Recently in Enterprise Content Management - ECM Category

Of course we think all of our conference sessions are not to be missed, but for those specially interested in enterpirse social networks, and process transformation we've paired up AIIM President John Mancini, to share some of the research his organization is completing on this topic, and Mike Gotta, Senior Technical Manager for Social Software at Cisco, and ex Gartner VP & Research Director. Be sure to check this one out the latest trends in this area

C4. From Collaboration to Business Transformation: Expanding the role of Enterprise Social Networks

1. sales and marketing;
2. product design and innovation; and
3. knowledge worker creativity and productivity.

This session will demonstrate why the time has come to move discussions of social business from the abstract benefits of "collaboration" to a richer focus on process and value chain transformation. 

We are going to have fun with the keynotes this year with our new rapid-fire format. You won't want to miss any of it so be sure to get their early enough for a good seat. Also, please remember that after seven years at the Westin at Copley Place we have moved to a roomier spot at the Westin Waterfront at 425 Summer Street. You could easily lose 45 minutes by showing up at the wrong hotel!

K1. Opening Keynotes: Big Ideas - Bold Statements
Wednesday, November 30, 8:30 - 10:00 & 11:00 - 12:00

Our keynotes are designed to inspire, provoke, and provide perspective on the big issues, trends, and shifting foundation of technologies, digital strategies, and channels for communication and engagement. Our keynote sessions this year will use a rapid-fire format. Each speaker will focus on describing a single big idea or making a bold statement that will help us think a little differently about our use or expectations of content and content technologies. Presentations are limited to 10-15 minutes with 5 minutes for Q&A. Use of slides will be minimal.

Moderator: Frank Gilbane

Christos M. Cotsakos, Ph.D.
Founding Chairman, CEO & President, EndPlay
Christer Johnson 
Partner, North American BAO Advanced Analytics Leader, IBM Global Business Services
Georgiana Cohen 
Manager, Web Content and Strategy, Tufts University & Co-founder, Meet Content
Maureen Chew 
Chief Applications Officer, Information Technology Division, Commonwealth of MA
Stephen Powers 
Principal Analyst & Research Director, Forrester Research
Tony Byrne
Founder, Real Story Group & CMS Watch
Scott Liewehr 
Lead Analyst, Web Content Management, Outsell Gilbane Services & President, Content Management Professionals Assoc.

Registration information

For those of you who aren't familiar with who I am, I am the Marketing Specialist for Gilbane, more specifically the man behind the various social media curtains. One of my favorite parts of social media is memes, defined as, "a unit of cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena." The most famous example of a meme, almost synonymous with the internet now, is Lolcatz. One of the great pleasures I have managing the Gilbane accounts is the unique community. Defying stereotypes of computer geeks, the online CMS community has proven to be composed of a plethora of creative, witty, clever, and simply funny individuals spanning timezones, continents, and native languages. Earlier this year, we were treated with CMSHaikus, which I was happy to preserve in an ebook (the .pdf originally had Youtube videos embedded in it, but these have since been blocked due to a security patch). This time around, @Adriaanbloem took another meme and spun it with his own angle.

The tweets that followed were a mixture of angst, disappointment, frustration, front-line experience, but most importantly humor! The sarcasm runs rampant here, but the jabs are taken at brands, vendors, scripting languages, developers, each other, and consulting agencies (although the "Godfather" and the agency in his name still seems to command respect as of this writing ).

The engine seems to have plenty of meme steam left in it, but when it's gone you can read the #CMSRetraction Archive, or better yet follow the participants and become part of the quirky CMS Twitterrati. If I missed you on the list, drop me a line (@gilbane or @tallbonez) and I will be sure to add you!

I am delighted that I’ve just completed my first solo paper here as an analyst: Looking Outside the CMS Box for Enterprise Website Governance. I say solo, but I ought to start by saying I’m grateful for having had a great deal of support from Mary Laplante as my reform from vendor to analyst continues. 

This paper has allowed me to pick at a subject that I’ve long had in the back of my mind, both in terms of CMS product strategy and of what we, as content management professionals, need to be cognizant of as we get swept up in engaging web experiences – that of corporate content governance. 

When I write and talk about web engagement or the web experience, I often refer to the first impression – that your website meets all of your audience, prospects, customers or citizens. They don’t all see your shiny headquarters building, meet the friendly receptionist or see that you have todays copy of The Times on the coffee table – but they do see your website. 

Mistakes such as a misspelling, an outdated page or a brand inconsistency all reflect badly on your attention to detail. This tarnishes the professionalism of your services, the reliability of your products, and attention you will pay to meeting consumer needs.

