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Comparing relational vs. object-oriented database use in content management is highly subjective, and can’t be generalized. That would be like saying that the movie is always better than the book it is based on. Take the Harry Potter series. While the books have been phenomenally successful, the movies are doing equally well at the box office.

There’s not a one-size fits all approach for technology either. Comparing relational and object-oriented databases needs to be done from several perspectives – notably business rationale for the end user as well as technological advantage – not just one.

On the business end, documentation is mission critical, and must be available 24x7. Relational databases like Oracle support application clustering and high availability out of the box. Customers can count on Oracle always being available, and in a global working environment, everyone can get their job done.

Many businesses need to migrate from some form of binary documentation to XML, but it doesn't happen instantly. Using a relational database, these businesses can store their binary documentation and take full advantage of a CMS while they undertake the process of converting to XML. A relational database can also act as a single repository that stores both XML and binary content, eliminating the need for a separate file system and creates a more homogenous environment for IT.

When business demands and technology realities meet, an argument can be made that a mission critical database application like Oracle requires an amount of care and feeding to be properly maintained. There is, however, also a misunderstanding that with an XML database, an end user can simply let it run and everything is fine.

In reality, many companies like to have control over their “family jewels,” and may want the option of feeding other applications that have canned integrations to relational databases. XQuery may be great, but businesses need to search for content that can be in many forms, XML, PDF, Word, etc. Using a relational database and other technologies, it is possible to support a very robust search mechanism across over 295 different formats.

In both cases, scalability is always a concern. The user must be able to scale and manage both vertically (larger machines) and horizontally (additional machines) while maintaining the integrity of the data and 24x7 access to the system.

Relational databases provide out-of-the-box horizontal scalability, as well as the ability to acutely control how system resources are used. This is crucial in serious business applications. Relational databases can stuff entire areas of XML into a single row (such as a

WIth Carl's recent post on SaaS, and John Newton's "Content Management 2.0" discussion, I thought I'd throw this into the mix... recently there has also been a flurry of activity around a concept called “Office 2.0” – another offshoot of the term “Web 2.0” – in which all traditional office applications can be replaced by online services accessible through a generic web browser.

What’s making this possible is a set of new technologies including AJAX, RSS and web services, a set of actual applications such as Google’s gmail and ZOHO’s “online” word processor, and a great deal of unbridled enthusiasm.

Since Office 2.0 is particularly aimed at applications that affect business and larger enterprises, I’d like to take a quick look at how well it fits the needs of such enterprises, and then suggest how it might be extended to better meet these needs.

But first, I’d like to point out that it’s easy to get caught up in the details of technologies like AJAX and RSS, and miss the bigger picture. I would propose that the real excitement is in the vision enabled by the technology, as opposed to the technology itself. To not see this leads to the inevitable “religious wars” around specific tools, which we of course want to avoid...

To put this in perspective, Office 2.0 reminds me of what happened with CD-ROM twenty years ago. I still vividly recall a colleague of mine proudly announcing that he was going to the world’s first international CD-ROM conference, which he described as the “Woodstock” of the computer industry. He simply couldn’t contain his excitement about this pivotal event. But then, I remember him suddenly changing his facial expression, looking at me wryly and saying, “well of course, CD-ROM is actually only a storage medium…can you imagine me being excited about going to a floppy disk conference?”

Twenty years later, we might well ask the same thing. CD-ROM has become about as mundane as floppy disks were then. But at the time, CD-ROM represented much more than a new storage medium. Instead, it symbolized the sudden freedom to access and search information – right from your own desktop – that would otherwise be virtually inaccessible. It was in fact, the first glimpse of the kind of mass interconnectivity that the World Wide Web would later provide.

Office 2.0 is much like that – it represents freedom from the tyranny of desktop applications and proprietary data locked up on individual computers. It heralds a new age of unfettered collaboration and information sharing within enterprises.

So what are the key things that are exciting about Office 2.0, and do its maxims and rules actually fit larger enterprises? I think the answer is a tentative “yes” - at least at a conceptual level. And at least so long as the Office 2.0 folks are willing to make a few compromises and entertain some crucial extensions.

To explore this further, let’s go through the official Office 2.0 rules one by one…

#1 - No client application other than a web browser. Actually, this the holy grail of nearly all corporate IT departments, because one of the biggest headaches in IT is trying to keep all the client applications up to-date on individual computers. In practice, we’d have to accommodate situations where a high-speed Internet connection is not available, but I would grant that this is increasingly the exception.

