Leading off this installment of The Weekly Watch is Alfresco, a company that's proven there's plenty of innovation left in the enterprise content management (ECM) sector. Alfresco sent InformationWeek some of its recent accomplishments and a few grabbed our attention.

In addition to some major OEM deals, apparently downloads of Alfresco have now eclipsed one million. The other significant news involves the growth of the Alfresco community, which now numbers almost 50,000 members. We'll be speaking with Alfresco executives next week, so stay tuned.

One of the areas we'll be covering more is enterprise search. In some ways, search has become the new interface for how many of us access the information we use every day to get work done. But let's face it, enterprise search has two problems: visibility and a very tough road to hoe with Google being so pervasive. Companies like Autonomy, Vivisimo, FAST, and others are solving real business problems by using search to unify disparate content and personalize the way that content is delivered. And speaking of the vendor visibility challenge, I got wind of dtSearch recently, a company that apparently has been working on enterprise search for more than 15 years.

dtSearch says its software searches terabytes of data in a wide variety of formats across a desktop, network, the Internet, or an intranet. Its latest release also includes a 64-bit engine for Windows and .Net that allows users to integrate with other Web-based applications. International language support is accomplished through Unicode, which spans hundreds of international languages. I still think there's tons of innovation ahead of us in the search space.

On the Web content management front, SiteCore sent InformationWeek news of its recent deployment with Royal Copenhagen, one of the world's leading porcelain manufacturers. A company spokesperson told us SiteCore's platform is helping Royal Copenhagen "optimize its e-commerce operations by speeding up its transactions and giving content managers the ability to change and enhance the Web experience." I pulled that quote because of the "Web experience" reference. That's something we've spoken about quite a bit recently. Hopefully it's a sign of the times. I don't know about you, but a better Web experience is something we can all use more of.

Here's one from the "I'm not sure if I can beat 'em" file. Mainsoft, an IBM partner, will soon release its SharePoint Integrator for Lotus Notes.

According to a company spokesperson, the software gives users point-and-click access to SharePoint content, including Word documents, Excel worksheets, and PowerPoint presentations, all from a Notes-driven sidebar. Mainsoft says Notes users also can store updated documents within SharePoint sites. And I got a kick out of the PR firm's pitch, if for nothing more than its attempt to balance things a bit delicately.

"For enterprise IT, replacing multimillion dollar Lotus Notes/Domino infrastructures with a Microsoft stack is a highly political, costly project. Migrating from SharePoint to Quickr is one option, though SharePoint fans oppose it."

And finally, in a classic case of a company taking our plea for vendors to eat their own dog food, Neighborhood America sent us news of its own community launch. Kristi Grigsby, head marketer, sent us a note on how our recent post on why content management companies fail hit home.

"... like in your post last week about the top 5 reasons a content management company fails. I loved that. We have been stuck in some of those traps ourselves, and # 5 was EXACTLY why we've been working so hard to rebuild our Web presence! In true 'eating your own dog food' fashion, we have integrated our own ELAvate platform and will continue growing into it as our community evolves."

Let us know if you'd like to be included in next week's Weekly Watch.