round of M & A. The JCR will allow organizations to store their content in a standards compliant repository that will enable greater flexibility in the tools they use to manage their content. Now all we have to do is wait for a critical mass of CMS providers to support the JCR. The open source world is clearly in the lead with Apache JackRabbit, the JCR reference implementation and several open source CMS are using it. Day Software has a JSR 170 compliant JCR in Beta. Expect IBM to be the next company to release a commmercial JCR. Oracle appears to be dragging their feet and blew an opportunity to integrate JCR support into their new ECM product or their database.
Jun 20, 2005
Alfresco, a start-up founded by John Newton (co-founder of Documentum) just got $2MM in seed round financing from Accel Partners. They want to become the MySQL of Enterprise Content Management and promise an initial release of the product for download on July 27th 2005. The web site is a little thin but some information can be found on the road map page and the architecture page. They have made a great selection of OSS components: Lucene search, Spring AOP framework, and JCR (Java Content Repository) support and the application will run on JBOSS.
It is unclear if/how an external community will contribute to the project - that area of the site is not yet live. However, none of the people listed on the team page have a history of open source project leadership so it is possible that development might be limited to Alfresco engineering staff.
I am looking forward to trying Alfresco. There are few major open source CMS projects focusing on document management despite the fact that document management represents a major part of the content management market.