In our SharePoint Report 2008 we discuss SharePoint's shortcomings and strengths in the search space. While SharePoint 2007's search capabilities have been improved over the 2003 product, it's still not "enterprise class" for a variety of different reasons.

Clearly Microsoft saw this same shortcoming (both in SharePoint and it's overall search offerings) and announced that they were going to acquire enterprise search vendor Fast Search and Transfer (more information on FAST can be found in our Enterprise Search Report 2008).

For SharePoint users, this brings up a few opportunities and issues. In a previous blog post about the SharePoint conference, I highlighted the presentation that FAST employees gave. This presentation showed nifty new Silverlight-enabled search Web Parts. These Web Parts demonstrated several capabilities that FAST brings to the SharePoint world, like: content spotlighting, multimedia search, and taxonomy management.

The last capability is one that I believe would be particularly interesting for SharePoint users, since taxonomy management represents a challenging area for most SharePoint implementations -- SharePoint taxonomies are very rigidly based on physical structure of the SharePoint sites and leave little flexibility for a more logical taxonomic structure (Redmond folks would argue that the content query Web Part might help, but it's not a solution). That said, what Microsoft hasn't really provided is good guidance on what users can expect to see and any migration path between SharePoint search and FAST. Unfortunately, that really hasn't changed: Microsoft has not release any roadmap for Fast's integration, though you could argue it's still early.

That aside, what could the FAST acquisition mean to SharePoint customers? Here are a few of my thoughts:

• The FAST acquisition was officially completed today. This is a good thing, since Microsoft can now get down to the business of integrating the company's technology with the rest of Microsoft's products. However, it's not clear what, if any, impact this acquisition will have in the very short term. Judging by the Groove acquisition, which preceded the SharePoint 2007 release by some months, an acquisition after the release will not yield any updates in the core product until SharePoint vNext (probably around 2010 or so) and beyond. However, I'd be willing to bet that some elements of the demo given at the SharePoint conference make their way to sites like Codeplex or as free downloads on Microsoft's site.
• The former CEO of FAST will assume the role of VP of Enterprise Search. His responsibility will include all search products: SharePoint search, Search Server Express and Fast ESP. So I guess the "Enterprise Search" moniker might need to be removed or rewritten on the SharePoint search page; FAST is, by far, the new "enterprise" search product at Microsoft. What's interesting here is that Microsoft has historically brought Office-related technologies under one roof; just look at what happened to SharePoint specifically -- that product was once it's own product group. As they integrate FAST, it would appear that this announcement suggests Microsoft might break out search into its own dedicated team and make SharePoint a "customer." This opens up the possibility of decoupling SharePoint from any particular search technology -- perhaps a pipe dream, but we can always hope.
• In a blog entry on the Enterprise Search blog, Microsoft stated that the FAST offering will continue its Linux and Unix support. The blog entry was quick to reinforce the message that Microsoft does not want to support or wish to invest in Linux or Unix solutions. While they would like to "delight a core part of Fast's customer base," they are openly hoping those customers will convert to Windows and .NET. This does call into question whether this Linux/Unix support will be long for the world. In the short term, however, Microsoft can boast a better product from which to launch a play to be a real contender in the enterprise search space; see our related blog entries and article on FAST here. In the long term, Microsoft will have to come to grips with the fact that enterprises will continue to leverage non-Windows technology and if Microsoft wants to benefit from that revenue, they should consider continuing Fast's support for those technologies (their recent earnings announcement, and the subdued guidance for the year, may reinforce that message).
• Microsoft won't support SharePoint on Linux <gasp!>. This is probably not a surprise to anyone who is even vaguely familiar with Microsoft. However, the fact that FAST (currently) is supported on Linux may introduce greater content aggregation and, certainly, search capabilities within SharePoint. Let's hope that Microsoft sees it that way.

In general, the FAST acquisition, for SharePoint, will likely have little impact short term. Over the longer term, it's clear that the Office 14 version of SharePoint will be substantially improved in the search area (depending on the SharePoint product team's willingness to implement the new technology). I would personally like to see some add-ons in the near term, since that would improve search within organizations that may have both tools.

Stay tuned for more on this topic as the integration progresses.

Our new SharePoint Report explains how one of the core challenges with the platform -- dating from inception through to MOSS 2007 -- is that the needs of a collaboration service often conflict with the requirements of other information services, particularly around website publishing.

One example: like many other portal vendors, by default MOSS wants to insert a lot of extra code and non-standard mark-up on every page to create an interactive collaboration dashboard. As this MSDN brief on how to performance-tune a MOSS 2007 WCM site warns, "Office SharePoint Server, by default, is not XHTML compliant." This has manifold implications for website publishing, not the least of which is accessibility.

