This week I start a new challenge as a Senior Product Manager at RSD (www.rsd.com) one the market leader in the rapidly growing Information Governance (IG) sector.

Information Governance is one of these rapidly growing trends in the Enterprise Information Management space. IG should not be simply considered as the version 2.0 of the older Record Management practice. From a similar manner to the ECM acronym, IG should be rather treated as a global strategy which includes the people, processes, policy and of course a wide variety of software tools including among others Master Data Management, eDiscovery, Archiving and of course RM oriented-applications.  With the ever-growing deluge of information which spans organizations, the costs and risks associated to properly retain or reciprocally dispose of all the key digital content assets rapidly become a time bomb that organizations have to properly deactivate.

Improving the way information is governed across all the existing content silos, for all the different jurisdictions, for all the types of content and throughout the entire content lifecycle is however like wanting to fight a giant octopus without having the proper ammunitions: everybody agrees that something should be done but no one knows what angle to start and no one wants to be hold accountable for it. And the main reason is that such a mission is not trivial. For a multinational company with hundreds or even thousands of heterogeneous systems in place, various international regulations to comply with and usually a lack of controls in the way emails, collaborative workspaces and other (un)structured content are governed over time this is then not a surprise if nobody wants to tackle such a challenge at least without having the proper tools in place to address such issues at a larger and global scale.

This is precisely where RSD GLASS, the new flagship product offer from RSD, typically fits. This application of the latest generation specifically addresses the needs of Fortune1000 to help them streamline, improve and enforce all their Information Governance rules and best practices. By centralizing all their international information policies, by ensuring that that they are correctly enforced within all the different content stores and according to all the different jurisdictions and by providing the adequate Key Performance Indicators (KPI) to properly monitor and control the effective usage of all these procedures, such a tool aims to provide a practical and unified solution to embrace these new digital challenges.

Quite strangely and without knowing that RSD would launch GLASS this year I wrote last year as part of my 2011 predictions: “The deluge of data and content, mixing various public and private sources, will impact the way we manage our “systems of records”. Traditional records management, focused on information retention, auditing, logging, permissions, and so on on a per content silo basis, will then have to meet the Linked Data paradigm. Thus, a “Linked Records” era of distributed content interoperability able to properly ensure content governance along the whole information lifecycle will start to emerge”. When predictions meet real life scenarios!

Of course fully decoupling all metadata related to Governance, Risks and Compliance (GRC) either from the physical information storage tier or from the other business-related features is not trivial. Most if not all existing systems were not designed for that purpose. And record-oriented interoperability standards are not ready yet. Better support for retention and disposition is only planed as part of the future CMIS 2.0 standard (a sub working group is however currently working on a first possible extension) and other emerging standard such as the recently published MoRequ2010 still need to work on the details of their data interchange protocol and has especially to gain a stronger momentum in the industry and a larger market acceptation.

What is sure is that the new Information Governance challenges combined to the needs of organizations to better take control on all their digital content’s lifecycle throughout all their heterogeneous content repositories will open the way to a new generation of tools and applications. By already extending standards such as CMIS or JCR, RSD GLASS is typically one of these players. Offering an extra unified and federated governance layer regardless of the type or source will significantly help organizations reduce their litigation risks whilst helping them increase their costs savings.

So embracing such a challenge now, just at the beginning of this new era, appears like a really attractive proposition. But joining a great team with a disruptive vision and an awesome application sounds rather like a fantastic journey. So expect to read a lot more about Information Governance over the next couple of months.

I was pleased to present my views on the future challenges that the semantic world is facing at the last IKS Workshop. Please find below the abstract and a copy of the slides.

Abstract

Last decade was focused on building the underlying semantic foundations required to turn the semantic utopia into a reality. The rapid commoditization of those technologies is now happening and we should help to get a new generation of semantically-enriched tools and applications out to end-users. The time is right and everything is in place: The Deep Web is today ubiquitous, Structured and unstructured data are available in quantities never seen before, Growth perspectives are exponential. And we all start to be impacted be it as consumer or worker by this tsunami of information. With this information overload, the lack of proper filters and the absence of smarter content are becoming real problems and users now expect to see the arrival of new concrete and effective solutions.

But the semantic industry is still facing the challenge of  making semantic technologies palatable to the end consumer. Over the last couple of years, the development of underlying semantic frameworks involving linked data, natural language processing, entity extraction, ontologies or reasoners took precedence over user-driven features and usability concerns. Zemanta CTO, Andraz Tori, mentioned in a thought-provoking presentation last year: “We need to tailor the experience to specific use-cases, ignoring (powerful) technology at first and spending more than 10% of the time figuring out where the software/data are going to be used in practice. User experience is not just graphics design.” Semantic technologies are only here to help but no one has found the semantic killer application yet.

Finding the right balance between technology innovation and new pervasive ways to experience better information access and discovery is however a tough challenge. Creating and customizing the next generation of semantic based applications is still reserved to early adopters, often requiring tremendous technical skills, betting large development budgets on risky projects which have to integrate various emerging technologies.

Next generation CMSs will have to commoditize the way developers and power end-users can rapidly design, assemble and compose such applications, at a lower price, through point and click interfaces, without having to necessarily understand the whole technical complexity required to generate such semantic-aware applications.

Today semantic technologies are bringing the foundation to better understand and exploit the rich volume of information available out there. The challenges of this decade will be to build effective solutions on this new infrastructure. The Semantic Web is still mostly used as a data interchange layer. Semantic usage should become much more immersive and intuitive than it is now, performed less as an end and more transparently pre-integrated within the context of use if it wants to become mainstream.

There are hundreds of business problems the content industry can solve with current technologies without having to wait for a brighter future. Current limits are primarily based on our imagination and on bringing this new layer of semantic simplicity to the end-users. Semantics should no longer be considered as a technology, but as a means of delivering efficient business solutions.

Keynote Slides

Introduction:

We recently went through the rise of content composite platforms, a new generation of ECM platform, which could serve, coupled to a User Experience Studio, as an integrated backbone to rapidly develop a wide range of content rich applications.

