Hosted enterprise portals
ECM (Enterprise content management ) - is a set of technologies used to capture, store, preserve and deliver content and documents and content related to organizational processes. ECM tools allow the management of an organization's unstructured information, wherever that information exists.
ECM employed the technologies and strategies of content management to address business process issues, such as records and auditing, knowledge sharing, personalization and standardization of content, and so on.
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.
About the Army Knowledge Online (AKO) portalThe AKO serves about 1.6 million users, including soldiers, civilians and support contractors for the U.S. Army. It is the focal point for knowledge communities, collaboration and e-mail. Important policy statements and news items are posted on the AKO, and many activities relating to personnel, logistics and training are accomplished through it. The AKO was deployed using Appian Portal from Appian.KMWorld recently hosted a roundtable discussion that focused on the Army Knowledge Online (AKO) portal. Led by KMWorld senior writer Judith Lamont, the roundtable included Col. Timothy A. Fong, director, U. S. Army Chief of Technology Office, Network Enterprise Technology Command/9th Army Signal Command; Jim Murphy, senior analyst, AMR Research; and Michael Beckley, co-founder and VP of product development, Appian.
The hosted CRM vendor has recently announced that they will focus on enabling customers to run "their entire enterprise on The Business Web" according to CEO Marc Benioff. Already a third-party company called iCentera offers portal and content management functionality through Salesforce.com. According to the controversial author Nicolas Carr, "there is no doubt that Salesforce.com will develop engines for content management." That's a fascinating idea, but you should remember that the world of data -- where Salesforce.com has experience -- is quite different than the world of content, and a loosely modified CRM system will not a Web CMS make.
Summed up in a nice, detailed blog entry by Mike Fitzmaurice. He is a Sharepoint developerevangelist who concedes that Microsoft has traditionallynot been "especially eager to promote WSRP." WSRP(Web Services for Remote Portlets) is astandard for access and display of portlets hosted on a remote server. Theidea is to have a standard way to integrate portlets running ondifferent machines (including different portals), internally or externally. While many vendors areclaiming WSRP support, few enterprises have embraced it fully, andmany are still running quite self-contained portals.
 |
