InformationWeek Stories by Tony Byrne

InformationWeek Stories by Tony Byrnehttp://www.informationweek.comInformationWeeken-usCopyright 2012, UBM LLC.2013-01-22T09:06:00ZCIOs Clueless About Social? Maybe NotOne survey does not prove CIOs underestimate the importance of social business. There might be other reasons social ranks low on CIO to-do lists.http://www.informationweek.com/thebrainyard/news/strategy/cios-clueless-about-social-maybe-not/240146613?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_AuthorsA few days ago, The Wall Street Journal cited a Gartner survey where CIOs ranked "social" as their 13th priority for 2013, and declared in a headline, <a href="http://blogs.wsj.com/tech-europe/2013/01/17/cios-ignoring-impact-of-social-says-survey/">CIOS Ignoring Impact Of Social</a>. As you can imagine, Twitter lit up with approbation. Those clueless CIOs! Actually, They Might Have Good Reasons I'm a big believer in the promise of social capabilities in the enterprise -- though primarily in the context of collaborative work -- but let's not rush to judgment here. Consider that the rankings might actually reveal any number of plausible alternative conclusions, such as these: -- CIOs' hype cycles are necessarily shorter than those of E2.0 evangelists. -- CIOs already have blessed social initiatives, likely with full awareness of the longish impact of horizons typical of projects that require major change management. -- CIOs quite properly understand social as a feature and not a technology in itself. -- CIOs previously deployed social technology that <a href="http://www.realstorygroup.com/Blog/2416-Challenge-of-Scale-Part-3-Social-and-Collaboration-Platforms">didn't scale well at enterprise levels</a>, and they're taking an investment break. -- Other projects in their portfolios are even more transformational than social – sacre bleu! I don't know if any of those are true in your enterprise, but they are just as plausible as accusing CIOs of "ignoring social." By the way, note that Gartner's own press release didn't criticize the CIOs' self-reported priorities. Revealingly, <a href="http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=2304615">Gartner's survey</a> shows CIOs ranking collaboration as their fourth highest technology priority. To people who promote Enterprise 2.0 this should augur good tidings. It suggests the industry is growing up. Data Comes First The survey results might also suggest that -- unlike many industry pundits -- CIOs possess a keen understanding of the difference between internal social initiatives and external social engagement. There's a very good chance that your CIO sees great promise in external social media initiatives, but calls them by different names, such as Analytics (#1 in the Journal survey), SaaS (#3) or CRM (#7), quite reasonably leaving the business end of it to CMOs. Based on conversations with our own advisory subscribers around the world, we've certainly seen that those enterprises who've developed some maturity around social media analytics and engagement quickly find that data management and integration can pose critical bottlenecks. So if your CIO is working on improving enterprise capacities around data, while leaving Facebook campaigns to someone else, your CMO might want to count her blessings. Of course, you can find clueless people everywhere, so by the law of averages, some of them will be CIOs. But no one wins by <a href="http://www.realstorygroup.com/Blog/2398-IT-can-become-a-positive-force-in-Enterprise-2.0-success">knee-jerk accusations of IT Ludditism</a>. Show business value, and most CIOs will notice. Attend <a href="http://www.onlinemarketingsummit.com/sandiego?_mc=WETW01">Online Marketing Summit San Diego</a>, Feb. 11-13, and gather the insights and strategies you need to make the right online marketing choices to deliver the most value for your business. OMS San Diego offers three days of inspiration, connections, and practical learning. 2012-11-07T13:47:00ZSmall Data Beat Big Data In Election 2012The Obama re-election machine was really about small data--and enterprises can learn from that.http://www.informationweek.com/thebrainyard/news/240062584?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_Authors  <div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/thebrainyard/news/galleries/social_networking_consumer/240007177"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/galleries/automated/866/slide-1_full.jpg" alt="Social Studies: Obama vs. Romney" title="Social Studies: Obama vs. Romney" class="img175" /></a> <div class="storyImageTitle">Social Studies: Obama vs. Romney</div> (click image for larger view and for slideshow) </div>   Even before polls closed Tuesday, some observers were describing the Democrats' vaunted "ground game" -- a.k.a., get-out-the-vote, or GOTV -- as a victory for big data. Doubtless, the staff of both presidential candidates performed some deep analysis of large datasets. Having participated with my family in GOTV efforts for the past four quadrennial U.S. elections, I have a different take: The Obama re-election machine was really about small data. Small Data Writ Large Compared to previous years, what was fascinating about the Obama effort this time was the intense effort on <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/thebrainyard/news/social_networking_private_platforms/240012574/nationalfield-campaigns-for-social-business">data curation</a> at the individual record level. In past cycles, registration and voter data seemed like a read-only Excel sheet: You got a well-thumbed, printed list of voters to call or visit with some basic info about them and -- if you were lucky -- some handwritten notes from previous canvassers. This led to a lot of duplicate effort, frustration and miscommunication. This time, we saw a much more systematic effort to refine and annotate each record iteratively, to match message and approach to where someone lay in their decision cycle. When someone was "touched," their record got updated. If the previous canvasser uncovered a preference for Obama, the next canvasser worked on intent to vote. And if that succeeded, the next canvasser, closer to Election Day, worked to make sure the voter had a practical plan for voting (a key predictor of actual voting, especially among young or distracted voters). A premium seemed to be placed on obtaining mobile phone numbers, updated address information and names of additional potential voters in the household (typically adult children living at home). [ For more on how the campaigns used big data to chase voters, see <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/big-data-analytics/election-2012-whos-winning-big-data-ra/240012471?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Election 2012: Who's Winning Big Data Race?</a> ] An enterprise data manager would recognize the basic steps: 1. Validate 2. Clean 3. Annotate 4. Enrich 5. Adjust Outreach Message 6. Repeat To be sure, this was not happening in real time, and it wasn't mobile-enabled, at least from what I saw. A lot of handwritten annotations got updated digitally each evening for reprinting the next day. But the whole process had to be simple and methodical enough that many thousands of undertrained volunteers could master it. I caught a brief glimpse of the packaged software underneath all this, and it was no great shakes, at least from a data-entry standpoint. But with motivated actors, perhaps that didn't matter. Another notable improvement came in geolocation. For canvassers on the street, more precise maps and better choreography of target lists with a sensible path makes for a more efficient trek. Maybe Google's API will prove another underrated key to this election. Some Caveats I should add that this process was by no means foolproof, and every Obama volunteer can tell stories of mistakenly knocking on doors of confirmed Romney supporters, although overall it struck me as a noticeable improvement over what my family saw in 2008. Also, I'd guess the Romney campaign was similarly taking a more sophisticated, CRM-like approach this cycle as well, although they don't seem to have staffed it as fully. The human element is critical here. And let's not underestimate content: sophisticated GOTV only works if people are already predisposed to voting for your candidate. Small Data and Your Enterprise Still, there are many lessons here. That data quality and relevance matter. That improved execution may compensate for diminished prospects. Perhaps most importantly, that some data is too important to be left just to machines. In the end, the data was big alright, but it took live human beings to realize its value, one record at a time. As someone who <a href="http://www.realstorygroup.com/Research/DMT">evaluates marketing automation suites</a> -- which try to funnel prospective customers automatically through a similar decision process in the digital world -- it also got me thinking that the current emphasis on sophisticated campaign design over sophisticated data management in that marketplace seems a bit misguided. Of course, your enterprise probably has to hit targets four times a year, rather than once every four years, and most of you cannot call on passionate volunteers to help. But I wonder if there aren't more lessons to draw here. What do you think? The business world is changing. Is your company ready? E2 Innovate, formerly Enterprise 2.0, is the only event of its kind, bringing strategic business professionals together with industry influencers and next-gen enterprise technologies. Register for <a href="http://www.e2conf.com/innovate/registration/?_mc=IWKPL">E2 Innovate Conference & Expo</a> today and save $200 on current pricing or get a free expo pass. Nov. 12-15, 2012, at the Santa Clara Convention Center, Silicon Valley.2012-07-20T12:06:00ZMyth Of Systems Of Record Vs. Systems Of EngagementEnterprise software world doesn't divide in half that neatly. Weave the two together to accomplish more.http://www.informationweek.com/thebrainyard/news/240004108?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_Authors<div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/thebrainyard/article/240001229"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/galleries/automated/801/collage_full.jpg" alt="10 Social Acquisitions Signify Bigger Trends" title="10 Social Acquisitions Signify Bigger Trends" class="img175" /></a> <div class="storyImageTitle">10 Social Acquisitions Signify Bigger Trends</div>(click image for larger view and for slideshow)</div>When Geoffrey Moore famously divided the world of information management and collaboration into two different categories of systems--systems of engagement versus systems of record--he offered a convenient way of figuring out how to address the age-old management challenge of balancing empowerment and control in the new digital workplace. The thinking goes like this: Some digital systems are designed to handle business transactions and other artifacts that constitute enterprise records requiring specific rules, retention periods, and disposition schedules. We are now witnessing the rise of a new class of systems to support looser, more ephemeral, engagement-oriented activities. These two types of systems feature very different capabilities and operate under radically different norms. [ Need guidance on how to make the case? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/thebrainyard/commentary/social_networking_private_platforms/240003299/socials-enterprise-value-lessons-from-random-house?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Social's Enterprise Value: Lessons From Random House</a>.] Such bifurcations are simple, and <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/giovannirodriguez/2011/12/30/the-best-social-media-idea-of-2011/">as others have pointed out in this case, simple is good</a>. Unfortunately, in the real world, business systems don't divide neatly this way. In customer research for our vendor evaluations of <a href="http://www.realstorygroup.com/Research/Channel/Collaboration/">social collaboration</a> and <a href="http://www.realstorygroup.com/Research/Channel/ECM/">cocument and records management</a> systems, we found a rather messier reality. For example, people discuss important business decisions--thereby creating records--on enterprise microblogging platforms every day. (This is why you need to carefully assess SLAs and key data ownership terms in both the free and paid versions of platforms <a href="http://www.realstorygroup.com/Blog/2305-Yammer-is-driving-CIOs-crazy-and-what-they-can-do-about-it...">such as Yammer</a>.) Meanwhile, employees want to engage with their colleagues directly from within line-of-business systems such as document management services and even ERP platforms. In other words, your colleagues are creating records while they engage, and seeking to engage while they manage formal documents and participate in structured processes. Ditto for your interactions with customers and other partners beyond your firewall. This is all really coming to a head as the industry crawls its way toward what many observers call <a href="http://www.realstorygroup.com/Blog/2362-Social-layers-as-silo-slayers-Chatter-tibbr-and-Socialcast-under-the-microscope...">social as layer</a>. What this means is that social functionality is a common, unifying layer of interaction that appears as part of many applications, rather than only in an enterprise social networking tool. As a concept, social layering remains quite nascent, and vendors still have many things to figure out, including compliance, for handling things such as records and security, and truly contextual usability, for spontaneous engagement. But the inexorable push in this direction clearly reflects genuine needs in the workplace. The implications here seem very important. In the end, you can't fence off information management, structured rules, and classification services to some dusty old corner of your digital workplace. Important records can reside everywhere today. And likewise you can't relegate social networking and collaboration to some groovy community space outside your traditional enterprise workspaces. Humans want to engage fluidly on their terms, not yours. I recognize that in some industries--pharmaceuticals, for instance--a bright red line still exists between compliant and non-compliant systems. But that's increasingly the exception to the rule. Going forward, I suspect that successful enterprises will weave effective information management into collaboration platforms, and humanize legacy environments through embedded social interaction. The vendor community hasn't fully gotten there, yet, but this is only partly a technical challenge. Addressing the challenge means beginning to think of every system in your enterprise as a platform for records and engagement alike. Every company needs a social networking policy, but don't stifle creativity and productivity with too much formality. Also in the debut, all-digital <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/thebrainyard/gogreen/062512by/?k=axxe&cid=article_axxt_os">Social Media For Grownups</a> issue of The BrainYard: The proper tools help in setting social networking policy for your company and ensure that you'll be able to follow through. (Free with registration.) 2011-06-02T08:00:00ZEnterprise 2.0 B.S. List: Term No. 1 ConsumerizationConsumerization may let Enterprise 2.0 folks wallow in the Apple glow, but it can lead to some really bad decisions.http://www.informationweek.com/thebrainyard/news/229700110?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_AuthorsI'm tempted to invoke the "global filter" in TweetDeck that will zap tweets containing terms I don't want to see anymore. You see, I follow a lot of Enterprise 2.0 gurus but am losing patience for some of the buzzwords. I don't want to unfollow them, since some of my favorite commentators lapse into B.S.-speak (and of course I have lapsed myself). As my 12-year-old solemnizes, let's criticize the behavior, not the person. Here's the real problem. Behind hyped-up language lies the haziness that characterizes much of Enterprise 2.0 today. By changing our language--and more importantly, changing our attention--we can get clearer about what's really important. This is my list of four E2.0 B.S. terms: 1. Consumerization 2. Gamification 3. Disruption 4. Commoditization In a series of four BrainYard posts, I'll try to offer a better alternative to each of these tedious concepts. Consumerization Is Lame Consumerization of enterprise applications is a sexy concept that's frequently predicted as a trend by my analyst brethren. It's the most alluring kind of prediction because it's also aspirational. Touting consumerization lets the mossy technology pundit step out of SAP's occluding shadow to bask in Apple's warm glow. Wouldn't it be cool, the thought goes, if Steve Job's dictum that interfaces must be "lickable" also applied to workplace applications? Predictions of consumerization also allow analysts to lecture the marketplace without making specific recommendations, beyond such bloviations as telling developers to make "delightful" software. The rapid rise, and then equally rapid cooling, of the immersive collaboration technology space--think Second Life for the enterprise--should serve as a caution about the consumerization of enterprise technologies. Not all consumer technologies have readily obvious workplace applications. Because something looks cool doesn't mean it brings value to your busy colleagues. Consumerization is also frequently touted by those who think we're moving quickly toward a blurring of personal and professional mobile devices (not to mention blurring personal and work time). But it can lead to some bad decisions. The desire to "consumerize" mobile apps for their own sake is stoking today's outsized enthusiasm with device-specific enterprise mobile apps at a time when <A HREF="http://dev.w3.org/html5/html-author/">HTML5 </A> is right there staring us all in the face. Native apps make sense for battling angry birds, but they're too brittle and proprietary for enterprises trying to adapt to changing employee needs. Humanization Is Good A better alternative to consumerization is humanization. As a consumer and an employee, what I really want is a humane experience. Traditional corporate software treats us like dull robots. Any objective observer would have to declare most enterprise applications as downright inhumane. To be sure, humanization isn't an entirely novel concept. For example, behind the innumerable gems in Jaron Lanier's book, "<A HREF="http://www.jaronlanier.com/gadgetwebresources.html">You Are Not a Gadget</A>," lies a main theme that "human" always trumps "social." In an enterprise 2.0 context, humanization means addressing application usability forthrightly. But what exactly is usability? Steve Krug, in his fine book, "<A HREF="http://www.sensible.com/dmmt.html">Don't Make Me Think</A>," defines application usability as "fitness to purpose." Fitness is a difficult concept because it implies that usability is situational, and therefore you'll need to experiment and perhaps struggle to discover what your colleagues find even remotely lickable. (Personally, I try to keep my tongue inside my mouth at work.) Yet, Krug's definition is also liberating because it takes the vague yet essential concept of usability and attaches it to a proven methodology. That methodology is called <A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User-centered_design">user-centered design</A> (UCD). You can find a ton of great literature on it. You can also find alternative usability methodologies that are probably just as good; the point is to follow one. Hopefully, your software vendors are reading up on UCD as well, but don't be too sure. Our <A HREF="http://www.realstorygroup.com/Reports/Collaboration/?utm_source=brainyard&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=BS1">research </A>into 27 enterprise collaboration and social software products found myriad application interfaces that look cool to information gluttons like you and me, but are vertigo-inducingly busy for most normal people. Note that this approach to humanization does not mean virtualizing the employee's physical world. Your co-workers don't need a new application that will represent them with a 3D avatar; what they need is a human-friendly mobile interface into their workaday teamspaces. Productivity is the new sexy. Some in the Enterprise 2.0 community have an answer to the usability challenge: Don't bother with it at all. Forget Steve Krug. Let your colleagues experiment with different tools and decide for themselves what's effective. This approach sounds sensible and aligns with notions of "emergent" software adoption. The challenge comes when you try to extend social and collaboration services enterprise-wide, across diverse job roles, locales, and work contexts. The user experiences that one set of employees elects as useful may prove incomprehensible to a different set of coworkers. Humanizing workplace experiences typically requires customizing application interfaces. Alright, enough complaining. Here's a positive message in closing. Go forth and see if you can humanize the digital experience in your company, perhaps initially on an experimental basis, but grounded in user-centered design, actively drawing lessons and maturing your systems and knowledge over time. Then tell the world about it. I will happily <A HREF="http://twitter.com/TonyByrne">re-tweet</A> your successes. Tony Byrne is president of the <A HREF="http://www.realstorygroup.com/">Real Story Group</A>, an analyst firm that publishes independent vendor evaluations to help businesses invest in the right content technologies for their needs. Contact him at <A HREF="mailto:tbyrne@realstorygroup.com">tbyrne@realstorygroup.com</A>. Attend Enterprise 2.0 Boston to see the latest social business tools and technologies. Register with code CPBJEB03 and save $100 off conference passes or for a free expo pass. It happens June 20-23. <a href="http://www.e2conf.com/boston">Find out more</a>. 2011-03-30T08:00:00ZDon't Get Run Over By The Drupal BandwagonCustomers expecting a simple platform immediately discover that Drupal is friendly neither to developer nor novice contributor.http://www.informationweek.com/thebrainyard/news/229300810?