As recently mentioned by Scott Brinker: “The concept of “the web site" is becoming less important than the underlying content and its social propagation. People now consume online content on a variety of devices, from their computers, their iPhones and Android phones, and new tablets like the iPad. They consume content not necessarily from the site of the content producer, but from social media hubs, social networks, aggregators, and a wave of social sharing services from which it is reblogged and reposted (or reshared as the term du jour). You need to design your content — and the process and metrics by which you generate and maintain that content — to be effortlessly absorbed into this malleable and organic distribution engine. It's a different paradigm than the closed walls of the 1990's web site.”

This directly leads to two main conclusions which could be resumed by two quotes from this Razorfish Nimble report:

Firstly, the multiplication of channels is not an end itself but a way to reach your different targeted audiences within their context of content consumption and usage. « At the end of the day, I don’t think the user really cares about where this content lives. They want useful information. » Jim Stanley, VP of Products, Technology and News

Which automatically conducts to the second assertion:
“You can't afford to [create] a piece of content for any one platform. Instead of crafting a website, you have to put more effort into crafting the description of an asset and the different bits of an asset, so they can be reused more effectively, so they can deliver more value.” Nic Newman of the BBC

Handling and managing the combinations of all the various possible user experiences becomes an even increasing tougher challenge which need its own set of dedicated software tools. This opens the doors to a new generation of user experience management solutions which are at the juncture of WCM, Portal, Collaboration and Social. Some may call it WCM 2.0, others Portal 2.0, others WEM or UXP.

Information Lifecycle Management vs User Experience Management

Most CMS solutions currently embed two different set of features packaged into one single solution:

• Content Production and Lifecycle oriented capabilities
• Content Publishing and Delivery mechanisms which turn to be included into a larger User Experience Management category

Acronyms often create a lot of debates in the industry and sometimes some confusion for the customers himself struggling to clearly delimitate the boundaries between both kinds of systems. Alfresco's consulting lead for North America, Peter Monks, mentioned in a debate on "The Case for Killing 'WCM'": “To start undoing the 15 years of mind share that the term "WCM" has enjoyed, it's time to start thinking about new terminology that better describes these two functional categories. For several years I've been throwing around the terms "Content Production System" (CPS) and "Presentation Management System" (PMS)”

More recently, AIIM also worked on introducing two new notions: system of records and system of engagements. Even if a System of Record is closer to what I name myself Information Lifecycle Management, System of Engagement is a too restricted term limited to social or collaboration features only which should be in my humble opinion encompassed in a larger user experience management category.

I would then rather classify them according to the two following paradigms:

1) Information Lifecycle Management

Gartner Group mentions : “Enterprise content management (ECM) is a contradiction in terms. Few enterprises have a single resource to manage it, or a consistent view of what content is — and 90% of the 80% of information that has been qualified as unstructured content is virtually unmanaged.”

The reality of the field is that there are multiple enterprise content management platforms each of them serving different purposes and audiences and provided with their own set of specialized content management features. DAM, DMS, RM, BPM, Case Management, etc… are acronyms which are rapidly proliferating but which all gravitate around the same notion of providing tools to better address the production, management and archiving of certain type of information and all the processes required to go from one stage (e.g: draft) to the others (e.g: validated, in-use, archived, etc…). In such a way I personally think that the term ILM better encompass all these products rather than the CPS one for instance which is too focused on the Production side only.

The novelty of today’s world is that we are assisting to a commoditization and standardization of common CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) operations across all these systems of records which I would also extend to a few additional ones such as Search, Observe and Query. This means that end-users can now interact with their content assets, in a Read-Write flavor, from within various product offers made available from different vendors, at least concerning all the core commonly shared functionalities. However do not suddenly believe that a front-end Portal or WCM solution could replace all the bells and whistles of your state of the art Record Management solution. This only means that some common operations, which do not necessarily require specialized user interfaces, could now be performed across different contexts of use.

For example, do you really think that people will stop using MS Word and move to a more basic Web based WYSIWYG Editor to edit all their content items just because they can suddenly access to the underlying ECM server from within their WCM system? Probably not. But sometimes it could still be quite convenient to be able to rapidly modify a typo or add a break line directly from within the WCM context.

So what is changing is that we are reaching the end of the Cut and Paste era and the multiplication of unlinked and unmanaged copies. As mentioned by Laurence Hart: “CMIS allows all content to stay where it already lives and surface that content into the systems that people are using.”

As users want to interact and manage with their content items wherever they live from within their current context of use, next generation of WCM systems will have to provide the unified interfaces and content management tools needed to support most common CRUD operations from a federated manner. As mentioned by Gartner analyst Ted Friedman in the Hype Cycle for Data Management, 2009: “The potential of data federation technology is compelling. In theory, this technology can create an abstraction layer for all applications and data, thereby achieving flexibility for change, pervasive and consistent data access and greatly reduced costs, because there is less need to create physically integrated data structures. The end result is greater agility from, and freer access to, an organization’s data assets.”

WCM systems should then not try to directly compete with specialized Information Lifecycle Management features. However they will act as a federated information proxy unifying various data silos and providing the interfaces to perform all most common content operations from a centralize manner. WCM will not replace Information Lifecycle Systems but will complement them through Unified Content Management capabilities.

2) User Experience Management

One should not forget that the main purpose of a front-end delivery system is to aggregate heterogeneous information and applications, present and publish them across different channels, favor engagement with the various audiences and monitor their usage. Basically these are the main goals of a WCM, a Portal, a Collaboration or a Social Software. Their merge is inescapable and will open the doors to a new generation of personalized, contextualized, context-aware, multi-source and multi-channels line of products.

As far as I am concerned, User Experience Management seems to me the best term to aggregate all these features being merged together. Such tools will focus on helping publishers, now also called “curators”, to best reuse and deliver their content assets across different sites, applications and devices and to enrich or mashing up them if required throughout the use of various value added services. Such products should also be in charge of delivering compelling and more and more personalized user experiences.