Of course, when those lapses are related to compliance issues (such as regulatory requirements and accessibility standards), they can be even more damaging, often resulting in financial penalties and a serious impact on your reputation.

I see this governance as the foundation for any content driven business application, but in this paper we focus on website governance and aim to answer the following questions:

• What are the critical content governance risks and issues facing the organization? 
• Is your CMS implementation meeting these challenges? 
• What solutions are available to address governance needs that are not addressed by CMS? 

The paper is  now available for download from our Beacon library page and from Magus, who sponsored it.

Magus are also presenting business seminars on website governance and compliance  on October 12 in Washington, DC, and October 14 in New York. My colleague Scott Liewehr will be presenting at those events, drawing on the analysis in the Beacon as part of that seminar program. You can learn more about those events and register on the Magus website.

Yesterday, it was announced that another CMS poster child of the late 90’s is to be acquired as Adobe Systems Incorporated and Day Software Holding AG announced the two companies have entered into a definitive agreement for Adobe to acquire all of the publicly held registered shares of Day Software in a transaction worth approximates US$240 million.

This follows Adobe’s acquisition of Omniture late last year and clearly demonstrates their intent in entering the web experience management (WEM) market place that we cover with interest here at Gilbane - as we anticipate they bring together the audience insight gained through the web analytics of Omniture and Day’s CRX content platform.  

This will presumably add momentum to Day’s own move into the WEM space with their recent product marketing strategy, as they have reinvented themselves to be closer to the marketer with recent attention paid to functionality such as personalization, analytics, variant testing and messaging around using their repository for marketing campaigns and asset management.   We await with interest firm integration plans. 

In addition Day are a longtime advocate of CMS repository standards (JCR and CMIS), something that is also close to our heart at Gilbane. This announcement has also sent tremors through the Open Source community, as they wonder about Adobe’s commitment to the Apache projects like Sling and Jackrabbit that Day have been so supportive of.    

Whilst Adobe and Day have been very quick to state that they will maintain Day’s commitment to these community projects, it’s hard not think that this commitment inside Day is cultural and we wonder whether this can realistically be maintained as the acquisition matures and Day is brought into the fold. 

The acquisition also raises questions about what this means for Alfresco’s two year relationship with Adobe that runs pretty deep with OEM integration to Adobe LiveCycle – and Erik Larson (Senior Director of Product Management at Adobe) has publically stated the intention to integrate Day and LifeCycle to create a ‘full suite of enterprise technologies’.  It will be important for the Adobe customers that have adopted the Alfresco based integration, to understand how this will affect them going forward. 

One other area that I am sure my colleagues here at Gilbane in the Publishing Technologies practice will be watching with interest is the impact this will have on Adobe’s digital publishing offering.  

As we’ve seen with previous acquisitions, it’s best to be cautious over what the future might hold. From a WEM product strategy perspective bringing Ominture and Day together makes a great deal of sense to us. The commitment to standards and open source projects is probably safe for now, it has been a part of the Day identity and value proposition for as long as I can remember and one of the most exciting things could be what this acquisition means for digital publishing. 

Let’s wait and see… 

Suggested further reading:

• Adobe Press Release 
• Day Software FAQ 
• CMSWire - Perspectives: What the Adobe + Day Software Deal Means
• Real Story Group - Adobe To Acquire Day - First Take ECM Perspective 
• Adobe Buys ECM Vendor (and Apache Contributor) Day Software

The call for speakers has been issued, with June 14, 2010 being the deadline to submit a proposal for presenting at Gilbane Boston this year.

Guidelines can be found here: http://gilbane.com/speaker_guidelines.html

Feel free to ask us any issues you have that aren't covered above!

I am very happy to announce the addition of Ian Truscott to our team as a Gilbane Group Senior Analyst based in London. We have had customers in Europe for many years and have wanted to expand our business with a local presence, so Ian is an especially welcome addition. Ian's focus will be on Web Content Management, which remains our largest area of consulting, and has become even more important with the increasing influence and activity of enterprise marketing in web content strategies and purchases.
 
Ian comes to us from Alterian, where he was VP, WCM Product Strategy. Alterian sells a platform that combines web content management, marketing campaign management and social media monitoring tools.
 
A little more on Ian from his summary on LinkedIn:
"... fifteen years of enterprise software experience, ten of which working with web content management. This experience has come as a CTO, in product marketing, product development, sales and consulting - from starting my career as a computer operator and UNIX administrator. A strong web content management pedigree, having focused on web technologies for the last ten years, working with some of the major vendors and pioneers in this area. During this time I have taken various products to market, engaging with a broad range of organisations (including McDonalds, Diageo, AstraZeneca, WWE and Glaxo) and large central government departments while living and working in the USA and UK. "  
 
You can reach Ian at: ian@gilbane.com, or: +44 (0) 203 137 9600. Ian is an active Twitterer at @iantruscott. You can also meet Ian if you will be at our conference in San Francisco in May. You might even find Ian together with our Senior Analyst Scott Liewehr in the hotel pub amid a gaggle of other CMS industry insiders.
 
