Enterprise Content Management: from niche to mainstream

At the end of last year, an interesting article was published on the Transform website by its Chief Editor Doug Henschen. Tranform was established in 2001 as a web publication focusing on enterprise content management. In this article "Moving out of a Niche, into the IT mainstream", Henschen announced that this was the last issue of Transform and that this publication would be absorbed by it's sister publication Intelligent Enterprise. Although we may regret the disappearance of this nice web publication, this is clearly a writing on the wall: enterprise content management is getting mature.

And here is some more proof of this evolution:

- Enterprise Content Management is starting to grab the attention of senior management: not only are the exploding amounts of unstructured content within organizations causing serious loss of productivity for knowledge workers, they can also pose a major threat. And we are not only talking "Sarbanes-Oxley-like" compliance here. No, we are talking about companies shipping heavy-duty machinery with faulty technical maintenance manuals. About sales reps who received the wrong price list and were selling products which did no longer exist. About purchasing departments who could no longer find the contract with a major supplier. About a publicly traded company who published the wrong press release on the French version of its Investors Relation web site. And so on...

- The big boys are moving in! With it's Sharepoint offering at entry-level pricing, Microsoft has had a lot of success in 2004. And for 2005 one may expect Oracle to join the ECM-race. Last December, they announced that their upcoming ECM-offering - at that time code-named 'Tsunami' but for obvious reasons quickly re-baptised to Collaboration Suite 10g - would become available around May 2005. What's also interesting to see is that high-end vendors like EMC Documentum are no longer only focusing on the big enterprises with deep pockets but are becoming really affordable to midsized companies.

- ECM software vendors are starting to ship specific business solutions build on top of their generic ECM platform. Some nice examples are Web Content Management vendor Tridion who is offering its Tridion Marketing Communication Solution to marketing professionals or Enterprise Search vendor FAST who is launching a complete range of 'Search derivative applications': AdVisor(TM), an eDirectory search solution or Marketrac(TM) which is an extremely powerful tool for market/competitive intelligence departments.

But the best proof that the ECM-market is getting serious is the impressive increase in the number of strategic long-term ECM-projects that are started up within larger organizations combined with the fact that small and midsized companies are also starting to invest in content management solutions and best practices

Amplexor Webwatch - Useful ECM resources on the Web

Making your content inventory

One should be surprised how many companies have purchased content management software without having a good insight on what content they have and what they want to do with it. A prerequisite to a successful ECM project is knowing precisely what content a company uses and where it is stored. This article can help you start to make your inventory.
(Source: Infoconomy by Jessica Twentyman)

10 Ways to improve your Intranet

Redesigning your Intranet from the ground is off course the best way to revive an underperforming Intranet. But it is also the most costly and time consuming way to go. How can the intranet team possibly find the time to improve the intranet whilst at the same time meeting the day-to-day maintenance schedule? This article outlines 10 practical ways that an intranet can be improved incrementally without yet another redesign.
(Source: KM Column - Step Two Designs)

Workflow is dead! Long live Business Process Management!

It strikes us that more and more workflow software vendors are positioning themselves as Business Process Management (BPM) software vendors. This article gives an insight in the true evolution and a brief overview of the vendors in the marketplace.
(Source:Infoconomy)

JSR170: a standard to watch?

The Java Community Process (JCP) programme has been very active since 1998 in developing open JavaTM technology specifications. One of the upcoming new releases - JSR 170 - could have a major impact on the content management architectures in the future. JSR170 specifies a standard API to access content repositories in JavaTM 2 independently of implementation. This API proposes that content repositories have a dedicated, standard way of interaction with applications that deal with content.
(Source:Java Community Process)