They should also be in charge of engaging with the various targeted audiences, collecting the proper feedbacks and ensuring their proper archiving back into the right content store (cf: in the previous Information Lifecycle Management systems).

Today people are not only passively consuming information any more. Most of the time they are or at least they can interact and engage with it. Content consumption oriented applications which excel at reusing, repurposing, curating or surfacing the best content to ease proper information digestion are only today one piece of the puzzle. With the advent of Web 2.0 or E2.0 technologies, content rich applications have to become more actionable and to provide additional built-in collaboration and engagement tools. This means that such contextual and topical applications will not only serve to deliver content but will also be used to generate new content items in return. Such feedbacks, comments, blog posts wiki articles,... will also have to be properly managed whatever the front-end applications that was used to generate them.

Finally User Experience Management solutions should also ensure a proper monitoring of content consumption usage across all the various sites, channels, networks and devices being in use. But who say monitoring say also logging users behaviors, activities and relationships. By natively integrating and supporting a new range of analytical engines, such solutions will open the doors to more advanced personalization and recommendation services than what we are used to employ today. And in a world flooded by information where users attention is more and more difficult to get, next generation of content delivery systems will also be in charge of ensuring the proper delivery of relevant information regarding the interests and context of the current user.

xCM: A combined approach to seamlessly managing User Experience while federating all your Content Assets

In order to achieve such a strategy, already illustrated by Jahia in this prior video, you need to assemble the proper set of tools and functionalities.

We simply call this combination here at Jahia XCM: eXtended Content Management or simply put W+1 CM - which also stands for:

• e(X)tended content management: In a world which multiplies the manner of accessing information, next generation of user experience systems will have to natively embrace this diversity of devices, sites and apps.
• extended (C)ontent/(C)ontext/(C)omposite/(C)ontributor management tools which will provide an integrated environment which not only let you manage content but also the various context of content consumption, all the dynamic modules, mashups and applications required by your various audiences (the composites) and properly manage interactions with the various personas (Contributors) engaged on your system.
• and finally some extended content (M)anagers which should provide a unified interface to manage all the most common content operations needed. Publishers needs to have today a convenient and easy way to interconnect best-of-breed content silos to efficiently create content rich applications which federate, curate, surface, mashup and personalize the information their audience needs whatever the content store where the information lives.

If we zoom in the xCM layer, we find the two aforementioned main blocks sitting on top of an embedded Composite Content Platform which will both serve to store all data related to managing all the user experiences or to remotely reference all the needed distributed content assets.

Briefly speaking next generation of front-end WCM and Portal products will act as a unified proxy which will help the end-user best leverage the content assets and applications he needs, wherever they live, while helping the publishers create the most compelling and best contextualized user experiences.

Already the end of the year. So as usual it is time to make some predictions for the next incoming year and to review precidions done for this year.

Top 10 Predictions for 2011

1) Rise of Composite Content Platforms
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As apps become sites and sites become apps, we will continue to see the emergence of content-enabled application servers and, vice-versa, application-driven content platforms. Content-enabled mashups, JCR-leveraged portlets, and socially empowered composite applications will all be around in 2011. Their development will favor the emergence of next generation pre-integrated SOA/WOA composite content platforms that provide social, content and applications as default core services.

2) From Open Source to Open Data
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The disruption caused by open source, community-driven CMS is reaching a plateau. The new wave for 2011 will focus on sharing mass-volume data and content, rather than the sharing of code. As Tim O'Reilly said last March, the next real open source opportunity lies with data. This deluge of data and content, mixing various public and private sources, will impact the way we manage our “systems of records”. Traditional records management, focused on information retention, auditing, logging, permissions, and so on on a per content silo basis, will then have to meet the Linked Data paradigm. Thus, a “Linked Records” era of distributed content interoperability able to properly ensure content governance along the whole information lifecycle will start to emerge.

3) Smart Content
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Eighty percent of information growth in coming years will be in unstructured content. CMS are now focused solely on managing content lifecycles and delivering compelling user experiences. They completely fail to leverage the vast information universe available within their own content stores. Content enrichment services, text mining utilities, and content intelligence features will start transforming this raw data into smart content.

4) Personalization and Curation
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Automatically surfacing the best and curating the rest will be one of the key trend for 2011. We should see reemergence of business and content intelligence tools with the return of personalization, either implicitly or manually performed. Reading suggestions according to your various interests, buying recommendations based on social profiles, and multivariate testing to personalize delivery to better reach audiences, will all be hot topics for 2011. We should see merging of user, social, and content analytics in better prediction, recommendation, and foresight engines. As such features are still emerging and often hard to implement, they will be complemented by a new series of tools aimed to "curators" who sit between traditional, passive readers and active editors, and who want their CMS not only to deliver compelling experiences, but to also to help them more easily re-share information available throughout all their heterogeneous information sources.

5) Renewed Interest in Search
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With information overload, search will again become a hot topic. Over the last few years, the classical keyword search industry has been commoditized by Apache Lucene, which is now integrated by default into nearly every CMS. Search-CMS integration is, however, limited to the traditional search input form and some faceted results page. There is a need to go beyond traditional keyword search and improve the overall search experience within the context of content consumption of the end user. Search-based applications (SBA) should better combine search and CMS in 2011.

6) Never Easy Enough
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Posterous, Tumblr, Evernote, Dropbox, and others continued to push for increased simplicity in 2010. Most CMS are still engineer-driven, with heavyweight, complex interfaces. Though we are seeing a shift in the WCM industry towards the complex needs of top-notch marketers (WEM), most CMS/WCM projects are still dealing with ease of use for traditional, non-tech-savvy users. Simple email content posting, transparent handling of all types of content assets, and better integration between the browser and the desktop in simpler user interfaces, will remain key differentiators in 2011.