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_AuthorsDrupal -- the open-source Community Platform + Web CMS -- is officially trendy. How do I know that? Well, a short while back, within one week two people came up to me separately during meetings to express how "cool" Drupal is. What both people had in common was that neither of them had ever seen, let alone used, Drupal. When a technology platform achieves that degree of cool factor, it means a bandwagon has started rolling. Last year it was SharePoint. This year it's Drupal. Whatever the platform's strengths, however, not all is well on the Drupal bandwagon. If you try to jump on and miss ... well, you might get run over. Drupal boasts significant merits. It's an interesting combination of community Web-site-in-a-box and conventional Web publishing platform. Drupal has attracted the interest and expertise of integration firms large and small. It boasts a vibrant ecosystem producing a nearly bottomless collection of add-on modules. Drupal is open source and written in (the very accessible) PHP. So what could go wrong? Actually, quite a bit. Customers expecting a simple platform immediately discover that Drupal is friendly neither to developer nor novice contributor. Drupal consultants praise its extensibility, but if you don't have the time or resources to climb a steep learning curve, Drupal starts to get slippery, or expensive, or both. Drupal, even in its latest version, is a resource hog that may require you to upgrade your gear. Moreover, Drupal -- or more notably its many modules -- gets targeted more frequently by those probing for vulnerabilities. Such is the price of fame. You can secure Drupal, but it takes ongoing attention. Drupal's famous modules also vary in quality, performance, support, interoperability, and upgradability. It will take at least a year for Drupal 7 modules to be remotely as plentiful as they are with Drupal 6. Finally, for better or worse, Drupal wasn't designed with traditional enterprises in mind, and when developers bump up against shortcomings like the ones described here, it isn't on anyone's priority list to fix them. A primary weakness here is that Drupal lacks support for real configuration management, which becomes a problem for large development teams or multi- environment implementations. Another weakness for Enterprise 2.0 deployments is Drupal's lack of native integration hooks. It's no surprise that "I Hate Drupal" forums are dominated by two groups of critics: experienced developers frustrated by the limitations of the platform, and novice contributors overwhelmed by the complexity of its editorial interfaces. The latest version, Drupal 7, offers some remedy for both, with a more uniform and abstract infrastructure and a more usable interface. However, these changes aren't as radical as the Drupal community would have you believe, and they don't change the essence of the system. Of course, none of these shortcomings is unique to Drupal, but that's just the point. These are early days for social computing. Drupal has <A HREF="http://www.realstorygroup.com/Research/Channel/Collaboration/?source=E2Mag">at least 25 major competitors</A>, and all of them can boast some unique differentiators of their own. So don't default to Drupal -- or Microsoft, or Google, or IBM -- just because there's a lot of awareness of a particular package in the marketplace right now. Awareness is a marketing concept that cannot convey how a product will fit for you -- architecturally, functionally, and financially. It doesn't matter that Drupal is open source; hype is hype. So sure, look into Drupal, but then have some good reasons for picking it against its many alternatives. Real Story Group analyst Adriaan Bloem contributed to this post. Tony Byrne is president of the <A HREF="http://www.realstorygroup.com/">Real Story Group</A>, an analyst firm that publishes independent vendor evaluations to help businesses invest in the right content technologies for their needs. Contact him at <A HREF="mailto:tbyrne@realstorygroup.com">tbyrne@realstorygroup.com</A>. 2007-12-03T12:01:00ZPick the Right Content Management ApproachDo you need enterprise content management, Web content management or a portal with built-in content management capabilities? Take this scenario-based approach to set priorities and choose the right technologies. http://www.informationweek.com/news/204600724?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_AuthorsThe lines between all content technology families are notoriously blurry. This is especially true of portals, Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems and Web Content Management (WCM) system, where there's lots of overlap in vendors, product functionality, and marketing messages. For example, if you're looking to implement Intranet-based document management, you could conceivably use any of these three types of products. Yet some consultancies will try to sell you all three types of solutions, with an obligatory (and expensive) integration project. Take a scenario-based approach that solves your most pressing needs first. ECM, WCM and portals fill fairly specific roles and tend to address different problems. By understanding what you're trying to accomplish, you can better identify the technologies you do and don't need. This article presents common content management scenarios that fall most appropriately into one of these three technologies camps. The idea is to distill the core of your business problem or opportunity and then build from there. Evaluate Three Sets of Scenarios <table width="185" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" border="0" align="right"><tr><td rowspan="3" width="10"><img src="http://i.cmpnet.com/infoweek/spacer.gif" width="10" height="5" hspace="0" vspace="0" border="0"> </td><td width="175"><A HREF="http://i.cmpnet.com/intelligententerprise/images/120307/ScenariosTable.gif" TARGET="browser"><IMG SRC="http://i.cmpnet.com/intelligententerprise/images/120307/ScenariosTable_sm.gif" WIDTH="175" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0" BORDER="0"></A></td></tr><tr><td width="175" class="artCaption" align="center">Common Content Management Scenarios (click image for larger view)</td></tr></table> Take a quick look at the common conent management scenarios listed in the table at right. These are the scenarios by which CMS Watch reviews vendors in its <a href="http://www.cmswatch.com/Reports/"target=_blank>head-to-head technology evaluation reports.</a> As you can see, the WCM scenarios are fundamentally publishing challenges. The type of Web site(s) you publish plays a big role in your requirements -- and the suitability of different vendors. Similarly, there are different types of portals that try to accomplish different business objectives. On the ECM side, as you would expect, the scenarios become more process oriented. Industry verticals also tend to matter more in the ECM space, again mostly because of industry-specific business process needs. Consider Overlapping Scenarios Of course, scenarios also overlap. A WCM tool that excels at "community-oriented sites" may well look quite a bit like a "collaboration portal," which in turn might fit the bill for the kind of "workgroup collaboration" handled by ECM systems. And what exactly, you might ask, is the difference among "Global Intranet" (WCM), "Enterprise Intranet" (Portal) or "Enterprise Web Publishing" (ECM)? Quite possibly very little. On the other hand, you should know that the tools approach the problem in different ways. The WCM solution will likely emphasize semi-structured content and documents with employee-friendly editorial interfaces. The intranet portal will bring a functional focus to interactive applications (such as a people-finder portlet). The ECM product will likely provide native hooks from the intranet into its own document and records management repositories. Ironically, CMS Watch research suggests that "enterprise-tier" vendors do a comparatively poor job at the kind of multi-Web-site management scenarios you see in large enterprises. Most importantly, scenario-based analysis should tell you what type of product you shouldn't pursue. Just because a WCM tool claims it can store scanned documents in its repository doesn't mean you should use it for high-volume imaging. Most ECM products likely provide a poor platform for a customer self-service portal. You probably wouldn't use portal software for an ultra-large single Web site. And so on. Vendors will often market the same product for different categories of problems, and sometimes that actually makes sense. The promise (and great frustration) of MOSS 2007 is that it can conceivably play in all of these three spaces to varying degrees, but, like its competitors, Microsoft has different ways of getting there, and one SharePoint installation still doesn't want to play too many different roles at once. What You Should Do If you've been looking at tools at all, you've doubtless noticed that vendors (and many consultancies, and some analyst firms) tend to take something other than a scenario-based approach. Some use horserace concepts to distinguish solutions, trying to answer the ubiquitous question, "who's leading?" You should, in turn, ask, "leading at what?" That fact is that different scenarios favor different products. Other vendors and commentators look at size. Large vendors with complex platforms claim that their smaller competitors can't scale, saying in effect, "Don't send a boy to do a man's job." Lower-tier players retort, "Don't kill a fly with a cannon." Yes, size and extensibility matter, but from a business perspective, you risk losing the more important point around "fit" here. You want to find a good fit with your business objectives. First that means figuring out which type of technology will provide the biggest near-term value. Then it means knowing what type of scenario(s) you're addressing, to begin to isolate vendors that potentially hit that sweet spot. It doesn't matter whether you employ the list of scenarios above or not; the key goal is to carefully outline what you're trying to achieve with which types of content. A little analysis up front before you commit to the wrong technology path can save you a lot of time and money later. Tony Byrne is Founder of <a href="http://www.cmswatch.com/"target=_blank>CMS Watch</a> , a vendor-neutral technology analyst firm. He is lead analyst on The Web CMS Report, and publisher of other CMS Watch reports. Write him at <a href="mailto:tbyrne@cmswatch.com">tbyrne@cmswatch.com</a>. 2007-02-02T18:00:00ZPut to the Test: IBM WebSphere Portal 6.0This portal's best play is enterprise integration, but it's also suitable for intranets and workgroup collaboration. Implementation can be complex and confusing, but a new Portal Express offering is aimed at companies with fewer than 1,000 employees aims to speed and simplify deployment.http://www.informationweek.com/news/197003020?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_Authors<style> .tablesh{ font-family:Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size:10px; color:#000000; margin-left:10px; margin-right:10px;} </style>  <table class="tablesh" align="right" bgcolor="#dce5f6" border="0" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1" width="250"><tr> <td>PROS </td> </tr> <tr> <td bgcolor="#ffffff">• Experienced partner channel and active developer community offer strong peer support.