Can you fix this? Yes, with an experienced developer carefully going into the innards of the tool at various levels to replace code. Not particularly friendly.

Of late, Redmond has been touting its "Accessibility Kit for SharePoint." At least one avid researcher points out that the fix remains incomplete. (Link thanks to Martin White.)

As Web CMS Report readers know, some competing web content management packages quietly suffer the same problem. At least with SharePoint you can read all about it publicly. But Microsoft casts a huge shadow on this space, and their relative disregard for core web standards just lowers the bar for everyone else.

Our partners in Denmark, J. Boye, have just published a white paper, Wiki in the Enterprise.

There are many useful nuggets in the research (including a handy project check-list), but what I liked best about the paper is that it clearly contrasts the real value of wikis in a workgroup setting with the thorny challenges that wikis present enterprises once they evolve beyond a single departmental implementation. Have a look.

"Recycling" information (a.k.a., "content reuse") is a critical goal for most content management systems. On this Earth Day 2008, I thought it appropriate to share another green movement that's emerging in the content management industry. While researching SaaS (Software as a Service) solutions for The Web CMS Report 2008, I talked to several customers who stated "it is greener" as a reason they decided to choose a hosted solution for their enterprise.

Granted, it was not the decisive reason -- apparently getting out of the IT business is more compelling than saving the planet -- but it was the first time that I heard it as a factor.

Many observers consider SaaS greener to the traditional installed approach because SaaS providers host multiple "tenants" on the same servers. This more efficient approach requires less energy and releases less CO2 than if each tenant were running their own servers.

So it should come as no surprise that two of the four SaaS CMS vendors we cover, Clickability and CrownPeak, both promote their offerings using the "greener" message. Clickability promotes their Four Green Tenets of the SaaS Model, and today CrownPeak announced a site devoted to helping other companies achieve carbon neutrality.

In an era of increasing server virtualization, this argument holds less water, at least within larger enterprises who are increasingly mastering virtualization. But for the mid-market customers that most SaaS vendors target, energy savings could become quite real. The bigger benefit may come in not having to employ people to babysit your Web CMS servers -- quite literally reducing the carbon-based footprints in your enterprise...

Of course, SaaS isn't for everyone. Bringing the wrong solution into your enterprise can generate a lot of hot air and steam, too, so consider all factors here.

Happy Earth Day.

Last week we received an e-mail from an IT staffer at an outfit that is looking to buy a Web CMS tool, with PaperThin's CommonSpot and RedDot CMS (part of the extended Open Text family) under particular consideration. The e-mail was a forwarded message from a RedDot salesperson, excerpting significant pieces of our Web CMS Report 2008 to make CommonSpot look bad and RedDot look good.

This is an explicit violation of our no-commercial-use policy, which forbids vendors or anyone else from using our findings as marketing material (our policy is modeled after that of the famous U.S.-based evaluation service, Consumer Reports). Somebody or some bodies at RedDot clearly took a lot of time to either OCR or re-type the text (you can't copy-paste from the PDF). They then took a lot more time to extensively -- if quite disingenuously -- redact portions of the text to make it look like we love their product (we don't) and dislike CommonSpot (we don't). I imagine other RedDot competitors were lined up and chopped down in similar fashion.

Consider the following excerpt from the RedDot salesperson's 4-page message:

"Open Text also holds a yearly LiveLinkUp conference for all of their customers and partners,... You can also find regional user groups around the world, an annual international summit, and an online developer community."

And our actual report text with the redacted clause italicized:

Open Text also holds a yearly LiveLinkUp conference for all of their customers and partners, although RedDot customers we met there departed wondering where their web publishing needs fit in among the enterprise-focused Open Text strategy. You can also find regional user groups around the world, an annual international summit, and an online developer community.

Or this from the e-mail:

"...the product is mature, with a large customer base (over 2,500) and significant internal and external consulting expertise for customers to tap, plus a modestly active user community..you would buy it from a well-regarded vendor, Open Text, with a solid (if complex) "ECM" strategy..."

Which is really this in the report:

RedDot may lack the R&D energy of an Interwoven, Tridion, Day, or Sitecore, but the product is mature, with a large customer base (over 2,500) and significant internal and external consulting expertise for customers to tap, plus a modestly active user community.

And yet, RedDot average deal sizes continue to grow. We think this reflects more the cachet and customer expectations surrounding working with a major ECM vendor like Open Text, rather than intrinsic improvements to the core product -- which indeed have been rather slow in coming. Indeed, for what you get -- a somewhat dated mid-marketish toolset -- RedDot cannot be a called a great value. Nevertheless, you would buy it from a well-regarded vendor, Open Text, with a solid (if complex) "ECM" strategy.