7) Managing, not only creating, compelling User Experiences
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Multi-sites, multi-channels, multi-devices, multi-languages, multi-users, multi-localizations, etc. There are now so many multiples to consider in 2011, that efficiently delivering all the possible user experiences is becoming a challenge. CMS/WCM will have to improve the tools and utilities to manage of all these user experiences.

8) Social as a standardized Service
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All applications are being "socialized", including CMS and the sites and applications they generate. To avoid creating a mess, organizations must now develop according to standards (e.g., activity streams and opensocial), and will expect their CMS to provide social as a default core service. Expect also to see more and more integration among pure-play social players (e.g., social decks and social analytics) and CMS/ECM vendors in 2011.

9) Business Solution Accelerators and Cross-Over Technological Suites
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Organizations will see more and more interest in customized, pre-packaged, vertical suites combining several product offerings, which best fit their industry needs. Vendors will offer such solution accelerators on top of their generic offerings, especially since such customized bundles of  connectors, technologies, modules, and possible integrated partnerships, can be sold at a much higher price and generate new revenue streams, versus generic CMS features which tend to become free commodities.

10) User-Centered Design and Integrated Collaborative Development Environment
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Developing a new web site is usually a continuous fight between IT developers and the various business lines, neither one understanding the needs and constraints of the other. CMS are mostly perceived as either a production server for publishers or as a development environment for techies. Most CMS do not natively integrate tools to better support the necessary flow of comments and feedback among the various stakeholders crafting a new web initiative. Much of this process is still being done through email with annotated screenshots, or through separate wireframe and mockup utilities which are not integrated with your CMS. It’s ironic that an industry which specializes in improving communication and engagement among various audiences is unable to provide the tools needed to communicate efficiently within the CMS team itself. I hope to see a better recognition of the value chain from development to production, and from web developers to end-users, from within the CMS environment in 2011.

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How did my 2010 predictions fare?
(cf: Top Trends for CMS/WCM in 2010)

1) The Extended "Web"
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WCM will not only have to handle classical web outputs, but also deliver to new channels, including mobile and tablets. This has largely happened, even if proposed features are still relatively immature and mainly available at a framework and templating level, rather than fully integrated into the CMS product line. #success

2) LATCH Time
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LATCH was all the rage for social software this year: Geolocalization (location), Social Search (alphabet), Real-Time and Social Archive (time), Image or Content Tagging (category) and Sentiment Analysis (hierarchy) were at the forefront. But this only partially impacted traditional WCM/CMS vendors. So only a 50% score. #semi-failure

3) Content Services on the Cloud
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We assisted to a RESTful APIsation of the world in 2010. More and more value-added APIs and services are available on the cloud, such as social services, semantic services, and translation services. More such services are being integrated into existing CMS and made available as optional extensions in vendor forges and mobile marketplaces. This trend will continue in 2011.

On the CMS platform side, cloud offerings have emerged from nearly every CMS vendor in 2010. Most have simply leveraged the convenience of a more elastic IT infrastructure, without enhancing their products to correctly handle all the challenges of the cloud, such as native multi-tenancy support. However, solutions such as Acquia Gardens, SquareSpace, DropBox, and Box.com have marked the year. #success

4) Semantic Lifting
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We witnessed a maturation and commoditization of the core semantic/NLP technological bricks in 2010. Several CMS vendors started to embed semantic annotations and enrichment services. CMS such as Drupal 7.0 now provide default support for RDFa and other standards. Some semantic publishing initiatives, such as one used by the BBC for the World Cup 2010, proved that we can now create effective publishing systems with semantic technologies. But this mainly stayed at a R&D level this year again. However, this trend should continue in 2011, as we already see the rise of new interest in "smart content" and increased interest into open and linked data. We should witness an evolution from record management to linked records to smart records over the next couple of years, but this was a #failure for 2010.

5) Hot Actionable Content Triggers
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It has never been easier to favor, like, share, re-blog, and reuse content than in 2010. Which CMS does not integrate with now on popular social networks, or provide content services from basic RSS to full-fledged CMIS access. Boundaries among internal content, free content on the web, and paid content tend to fade into a larger concept of extended enterprise. As a result, a deluge of unfiltered raw information now inundates the user. Avoiding procrastination and ensuring efficiency by providing the right content curation tools, and implementing automated personalization filters will now be one of the challenges for 2011. #success

6) Content Platforms, Content-Rich Apps and Content Solutions
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The split between open, standards-based ECM/CMS platforms for techies, and WCM, DAM, DMS, and case management products for business lines is now happening. Several CMS/WCM vendors better split their product offerings in 2010 between their underlying content platforms and their content products sitting on top. This trend will continue in 2011. #success

7) E2.0 <-> CM/KM Reconciliation
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The E2.0 trend spurred the launch of various "social workplace" and “social business” offerings from traditional content management vendors. More recently, we saw the rise of "user experience suites," bundling social, portal, and other WCM products. It is, however, still hard for the IT or business managers to understand how to merge or interconnect all their public and private-facing WCM, ECM, collaboration, and social initiatives. “Cross-over bundles” mixing various technologies will be a hot topic for 2011. #semi_failure.

8) PCM is the Next Enterprise Shadow IT
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With the advent of enterprise mobility and the ease of installation of micro, content-enabled applications, combined to the increased richness and accessibility of SaaS solutions, we were seeing a new generation of Shadow IT tools which bypass IT departments and their heavyweight alternatives. With companies such as Evernote now reporting that their tools are used mostly for business purposes, we should see the introduction of a new generation of content-driven players in the enterprise market. They will have a bottom-up approach, similar to the one employed by SharePoint 2007 to replace shared departmental network drives, often without prior IT department consent. #success

9) Tablets Will Become a New Content Consumption Best Practice
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Last December, nobody had heard of the iPad! Not only was the iPad one of the major successes of 2010, but it is also starting to disrupt the content publishing industry. New content-driven applications, such as Flipboard, are reinventing the way we syndicate, aggregate, consume, curate, and re-share content. As tablets enter the enterprise world, CMS still have to find their place with micro-applications to deliver content. #success

10) No Market Consolidation but Even More Content Solutions Providers
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Other than the acquisition of Day by Adobe, there weren’t a lot of changes in the CMS landscape this year. The CMS/WCM scene is, however, rapidly maturing. Several local players, at least in Europe, now aim for global exposure with products that have nothing to concede to larger rivals. As a result, there are more alternatives claiming to be everything to everyone, but with no clearly defined selling propositions. Clarification of such a fast moving market is needed, but not simple. #success, but was an easy guess.