</td> </tr> <tr> <td bgcolor="#ffffff">• Designed for integration with other IBM systems as well as third-party applications.</td> </tr> <tr> <td bgcolor="#ffffff">• Well-integrated with Microsoft products, including Word integration for authors and drag-and-drop capabilities from Windows.</td> </tr> <tr> <td bgcolor="#ffffff">• Impressive Portlet Factory UI development tool with tight Eclipse IDE integration</td> </tr> <tr> <td>CONS </td> </tr> <tr> <td bgcolor="#ffffff">• Claims open standards and SOA support, but runs exclusively on IBM software </td> </tr> <tr> <td bgcolor="#ffffff"> • Requires substantial hardware investments and intensive caching configuration.</td> </tr> <tr> <td bgcolor="#ffffff"> • • Overly complex for most departmental requirements and new Express offering has yet to be proven.</td> </tr> <tr> <td bgcolor="#ffffff"> • Complete solution may require multiple IBM products and ample professional services to weave them together..</td> </tr> </table>  IBM's product portfolio is so vast, it can be downright confusing. As the name suggests, IBM's WebSphere Portal is a part of the WebSphere product suite, which includes an application server, a commerce server and solutions for enterprise integration. The current release, Websphere Portal 6.0, has been out since last July, and the version upgrade delivered a Portlet Factory, user interface improvements (including nifty usage of AJAX) and performance enhancements. The best play for WebSphere Portal (WP) is enterprise integration, and it’s no surprise that it particularly excels at integrating with IBM products such as DB2 Content Manager, Lotus Notes and the DB2 OmniFind search engine. The distinctions among these different solutions are important, but it can be hard to tell which specific features come from which IBM product. Your software costs can easily exceed those of competing products when you look at the big picture. Much like SAP Portal, WP can serve as a user interface that integrates legacy systems; it does so through the underlying WebSphere Application Server, using either MQ Series or available adapters for third-party products. WP is also suitable as a stand-alone product for less-complex scenarios, such as enterprise intranets or workgroup collaboration, but it’s overly complex for prospective customers with simpler requirements. The good news is that Big Blue has finally woken up to portal competitors that have been busy innovating and stealing market share while IBM was preoccupied by multiple acquisitions and Byzantine user interfaces. In a repositioning announced in January, Microsoft is now targeted as the main competitor, with the popular SharePoint having carved out a surprisingly large market position with quite a simple solution. IBM has responded with a new Express Edition aimed squarely at SMB’s with fewer than 1,000 employees. Templates ease implementation and licensing/pricing parameters have been adjusted for small enterprises. It's all built on the same underlying code and platform as WP 6.0, so you can easily upgrade to the full edition as required.<h3>Portal Services</h3> More than just a window into legacy applications, enterprise portals typically provide a broad slate of services as well, including collaboration, search, content management and navigation. Across its many product lines, IBM can muster strong offerings in the realm of collaboration, although this is one of the areas where it’s hard to identify in which IBM product any particular feature lives. When IBM demos WP, typically it’s fronting either IBM’s Java-based Workplace collaboration suite or Lotus Notes (note that IBM revealed in January that it will be moving away from the Workplace name in favor of Notes and just plain "WebSphere" in the coming months). If you aren't using Notes or Workplace, the collaboration features offered natively in WP may seem comparatively thin, depending on which portal edition you choose.  <TABLE WIDTH="120" ALIGN="right" CELLSPACING="0" CELLPADDING="8" BORDER="0" hspace="5" vspace="5"> <tr> <td bgcolor="#ffffff"> <div align="center">click to enlarge <a href="http://i.cmpnet.com/intelligententerprise/images/0702/Portlet_Factory.gif" target="new"> <img SRC="http://i.cmpnet.com/intelligententerprise/images/0702/Portlet_Factory_tn.gif" border="0"></a> <a href="http://i.cmpnet.com/intelligententerprise/images/0702/Portlet_Factory.gif" target="new" class="storyDek"> WebSphere's Portlet Factory offers 125 wizard-like builders for different types of portlets, including popular integration points. </a> </td> </tr> </table>  In another area that can quickly become confusing, WP ships with a simple, homegrown search engine that’s designed exclusively to index and retrieve portal content. For more advanced search requirements, including enterprise search, IBM offers a wide array of its own system, OmniFind, as well as third-party integration to the FAST search engine. In 2005, IBM acquired natural-language search vendor iPhrase, and that technology is now embedded in the Discovery Edition of OmniFind. IBM has also announced that Google will provide desktop search in conjunction with OmniFind. For Web content management, WP is integrated with IBM Workplace Web Content Management (WWCM). This is a broadly-capable tool (also upgraded in the current release) that excels in pushing content through WP, but users say WWCM is buggy and IBM does not seem to have put substantial support and development muscle behind it. IBM acquired the enterprise content management vendor FileNet last fall, but IBM is maintaining it as a separate product line while improving integration across DB2 Content Manager and the FileNet P8 platform. Integration with FileNet WCM components and third-party WCM systems is possible, but IBM is clearly banking on WWCM going forward. The new Portal Express Edition includes built in content management capabilities (both document and Web content), collaboration features and templates for intranet and extranet sites. These built-in features combined with competitive pricing will surely be compelling for those considering the old Microsoft SharePoint 2003, but it remains to be seen if it will go far from enough to combat the new and largely improved Microsoft SharePoint 2007.<h3>Intangibles</h3> On the plus side, you may not have to pay list price for WP. IBM has often heavily discounted licenses, in particular when included in larger software deals or in combined software-and-services contracts. This has helped disperse the product and, indeed, WP boasts a large and fairly active developer community, which bodes well for finding peer support for your projects.  <TABLE WIDTH="120" ALIGN="right" CELLSPACING="0" CELLPADDING="8" BORDER="0" hspace="5" vspace="5"> <tr> <td bgcolor="#ffffff"> <div align="center">click to enlarge <a href="http://i.cmpnet.com/intelligententerprise/images/0702/web_search.gif" target="new"> <img SRC="http://i.cmpnet.com/intelligententerprise/images/0702/web_search_tn.gif" border="0"></a> <a href="http://i.cmpnet.com/intelligententerprise/images/0702/web_search.gif" target="new" class="storyDek"> WebSphere offers a built in search facility, but you can also integrate with IBM's OmniFind or the third-party FAST search engine. </a> </td> </tr> </table>  Some customers complain that IBM used WP as a kind of loss leader, demonstrating all manner of content and data integration during the sales process that actually required substantial investments in other IBM tools when it came down to implementation. Caveat emptor. With a veritable army of consultants available in large numbers around the world, IBM can take the lead on any WP implementation. Most projects, though, get implemented with the help of experienced local partners, many of whom are more experienced in the portal product than IBM’s own consultants. This labor is not cheap, but you can save money by negotiating installation help with the software deal. Customers report mixed experience with the optional portlets in the IBM Portal Catalog. Some have worked well and saved time while others have been difficult to get up and running and tough to maintain. As with any other portal product, you’ll want to test third-party portlets carefully, especially with respect to security and performance. Support and documentation for WP product can be hard to come by. IBM has many support sites, but it can be difficult to find answers to specific questions. IBM hosts forums that the support team doesn’t seem to actively monitor; questions often go unanswered or peers jump in and explain short cuts because of a dearth of official support. The best advice can be found in the articles written by integrators and in trade publications like Websphere Developers Journal.<h3>Coming Attractions</h3> IBM is planning upgrades to the portal in second half that will add templates from Express offering and to the core portal, and it will add performance improvements alongside a new Google Gadget integration. For those choosing IBM collaboration tools, you can also look forward to Web 2.0-style functionality from two new products announced at January's Lotusphere and expected to debut this summer. Connections is a social software solution with components for activities, communities, dogear, profiles and blogs to help people connect and build conversations. Quickr is good old Lotus QuickPlace with a fresh brush of "Web 2.0" look-and-feel to compete with SharePoint. This offering is aimed at quickly and easily sharing content while reducing the heavy e-mail burden in most organizations. Whatever the charms of working with Big Blue – armies of consultants and salespeople, confusing and overlapping product families – the company has committed itself to WebSphere Portal. The product had modest beginnings, but it has grown steadily and IBM continues to put major research and development into what remains one of the most deployed portal in its class. • WebSphere Portal 6.0 is licensed per CPU starting at $50,000 per processor. WebSphere Portal Express starts at $2,780 including 20-users. Prices include one year of software support and maintenance. Janus Boye and Tony Byrne are Lead Analyst and Publisher, respectively, of the Enterprise Portals Report, which critically evaluates 15 leading portal solutions. The report is published by <a href="http://www.cmswatch.com" target="new">CMS Watch</a>.ugh to combat the new and largely improved Microsoft SharePoint 2007.2007-01-01T00:00:00ZDashboard: Whither Content Management?What's the latest direction of the enterprise content management market? That was the question mulled over during a keynote session at November's Gilbane Conference on Content Technologies. http://www.informationweek.com/news/196603910?