The hatchet job on CommonSpot was as bad or worse.

Now, you and I both know that software sales can be a hurly-burly sport. Caveat emptor and all that. And we've all seen vendors distill convenient quotes from analyst reports across the spectrum (though, disappointingly, often with those analyst firms' approval). What's a bit startling here, though, is the depth of the dishonesty behind the very many ellipses. Although possibly the work of a rogue sales exec, it would seem to confirm my growing suspicions over the years that RedDot as a company has a tendency to play it rather fast and loose.

This makes RedDot all the odder fit within Open Text, an ECM vendor that -- whatever its shortcomings -- has always maintained a conservative, lower-key reputation in the face of the Oracles of this world. In fact, you can really feel the distance within Open Text (c.f., the LiveLinkUp meeting mentioned above), as if Open Text considers RedDot a sometimes charming younger sibling whose misdeeds are ultimately an embarrassment to the family name. It's too bad, really, because RedDot customers probably lose out in the end.

The larger issue here, though, is the way you look at software. Software development is really about trade-offs. Unless we all start managing our websites exactly the same way, something that works well in a tool for one customer can be a detriment for another customer. Do not seek to discover whether a software product is "good" or "bad." Ultimately you have to take a tougher but more meaningful measure: is that product a good fit for what you're trying to accomplish.

This means that every time an analyst or consultant praises some product feature, you have to ask yourself whether, in your case, that feature is actually a demerit -- and vice-versa. A more balanced view of the products -- and your needs -- can get you to the right solution.

I have used a slide called "The E in ECM" in various PowerPoint incarnations for years. Today I read a great blog entry by Philip Howard, who adds another interesting perspective to this. The E in ECM stands of course for Enterprise, but what does the word "Enterprise" actually mean? Well strictly speaking an Enterprise is any firm with more than 10,000 employees (definitions vary of course), and tends to consist of many divisions, departments, and locations.

So an ECM system then is a Content Management System that can be deployed across an Enterprise, or then again, maybe it is not.

Vendors take particular liberty with the term Enterprise. In fact of the 32 vendors we cover in the ECM Suites Report, less than a handful can make a serious claim to be true enterprise-wide options. Most have been built for departmental use, and that is also how they are sold -- albeit that the buying department may comprise a small part of a larger "Enterprise." Most ECM systems have not been architected to scale to 10,000-plus users, they have not been designed to operate in a truly complex and heterogeneous infrastructure, nor have they been priced and licensed to make sense in such wide deployments. In short for most vendors the E simply makes a product sound important, nothing more.

Philip makes the interesting point that ECM is also about enterprise-wide strategies and implications, not just technology. That is, the wrong local decision can have negative impacts on the enterprise as a whole, just as the wrong technology selection can (and often is) a failure at the buying point, but with repercussions that can resonate throughout the enterprise.

ECM is expensive both in terms of resources as well as software. Getting it right though can bring huge benefits. The onus then is unfortunately is on you, the buyer, to see through the mislabeling of products, and to "think globally and to act locally" A technology vendor cannot normally help you with that process, but good advice from independent consultants, advisers, user groups, and forums (and of course CMS Watch reports!) can make a difference.

The announcement to make Yahoo! IndexTools a free service, coming so quickly on the heels of the acquisition, would seem to serve notice to Omniture, Google Analytics, and other market leaders, such as Nedstat, Coremetrics', Unica, and WebTrends' about the seriousness of Yahoo!'s intentions.

Eric Peterson has written a very thoughtful post that delves into the market implications on this latest move.

But from a customer perspective, this could become a bit confusing in the short term. According to IndexTool's Dennis Mortensen, current customers were contacted to let them know they'd be able to continue using the service at no cost if they sign forthcoming agreement from Yahoo!. Details about the agreement and how this impacts current customization projects is still being sorted out, as is how long customers will have to determine if they want to accept the terms.

I'm sure most customers will be inclined to sign the agreement to maintain continuity, unless they have concerns about Yahoo! storing their data, as Google stores Google Analytics data.

Is this a founded concern?

It all depends on your privacy policies -- something you should consider in your requirements for a web analytics tool to begin with. If you haven't figured this out, then you should.

My guess is that for most current IndexTools customers, this will not be a show stopper.

If it does present difficulties for your enterprise, now would be the time to review the vendor profiles in the Web Analytics Report.

In the meantime, current IndexTools customers will surely be asking some important questions, like whether all their current functionality will remain available for free, and if so, for how long. Will data from the pre-Yahoo! days still be available? For how long? How will this affect custom work that you're doing or planning have done by IndexTools, as well as whether there will be a new technical and professional service availability and cost structure? And what about new features and releases, such as Rubix; what will be the cost and support structure?