For 2010 I got a respectable 8/10: Not too bad, what do you think?

We explored in the last posts why a Composite Content Platform was critical to any of your future content-rich initiatives and how to rapidly develop and assemble dynamic sites and content-rich applications with a User Experience Studio on top of it.

Such a fast content composition capability mean that your organisation will have a strong need to multiply its web initiatives and propose different views and entry points to all its stakeholders. So why would you suddenly need to manage so many different content-based sites and applications? Wouldn’t it be easier to stick to a single global intranet and a public-facing web site?

As the web evolves, it becomes the forefront gateway to all your various knowledge bases, business applications, information dashboards, promotional sites or collaboration spaces. Globalization pushes organization to better handle localization issues throughout different web initiatives. Meanwhile user needs are now integrating new way of consuming information, by topic, on a per usage basis, through different channels and various devices. Finally the volume of information available to white collars does not stop to explode and filtering the noise according to a given context becomes a key critical usability and efficiency factor.

As announced by Nick Jones from the Gartner Group, « The knowledge worker of 2015 will own several wireless devices, will be continuously connected and will communicate and collaborate in a wide variety of ways without being tied down to specific locations and services. »

The recent intranets evolution that evolved from a simple newsletter combined to a shared address book and an administrative knowledge bases to a multi-facets social workplace is the perfect example. As mentioned by Andrew Wright, the scope and usage of the “intranet” is becoming much larger, which include among other:

• “use the intranet to manage intellectual property. There is much research to show that IP is often the most valuable asset of many organizations and yet it is not managed with anywhere near the same discipline as other assets (how much IP sits on people’s C drive or email folders for example?)
• use web forms and work flow functionality to implement business process improvements (how many Word/PDF/Excel forms do organizations have that could be converted to a web form?)
• facilitate collaboration through a comprehensive staff directory, team sites, discussion forums and blogs – ensure there is a process in place for capturing and classifying IP that comes out of the collaborative process
• use the intranet as a portal to valuable, often hard-to-find corporate data. For example, data that resides in ERP/CRM systems
• use the intranet as a portal to business applications and external websites that staff need to do their jobs
•  use the intranet to provide dashboards and other management reports
•  use the intranet for training, change management and continuous improvement initiatives
•  use the intranet to increase employee engagement (studies have shown there is a direct correlation between the level of employee engagement and profitability)
• use case studies from other organizations to demonstrate business value
• make sure staff have access to the intranet off-site and via mobile devices if possible (how many staff use webmail to file work documents?)
• etc.”

In parallel, with the raise of social networks and in-application content delivery (such as dedicated content-focused applications for the iPhone or the iPad), the same question could exactly be raised about public-facing web sites: Julie Hunt recently asked in a thought-provoking article: « whether or not the “corporate website” is becoming obsolete for many types of companies ». Will your public web site morph into various customer-driven, context-aware, distributed web initiatives where people will be able to consume and engage with your company throughout different channels, applications and devices?

What is sure is that combining the whole into one single, monolithic, rigid, page-based centric web site is doomed to failure. There is no way a single web initiative could be everything to everyone any more. There is then a clear need to multiply, by topic, by language, by audience, the content rich applications made available for your different targeted users base.

From Raw Features to Content-Rich Applications

However most content-rich applications rely on the same baseplate, core content items and application composites.

If you analyze an idea generation space, a customer community or an internal market-watch knowledge base, you should rapidly be able to decompose the key features into a common list of core components, for example:

• social composites such as threaded discussion, ratings or comments
• micro-applications composites such as mashups, gadgets or widgets
• content composites such as lists of content items or results of some dynamic content queries
• input and authoring composites such forms or built-in editing feature
• navigation composites based on manual navigation, breadcrumb paths or more complex facetted content queries
• etc.

Their assembly should then rapidly provide working and effective content-rich applications. Ideally speaking, such a composition process could even be limited to simple configuration steps by best leveraging some predefined Starter Kits or some built-in step-by-step wizards (cf: my previous post on the User Experience Studio).

From Applications to a Global Solution

The second step is about the definition of how these content-rich applications fit into your global portal and content strategy and how to federate them into an integrated and consistent solution?

There are generally two main axes to consider:

The first one is the scope of influence of any of your new initiatives. Not all content-rich applications, sites or spaces are equal. Addressing the level of control and flexibility required to successfully manage personal think boxes, team work spaces, departmental knowledge bases or global corporate sites is key and completely independent of any technical complexity. The same application, e.g. a blog, could be seamlessly used at an end-user, workgroup, departmental or global corporate level. However the level of governance and control required will not be the same at all.

Usually companies tend to adopt a top-down approach. They start with heavily controlled web initiatives, as for their public-facing web site initiatives or their global intranet. But with the raise of social media, we are assisting today to the fast growth of more flexible departmental and workgroup oriented collaboration spaces. Tomorrow we should assist to the proliferation of personal content-rich applications which could be consumed from a self-service manner according to each user needs.

The level of flexibility and the number of initiatives organizations launch are inversely proportional to the scope of influence. And companies only start to explore the bottom-up approach.

The second axe is about the type of content-rich applications you are building which will require different features and composites to form the solution needed. We can find three main categories:

1) Knowledge Network-oriented Sites and Applications

Goal: Leveraging personal knowledge and strengthening business relationships among subject matter experts

Keywords: Near real-time update; improved identification of experts; community building; improved peer reviews and gratifications; informal mentoring, etc.

Tools: Profile and expertise locators; Personal Thinkboxes, Micro-blogging and other types of activity streams; social intelligence and interest-oriented recommendations; etc.