#2 - No files on your personal computer. In principle, this is the entire thrust of enterprise content management initiatives, taking information that’s buried on people’s “C:” drives and getting into a managed and accessible central repository. So far, so good.

#3 - No dependence on any particular vendor.This is another mantra of corporate IT, expressing itself in the current fervor over Software as a Service and Service-Oriented Architectures, ideally with plug-and-play vendor apps encapsulated in generic web services interfaces.

#4 - Collaboration through document sharing and publishing. Again, this a winner with big enterprises. In fact, this is most of what my company, Flatirons Solutions, does for a living. And from the overall perspective of Web 2.0, I might add that wikis and blogs are an increasingly popular way to share ideas and knowledge within larger organizations, supplementing the sharing and publishing of documents.

#5 - Syndication in addition to peer-to-peer collaboration. This is another focus of enterprise content management, allowing people to subscribe to documents or content that has changed or is newly-published. And RSS syndication is increasingly one of the key channels to which we find ourselves publishing content.

#6 - Seamless data import/export across services. This is a fundamental objective of all enterprise content management initiatives, but now comes the rub. The current Office 2.0 vision thinks of sharing in terms of “interchangeable” formats like .DOC, HTML and PDF. But .DOC is a common but still proprietary vendor format, and HTML and PDF are really only sharable at the visible level. In other words, HTML and PDF let you display and print each other’s information, but not actually interchange the underlying source data and information in a way a computer can process and transform.

Proprietary word processing seems less proprietary when it’s on the Web, but if you really want interchangeability between services, you need to be using a vendor, format and media-neutral standard like XML. XML does not assume a particular vendor, nor does it assume web or print as the output medium. Instead, it encodes the information itself in a completely neutral form, from which media-specific formats like HTML and PDF can be derived.

In the work we do with large enterprises, XML also provides the key to sharing information at a much deeper level than “documents.” When we look at the set of documents that people need to share and publish, we see that there is often a tremendous amount of redundancy. If this overlapping information is authored and maintained independently, there are huge problems with inconsistency, and a lot of unnecessary time and cost maintaining and reconciling the multiple versions.

XML allows source information to be “chunked up” into the underlying building blocks, and from there flexibly mixed-and-matched to create the full array of print and Web-based documents. Individuals can collaborate on the source building blocks – without needing to assume a particular assembled document or output medium – and then combine the building blocks of interest into the documents they produce. Furthermore, if these reusable building blocks are structured as standalone “topics”, they can be directly published and syndicated outside the context of a higher-level document or web page. We call this “single source” publishing – because underlying content is maintained once, and then reused many times.

So, is Office 2.0 the right idea for larger enterprises? Perhaps, in principle…but to make it really work we need to merge its vision with the significant work already going on in single-source XML-based publishing. Then we’d have the potential for a real winner.

I’m not at the conference this week (we do have several people from our shop there), but to answer a question posed by Frank Gilbane:

What is the future of software as a service, and is it appropriate for enterprise content applications like content management, authoring, etc.?

The SaaS model seems to have been proven to the point where it’s hard to imagine that it won’t keep growing. We recently posted a whitepaper on SaaS myths, which debunks most of the common arguments against SaaS. In addition to that discussion, I’d offer the following four points:

1) SaaS is a proven technology. It arguably extends to the early days of the web with software ASPs. I guess you could even argue the lineage goes all the way back to mainframe apps! :-) Certainly, though, the existing SaaS companies have been working successfully with this business model for more than six years now.

2) Web technologies have reached a point where SaaS is an out of the box solution. You can now count on fast network connections for users both in the office and home. Security systems are complete from SSL with web browsers up through terminal services like Citrix which allow even HIPAA compliance. For web apps, browser technologies like IFRAMES and AJAX allow apps to be easily integrated on a page (mashups).

3) SaaS provides much more robust server management and security, especially for small and medium sized businesses. As web applications grow more complex, SaaS allows much more convenient, rigorous and cost-effective control over hosting. By centralizing and focusing, the best resources can be brought to bear on fewer hosting environments.

4) This one is a bit of a prediction, and is specific to web sites. Currently, you have a couple options when adding components like blogs, rss, ecommerce, polls, surveys, and search to web sites. You can install apps for those services, which allows you to control ad placement and design. The alternative is to use free hosted apps where the ad revenue goes to the SaaS company. So, the logical next step is for high quality hosted apps where the ad revenue is shared with the web site. This is already appearing with sites like MetaCafe. For an advanced CMS, though, I am not sure this will happen since the CMS tends to be the hub for all the other web apps, but it is certainly possible for a basic CMS.

