Since my post last week mentioning the fight to surpass SharePoint in the marketplace, I've received a lot of feedback from various SharePoint partners and competitors. This installment of the "Weekly Watch On Content Management" is peppered with some SharePoint-related stuff, collaboration news, and an acquisition rumor that just won't die.

There's been rumors for the last five years or so that OpenText will be bought. I don’t think it’s going to happen anytime soon, but many obviously disagree. Oracle and HP always seem to be the likely suitors, which make sense, but both are still soaking up recent acquisitions of their own. Oracle could certainly handle the OpenText infrastructure from a resource perspective, but with Stellent being nicely folded in and BEA Systems in the wings, I don't see it. The HP talk makes more sense as it doesn't have quite the ECM platform layer as some of the its larger competitors. All that aside, the fact remains that OpenText is still the largest independent ECM vendor and has a healthy product road map, so I suspect the talk to persist indefinitely.

Xythos Software, a document management and collaboration software company using SaaS and Web 2.0, was recently purchased by Blackboard. With the recent string of other doc management and collaborators making funding and market share headway, this segment of the content management market should continue to expand rapidly. In other words, cloud-based content and document management is for real,folks.

Telligent is releasing its new Community Server 2008 on the 15th. I'll be talking to CEO Rob Howard this week to get the scoop on that and some other SharePoint-related news. Rob and company are obviously close to Redmond and have become a pretty good barometer for how Microsoft's technology can be used for social computing environments. Let's see if the combination of Community Server 2008 and SharePoint makes things more interesting.

NewsGator also is bringing more user-focused capabilities to SharePoint environments. Its Social Sites infrastructure is really nice technology, adding just the right levels of Web 2.0-based collaboration to sometimes-stale SharePoint sites. I enjoyed the demo last week -- NewsGator's product has the most SharePoint sizzle I've seen in a while.