Yahoo! is moving quickly, and I expect that they will seek to address these issues. However, as a customer, you'll have to make sure that you get these and other questions answered completely before signing on the dotted line.

We participate regularly in the semi-annual Enterprise3 Conference (former Portals and Collaboration Conference). The next event, in San Diego, CA in May, covers a wide range of topics, mostly around the nexus of Portals, SharePoint, and Social Software. Jarrod and I will both present on a number of topics (e.g., Facebook).

As a pre-cursor to the event, I'm leading a free one-hour webinar, "Evaluating SharePoint from a Business Perspective," on Thursday, April 24, 2008 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM EDT. Use the "CMS" priority code when you register. Hope you can join in!

Within most enterprises, the worlds of "data" and "content" remain far apart, despite recurring business needs to converge different types of information. Tony Byrne argues that data specialists have a lot to teach content specialists -- and vice-versa. The trick is finding common ground, allied interests, and a common vocabulary...

If there is one word I hate to hear used in this industry it's the word compliance.

To me it's like fingernails down a blackboard, and frankly if I never hear it used again then I would be a happy man. Of course I have to endure the word in virtually every article and vendor press release I read. I don't like the word because it is a blanket term that used without context is totally meaningless, yet it's a word (much like governance) that sounds impressive and few people in the room will admit that they don't really understand it. Well let me be among the first to point out the the Compliance Emperor often has no clothes.

The first question we should ask when the C word is used is: with what exactly is do you expect to comply? It could be one of three things:

Policy Compliance - to meet the needs of internal procedures and policies

Regulatory Compliance - to meet the needs of a specific regulation such as the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure

Legal Compliance - readiness to meet any particular legal challenge that may impact your enterprise

These are three increasingly stringent compliance types - all quite different, and all typically requiring different strategies, technologies, and skill sets to support.

When vendors blithely talk about compliance, it's incumbent on you to ask specifically what compliance needs they are referencing. And also for you to consider if you have the patience and resources to manage such potentially granular compliance needs. It all looks so easy on a PPT presentation, but can rapidly become near impossible to manage in reality. Many of the people I have been talking to over the past few months are in the very most regulated industries, and virtually all of them told me that despite investing in very expensive compliance software, they have reverted to the most basic policies possible for retention and disposition. Pretty much what they had and were doing prior to buying yet more fancy technology.

Think about it. If you are trying to justify the purchase of archiving or content management technology using compliance as the driver you are very likely to fail. Sure if you are broker on Wall Street then theoretically at least you have to be compliant with certain regulations (such as SEC 17A) or you cannot trade. But outside of such places, most people wing it - be it in Pharmaceuticals, Energy, Aerospace or any other highly regulated sector you care to think of. In fact, most enterprises have at best a cavalier attitude towards compliance. For they know there are very few inspectors (internal or external) around, they know they basically have to do something spectacularly criminal or stupid to be audited, and they figure that ultimately it's just not that big an issue. Frightening, and maybe hard to swallow, but true.

My point -- if I have one beyond the need to rant -- is that simple retention and disposition makes a whole lot of sense. It may only meet the minimal needs of compliance requirements, but in most cases it's enough. Mix this with the added benefits of promptly destroying content that you have no need to keep, and you can gain quick server and storage optimization advantages, over and above the increased ability to actually find stuff. Getting bedazzled by a technology pitch usually leads to a dead-end. You buy the tool, then you see the enormity of the task ahead, then you walk away. While anathema to many, simply doing something is nearly always better than doing nothing, but doing nothing and wasting a lot of money in the process really stinks.

Ted Leonsis, the former AOL executive and current owner of the National Hockey League's Washington Capitals, recently posted a blog entry comparing Facebook's critical development crossroads to that of AOL. He challenges Facebook to make the hard decision of whether they want their brand to be loved (like Apple or Nike) or needed (like Comcast or Microsoft). He concedes that it's possible to be both, but very few have been able to sustain being at the top for very long. He claims that AOL achieved both for about three years and that Google is currently the best example of being needed and loved.

This question parallels the question we have been asking lately: is Facebook just a (fun) timewaster or is it capable of truly becoming an enterprise productivity tool? Like being needed or loved, it is very difficult (if not impossible) to be both.

I agree with Ted Leonsis that this is an absolutely critical point for Facebook. The company has surely done an impressive job of building a brand that many people love. Facebook has even been able to withstand very public blunders and bad public relations. But, now Facebook needs to decide if it wants to continue to be a lovable brand or become a service that people need in their daily lives?