The Content Management market today seems to be moving in two contradictory directions at once. On the one hand, we see ever larger software players, such as IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft building or acquiring content management, driving it "down" into infrastructure. To IBM and Oracle, content is just an extension of their dominance in the data center. ECM to them is thus an extension of the database. Microsoft's push, with both Windows SharePoint Services, and eventually WinFS (no longer part of Vista) is similar, but treats content more as the extension of the file system - the "back end of Office" as it were. While based on Microsoft’s very different perspective of working from the desktop inward to IT, it is still fundamentally an infrastructure play. Content management in this world is still fundamentally way down in the IT technology "stack."

Yet on the other hand, we see customers increasingly funding content management from line-of-business budgets, and purchasing content management based on its ability to solve line-of-business problems. Performance, scalability, reliability are not to be ignored, but other questions dominate selection, such as: "Will we get more returns from our internet marketing efforts with this system?" or "Will our department be able to move up deadlines with this system?" In short, these buyers are positioning the content management system far "up the stack" as one or more different content-driven applications used to produce measurable line-of-business returns.

How can buyers be moving up the stack while the major vendors move down? The answer is part semantics, and part market shift. The term "content management," including all of its current acronyms ECM, WCM or just CMS, is too generic. This is largely due to the fact that managing content itself is so new to both applications and infrastructure, that there it belongs in both places. Secondly, there is a real bifurcation going on in the market. The true infrastructure aspects of content management, such as optimal storage and retrieval, indexing, and library services are increasingly becoming commoditized and absorbed into the infrastructure software stack. But as these content services precipitate downward, they become too generic to solve any particular line of business problem on their own. This means that another layer of content-driven applications must emerge at the top of the stack, to provide the horizontal and vertical applications, such as internet and multi-channel marketing, something I blog about quite a bit. All of these very different offerings are today called "content management" with vendors for each moving down and up the stack respectively.

While technologists love the simplicity of block diagrams showing "the content management goes here," the reality is that content management goes in a lot of places. For the foreseeable future, we're going to have many systems, all of which do very different things, and yet all called Content Management of one kind or another. If you can better understand the specific initiative driving each new system or solution, you can better understand how your current systems do or do not apply, and whether you need to add more "content management" to achieve your goals.

If you haven’t heard of Web 2.0, where have you been? If you actually know what Web 2.0 is, then congratulations. I believe the best definition of Web 2.0 is given by Tim O’Reilly who arguably created the term. Web 2.0 has generally referred to the new breed of start-up who provides a new level of user service, but it also applies to a new wave in technology supporting that user service.

Web 2.0 is radically changing the experience in which end users interact with enterprises and types of user experiences that we now expect from on-line systems. Going hand in hand with Web 2.0 are the raised expectations users have of the interactivity of content, how content is managed and how personal that content is. Providing a self-service experience and to automatically deliver necessary content to new and interactive contexts has put a burden on the existing infrastructure of current generation content management systems. A new generation of enterprise content management is needed to meet the challenges of Web 2.0.

Content Management 2.0 is my term for this new generation of content management. Given everyone is starting to talk about Security 2.0, Virtualization 2.0, etc., I thought I would stake out the term after a brief search on Google seemed to indicate no one has talked about it before. (If you are aware of someone using it, please let me know. I'll give them credit.) IBM has talked about next generation content management, but the term Content Management 2.0 seems to go along with the phenomenon that is finally injecting innovation back into the content management market. These new technologies provide greater interactivity through AJAX, new collaborative styles of classification and tagging, and user driven configuration are being led more by open source than the traditional engines of enterprise content management expansion.

I recently gave a presentation at the University of Oxford where I discussed the concept to the people concerned with the various web sites and content services in the university. The concept originated after an internal discussion about where content management is going. It became clear to us that many new things were happening to content management with blogs, wikis, syndication and new styles of user interface affecting how people build web sites, content, and new web frameworks.

The presentation explained the challenges that existing enterprise content management has in addressing Web 2.0, what needs are not currently being met for end users, what technology changes are required, and how do these technologies “mash-up” to be able to glue systems together through web services and other web-oriented protocols. It also discussed the role that open source will play in this next generation of enterprise content management.

It will be interesting to see how the ECM vendors and specialist WCM vendors react to Web 2.0 and whether they aim for a new Content Management 2.0.