ECM News Radar

Call it rubber-necking or whatever you want, but when one company buys another company in this business we want to know the details.Such is the case with the announcement that Pennsylvania based Really Strategies has just bought out DocZone, a Dutch-based SaaS XML content management provider under — you guessed it — undisclosed terms. DocZone’s DITA solution is known as being one of the most affordable on the market, while Really Strategies’ RSuite is a browser-based web content management system for publishers.

Let's take another trip to the cloud, shall we? Yes, the adage may be old: to cloud or not to cloud? The open source Enterprise CMS vendor Nuxeo solved this poetic dilemma and took its document management product to the cloud. Nuxeo DM Cloud Edition, now available as SaaS, promises security and reliability, among other things.While many organizations still seem to shy away from SaaS for many obvious reasons, Nuxeo is sure that it can address “the needs of organizations that want to benefit from a proven ready-to-go ECM solution without the related IT constraints and costs.”

On the heels of its acquisition by Open Text, Vignette plans an imminent introduction of VCM 8.0, a key component of the Vignette Web Experience foundation, which is designed to empower marketers and business users to manage media-rich, global Web properties.Vignette says VCM 8.0 allows organizations to easily create and manage an engaging online experience while relieving IT of basic, day-to-day Web responsibilities. Reportedly, a novice user will be able to build Web sites in minutes rather than hours while maintaining brand consistency. VCM 8.0 also includes productivity-enhancing capabilities such as personalized toolbars, favorite shortcuts and workspaces that recall user preferences.

Open source enterprise content management vendor Alfresco really doesn't strike you as a vendor that likes to stay in the shadows. Quite the contrary actually. And the work they have been doing on CMIS — the Content Management Interoperability Specification — proves it. Their goal — and they aren't being subtle about it — is to the first Enterprise CMS that is fully CMIS compliant. There From the Beginning, Almost Although the first official announcement regarding the new proposed CMIS specification came from Microsoft, IBM and EMC, Alfresco was there almost from the beginning. And they have been the most vocal about what they have been doing to implement the proposed standard:

The initial vision for Web CMS Plone 4 was so complex that it wasn't slated for release until 2010. In order to allow for smaller, more focused releases, Plone Founder Alexander Limi announced at the Plone Symposium at Penn State that the Plone Roadmap has been revised. What was originally Plone 4 has been split into Plone 4 and Plone 5. The New Plone 4Plone 4 is due in late 2009 and its release manager is Eric Steele.  This release will feature:

We are not market researchers, but we do think it is important for every buyer to grasp a basic understanding of underlying market dynamics. For those of you intrigued or interested at what is happening in the world of Enterprise Portals, here is a SlideShare recording that looks at our updated Cross-Check Analysis of the vendors as of June 2009. Much more detailed analysis on the marketplace and head-to-head evaluations of enterprise portals vendors and products can be found in The Enterprise Portals Report 2009.

It would be an understatement to say that social media is a hot topic nowadays, including in the enterprise. You may be terrified of using it in your organization, but you really have no choice. Social media is here to stay, and you may as well embrace it rather than fight it. Open Text watches this trend closely and acts accordingly, in its true “candy and aspirin” fashion. Today, the vendor has announced a new addition to the Enterprise CMS platform — Open Text Social Media, which may help conservative organizations to (safely) warm up to social media.

German company, Ontoprise launches the latest version of its open source Semantic MediaWiki+ to help improve a company's knowledgebase and make finding information and retrieval easier. Digging the Information MineToo much data and information is a growing problem for any number of companies, not just major enterprises. Finding that data, in context, is something that standard search engines are not very good at. So, we arrive in the realm of semantic search.Ontoprise thinks that its semantic wiki will make life easier for those in need of not just search results, but knowledge.

There are a lot of solutions on the market today that you could implement to provide social software to your employees and customers. And they all offer very similar functionality. So there is a need to differentiate and offer specific point solutions based on that technology.This is what MindTouch is doing. Today they announce the first of three collaborative network solutions based on their open source collaboration platform: MindTouch Collaborative Intranet.

Liferay Portal Enterprise Edition 5.2 is now available, boosting the speed and feature-set found in the previously released Standard Edition, including benchmarked performance improvements. The Enterprise Version Catches UpLiferay Portal Enterprise Edition was launched back in January 2009 to complement the existing free Standard Edition. Version 5.2 of the Standard Edition was launched back in February to the open source community, offering content management, collaboration tools, mashups and social networking applications in a single package.

Many industries face management challenges when it comes to regulatory issues. From the financial sector to the pharmaceutical, figuring out how to best manage, store and archive content while meeting compliance mandates is often a complex process. Thanks to Virtify, a leader in enterprise content management solutions for life sciences companies, things are getting easier. Today they've announced the release of an end-to-end web based solution aimed at managing content and compliance requirements for all facets of the life science industries.