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_Authors With FileNet, Hummingbird and Stellent all snatched up in recent months, what's the latest direction of the enterprise content management (ECM) market? Mulling over that question during a keynote session at November's Gilbane Conference on Content Technologies in Boston, four panelists all cited "integration with other applications" as important, but they disagreed on the right approach. Suggestions ranged from mashups to support for JCR (Java Content Repository) to Web services infrastructure. <img src="http://i.cmpnet.com/intelligententerprise/images/070101/jan07dashf.gif" border="0" align="right"> Panelists also cited the growing importance of managing content delivery and customer interaction. "Everybody should have figured out how to manage content by now; the challenge lies in end-user experience," said Detlef Kamps, CEO of RedDot (a division of Open Text). Indeed, customer experience is propelling new investments for features such as blogs and wikis, even if most enterprises haven't figured out how to manage content effectively. "Wikis are driving new expectations for user experience--to browse a Web site and make changes right there," said David Nelson-Gal, senior VP of engineering at Interwoven. Discussing the recent mergers, the panel agreed the market increasingly has two camps. "I know the margin pressures, and absolutely: The industry is dividing between platform providers and solution providers," said Jared Spataro, a senior product manager at Microsoft and a former Open Text employee. Sounds reasonable, but given the slow pace of integrating products and proving solutions, buyers should expect many vendors to straddle both camps for the foreseeable future. --Tony Byrne <img src="http://i.cmpnet.com/intelligententerprise/images/070101/jan07dashg.gif" border="0" align="left">2006-12-12T18:48:00ZIn Focus: "Whither Content Management Technologies?"With FileNet, Stellent and Hummingbird all recently acquired, the market is splitting into platform and solutions camps. Meanwhile, the front-burner issues for users continue to be usability and content delivery. http://www.informationweek.com/news/196603639?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_AuthorsGiven the recent spate of mergers and acquisitions among enterprise content management (ECM) suppliers, what does the future hold for content management technology buyers? At a recent <a href="http://www.gilbaneboston.com" target="_new">Gilbane Conference</a> keynote panel, four content management vendors agreed that the marketplace was dividing into separate camps of infrastructure and solutions suppliers. Explained Jared Spataro, Senior Product Manager, Office Servers, at Microsoft, "I used to work for an ECM suites vendor [Open Text]. I know the smoky boardrooms, I know the margin pressures, and absolutely: the industry is dividing between platform providers and solution providers." This sounds reasonable, but customers should understand that many vendors straddle both camps today and vendor roadmaps here are likely to remain multidimensional for some time. EMC|Documentum promotes its toolset as core infrastructure, but continues to market specific industry solutions. Oracle's recent acquisition of Stellent surely confirms that its previous "platform" orientation towards content was missing a big slice of the market that wants more prepackaged solutions. Buyers should beware that most ECM vendors have not decoupled their applications from their (often proprietary) repository platforms, so visions of SOA remain more for marketing brochures than production installations. Meanwhile, however fascinating it is to noodle about vendor mergers, perhaps the bigger question is when content management technologies will finally overcome traditional shortcomings in usability, scalability and customer relevance? First in mind among many buyers is the challenge of integration, given the dearth of mature standards. Jim Howard, CEO of hosted Web content management service CrownPeak, hinted that features still sell products when he explained, "We have to accommodate a variety of different environments in the marketplace; we're not standardizing, we're adding options that the marketplace wants." It's still a young market. One bright spot is the growing importance of managing content delivery and customer interaction. "Everybody should have figured out how to manage content by now -- the challenge lies in end-user experience," argued Detlef Kamps, CEO of RedDot (a division of Open Text). Indeed, an emphasis on customer experience is propelling new investment in web content technologies, but in fact, few enterprises have yet really figured out how to manage content effectively. Nevertheless, a key barrier remains: poor usability for content managers who often have access to much simpler wiki and blog tools. "Wikis are driving new expectations for user experience: browse a website and make changes right there," noted David Nelson-Gal, Senior VP of Engineering at Interwoven. Interestingly, few content management vendors are mentioning the "P" word at a time when many enterprises are investing in portal technology to manage user interaction and apply social software techniques. "We've actually dropped the portal moniker [from SharePoint 2007]," said Microsoft's Spataro, who argued that portal packages had become "proxy wars" for platform vendors looking to integrate across their stacks. That is partly true, but many enterprises still look to portal technology for simpler informational use-cases, and face tough choices about whether and how to integrate overlapping content management and portal tools. Tony Byrne is founder and lead analyst of CMS Watch. Write him at <a href="mailto:tbryne@cmswatch.com">tbryne@cmswatch.com</a>.2006-12-01T00:00:00ZHeadsup: Explorer Upgrade May Break InterfacesWill IE7 affect your software?http://www.informationweek.com/news/195900023?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_Authors When Microsoft releases a major new version of the browser that still boasts 85 percent market share, Web managers around the world take note. Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) is more standards-compliant than its predecessor, but like all browsers, it has its foibles. Perhaps more importantly, it's not IE6, a finicky browser for which software developers built special work-arounds that may now break or need revision under the new version. Will IE7 affect your software? Here are some known content management systems (CMS) and portal problems: Active X: Many commercial CMS packages still use ActiveX controls as rich-text editors or as the entire interface; these need to be updated. Among other things, Microsoft's new security emphasis mandates an "opt-in" approach in which ActiveX controls need to be reregistered and perhaps reinstalled under new security settings. Vendors have had to modify some features of the controls. Cascading Style Sheets: This is the big one. IE7 fixes most (though not all) of the bugs in CSS standards support. This is a good thing but creates problems when apps lack upgrades for work-arounds developed for IE6, particularly when browser sniffers look for "IE6 or greater" and serve a mangled page. Many portal and CMS interfaces are CSS-driven, so this could become a major support challenge. Unknowns: Nobody knows quite what IE7 will do to an application until they test it. Based on past experience, heavy use of DHTML and JavaScript could present glitches, though few concrete problems have emerged to date. Because of the relative dearth of testing thus far among vendors, it is customers who will eventually expose incompatibilities. --Tony Byrne and Janus Boye, CMS Watch 2006-07-01T00:00:00ZPut to the Test: Sun Portal 7.0New collaborative functionality and open-source licensing bolster Java System Portal Server 7.0.http://www.informationweek.com/news/189500534?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_Authors <table class="body" align="right" bgcolor="#dce5f6" border="0" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1" width="250"><tr> <td>PROS </td> </tr> <tr> <td bgcolor="#ffffff">• Easy to create workgroup collaboration areas with novel wiki support.</td> </tr> <tr> <td bgcolor="#ffffff">• Reasonably clean Java architecture with good support for standards.</td> </tr> <tr> <td bgcolor="#ffffff">• Proven integrations with multiple content management products.</td> </tr> <tr> <td>CONS </td> </tr> <tr> <td bgcolor="#ffffff">• Comparatively limited adoption, and doesn't enjoy as broad a customer community as competing products. </td> </tr> <tr> <td bgcolor="#ffffff"> • Lacks BI and reporting tools.</td> </tr> <tr> <td bgcolor="#ffffff"> • Java Studio Creator IDE lacks Eclipse integration.</td> </tr> </table>  When Sun released version 7.0 of its Java System Portal Server last December, the company put the spotlight on the product's expansive embrace of "Web 2.0," calling it "the first platform to integrate wikis and other next-generation platforms." With its emphasis on collaboration, the product clearly takes aim at would-be SharePoint adopters, albeit with a Java twist. What's more, Sun announced in May that it would move from closed-source, no-cost licensing to a less-restrictive approach by making its entire services-oriented architecture platform--the portal, Java Studio Creator IDE, BPEL Engine, Java Message System and other elements of the stack--open source. Even though Sun will be giving the portal away for free, the package has seen limited adoption in a crowded portal market. Many Sun customers have opted for commercial portals, such as those from BEA Systems or IBM, or for popular open-source portals, such as JBoss or Liferay. Sun's framework focus makes it suitable for organizations with content management, collaboration or workflow requirements. With the right infrastructure, it can scale to fit the needs of high-traffic, public-facing portals, but it's a bit less usable out of the box compared to other products, such as BEA AquaLogic Interaction Server, Microsoft SharePoint Portal, Oracle Portal and Vignette Portal. <h3>Easy Collaboration</h3> A major theme in Sun Portal 7.0 is better support for collaboration through the concept of "communities"--essentially portlets that run a JSP-based wiki. Each community can roll out its own set of services, including individual and group calendars, tasks, wikis, surveys, polls, workgroup searches and discussion boards. In short, Sun is taking a direct run at SharePoint, with the crucial difference that the portal runs on Java. In a nod to business users, Sun has developed a reasonably friendly wiki editor that uses HTML rich-text editing as well as wiki tags. This makes it easier for the nontechnical user to work with content in the wiki. Another nice detail is that you can have portlets inside the wiki, which enables integration with useful functionality (such as automatically finding related postings) or external content. You must have JavaScript enabled to get the WYSIWYG features of the HTML editor, which could be a problem for users with older browsers and organizations that choose to deactivate JavaScript--they must learn basic HTML to get along. You can create as many formal communities as needed, organized by business function and maintained by an administrator. In contrast to the rigidity of many other portal products, Sun Portal communities also can be organized informally around a particular interest and then maintained by users. All communities are indexed by Sun's integrated search engine. To support live collaboration, Sun has partnered with Elluminate, which provides a separately licensed, Java-based tool for online meetings, much like Webex. For instant messaging you can use Sun's IM product over a provided portlet. Because it's based on the Trillian client, the IM service also supports AOL, Yahoo, MSN, ICQ and IRC instant messaging. For better security and performance, it should be installed on a separate server.  <TABLE WIDTH="120" ALIGN="right" CELLSPACING="0" CELLPADDING="8" BORDER="0" hspace="5" vspace="5"> <tr> <td bgcolor="#ffffff"> <div align="center"> <img src="http://i.cmpnet.com/intelligententerprise/images/060701/jul06testa.gif" border="0"> </td> </tr> </table>  <h3>Content Management</h3> Sun doesn't have its own CMS (content management system), but has purchased unlimited distribution rights to FatWire's Java-based Spark PCM (Portal Content Management), which is bundled with the portal at no charge. This full-featured Web CMS lets you manage content ("assets" in Sun's parlance) with functionality, including previews, workflow, versioning, check-in and check-out, all integrated through the Sun portal interface. Sun relies on other partnerships, so licensees should carefully evaluate the long-term implications of committing to these third-party products. Sun also has a close reseller agreement with Interwoven, for example. Sun salespeople will direct customers wanting to purchase a content or document management system to Interwoven's TeamSite and WorkSite products, rather than FatWire Content Server (the full version of FatWire Spark PCM). New licensees should consider which product is a better fit in their architecture. TeamSite may fulfill broader functional requirements, but the products from FatWire are Java-based, unlike TeamSite, and might be a better and cleaner architectural choice. There is a Java-based version of WorkSite, but integrations with the portal communities aren't available out of the box, which means that the document management and collaboration systems will be inconveniently separated. For organizations that have invested in other products, Sun has integrated other CMSs, including those from Documentum, Stellent and Vignette. If all you need is file sharing and basic document management, Sun Portal's centralized repository might suffice. You can create folders, upload/download documents and share files with permissions, and all files and folders are searchable. <h3>End-User services</h3> If you're used to working with portlets or Microsoft Web parts, you'll have to get used to Sun's unique lingo. A Sun portal dashboard is called the "front channel," which consists of multiple channels, each with containers inside. Channels can be developed as JSR-168-compliant portlets using Java Studio Creator. You can adhere more closely to standards by employing cascading style sheets in the presentation layer, but Sun provides nothing to manage these style sheets, which makes even trivial changes more complex. As with most portal products, Java System Portal URLs are quite ugly out of the box unless you employ complicated workarounds. A standard portal URL looks something like this: http://servername/portal/dt?action=content&provider=JSPTabContainer Unfortunately, this URL is both product- and technology-dependent, so existing links to your portal will break if you later change portal products. There's also an important, but oft-underappreciated usability deficiency with this sort of cryptic address--it can make bookmarking difficult. The search engine included with the portal was developed by Sun Labs, and it offers more than simple Web search. Federated search capabilities let users submit a query to multiple repositories and search engines concurrently (including, for example, Google, LDAP directories using JNDI, and databases using JDBC). Search results are presented on a single page and scored across search engines. The engine also offers wizards for importing, building, maintaining and automatically generating taxonomies. Sun's search technology deserves respect from an engineering standpoint, but it hasn't been broadly deployed, so it's a bit of an unknown quantity, particularly when it comes to indexing nonportal content. Thus, it may not be the right solution for broader enterprise search. Unlike leading portal offerings, such as those from BEA, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP, Sun's portal doesn't natively provide much reporting on users and system activities. Reporting is available only through an arcane and technical interface or reading log files. Also, you won't find the built-in business intelligence features offered by the products from IBM, Oracle and SAP, so you'll need to rely on third-party integration--and here again there's not a lot of experience with this challenge in the market.  <TABLE WIDTH="120" ALIGN="right" CELLSPACING="0" CELLPADDING="8" BORDER="0" hspace="5" vspace="5"> <tr> <td bgcolor="#ffffff"> <div align="center"> <img src="http://i.cmpnet.com/intelligententerprise/images/060701/jul06testb.gif" border="0"> </td> </tr> </table>  <h3>Administration concerns</h3> As you would expect, Sun has substantial experience with large installations that feature sizable clusters. Java System Portal supports various hardware and application server combinations, but most of the high-availability experience with the product comes from running on Sun hardware with the Sun application server. Test performance carefully if you plan to run the software on something else. The portal server comes bundled with Sun Java System Access Manager, which is a security foundation that enables standards- and policy-based authentication. This lets you secure remote access with "VPN-on-demand" (as Sun calls it). Various authentication models can be used, including Windows NT, Active Directory, X.509 certificates, LDAP, RADIUS and SecurID. In addition, advanced features such as Multi-Level Security can be set up, whereby a user who is logged in with LDAP and wants to select a special portlet would be required to meet a higher authorization level, such as SecurID. Single sign-on is included with the Access Manager, as well as federation across trusted networks of partners, suppliers and customers. The product is tightly integrated with Sun's LDAP server, so you can support administration within the portal itself. Java Studio Creator, the IDE for portal projects, is targeted at developers familiar with simple languages (such as Visual Basic). The focus is on ease of use, and there are plenty of drag-and-drop features. More experienced developers might be disappointed to find no plug-ins for Eclipse, though portlet projects can be created and deployed from Sun's new NetBeans IDE. The features of Java Studio Creator are expected to migrate into NetBeans 5.5 later this year, according to Sun. <h3>First-Mover Hiccups</h3> Version 7.0 is still less than six months old and not yet fully battle-tested. Be sure to talk to implementation partners to avoid problems encountered to date. As you would expect in any new product, there are bugs. By default, for example, Java Studio Creator will associate themes--graphical layout templates--with every portlet, but those themes might clash with those associated with other portlets on your page. What developers may really want is to create portlets without any themes associated, so layout can be applied later on a page-wide basis. According to Sun this will be fixed in a future release. Meantime, developers must make HTML changes to move around style sheet references. Despite these glitches, Sun's community-oriented tools and open-source positioning are welcome departures for the portal market. Like Oracle, Sun is clearly trying to take on Microsoft, albeit with an emphasis on Java-based development. But it will take more than free software and a fresh coat of Web 2.0 to win over the masses. Sun Portal 7.0 Currently licensed at no charge, but Sun has announced a move to open source. Maintenance and support purchased separately from Sun starts at $4,000 per CPU, per year0. Janus Boye and Tony Byrne are lead analyst and publisher, respectively, of the Enterprise Portals Report, which critically evaluates 13 leading portal solutions. The report is published by <a href="http://www.cmswatch.com" target="_blank">CMS Watch</a> . 2006-06-19T12:34:00ZIn Focus: D.C. Conference Suggests Government Is Ready for Web 2.0Do blogs, wikis, and RSS feeds have a chance in the government bureaucracy?http://www.informationweek.com/news/189500431?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_Authors Is Web 2.0 in government an oxymoron? It would seem that Uncle Sam in particular could easily fall out of step with a "new" Web of blogs, wikis, podcasts and RSS. Yet last week's "Gilbane Conference on Content Technologies in Government" in Washington, DC, suggests that federal Web managers are indeed exploring Web 2.0 technologies. Blogging is controversial across private industry, and the federal experience has been slim. Nonetheless, the conference revealed that some <a href="http://nnlm.gov/mar/blog/" Target="_blank">niche blogs</a> in government agencies are beginning to find their voice. Still, skepticism among federal employees abounds. "Blogs are just for personal opinions," argued an attendee of one of 20 sessions at the conference. Presenter Michael Edson, who leads a successful team of bloggers at the <a href="http://eyelevel.si.edu/" Target="_blank">Smithsonian Museum of American Art</a>, begged to differ. Citizens want to understand better how government institutions work, Edson argued, and blogging can be an important way of connecting with them. "I was dubious at first," noted a Treasury Department Web manager, "but now I'm going to go back and start talking up blogging within my agency." Government use of wikis is a bit more promising. Uncle Sam hosts a small handful of public wikis, but many more are sprouting up on internal networks, especially for collaboration among technical specialists. After a successful pilot project, the Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics recently evaluated 11 wiki products, eventually settling on a package with the kind of strong enterprise credentials -- LDAP connectivity, XML storage and a Java API -- favored by major government agencies. Among the simplest of all Web 2.0 technologies, RSS feeds are proliferating rapidly among federal agencies. But syndication presents a dilemma for government Web managers, who typically justify their budgets with growing traffic numbers, because RSS-delivered content can reduce overall page-views even as more citizens are accessing information. In an example shared at the end of the two-day conference, White House Internet and E-Communications Director David Almacy described briefing President Bush on the latest annual version of the popular <a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/barney/" Target="_blank">"Barney-cam" video</a>, featuring the First Dog. The President reminded him that the previous year's video had been downloaded 8 million times. In an era of syndication, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/" Target="_blank">YouTube.com</a>, GoogleNews