Deliverable: Foster personal knowledge, improve communications and leverage talents detection

2) Social Collaboration Sites and Applications

Goal: Boost team working

Keywords: draft; ongoing work; collection of prerequisites and other types of working materials; meetings notes and brainstorming sessions; spontaneous idea generation; group oriented web filing cabinets; etc

Tools: Dedicated Workspaces; Digital Communities, Document annotations; Recording of visio-conferences or group chats; Digital whiteboards; Digital post-its; etc…

Deliverable: Validated content assets

3) Intelligent Content Delivery Sites and Applications

Goal: Harness company collective intelligence

Keywords: validated information; trusted information sources, moderation and filtering; federated search; unified company taxonomies; intelligent content aggregation and content consumption; multi-channels contextual content repurposing; personalization and suggested readings; In-application content delivery, etc.

Tools: Corporate Knowledge bases: Content Farms; intelligent digital eZine; User-centric personalized Information Dashboards; Search Based Applications (SBA); etc.

Deliverable: widespread delivery and consumption of gathered collective intelligence; build awareness; serendipity.

Correctly filling the cells addressed by these two axes through the rapid creation and assembly of various content-rich applications will definitely help your organization reach a new level of flexibility and agility by providing the right tools required by end-users both at a personal, workgroup, departmental and global level.

What about CEVA (Content Enabled Vertical Applications)?

The Gartner replaced the term CEVA by the more generic CCA (Composite Content Applications) one last year. The « V » letter is however still important and will perfectly complete more generic and horizontal Composite Content Applications.

Industry-driven domain models, workflows and content will continue to increase the needs for highly verticalized applications and solutions.

For instance, Higher Education customers have now to choose between rapidly adopting a vertical, often SaaS-based and proprietary solution such as Schoology or to assemble and compose a similar kind of application based on a more generic and open Composite Content Application Platform.

With the fast commoditization of Composite Content Server, we should then assist to the multiplication of vertical distributions, leveraging the strengths and robustness of a generic underlying content application server combined with generic composites reuse the whole being pre-integrated with dedicated processes, content and templates. Such a trend to resell « open vertical distributions » based on an existing content platform recently started to emerge such as for example the OpenPublish (for the Media Industry), OpenPublic (for Gov2.0) or Covisint (Healthcare/Manufacturing) initiatives.

Do you need to develop a custom content application or use an off-the-shelves product package?

The trend to see more and more pre-packaged vertical distribution finally comes to the last question of this post: should your organization develop some custom-made proprietary applications on a per user need basis, should your IT department rather focus on making available reusable building blocks to foster the fast composition and assembly of solutions by non-technical users or should your organization favor the acquisition and installation of ready-to-use, off-the-shelves, products whatever the underlying platform they rely upon?

There is no single truth and it really depends of your company needs for the given project. For some initiatives you may privilege rapid installation and deployment over more complex configuration and customization. In such a case the acquisition of a ready-to-use product could be just fine. If you plan to multiply the number of similar projects, leveraging a common platform with pre-integrated, reusable building blocks will certainly generate a better ROI at the end. Finally, you will never be able to let non-technical users visually and dynamically compose your core business applications. Such applications will always require heavier development and customization work at a platform level.

I often compare this to the development of heavily-structured SQL application with either MS SQL, MS Access or MS Excel. All are managing structured data into tables but not all address the same audiences and usage. While this phenomena is generally well-understood by customers, it is often neglected when coming to the management of less structured content items. Finding a good balance and trade-off on a per composite content application basis is a tough challenge. Trying to unify everything is not the right choice (cf: the ECM vision of the last decade).

The only certainty is that your content assets will be more and more dissociated from any given context and the user experience will be more and more decorrelated from the application itself. If you combine this with the rise of Linked Data, Open API and all the other forms of content interoperability (e.g: CMIS, JCR, RDF,…), you should at least make sure that your content assets are independently managed from the sites and applications which repurpose them.

A good example is the latest experiences done by the BBC to publish the site related to the latest soccer world cup. In their opinion, « Another way to think about all this, is that we are not publishing pages, but publishing content as assets which are then organized by the metadata dynamically into pages, but could be re-organized into any format we want much more easily than we could before. » And this is the only way to successfully reuse content across multiple channels.

However this multiplication of user experience across various contexts of use such as some sites, content rich applications, spaces or or across various devices is currently being strongly limited by either the technology you are using or the number of IT resources being available within your organisation. This vision could then only become true if employees are able to rapidly create, compose, assemble and use the content-based initiatives they need, on their own, with the right tools, from a do-it-yourself manner.

This is all about the consumerization of content rich applications and the commoditization of rapid information assembly across multiple contexts of use.

What’s coming next?The last blog post of this series will detail the Products and Tools needed to let you manage all your content assets wherever they live across all your generated sites and applications.

The last decade saw a war between Portal and CMS frameworks, in which one had to choose between application integration and collaboration tools vs. information lifecycle management (from authoring to versioning) and Web publishing frameworks. With the advent of Web 2.0 technologies such as discussion forums, wikis, blogs, document spaces, microblogging and the increased use of mobile devices, boundaries among content, composites, contexts, and contributors are rapidly vanishing. This convergence where summarized in the previous blog post by the 4Cs Manifesto.

This trend is now pushing organizations to rapidly create all types of new portals, web sites and rich internet applications. Simple, static brochureware sites have become a thing of the past as each business lines need now to deal with a plethora of different public or private web initiatives such as document workspaces, social communities, interactive knowledge bases, customers and suppliers extranets or personalized information dashboards.

On their side, portal technologies are moving to what the Gartner calls User Experience Platforms. But portlet or mashup environments are still suffering from one big inconvenient: they are by default still not enough bound to any content middleware framework. Most portlet or mashup suites are simple presentation facades, which are clearly insufficient to develop real useful composite content applications.

