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The 'Weekly Watch' On Content Management

With all the activity in the content management market, I thought it would be a good idea to start a weekly ritual of quick blurbs and sound bites from vendors, users, and anyone else who'd like to throw their message in the mix.

The plan is to publish the "Weekly Watch" on Fridays, so tee up your comments or e-mails by at least Wednesday or Thursday so we'll have enough time to respond to your pitches, observations, and gripes.

This week's segment has a heavy vendor emphasis, but don't hold that against me. In no particular order, here's some of the things that crossed our plate.

-- Larry Ellison and company (Oracle) turned on the PR machine over the last few weeks to publicize some of its enterprise 2.0 juice. Just like some other ECM vendors, it's aggressively pushing the notion that enterprise content management (ECM) can (and should) be the cornerstone for a company's 2.0 strategy. And why not? If you've got the right team in place driving your ECM strategy, doesn't it make sense that the same folks can spearhead an enterprise 2.0 approach. After all, even if you bash the big repository guys, there's no denying that some semblance of unification and structure is desperately needed in many early enterprise 2.0 environments.

I'm scheduled to speak with Dthree about its enterprise 2.0 development, so we'll get the scoop and report back next week.

-- This week a Vignette spokesperson described its new caching technology as "steroids for Web content management." But wait, there's more. The pitch summarized the added horsepower to Vignette's Web Experience infrastructure as a great way to turn your system into a "veritable Barry Bonds of content management." They get some store credits for being timely on the baseball and steroids thing, but I doubt that metaphor ends up in any marketing collateral. As far as the offering, it's getting good reviews from one of Vignette's top partners. Anything that can take something so typically technical off IT's plate and put it into the hands of business users is a great thing in my book.

-- OpenText also continued its enterprise 2.0 push this week with a few announcements publicizing its take on enterprise social computing and the formation of what it's calling the Open Text Centre for Digital Media Research. I spoke with an enthusiastic Ken Coates, Waterloo's dean of the faculty of arts, about Institute 2.0 and its potential impact. Without pause, Coates fired back, saying, "Canada is figuring a way to to accelerate the digital revolution." OpenText's resident enterprise 2.0 guy Bill Forquer summarized the effort as something that would move the industry from "tool makers" to "tool users." Bravo.

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