and bloggers ripping and reposting videos, Almacy could only assure the BI Analyst-in-Chief that viewership would go up, regardless of traffic to <a href"http://www.whitehouse.gov/" Target="_blank">whitehouse.gov</a>. One concern for cash-strapped government agencies is bandwidth, as RSS readers and aggregators can stress networks by repeatedly hitting Web servers. The chief architect for <a href="http://www.WashingtonPost.com/" Target="_blank">WashingtonPost.com</a> offered a handy suggestion: The Post cut the number of items in each of its feeds by two-thirds and saw its overall bandwidth consumption drop in half. Federal agencies are also experimenting with podcasts, although many remain intimidated by the steep production curve and perhaps also by the need to continually come up with interesting tidbits to share. NASA has consistently enlisted its scientists to discuss their work in short, <a href="http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/podcasting/" Target="_blank">engaging sessions</a>. But even NASA has to include ample education about how podcasts work to a public audience still getting up to speed on them. NASA's staff has built more than 7,500 different Web sites, most of them for database applications on the internal network. Addressing the need for governance in such an environment, NASA's Associate Chief Technology Officer, Nitin Naik, acknowledged the need to balance flexibility and control. "NASA uses the carrot of content management to draw internal Web teams into a common infrastructure," he told attendees. NASA is not alone in trying to address Web site governance. Web leaders from the Environmental Protection Agency and Social Security Administration shared how they are building effective models for aligning in-the-trenches Webmaster councils with broader agency leadership goals. At nearly 750,000 pages, EPA.gov</a> <a href="http://www.EPA.gov/" Target="_blank"> is not a trivial site-management challenge. But the agency is beginning to get a better handle on all that information. What is the agency testing internally to help guide its content management project? A wiki. Co-developed by the <a href="http://www.gilbane.com/" Target="_blank">Gilbane Group</a> and <a href="http://www.cmswatch.com/" Target="_blank">CMS Watch</a>, the June 13-15, 2006, Gilbane Conference on Content Technologies in Government attracted 300 attendees from across government and industry. Tony Byrne is founder of <a href="http://www.cmswatch.com/" Target="_blank">CMS Watch</a>, a vendor-neutral analyst firm that evaluates content technologies. 2006-02-01T05:00:00ZThe Portal Makes the Platform Vignette's portal unites the V7 content management suite.http://www.informationweek.com/news/177100938?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_Authors <table class="body" align="right" bgcolor="#dce5f6" border="0" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1" width="250"><tbody><tr> <td>PROS </td> </tr> <tr> <td bgcolor="#ffffff"> • All Java-based suite offers potential development efficiencies.</td> </tr> <tr> <td bgcolor="#ffffff">• Capable and affordable portal consolidates access to Vignette repositories and can surface records and documents.</td> </tr> <tr> <td bgcolor="#ffffff">• Vignette Records and Documents is mature, stable and easily implemented and customized.</td> </tr> <tr> <td>CONS </td> </tr> <tr> <td bgcolor="#ffffff"> • Flagship Web content-management (WCM) product is extensible but overly complex. </td> </tr> <tr> <td bgcolor="#ffffff"> • Varying systems requirements and search engines across the suite work against infrastructure consolidation.</td> </tr> <tr> <td bgcolor="#ffffff"> • Portal integrates better with other Vignette products than with non-Vignette repositories.</td> </tr> </tbody></table> When Adam Smith first opined, "Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production," he was probably referring to tangible goods, but 230 years later, the same could be said for content. Few enterprise content-management (ECM) vendors have taken this dictum to heart more than Vignette Corp. The company focuses on not just managing information, but also delivering it to the end user. Vignette began as a Web content-management (WCM) vendor. After surging and deflating along with the dot-com bubble, the company settled down, rewrote its flagship product in Java and acquired related technologies to become an ECM player. Like its competitors, Vignette sells dozens of modules as part of its ECM suite, the V7 Platform; the main product set comprises Vignette Content Management, descended from the company's "StoryServer" WCM tool; Vignette Portal, acquired with the purchase of Epicentric Inc.; Vignette Collaboration, acquired with purchase of Intraspect Software Inc.; and Vignette Records and Documents, acquired with the purchase of Tower Technology. With its focus on content consumption, Vignette has differentiated itself from other ECM vendors by promoting its portal as the meeting ground for content across formats and repositories. The cost-effective portal and easily deployed record- and document-management module are among the platform's best features, but Vignette must smooth over disparate infrastructure requirements and stabilize its complex environment.<h3>Vignette Content Management</h3> Vignette Content Management (VCM) capably performs all the tasks you would expect from a WCM tool, including authoring, versioning, tagging, workflow and publishing. VCM also boasts advanced features, such as the ability to process batches of content together so you can build and deploy groups of pages or entirely new site sections at one time. Some important pieces are missing, though. Its XML support is poor, likely owing to VCM's strict relational model, which works well for catalog-type content, but not so well for large, text-rich information sets, such as corporate knowledge bases. These need a more hierarchical, object-oriented approach that lets authors and managers access content at different levels within a tree — something VCM does not do easily. Following its Java rewrite, VCM was bedeviled by performance problems and hitches in its publishing engine. Recent point releases seem to have addressed these but not before causing heartburn among customers who complained about immature code. The biggest knock on VCM is that simple tasks, such as modifying author in-boxes or search results, can be too complex. Many customers have an unusually deep reliance on Vignette's professional services arm, even by the standards of the services-heavy ECM market. The flip side of complexity in Vignette's case is extensibility. VCM has perhaps the broadest core API next to Documentum's; consequently, you can get the product to do what you need, including developing unusually detailed workflows and creating routines to clone subsites. Unfortunately, access to lower-level parts of the API requires an "extension kit." <h3>The Rest of the Suite</h3> Vignette's record- and document-management product is more mature than VCM. Those who are used to VCM marvel at VRD's reliability, ease of use and the experience of supporting Vignette consultants. HealthSouth, one of the nation's largest health-care services providers, is using VRD to manage medical records. The company selected Vignette because it offers all required tools from document capture to document management to records management without third-party software. HealthSouth implemented a system for scanning and processing 80,000 invoices a month in just a couple of days. Other customers report even larger document-management installations in surprisingly short timeframes. "You don't need a Vignette [consultant]," says Brent Quick, HealthSouth's director of records management. "You can do it yourself." That's music to any CFO's ears. Vignette Collaboration is designed to provide capabilities, such as threaded discussions, task tracking and alerts, using customizable project workspaces. The product is comparable to collaboration tools from Open Text and EMC, and Vignette faces stiff competition in this arena. Portal vendors, for example, tend to embed similar collaboration facilities. Moreover, Microsoft SharePoint offers many of the same features — albeit not in Java — at a lower cost. <img src="http://i.cmpnet.com/intelligententerprise/images/060201/test1.gif" vspace="5" hspace="5" align="right" alt="The Vignetter Portal">Vignette's Portal is the gem of the suite. Compared with VCM, Vignette Portal is lower priced, has a slimmer footprint and carries less overhead (developers can install it on their desktops). Compared with heavier-weight competitors, Vignette's Portal is simple to configure. It may lack some of the enterprise application integration tools that portal products from BEA Systems and IBM can offer, but Vignette Portal is simpler to configure. Customers rave about how businesspeople can easily create new content and service packages through browser-based interfaces, and they note that it's much easier to customize than VCM. Vignette sees Portal as the front end of its disparate components. Employees can manage content from other Vignette repositories within the Portal interface. For example, a Portal user can work with another colleague using Collaboration services, complete a document in VRD, then publish that document to multiple Web sites through VCM. A Portal fronting a VRD repository can be used to let authorized customers search for documents. The Vignette Portal is particularly adept at surfacing content from VCM in different contexts. Managers can administer VCM from within the portal admin interface, but that's not yet possible for Collaboration or VRD.<h3>Putting it Together</h3> Like many of its ECM competitors, Vignette still has work to do to make its suite greater than the sum of the parts. Unlike most ECM products, all Vignette's major offerings are based on Java, but different products bundle different search technologies and have divergent system requirements. VCM, VRD and Portal are bundled with a run-time version of BEA Systems' WebLogic application server. IBM WebSphere shops also have licensed VCM and Portal, but they must treat the Vignette implementation as a black box, rather than an integral part of their systems infrastructure. Vignette Collaboration only runs on Windows (though Vignette is porting it to Linux). Confused? You're not alone. The company only publishes technical specs for the entire suite, rather than for each product. Among ECM suites, Vignette's portal-oriented approach is unique and promising, particularly for consumer-oriented companies that want to surfacing Web content, documents and imaged records in custom packages. Despite the checkered track record of its WCM product, Vignette has married several mature technologies to what is now a broad ECM suite. The Vignette V7 Platform is best suited to organizations that have not yet settled on a portal product but have made a commitment to Java. What Vignette Portal lacks in EAI tools it makes up for in ease of use and tight integration with the content-management tools. • Vignette V7 Platform. Here's a rough guide to entry-level costs: VCM, $75,000 per installation and $1,000 per named user. Collaboration, $50,000 per installation, plus $300 per named user. VRD, $50,000 per installation and $2,000 per concurrent user. Portal, $70,000 per installation and $125 per administrator or developer. Vignette <a href="http://www.vignette.com" target="_blank">www.vignette.com</a>. Tony Byrne is the founder of <a href="http://www.cmswatch.com" target="_blank">CMS Watch</a>, which evaluates major content management, search and records management products.2005-12-01T05:00:00ZStellent Survives Among GiantsNimble Stellent delivers easy-to-deploy content applications.http://www.informationweek.com/news/174300407?