Just as they've made previous commitments to college and high school students, to make the service needed by workers in the enterprise, Facebook must make a commitment to professional users. Obviously, they need to address security and privacy slip-ups. But, in addition, they need to make significant inroads to helping professional users be more productive. It needs to be easy for workers to collaborate with others. It needs to be easy for someone to separate personal and private information. And it needs to be easy to find relevant information -- something becoming increasingly difficult as Facebook interfaces grow ever-more cluttered and unmanageable. And as Ted Leonsis says, they "will have to innovate and redefine utility-like services such as e-mail, messaging, search, chat, storage and self-expression. Today, many of those functions on Facebook are poor imitations of the real thing in the real world."

Facebook has showed signs recently that they are choosing the path of wanting to be needed. They have added improved privacy settings, they're currently rolling out chat functionality, and are planning new streamlined interfaces. While I think Facebook is far from being enterprise-ready, some companies have decided that the benefits of Facebook are worth riding out the growing pains. On Wednesday, May 21, I'll be moderating a panel of Facebook users at the Enterprise3 Portals, Collaboration, and Web conference in San Diego. These users will be describing their own experiences with Facebook as an enterprise tool. If you are using Facebook as an enterprise tool, we'd love to hear your experiences as well. Drop me a note telling me what works or doesn't work in your enterprise.

Oracle announced today that they were entering the archiving market with the release of "Universal Online Archive." UOA is an interesting entry to a market and positions Oracle to compete more directly against EMC and IBM in the e-mail and messaging archive space. It's interesting as only a year ago nobody was much interested in archiving, but in the past twelve months we have seen everyone from Dell to Google try to gain a foothold, and the market shows no signs of slowing down. It remains a chaotic and confusing sector risking a consolidation (which of course might not happen, or at least not soon).

UOA is built on top of Oracle 11g with technology acquired from Stellent, as well as from e-mail capture experts ZL Technologies. Why would Oracle be interested in archiving e-mails you may ask? Well the answer is simple: because there is an awful lot of it. And by archiving it, the messages will move out of Microsoft's servers and into Oracle databases. Remember in most firms e-mail is by far the single largest type of "data."

The Oracle offering is a pretty elegant one - making use of good technology from ZL and leveraging their own in house product stack- but it's too early to tell how well it will run for real, At an architectural level it looks decent, and should provide a competitive offering against EMC (who is releasing an upgrade to the current emailXtender product later in the year) as well as HP and Symantec -- who both also have serious ambitions in this space. It's yet more evidence of the morphing of the ECM sector away from collaboration (left almost solely in the hands of Microsoft SharePoint) and into the broader compliance and archiving worlds.

For buyers it should be noted that the EAM (E-mail Archiving and Management) market is very much in transition at the moment. There are some truly awful products out there, and some new but relatively untested approaches arriving. It's a market characterized by confusion - and an array of very differing and irreconcilable approaches - from Backup/DR through Archiving to compliance and legal discovery. You need to tread with real caution when selecting products and ensure you really do your homework both on the product roadmaps and the vendor itself. Some vendors are in a state of flux, and others on the brink of either acquisition or irrelevance.

Oracle's entry to the market adds to the options out there, but the entrance of major vendors like Oracle, Google, Dell, and HP in the past year is also a sign that sufficient R&D money and subsequent marketing and training will come to a sector that sorely needs it. It's a market that we will be covering in depth soon, so watch this space...

This past week's announcement that Yahoo! purchased IndexTools puts a new spotlight on the web analytics marketplace.

Yahoo! is clearly looking to compete with Google, but the reasons for this particular acquisition remain less evident. On the one hand, Yahoo! may be assuming that the mass market wants the kind of richer features that IndexTools offers. As you raise your own level of analytics competence, you may prove them right. On the other hand, since there were only a handful of independent, mid-range analytics vendors available out there for a decent price, IndexTools may have come to Yahoo! via more of a process of elimination.

The Yahoo! "party line" is that the technology will be a great boon to its small and mid-sized business (SMB) clientele. Probably true. In many ways, IndexTools resembles Google Analytics in its usable interface, featuring both dynamic drilldown and behavioral segmentation, as well as a nice collection of out-of-the-box reports oriented towards campaign analysis.

However, it is the perceived potential of IndexTools that has many observers hoping for more than just another Google Analytics. The company has been touting its next generation release, called "Rubix," since January. If Rubix lives up to its promise, it could possibly give Omniture's Discover offering a run in terms of functionality and ease of use. This has become the second-most anticipated non-release of a product in web analytics -- after Microsoft's Gatineau.

While Rubix could be a differentiator, without it, IndexTools does not offer the functionality that distinguishes it from Omniture and WebTrends -- for example the ability to analyze unaggregated data from a graphic UI and to perform repeatable Excel reporting. For now, you must use regular expressions to analyze unaggregated data and do manual updates of Excel...just like Google Analytics.