When we first looked at the new MetaVis Technologies tools for SharePoint, we knew there would be a lot of interest from enterprise struggling to manage and control their SharePoint implementations.These tools which include taxonomy support and metadata management for SharePoint — both MOSS and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 — are any SharePoint architect's dream, helping with the creation, deployment and management of SharePoint sites.Today they are generally available to the public and CMSWire caught up with Steve Pogrebivsky, MetaVis CEO and Co-Founder, to check on how the products are being received.

There is a wonderful future ahead for internal communicators who focus on content as a productive asset. Giving control of an intranet to a traditional communicator is a bit like giving a pub to an alcoholic. It's happy days. There's so much to publish. All the stuff they never read offline can go on the intranet. The homepage can be covered with news because the communicator with a hammer will see nails everywhere that need to be hammered home. And of course the intranet can reach everybody (in theory, at least), not like those magazines, brochures and flyers.

Alfresco is one of the most well known open source enterprise content management providers. With over 1.4 million downloads of their solution already and a number of marque clients for the Alfresco Enterprise, they should be happy to continue business as usual.But, as usual, they aren't. This week they have announced a partnership with ParaScale, a cloud storage software provider, to offer Alfresco "Content as a Service". The ParaScale PlatformIn enterprise deployments of ECM solutions, the traditional model is separate hardware for front-end and back-end (multiple this model based on usage requirements). It's the model that Alfresco would typically recommend to its clients.

So many things have gotten the "aaS" (as-a-service) suffix in the past year that it's hard to imagine anything new or noteworthy being added to the list at this point. But I'm starting to think that a new flavor of "aaS" (yes, I'm sorry to be the one to tell you this...) may well be in the works. I'll spare you the mental anguish of a new acronym. We can just call it what it is: hosted beta testing, or beta-software-as-a-service. Hosted beta testing may not be new. But it's far from the norm. It's an underutilized (to say the least) alternative to the usual "Go fly our kite in a storm and report back to us" type of beta testing. I think it could catch on bigtime, though, for many of the same reasons SaaS has gotten so much traction lately.

While we're not exactly saying that "Enterprise Portals are the new black," one of the most important trends the we observed in our latest Enterprise Portals research is the increase in buyers' desire for broad, scalable integration frameworks. You can read more about these findings in today's press release or read all of our research on the enterprise portals landscape including 12 head-to-head evaluations of the leading enterprise portal options in the new Enterprise Portals Report 2009. Also, last month at the Interop show in Las Vegas, my colleague Alan Pelz Sharpe explained some of his observations of the portal marketplace.

Last week I attended a conference keynote session where Microsoft's Tricia Bush (Group Product Manager, SharePoint) asserted that SharePoint was helping to provide Web governance with its workflow services. Now, I've seen a lot of SharePoint implementations and I think and dream about Web Governance constantly, so I found this comment disturbing. Software vendors say interesting things about their products all the time.  But because of the viral-like quality of SharePoint implementations, I thought it was worth stating clearly that SharePoint does not provide Web Governance.

Enterprise Content Management specialist, Alfresco Software and EnterpriseDB Corporation, are partnering to offer Alfresco Enterprise for use with EnterpriseDB's Postgres Plus and EnterpriseDB's Postgres Plus Advanced Server. A New PartnershipAlfresco's open source ECM, in use by the likes of FedEx, Fox and Virgin Mobile, already has a Microsoft SharePoint protocol and CMIS support, for a wider choice of operating system, database, application server and desktop environment.

I've been talking to numerous owners of corporate websites lately to try and understand where the "internet prescence" of large enterprises is heading in the future.  In my view the future for the "corporate website" looks bleak. Online services in large organisations are gradually melding, with the intranet, extranet and internet growing closer in technology, content and resourcing; due to synergies and efficiencies achieved. This could be good news for the "internet teams" but it isn't. In fact, the emerging trend is for increasing access to be given to intranets for people outside the firewall; suppliers, contractors, customers, former staff etc. Major companies globally are looking to open up to their marketplaces, customers and consumers. They are also looking to increase their presence and engagement with social media and emerging 2.0 technologies.

Wipro Technologies, the global IT services business of Wipro Limited (NYSE:WIT) today announced the launch of Hosted Document Management (HDM) solution - a cost effective enterprise document management offering based on the Software as a Service (SaaS) model. The solution was developed as a part of the strategic alliance between Wipro and EMC Corporation and leverages EMC Documentum Enterprise Content Management 6.5 - helping enterprises address the need for robust and scalable enterprise content management (ECM) solutions and to manage the increasing demand for transactional content and business process efficiencies. The solution is being launched at EMC World, 2009, EMC's international customer conference, being held at Orlando, May 18 - 21, 2009.