Monday, June 27, 2005
Blog Moved
Friday, June 24, 2005
Hummingbird buys RedDot
However, true benefits will only accrue if the two vendors actually integrate the products tightly. This means having a common user repository, common content repository and some kind of workflow interoperability. Otherwise, the two would just be like desparate products, with companies having to duplicate data and users, which defeats any advantages that could be got by a single ECM product.
Tuesday, June 21, 2005
Google - A new player in PCM space?
As far as content management goes, they are a leader in blogging which essentially is a poor man's CMS.
They already have API's to access many of these features. With a couple of more acqusitions and some consolidation in different services they have, they might be a player to watch for in the PCM space.
Tuesday, June 14, 2005
Usability in Portals and Content Management
More and more organizations are rationalizing and consolidating different sites and portals that had proliferated in the enterprise. Each of these have a different look & feel, navigation and a different user experience. Hence, it will be important to focus on usability in order to provide a consistent user experience.
Secondly, most of these products force you to follow a "design template" provided by the product. For example, almost all portal products let you choose a single column, 2-column or a similar template. It is certainly possible to have your own design but it is really difficult to actually implement it. Hence, the design is actually driven by what a product can (and can not) do rather than the other way round.
Portal Servers - A dying breed
IMO, in the future, more and more clients will buy or use portal features provided by the application server vendor. Laundry requirements like search, content aggregation and integration, basic content management, personalization etc will be provided by these. There will be niche offerings such as eLearning, collaboration etc for which these organizations will buy products that will need to integrate with the application (or portal) server.
Friday, June 10, 2005
Is Open Source good enough?
I'm thinking of migrating our portal to an open source (OS) offering. One of the uses of this portal is that it is like a brand for our group (I work with Portals and Content Management group of a leading Indian SI) and we use this portal to give demos to clients. Hence i'm spending a lot of time to decide whether this is a right move. However, with OS offerings maturing and more & more clients themselves considering OS, this might be a right move. Plus, if we use an OS product that is standards based (like JSR 168), we can always migrate the portlets to another portal server if there is a specific client requirement.
Because of the features that we require and some other factors, I've short listed Jetspeed and Liferay. However, Jetspeed-1 is not standards (read JSR168) compliant and Jetspeed-2 is not available for download yet. That leaves me with Liferay. Its a good product but I'm not yet convinced that it can compete with the more sophisticated commercial products.
PS: Because of political reasons, we are limited to java based products.
Friday, June 03, 2005
Consolidation in Content Management Space
Looks like content is indeed the king these days. Today, Sun announced a proposed take over of StorageTek. This gives them a foot hold in a fast growing Information Life Cycle Management (ILM) space. Next step would be to buy a Content Management vendor. Once that is thru, they will have presence in Server market, Storage and tools to manage that enormous data. This would also give some competition to EMC which became a big player in this area after they bought over Documentum in 2003.
Fatwire Content Server could have been a probable candidate. Its a brilliant product based on J2EE technologies had shared close relationship with Sun. Vignette could have been another choice but recently they've started focusing *again* on .Net. OpenText and FileNet could also be in the race too.
Microsoft already have a good offering in this space after buying out NCompass. IBM, BEA and Oracle too have small time offerings in CM space but they can not match the sophisticated feature set of Vignette, Interwoven et. al.
I think its not too far when all the biggies - IBM, BEA, HP, Oracle and Sun will have a content management offering, most likely thru an acquisition. Smaller players and Open Source will still be there in the market. However, they will need to be niche and should differentiate themselves from these big guys. After all, once Oracle or Sun has a CM offering, no one can stop them from commoditizing it and offering it as part of bundle free of cost.
Sunday, May 29, 2005
CMS features
One can always say that the data generated by, say a voting application is content and hence by definition, any application that handles that is a content management system. If we were to follow that line of thinking, then pretty much everything will be a content management system. An ERP, a CRM system, a search engine (Google??) - you name it and it'll be a CMS.
In my opinion, a CMS should provide core capabilities like:
- Content Creation - Web based forms for content entry, integration with content creation software like MS-Office
- Content Management - Repository Management, Workflows, version management etc
- Content Delivery - Some kind of templating that separates content from presentation and a mechanism to publish content
It would be good to have interfaces to search engines and other applications for dynamic delivery of content. This includes applications for security, personalization and so on. If some of these are built into the CMS, that should be considered additional.