Welcome Ian!

(Disclosure: Alterian has been a Gilbane client, and in keeping with our strict vendor neutral policy and our ethics policy regarding clients, Alterian was fully supportive of Ian joining us, and Ian has sold all his shares in the company.)

The term Cloud Content Management has begun to appear with increasing frequency in the last few months. But what does it mean? And how is it different from Enterprise Content Management (ECM)?

Gilbane Group answers these questions in our latest Beacon, which it titled Cloud Content Management: Facilitating Controlled Sharing of Active Content. Here is how we briefly define Cloud Content Management and contrast it to ECM:

"Cloud Content Management is an emerging set of content sharing and management
practices and a supporting category of software built on an open, secure, cloud-based
platform. It is rapidly deployed and easily used to manage content, in any format, that is
actively shared among collaborators working both inside and across firewalls. Cloud
Content Management is complementary to Enterprise Content Management, which is more
focused on controlling access to static, unstructured content in TIFF, PDF, and office
productivity document formats as it is electronically captured, stored, distributed,
archived, and disposed."

The Gilbane Beacon explores the various facets of this definition and goes into much more detail as to how Cloud Content Management differs from, and complements, ECM. We urge you to download the Beacon (free registration required), read it, then return here to share comments.

Congratulations to recently elected officers, and to new CM Pros board members Saravanan Rajan, Brett Zucker and Ian Truscott!

Content Management is often loosely defined but covers a virtual ecosystem of vendors and practitioners. The 2010 CM Pros board extends a call to the community of practitioners to further define product niches and areas of specialist expertise. The goal is to guide the market and the people that look to CM Pros.

Board-appointed officers for the coming year are:

• Scott Liewehr, President (Senior WCM Consultant at Gilbane Group and Principal at onesta)
• Saravanan Rajan, Vice President (Chief Technology Officer for CoSI Consulting)
• Ayse Kok, Secretary (PhD Student, ICT Consultant, and Researcher)
• Brett Zucker, Treasurer (Executive Vice President and Chief Technical Officer at Bridgeline Software)
• Ian Truscott, Director (Product Strategist, Alterian)

Look for action from this board as they gear up for a full season of activities that will engage the Content Management community. Be sure to join CM Pros at their Spring Summit at The Gilbane Conference (http://gilbanesf.com), May 18 in San Francisco.

About CM Professionals
Founded in 2004, CM Pros provides information, expertise, and support to global content management practitioners and related professionals and the organizations they serve. Through peer-to-peer knowledge exchange, educational events, and advocacy of respected practices, the association fosters a better understanding of this critically important discipline.

Join CM Pros on the Web at www.cmprofessionals.org.

I just published a new white paper, Social Publishing with Drupal, sponsored by Acquia and also available here. We forget that publishing and blogging (including this post) are stove-piped operations. But what would happen if we could intelligently keep track of all these disparate threads, combining the authoritative content from trusted sources with insights from friends and colleagues, organized contextually around the ways we think about things and make decisions? Social publishing is a new lens for delivering business value.

Here's the executive summary for the white paper. Click the link above if you'd like to learn more. What's the future of social publishing? Let's start a debate. /geoff

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Social publishing combines groomed and authoritative content, produced by an organization and emphasizing its core messages, with user-generated content that customers contribute via blogs, wikis, and social media tools. Drupal is an example of a social publishing platform, developed and maintained as an open source project, and delivered at an affordable cost.

Drupal is now deployed in major media companies, high technology firms, universities, magazine publishers, government agencies (including the White House), research groups, and non-profit organizations. Whether it is in a commercial, non-profit, or government setting, organizations rely on Drupal to project their presence over the web and to channel the interactive experiences that foster communities of contributors.

By leveraging Drupal’s capabilities as a social publishing platform, organizations are able to reinforce their branded experiences and deliver relevant content to their customers and stakeholders. By exploiting Drupal as an open source project, developers supporting these organizations can easily enhance and extend Drupal’s capabilities, and introduce innovative modes of interactivity that meet specific business requirements.

Drupal is an attractive investment with substantial business benefits. Organization can keep their license and support costs modest by building on an open source project. Organizations can leverage the collective expertise of Drupal developers to solve immediate publishing problems. By relying on Drupal, organizations can stay abreast of the rapid technology changes when building competitive solutions for the digital age.