The Weekly Watch On Content Management

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.On the acquisition front, HP confirmed its commitment to enterprise content management this week by snapping up records management experts Tower Software. It may be small monetarily, but should pay bigger dividends as e-Discovery and compliance continues to drive demand for better document access and visibility.

- Proving there's plenty of fish to be had in the mid-market stream, PaperThin sent InformationWeek news of recent customer wins and product enhancements to its CommonSpot platform. A PaperThin spokesperson said it's inked Emirates Bank, Hasbro, Sharp HealthCare and Sir Speedy as CommonSpot clients.

- Taking a page from some of the pure-plays in the collaboration space, Vignette will announce its own community offerings on Monday. We've been hearing the build-up on the forthcoming enhancements for a few weeks now, and it appears the "Community Service" and "Community Applications" products will be the cornerstone for its enterprise 2.0 capabilities. Next week is shaping up to be a big week for community-oriented offerings, as Jive Software is preparing its own announcement.

-One vendor that enables the behind the scenes magic when it comes to multi-channel communications is Thunderhead. They released Interview NOW this week, an application that makes it easier for companies to collect data from employees through an interview-style process. According to Thunderhead, the module includes out-of-the-box integration with various BPM products. Thunderhead also wins the weekly award for the "biggest marketing mouthful."

"With Interview NOW, businesses can leverage a complete enterprise solution for the creation and delivery of real-time and high-volume, multi-channel, personalized communications. That about covers it.