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Recently I've been pretty hard on content management vendors by pointing out some of the mistakes that can drive them out of business. While vendor elitism with customers can be a big problem, I can't let content management clients completely off the hook. There are a few mistakes that I've seen over and over in every vertical.

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I had an interesting discussion with John Newton, the co-founder of Alfresco, recently. I'm a little star-struck by this guy. It's hard to get much higher on the food chain when you look at Newton's credentials. Not only did he co-found Documentum, he's also less than five years into the launch of Alfresco, arguably one of the biggest disrupters to appear on the enterprise software radar in years.

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Across various industries, the one thing I always hear customers say is "How can I make sure I'm found?" This applies to both internet searches and searches within the firewall. Everyone wants their content to be found, read, appreciated and remembered.

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One of our contacts in the PR world sent over some thoughts after reading our continuing discussion about why content management companies fail. His remarks might not be terribly surprising for those of you that live and breathe content management, but they warrant a re-visit.

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The hits keep coming in from our "Top 5 Reasons A Content Management Company Will Go Out Of Business" post. This time, the experiences come from a university from the land down under, proving content management blunders serve us all on a truly global scale.

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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.

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I read this PC World story and I couldn't help but think how indicative it is of the typical command and control mentality within enterprises. I know there's a balance between fighting the external social network (SoNet) effect and creating a corporate one of your own. With all the technology, horsepower, and APIs gone wild, shouldn't we be able to figure out how to create some harmony between the two?

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As another Earth Day passed, I thought it was appropriate to pass along some green tidbits within the content management and IT space. I ran across Jarrod Gingras' post referring to how the green movement is affecting purchasing decisions for SaaS-based Web content solutions.

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I seemed to have touched a nerve in my recent entry about the top five reasons a content management company will go out of business, judging by the feedback received via e-mail, tweets, IM, and the blog.

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It's not often you hear terms like application integration and IT governance from companies building their businesses on Web 2.0 underpinnings such as blogs, wikis, and RSS. So I was somewhat surprised to be smacked in the face with just that from Aaron Fulkerson, the tech-talking co-founder and CEO of MindTouch, a company that wants to be the "tissue" that helps enterprises connect all those disparate systems.

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Last week I mentioned the danger to companies that disregard trends in the content management space. I'm going horizontal this time and taking a crack at one of my favorites lines of business -- marketing.

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The rush to provide social computing tools to the corporate world continued this week as Dallas-based Telligent released Community Server 2008. Unlike other pure-play community software and social networkers, Telligent is banking on Microsoft to help it befriend corporate customers that have big plans for SharePoint. But SharePoint isn't the only draw in this fight. ROI is the other weapon it's using to spar with others in the competitive social computing space.

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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.

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Several months ago a content management vendor told me that the oncoming recession was causing it problems with revenue generation. I said perhaps, but it's also possible its problems were related to the fact that its customers were really angry and really vocal. It's too easy to blame market conditions without taking a hard look in the mirror sometimes.

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Has social computing become the enterprise software vendor's strategy to avoid a recession? It's evident there's a rush to help organizations become better collaborators. If you stick 2.0 behind any typical enterprise-oriented term, you've probably heard all the versions. ECM 2.0, knowledge management 2.0, and, of course, the party favorite, Enterprise 2.0. The real question is whether we'll see real revenue as these types of systems are rolled out.

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I'm seeing more free CMS services pop up these days, even though we know that in true Web 2.0 style, eventually we'll have to pony up for something. The latest online incarnation is CushyCMS, and it comes from Stateless Systems, an Australian Web company that claims it has more than six million visitors a month visiting its Web properties.

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This week's "Weekly Watch" on content management includes an ECM acquisition, Vignette's enterprise 2.0 moves, and a few lesser-known companies making their own noise.

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Collaboration and community are two very big hills for vendors to climb these days. As the saying goes, many have tried and many have failed. Add Microsoft's SharePoint to the growing list of things you'll need to overcome and some might say you're spinning your wheels.

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I caught up with Oracle customer Dthree recently wanting to get the scoop on how Oracle's infrastructure is helping them deliver something meaningful to marketers. I'm always interested in how such technology-driven companies can speak to the business user.

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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.

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Some of open source's biggest proponents were probably gloating this week over some results from North Bridge Venture Partners' annual open source survey (PDF). Most of the findings weren't terribly prophetic, but there were a few that caught my eye.

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There's a lot of interesting scenarios these days around the intersection of software-as-a-service (SaaS) and content management. Thanks to companies like Google, Salesforce.com, and Amazon, cloud-based computing is no longer some mythical, business-led, revolutionary approach to accessing technology. Everyday, mission-critical applications are being neatly packaged and delivered to business users regardless of time, place, or device.

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My first post of 2008 was a content management trend watch: number two on the list was the movement toward green IT.

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I continue to be impressed with how vendors outside the CMS space are helping companies manage content, and lots of it. One in particular is Neighborhood America, the Florida-based company that provides social networking capabilities to companies such as CBS Networks, Kodak, and Fox News.

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After hearing FatWire Software brag about one of the best quarters in its history, I thought it was a good time to catch up with its CEO, Yogesh Gupta. We spoke about everything from open source to SaaS, with Gupta also highlighting some of the company's recent enterprise 2.0 moves.