Dennis Mortenson, COO of IndexTools, claimed repeatedly that IndexTools could do 80 percent of what Omniture could do, at a fraction of the price. People also say the same about Google Analytics. This is marketing spin at its best. It doesn't matter which 80 percent or which 20 percent; it matters only how it matches your requirements.

As Web Analytics Report readers know, larger IndexTools customers picked that solution to get good standard reports, plus additional reports customized by the vendor, all at an attractive price. Feature richness and attention to individual customer service are not traditionally the hallmark of mass-market solutions, so Yahoo! has some clear choices ahead here, and IndexTools customers will want to watch carefully which way the new owner takes the service.

Among the questions that remain to be answered:. Will Rubix ever see the light of day? Will the basic technology be morphed to a Google Analytics-type solution? A combination of the two perhaps? Or will all of this become moot if Microsoft acquires Yahoo!? Or perhaps IndexTools becomes the premier analytics offering from Microsoft?

We'll be watching.

Blink and you might have missed it, but Symantec signed an important OEM (original equipment manufacturer) deal with Autonomy the other day that was announced with little fanfare. However, it's an important deal, and here's why...

Symantec has long wanted to play in the content management sector, for just like EMC they see content management as an excellent feeder for and extension of their broader storage and archiving business. Their first steps came with the ingestion of KVS's Enterprise Vault archiving product into their portfolio. Since that time Symantec has seen growth and potential for their archiving (mainly e-mail focused) business. This potential is driven in part by the fashion for e-discovery in the US (due to new federal rules), but more broadly by server and storage optimization demand for Exchange environments.

The deal with Autonomy could allow Symantec to play much more broadly in the content technologies market place. Firstly by boosting their search capabilities (currently supplied via an old relationship with Alta Vista) and potentially bringing them into broader archiving situations (SharePoint) via products such as Meridio. Symantec is a very well known brand, and they currently hold a strong position in the EAM (e-mail archiving and management) sector. With the Autonomy deal, they could begin to make an impact elsewhere -- to their benefit as well as Autonomy's, who remains associated almost exclusively with its search technology.

I suspect that this arrangement is more than a simple OEM deal, that it is strategic in nature to Symantec's broader archiving and ECM ambitions. That over the coming year we will see Symantec start to appear more and more as key player alongside EMC, Oracle and HP (who recently acquired Tower), in an ECM market that is becoming increasingly focused on archiving, imaging, and compliance.

There's nothing like promising a Playboy centerfold to drive people (well, men mostly) to an upcoming technology conference. In this case, her name is PAM -- the Playboy Asset Management system -- and PAM will will be shown in all her revealing glory at the upcoming Henry Stewart Digital Asset Management Symposium in New York, May 12th & 13th.

And while I'm no Playboy centerfold, I'll be there too (clothed and looking sharp), speaking about my last few months of research into Digital Asset Management. My colleague Kas Thomas and I have spoken to dozens of customers and taken a hard look at 15 leading vendors in the marketplace, and will soon publish a report of our findings. At Henry Stewart, I'll be moderating a panel about DAM Software procurement with DPCI president Joseph Bachana (who actually is a model and concert pianist in his spare time), leading a session about the DAM marketplace, and appearing on the analyst panel to banter about the state of the DAM market.

Finally, I'll be leading a post-conference tutorial on Wednesday, May 14th about the content technology marketplace, talking about the differences between DAM, WCM and ECM, and helping you sort out which ones you need (or don't).

I hope you'll join me for this great event. In addition to everything you could want to know about Digital Asset Management, the Henry Stewart folks always seem to find really good caterers....

In recent news from the SAP Community Network, wiki functionality will soon get included in the SAP NetWeaver Portal offering. Actually SAP expects to ship a beta in Q3 2008, which will be built based on Clearspace Jive and integrated via iViews (SAP-speak for portlets), with support for portal roles. However, a final release is not slated until Q2 2009 -- a rather long time in wiki-years.

Many other vendors have recently added wiki functionality to their products, including:

• Stellent built it themselves back in February 2006. Stellent was later bought by Oracle, which has a somewhat problematic integration using an open source wiki with its WebCenter suite.
• Microsoft drummed up hype about integration with wiki vendor Atlassian in October 2007.
• FatWire bought a local wiki vendor in November 2007.

What I find particularly interesting in SAP's announcement is their overall approach. Clearly SAP is filling an unmet need among their customer base, but they are suggesting a solution that does not (yet) implement SAP product standards when it comes to usability, performance, maintainability, security, and licensing terms. Also the wiki will not integrate into "workspaces" in the portal, which reduces its value somewhat.