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_Authors The most recent story line in the enterprise content management (ECM) software category has seen the steady emergence of big infrastructure vendors — Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, SAP and EMC — as serious competitors for a variety of content management use-cases. Nevertheless, smaller ECM suite vendors continue to thrive. For example, Eden Prairie, MN-based Stellent is easily the smallest of the pack in terms of annual revenues ($106 million in fiscal year 2005), yet it continues to make plenty of RFP shortlists and win its fair share of deals. Stellent's flagship product is the Universal Content Management (UCM) suite, but despite the moniker it tends to be purchased to solve specific business problems such as managing intranet documents, achieving regulatory compliance or supporting multiple Web sites. <h3>At the Core</h3> Stellent's core repository, called Content Server, provides base services — versioning and version control, workflow, security and access control, and repository search — to a variety of applications that ride on top. The Content Server is comprised of four repositories: <ul> <li>A contributor-facing, file-based content store dubbed "the vault" <li>A database to hold metadata and system settings <li>A Verity search engine <li>A consumption-oriented cache for content delivery. </ul> Stellent exposes a variety of APIs here, including Java and COM, but developers are likely to find a deeper set of interfaces in competing products from EMC|Documentum, Vignette and IBM. Stellent is shooting for ease of customization over lower-level depth. Like competitor Open Text, Stellent uses its own proprietary scripting language, "iDoc." Developers use iDoc in Content Server to manipulate input screens, develop content output templates and define workflows beyond the simpler browser-based configurations. iDoc is easy to learn, but on complex implementations, developers may long for a more sophisticated, open toolset. For repository search, Stellent uses a customized version of Verity that indexes both content and metadata. Here again, Stellent has favored expedience over scalability. The Verity implementation works well out of the box, but collections tend to hiccup or experience substantial performance limitations as the content store grows — a problem some customers address by upgrading to the full version of Verity. In short, Content Server is easy to customize, but offers less of a development platform than many competing offerings. Where Stellent shines is in delivering content applications that fix specific business problems out of the box. Two of the company's more noteworthy products — Multi-Site Management and Sarbanes Oxley (SOX) — reflect the solutions-oriented approach. <h3>Compliance Starts with SOX </h3> Compliance with SOX requires solid, auditable processes. In particular, Section 404 requires documentation of key control procedures, presenting a document management problem to corporate CFOs and comptrollers. The Stellent SOX application encapsulates process elements — rules, issues, tests and documentation — as objects. Organizations can actively manage these elements by creating versions, spawning workflows, archiving where necessary and reporting on activity. For users, action centers around schedules of risks, which are entered into the system as part of initial configuration, and processes with associated documentation, which are managed through a control-panel interface. Compliance demands reporting, so the SOX application offers a broad set of internal reports, including dashboards with "heat" reports and drill-downs highlighting risks. Stellent also OEMs tools from Cognos that provide ad hoc reporting and drag-and-drop analytics. Sarbanes-Oxley also requires control testing, for example, that an assertion that a CFO makes in a quarterly filing has been adequately documented. That test itself generates documentation and results that can be managed in the SOX tool. If a test fails, the system can kick off a new "issue" for the process owner, invoking new workflows as necessary. SOX is relatively straightforward to use, providing a "one-stop shop" for Section 404 compliance, according to Chris Schneider, CIO at Stellent customer First Industrial Realty Trust, a provider of industrial real estate. Previously, the firm's Word and Excel documentation about financial controls was scattered. "Now we have one place to go for everything," Schneider says. The flow among SOX interface tabs won't be intuitive to all. Early adopters are auditors who have a strong understanding of compliance concepts. As companies extend the application to business process owners or beyond SOX compliance, they'll have to do more employee hand-holding on the Stellent user interface. Note that SOX doesn't manage instances of a process, just the process itself. Individual transactions — say from within accounts payable — can be tracked in Stellent's separate imaging/business process management (BPM) suite, but exceptions in that system can't be logged automatically into the SOX product. Stellent says it's working on this integration. Similarly, there's no prepackaged integration with Stellent's Records Management product. The company says there's little demand to do so, but this may simply reflect today's desire for expedient compliance solutions. In the long term, process documentation, tracking and related records management regimes should be intertwined. Stellent SOX customers say the application meets their needs more or less out of the box. "We hardly had to customize it all," notes Schneider of First Industrial, "and I can't think of any other product where we can say that." <h3>The Multi-Site Reality</h3> With its Multi-Site Management application, Stellent recognizes that the typical enterprise produces more than one intranet or Web site — often a lot more. So the ideal Web content management system for a distributed company should let some system aspects be centrally controlled while others are distributed to site authors. That is what Stellent has done, with good success. Like the SOX application, Multi-Site Management is built atop Stellent's core Content Server, but it also delivers several additional products: <ul> <li>Site Studio provides templating, in-context editing and other editorial services. <li>Content Publisher converts non-HTML content to Web formats while Site Studio Publisher provides a content delivery engine. <li>Connection Server deploys content from the repository to a production environment. </ul> Site Studio provides a user-friendly overlay for managing content across multiple Web sites. Authoring, editing and access privileges management, for example, can be delegated to individual administrators rather than maintained by a master gatekeeper, as many other products require. Users can also create new content types (such as press releases) without the aid of developers — a plus in distributed environments. Stellent offers a variety of choices about which interfaces to expose to which users at what times — a choice that some customers find confusing. Content Server lets you build custom forms interfaces. Site Studio delivers prebuilt interfaces as well as in-context editing, meaning contributors can browse to a page, log in and pop up a form to edit the content. Moving between interfaces sometimes inconveniently requires reauthentication. <TABLE width="250" border="0" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1" bgcolor="#DCE5F6" align="right" class="body"> <TR> <TD>PROS </TD> </TR> <TR> <TD bgcolor="#ffffff"> • Core Content Server product provides flexible repository services, workflow and strong access control for multiple applications</TD> </TR> <TR> <TD bgcolor="#ffffff">• SOX product works well out of the box with little to no customization</TD> </TR> <TR> <TD bgcolor="#ffffff">• Multi-Site Management application offers flexible governance and publishing models — as well as multiple user-interface options — across diverse Web properties within distributed enterprises</TD> </TR> <TR> <TD>CONS </TD> </TR> <TR> <TD bgcolor="#ffffff"> • SOX product isn't tightly integrated with Stellent's records management module nor imaging and BPM tools, limiting usability for broader compliance needs beyond the financial domain.</TD> </TR> <TR> <TD bgcolor="#ffffff"> • Significant customization requires proprietary "iDoc" scripting language</TD> </TR> <TR> <TD bgcolor="#ffffff"> • Bundled "lite" version of Verity search engine may beget expensive upgrades</TD> </TR> <TR> <TD bgcolor="#ffffff"> • Stellent has a comparatively limited developer/integrator community </TD> </TR> </TABLE> Developing page templates in Site Studio seems simple at first blush but can get complicated. Graphic designers can drag in components and build Web page templates, but the underlying logic is complex enough to require developers. The templating system is quite powerful in that developers can set various permissions and triggers at the element level, and here again you can delegate authority. Once templates are built, authorized business managers can modify which templates are applied to any set of content items. They can also alter some site structure, all via a browser interface. <h3>Platform versus Product Needs</h3> Stellent is a nimble vendor that has focused on solving business problems — SOX and Multi-Site being two cases in point. However, the company's small size isn't without drawbacks. Stellent lags in building international users networks and lacks the large-scale developer networks and deep integrator ties that help larger ECM vendors sustain their more complex offerings. Do enterprises require an ECM platform on which to build custom content applications, or simply a manageable collection of functional products? The Fortune 100 may be looking to standardize on a single ECM infrastructure, but most other enterprises buy piecemeal to fix specific problems. In this market, Stellent is not always going to win on technical elegance; but the company has held its ground by focusing on easy-to-implement products. • The Stellent Content Server is priced per server and per user, starting at $50,000. SOX implementations run from $100,000 to 200,000, including the Content Server. Multi-Site Management packages start at about $200,000, including the Content Server. Tony Byrne is founder of CMS Watch (<a href="http://www. cmswatch. com" target="_blank">www.cmswatch.com</a>), which evaluates major content management, search and records management products.