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A lot of the conversations I've had lately have revolved around the notion of the user experience, or in vendor speak, the Web experience. I'm not knocking the marketing messages (OK, maybe a little) but we've been talking about the Web experience since the Web 1.0 days, without much movement.

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It's always a challenge for something baked into an enterprise platform to be as competitive as the pure-play providers. And in most cases, if content management is the set of applications you're trying to incorporate, it can be even more daunting.

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The open source CMS platform Drupal is going commercial thanks to an 11-person startup named Acquia. It recently secured $7 million in funding and plans to sell a suite of services it says will make Drupal enterprise-ready.

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And public Wi-Fi hotspots, texting galore, and the iPhone are the tools of this seduction. But with more applications and wireless spectrum (and YouTube clips) on the way, where exactly are we going to store all this new content?

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E-mail governance might not be the sexiest thing when it comes to content technologies, but don't tell that to your CIO or general counsel. Besides keeping them out of jail, a solid e-mail governance strategy drives compliance, improves information retrieval, and reduces paper.

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Given the variety of ways that stored data gets sliced and diced these days, it's hard not to imagine that Ron Popeil of Veg-o-Matic fame didn't have a hand in there somewhere along the way. Here's what I mean.

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While no one doubts the demand for pure-play content management services, there's still a tremendous amount of confusion around what customers should hand off to certain vendors. Fact is, sometimes your CMS provider may not be the best fit for managing the flow of content in your online community or forum.

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In Vendor Land, it's a short hop from capacity planning to storage resource management (SRM). A couple product guys from IBM volunteered to explain why this makes good business sense (even if it blows your budget).

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A good way of perfecting your trend-watching in the high-tech sector is by paying close attention to how and when vendors release their so-called strategic road maps. It's essentially their way of legitimizing themselves in an increasingly competitive and noisy marketplace.

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You know, the kind where you want to decide where to go for dinner, and suddenly your significant other/spouse/soulmate is off and running on the past, present, and future of the relationship and why you never ... well, you get the point.

This is actually good practice for when you try to talk to a vendor or reseller about storage capacity planning. Why? Because this very specific function you want help with snowballs quickly into a referendum on the future and sanctity of your enterprise's data -- maybe its very existence.

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OK, so you can't take yourself public like Visa. But how much thought have you given to that big, fat check coming your way in May? You know, the "Spend our way out of this nonrecession" check?

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The "greening" of IT is very à la mode right now, especially in storage. But this umbrella term suffers from overuse, and near as I can tell, is a euphemism for using less electricity. It's also a "feature" that enables some vendors to bump up their prices. So what exactly is the fuss again?

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The little do-si-do between Congress and the White House over missing e-mails is apparently over. Cynics might predict the next steps will be a digging in of heels, followed quickly by threats to launch (and bungle) an investigation, or worse, appoint a special prosecutor.

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I caught up with Vignette as details were emerging about its updated Web content management tools. This week, we learned a little more about the Web Experience Platform, the company's new and improved approach at managing your content.

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Security researchers found/punched a new hole in one of VMware's products this week, and from some quarters, it's being written about as if virtual machinery had never been a target for malicious code before. Those in the data center know differently.

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Vendors see the world of technical challenges a bit differently -- and no surprise here: The items they cite often tend to play to the vendor's strengths or ongoing market initiatives. But here are how big thinkers at some storage vendors view the biggest engineering challenges ahead.

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Mask complexity, improve performance, and automate every last function possible -- those, in a giant nutshell, are the biggest engineering challenges for storage in the next several years, according to some big thinkers who've deployed a SAN or two in their time.

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Rob Howard, CEO of Telligent, pulls no punches when he talks about his company's aspirations in the content management space. And the way Telligent markets its new CMS offering is just as brazen.

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There are lots of good barometers out there -- the Dow Jones Industrial Average comes to mind, as does the Consumer Confidence Index. A little closer to home, this gauge of where VCs and angel investors are placing their bets tells you a lot about where storage is headed in the next 12 months.

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For those of you who think Web 2.0 is a fad, you might want to take a look at what's on tap for some of content management's household names.

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Late last week, the National Academy of Engineering issued a list of the biggest technical challenges of the 21st century, some real thorny knots like reverse-engineer the human brain and prevent nuclear terrorism.

It got me wondering how the some of brightest minds in storage might answer the same question. So I asked them.

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Even though most of us agree that content management systems are critical to serving our markets, there's just as many of us that would rejoice if we never had to touch a piece of CMS code again.

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And mercifully so -- the battle over the next-gen DVD came to a close as Toshiba threw in the high-def towel today. But as quickly as data and media formats are evolving, does it really matter?

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As a journalist, it makes me wince to witness reporters getting all sanctimonious when in reality they're doing little more than burnishing their reputations. But the roles got reversed as Hewlett-Packard settled one of two sets of pretexting and spying claims yesterday, acting and speaking with a smugness and neutrality that don't really put the matter behind anyone.

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Six weeks into the year and you're finally remembering that sinuous "8" when you write a new check. And it's been barely a week since the Year of the Rat celebrations ended. No matter -- in Storageville, it's pretty safe if we just go ahead and label this the Year of Storage Services.

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