SAP also cautions that this initial beta version comes without any future guarantees of backwards compatibility. Specifically SAP states that, "in case of an upgrade, content cannot be saved. The beta version is only a test version." So, if you want to experiment with a wiki inside the enterprise, my recommendation is that you look outside the SAP universe for a better alternative, at least until the expected general availability release.

Today I spent a delightful morning with 75 web managers from "K-12" (i.e., primary and secondary) school districts around the U.S. at the first annual "Education Web Professionals National Conference." It was quite interesting to hear how their needs differ from web managers in, say, higher education. Some observations in no particular order:

When every school in a district has its own website, and in many cases teachers can operate their own sub-sites, then multi-site management becomes a very, very big deal. As Web CMS Report readers know, effective multi-site management is a key gating feature that tends to separate less expensive from pricier products (though not all pricey products do it well!). Not surprisingly, most Web CMS projects in this space have begun as experimental Intranet implementations. Most public sites get managed manually.

Not surprisingly, web teams strapped for funding have great interest in open source, but even a simpler package like Joomla! can seem complicated to non-technical webmasters (and it won't effectively manage multiple sites). Like many government agencies, some school districts are longer on staff than discretionary funds, but the extent of their technical resources varies widely. I met some specialists from one of the wealthiest counties in the country who had an enviable technology testing lab, and then two minutes later chatted with a staffer from a small rural county who wanted to make more use of his PHP background, but spent most of his days putting out fires as the sole webmaster for the school district.

In general, districts make available more resources and attention for instructional technologies than school websites. Many districts license commercial learning content management systems (LCMS) like BlackBoard. But the open source LCMS Moodle is rapidly gaining in popularity. Some schools are stretching Moodle a bit to serve as a kind of Intranet portal and internal "Web 2.0" platform, even though that isn't what Moodle's really intended to do.

As in other sectors, most Web 2.0 initiatives (especially blogs) remain mostly behind the firewall. One school district superintendent wanted to blog publicly, but was shot down by her legal counsel, who pointed out that everything she wrote publicly became official policy and carried legal weight. No personal opinions. Too bad.

On the other hand there is great potential in podcasting, whatever the pedagogic (and production) challenges. One ambitious district figured out how to develop inventive podcasts in areas where their high school students were under-performing. The podcasts apparently became something of an underground hit, with students listening to them in the privacy of their own MP3 players, where no one could accuse them of being "uncool."

Parents often have higher expectations for school websites than the schools themselves. Central district web leaders use parental surveys and focus groups to leverage standardization measures across tiers and schools. Calendars are the #1 requested parental resource. Sports information and stats are another popular area. Parents frequently ask for printable, high-res photos of their little darlings after they appear on a school website (one district pays "Smugmug" $45 a year to handle this for them).

However, one school district manager observed that parental focus groups tend to be dominated by power-volunteers, who often are not power web users. But then more sophisticated parents complain when website redesigns end up insufficiently modern/functional. Hard to know how much of that was a stereotype. But student reactions were almost universally predictable: "the site sucks."

E-mail remains the most predominant electronic info distribution method, far dwarfing RSS. But school districts have also learned to carefully meter the frequency of these communications (lest parents opt out amid the flood of other mail they get), as well as carefully monitor them for editorial content. Suggests to me that integrated e-mail campaigns must be a more important requirement for CMS buyers in this community. Still, one web manager had mixed feelings about these blasts: "We're training parents to be passive," she argued.

If you're in the school website business, I encourage you to check out the nascent group that's forming here.

Since moving to the US in 2002 I have become a fan of The Atlantic magazine, and in particular the last page of each edition that contains the "Word Fugitives" column. In this column readers ask for new words to meet commonly demanded needs.

For example, in the most recent issue somebody requested a polite but meaningful phrase for a couple to use when they are trying to conceive a child. My favorite of the suggested responses came from Laura Whitman, of Redwood City, Calif., who wrote, "In our group when a couple is married and everyone is wondering what their plans are in regard to procreation, we always ask if they are in the product research or product development phase...early product development refers to your correspondent's criteria." You see there is always somebody out there with the right answer.

So to our current challenge, we have designed a wonderful (in our own opinion) chart that provides buyers of technology with an at-a-glance risk/opportunity review of the products we cover in a particular segment. We refer to this currently as the Vendor Risk Report -- and internally as the "VORP" (Vendor Opportunity and Risk Profile). Not exactly terms that roll off the tongue. Now some of you may be aware of similar chart like products from other firms, charts that have catchy names like "Magic Quadrant" or "Wave." Well we want a catchy name too but haven't thought of a satisfactory one.

So in the spirit of Word Fugitives, we are throwing the door open to you. Please send me your thoughts and ideas and we promise to publish and credit the best of them here on the site. And for the very best one we will send a box of gourmet chocolates or bottle of good champagne (your choice). The gauntlet has been thrown down, can you rise to the challenge?