The convergence of content stores, portal frameworks, combined with powerful context-aware publishing systems and social interactions, is pushing traditional ECM, WCM, Portal, and E2.0 vendors to rely upon a new generation of integrated “Composite Content Platforms” (also called “Content–enabled Enterprise Portals” or “Content Application Servers”).

The Content Application Services Decalogue

Rather than trying to structure such a platform according to a classical IT stack, going from persistence to presentation, I privileged a generic, service-oriented vision to demonstrate how all these pre-integrated services could finally benefit to any of your portals, sites and composite applications initiatives.

The 10 key axes of content and application services for the next generation of content-rich applications are illustrated in the diagram and described below.

1. Library Services
As the CMS industry has matured, library services have become a basic core requirement. They regroup all the services required to correctly manage the lifecycle of any content assets, from persistence to content structure, versioning, file plans, observations and relationships. Thanks to the ongoing standardization efforts and open source commoditization, (e.g. CMIS, JCR with some freely available open source Reference Implementations) such library services will rapidly spread to related industries, such as social software, knowledge management, or learning management. Distributing these services in a vendor-neutral manner in the cloud will be one of the next key challenges.

Standards: JCR, CMIS, WebDAV, NoSQL,
New challenges: Content library services as a standardized, scalable and omnipresent utility; Portable data; Distributed persistence in the cloud; Shared ontologies; Content ownership.

2. Identity Services
In an era of transparency, flatness and openness, privacy concerns risk to quickly come back to the fore. Widespread adoption of a single, simple authorization and authentication mechanism is still a dream. The situation is becoming worse with the spread of distributed content environments and aside-storage systems (search indexes, triple stores)which are often duplicating data without solving security issues. Multiplication of similar user properties across systems will rapidly become an obstacle for end-users. At a content object level, the industry still sticks to standard ACL and DRM-kind of feature is still in its infancy, mainly limited to the media and musical industry.

Standards: LDAP, Kerberos, Shibboleth, SAML, XACML, OpenID, OAuth, and many others
New Challenges: Truly transparent, federated and widely used identity management standards; Digital identity as a utility; Distributed user profiles and properties; Improved DRM on any content asset.

3. Process and Orchestration Services
From BPML to BPEL/BPMN, workflow and orchestration services were often considered as a separate piece of the enterprise IT puzzle. Misunderstandings among orchestration services and human workflows, often combined with overly complex business processes modelers and tougher than initially estimated web services integration issues, limited the widespread usage of such technologies. As standards and implementations matured along with simpler Web 2.0 interfaces, we should see the comeback of business process management services natively and heavily integrated into the next generation of composite content servers.

Standards: BPEL, BPMN, BPEL4People, etc.
New challenges: Native integration in next generation of composite content servers; Focus on simplicity; new generation of Visual BPM Modeler; Better integration with mashup services.

4. Content Interoperability Services
Improved content interoperability is bringing the content silo era to a close. As core content library services are becoming a commodity, and as customers are pressuring vendors to open up their silos, content interoperability services and protocols are gaining in importance. Associating and linking content objects existed from the beginning of the web, but semantic web gurus were perhaps too focused on modeling domains to reach the next level of computer intelligence, rather than integrating the core library services required for a common playground. In the coming years we should see a merger of semantic web concepts with other content interoperability services.

Standards: CMIS, RDF
New challenges: Migrate from a silo’ed to distributed content universe; Migration from proprietary binary files to open content types; Evolution from linked data to linked content objects; Widespread usage of common ontologies among content stores; Secured P2P-kind of services on content objects.

5. Semantic Services
Most of the time “Semantic” only refers to the “Linked Data” terms coined by Sir Tim Barnes Lee, which is mainly about better managing “content relationships” (cf. point 4 above). For the purpose of this post, I clearly distinguish “data and content interoperability services” from “semantic services” oriented toward the extraction and understanding of the meaning of content. The latter integrates all kind of techniques required to enhance and enrich any content assets, from simple text documents to images or videos. Such services rely on various algorithms, such as lexical and syntax analysis, natural language processing, object recognition.
Most existing content objects are still unstructured, with a poor set of available annotations and metadata. We are recently assisting to the rise of new semantic enrichment services – including OpenCalais API, Evri API, or Zemanta API – that dig into your content to automatically extract meaning, provide additional metadata and associate it to existing ontologies. Next-generation of content-enabled applications will rapidly embed such enrichment services to offer extra values to end-users.

Standards/Field of Computer Science: OWL, (P)LSA, NLP, etc.
New Challenges: Semantic lifting; Commoditization of semantic enrichment techniques; Standardization of semantic enhancement interoperability services; Adoption of very simple ontologies.

6. Information Access and Retrieval Services
Most content frameworks still rely on classical keyword searches. The Apache Lucene/Solr project is doing a fantastic job to commoditize access to core search services. But information access should not be limited to enter keywords in a search input form. The growth of content available in various stores, the lack of proper information filters, and the need to access to related information directly from your current content consumption context will foster the creation of new search-driven applications.

Standards: OpenSearch API; Need for a new search API standard?
New Challenges: Standardization of federated or unified search; Social search; Distributed LinkedData search; New information retrieval applications; Preemptive recommendations and suggestions; Genius-oriented kind of features;

7. Analytical Services
Web analytics services, leveraging audit trails, logs, and hits, have existed for years. They are now largely commoditized, mainly due to the apparition of the free Google Analytics service. Once considered simply as “nice to have” options, they now have to be at the heart of any application. These services are leading to the next level of “content intelligence”. Mixing public or private-facing audit trails, weblogs or social graphs will foster the development of more intelligent applications. However, finding the right mix among all possible factors, while leveraging such a mass-volume of data to turn them into relevant metrics and useful personalization services, remains a key challenge.

