Vignette alternatives - ECM Tools review.

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.

CMS vendor Ektron started out as a WYSIWYG widget maker and pretty much made that market through OEM deals with several major CMS vendors. But some customers don't want an ActiveX-based solution, and rich text editors are notoriously finicky, so not every solution works well within any given environment. There are many applet-based alternatives, although they have had a reputation for bugginess. Now it looks like Ephox is coming to lead that lot, announcing recent OEM deals with Vignette and Percussion, enabling those vendors to compete better in some markets (e.g. academia) where Windows does not dominate the desktop. With the rise of AJAX, though, I'm seeing more CMS vendors gaining confidence with DHTML+Javascript rich interfaces. So the days of the thick plug-in may be numbered...