The Gimmal Group's Dan Elam recently pointed me to an important and seemingly under-reported guidance memo (pdf) to U.S. federal government CIOs from Karen Evans. Evans serves as a kind of über-CIO for e-government at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).

The biggest news comes in the third paragraph:

When planning for and acquiring information systems and services, agencies must incorporate records management and archival functions, including the cost of implementing and maintaining those functions, into the design, development, and implementation of information systems.

The memo continues that OMB will monitor adherence as part of its overall evaluation of how different agencies make IT investments, presumably through its oversight of the so-called "Exhibit 300" process, where agencies must prepare business cases for large IT projects. Many federal employees look at preparing 300Bs as a hassle, a bureaucratic check-the-box exercise to justify a technology acquisition they already believe they need, and they don't always follow OMB guidance (and occasionally that makes sense, as OMB's guidance is sometimes incomplete or unrealistic). But on the whole the system works, and resembles successful approaches to technology investment review that you see in the private sector.

The shocker comes in an ensuing paragraph, where Evans recommends:

A recently finalized SmartBUY agreement for records management software provides a secure, scalable, and high-performance solution for the management and control of documents, records, and other enterprise content.

SmartBUY refers to a newish government-wide acquisition mechanism, where federal and state agencies can very easily purchase commercial software (typically from resellers) at cut-rate prices. There is actually only a single RM vendor (and in fact, the sole ECM vendor) in SmartBUY: Meridio.

Meridio is an Ulster-based software company that built a name for itself providing RM services for (the old) Microsoft SharePoint. Now, as ECM Suites Report readers know, Meridio's solution can be called many things, including "inexpensive" and "developer-friendly" (both fine attributes!), but is less well known for "scalability" and "high-performance." You probably also know that Microsoft, being Microsoft, spurned its once-favored partner by building its own RM services into MOSS 2007. And what did the jilted Meridio do? Turned the other way and quickly sold itself to UK-based search vendor Autonomy, who seems to have ambitions in the e-discovery solutions space. Perhaps most importantly, there is a big difference between RM and Archiving. Even if Meridio works well as an RM product for you, an Archiving solution it is not.

You don't need to be a genius to figure out what's going to happen next. Harried federal managers trying to complete their IT business cases are going to budget for a slew of Meridio licenses -- "that's what Karen Evans told us to do" -- licenses that in turn will almost surely sit unused. Meridio/Autonomy will not see all the funds -- the Service Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business reseller gets a piece -- but as a U.S. taxpayer I would look to OMB to point out a more competitive set of choices. Well, let's just assume the Meridio mention was a hasty mistake. A quick search shows 269 "Records Management Software" products available to federal buyers from two-dozen different suppliers.

The bigger problem is the latent message in the memo: Government agencies have an RM and Archival problem, and here's some RM software you can quickly procure to fix it. Remember that records management is only secondarily a technology problem.

Nevertheless, simply raising awareness is a very good thing. Most U.S. federal managers, like managers everywhere, often simply don't consider the long-term archival, retention, and disposition implications of the information systems they develop. And with government trying to move more at "Internet-speed" I don't really blame them. The Meridio meander notwithstanding, I think the bigger impact of this message may fall on the Archiving side, rather than the RM side, though the implications for both should not be underestimated.

More generally, I think this dovetails with broader trends in cost accounting that ensure that the expenses of storing and ultimately getting rid of stuff should fall under total cost of ownership. Consider the "recycling and disposal" fee you may pay when having your car's motor oil changed. Economists are increasingly looking at things like solid waste and carbon footprints when evaluating the real costs of various initiatives.

So why not the same for information? Surely the cost of an information management system should entail more than just the expense of getting data into a repository and playing with it. At some point your investment calculations need to account for the cost of either storing it long-term or getting rid of it, properly. It's good to see OMB catching up with its European counterparts and providing some leadership in this area.

In early March BEA announced the release of WebLogic Portal 10.2. The release was a bit delayed and focused primarily on enhanced Web 2.0 support, performance improvements, and enhancements to the developer experience. This will be the last release under BEA auspices, pending conclusion of their acquisition by Oracle.

According to a FAQ on the acquisition by Oracle (PDF), Oracle's Fusion Middleware will evolve as "the centerpiece of the combined companies' middleware offerings going forward". It continues to say "BEA products are expected to evolve into components of Fusion Middleware". I interpret that as good news for Oracle WebCenter Suite, but high-risk for customers of the other three enterprise portals (BEA WebLogic, BEA AquaLogic and Oracle Portal) in the mix here.

In other words, this is certainly the final major release before Oracle will be firmly in charge of the development teams. The question that looms for me -- and for you -- is whether this also represents the final major release of the product?