Standards and Techniques: OLAP, FB Open Gaph, ETL, etc.
New Challenges: Content mining; Interest graph; Usage patterns; Automatic audience segmentation;

8. Social and Collaboration Services
One of the recent goals of any composite content platforms is to let developers rapidly socialize their applications. Most so-called E2.0 software employ a top-down approach focused on the added value of adopting an enterprise social network that mimic Facebook rather than promoting the integration of social as a service.
Last year, socializing an application was mainly about enabling user generated content, such as comments, ratings, likes, and tags. We are assisting this year to the multiplication of all kind of activity and action streams. We should see tomorrow the rise of more standardized and distributed social profiles and collaboration protocols which will be natively integrated into the next generation of content application server.

Standards: ActivityStreams, OpenSocial, XMPP, Wave Federation Protocol, Salmon, SIOC/FOAF
New Challenges: Distributed user profiles; Unification of activity streams, Social archive management; Native integration of standardized collaboration protocols;

9. Mashup Services
Portal technologies have been decoupled from CMS for years, but as the web evolves, there is a growing need to develop content rich applications. The all-purpose MyYahoo-type of dashboards is reaching its limits. Users now want access to their back-end processes and information from within the context of their sites. Native support for portlets, gadgets, widgets, and other types of shareable micro-applications within a composite content platform is becoming a necessity and implies that your platform should natively support a good level of mashability.
Moreover, advanced end-users now want to create all the data, content, or process-driven mashups on their own. All these user-generated mashups will populate a new generation of enterprise app store. Composite Content Platform will also become in charge of offering all the discovery and governance services needed to efficiently manage such a repository.

Standards: JSR168, JSR286, OpenSocial, EMML, etc.
New Challenges: Mixing public-facing data with private-facing information; LinkedData composition; Comprehensive visual mashup builders; Governance of enterprise mashup stores;

10. Rendering Services
Users and developers should be able to rely on strong rendering and delivery services. The multiplication of sites (per audiences, language, topic, and so on), devices (including web, mobile, and social networks), personalization (such as user preferences, implicit personalization, or geolocalized settings), standards (including cross-browser compatibility, or new HTML 5 standard) and multi-scripting support (including JSP, velocity, groovy, or php) make rendering a complex beast. Combined with all the front-end delivery caching issues (CDN or similar natively embedded front-end caches), and the integration of highly dynamic UI components to create a rich user experience, content rendering and delivery has become a critical service for any content application server.

Standards: (X)HTML, WCAG, Javascript, AJAX, Multi-scripting, ESI/CDN
New challenges: Dynamic contextual and personalized content renderers; user experience platform; multi-device support; clear separation of form (context) from substance (content, data, metadata); easy content repurposing.

By leveraging at best such a collection of services, developers should be able to more rapidly assemble, reuse, and mashup existing content assets and composites into a new generation of content-rich applications. How many E2.0 solutions are today reinventing the wheel at a content platform level into what will rapidly transform into a new generation of Social Silo?

The rise of composite content servers signals the convergence among application servers, portal frameworks, social services, and content stores.

But in choosing a robust enterprise-grade composite content server, it is then critical to:

• Ensure that your data and content are clearly separated from your front-end applications from both a vendor-neutral and standardized manner.
• Understand how you can rapidly develop and assemble hundreds of contextualized sites and applications, employing all your content assets, social properties, or composites into such dedicated solutions.
• Make sure that your content application runtime can scale and adapt to your needs both on-premises or in the cloud.

Open Source Consequences

Today’s composite content servers are focused on trying to glue together a generic, unified content store and all the related services into a single consistent, robust, scalable and stable middleware platform.

But the IT industry’s commoditization is ramping. In 2005, we assisted to the commoditization of application servers with the rise of middleware such as JBoss, Apache Tomcat, and similar offerings. We should now look for accommodation at the content application layer, both from free proprietary solution (e.g. SharePoint Foundation 2010) or from open source alternatives (e.g. Apache Jackrabbit+Sling, Nuxeo EP, JBoss GateIn, Alfresco Content Application Server, etc).

However delivering such a complete stack requires skills and ongoing investments in so many different specialties that it will certainly and rapidly lead to some level of consolidation in the industry at least in the open source world. Open Source Software vendors will then focus on delivering and selling finished applications on top of the stack while working together at a platform level.

Where’s this all going?

Monolithic, ever growing, content application platforms, even if composed of hundreds of relatively independent sub-libraries, are dinosaurs on the way to extinction. Their lack of flexibility and their high integration and maintenance overheads will spur the turn to a more agile and distributed approach.

So let’s try to foresee some trends and their possible consequences on the content application server market:

Trend #1: The cloud as your main distributed content and data store
Content assets need do become omnipresent. Open, standardized, interoperable, and distributed content stores should allow any content owner to securely store, access, and archive any kind of content asset from a transparent manner. Customers will buy disk quotas and value added services (such as replication, backup, caching, and secured data center) rather than applications. As mentioned by Lee Dallas: “Application archives need to be ultimately independent of the array of systems generating the data they store.”

Trend #2: Distributed RESTful Services
The ever-growing Internet bandwidth, improved security on cloud computing, together with the generalization of distributed RESTful APIs, should lead more and more software vendors to focus on specific niches and offer specialized services on the cloud which could be easily integrated back into your custom solutions.

Trend #3: Rapid assembly of content-rich applications
To best leverage trends #1 and #2, developers and power users should be able to rapidly compose the applications they need by federating content from several stores and by mashuping it together with all the required, local or distant, services they need.

This will lead to the creation of dynamically assembled composite content platforms relying upon widely distributed services which will connect to, reuse, and repurpose information available in various local or distant stores.

However, this vision of a truly distributed content application server seems unrealistic for the next 5 to 10 years, at least for enterprise-grade, mission-critical applications, even if it was already actively promoted by CORBA ten years ago, then by SOAP/UDDI, and now by OSGi. Too many standards are still missing. Cloud-based document storage (such as GDocs and DropBox) should transition into more granular content centers. Content interoperability and data portability should support more complex use cases. Content owners should be able to manage their distributed content in a transparent and secure manner, no matter what content centers they employ. Distributed SOA/WOA services should have the same level of performance and security as local, internally installed services. Identity and authorization mechanisms need to be standardized at an international level. Then the content industry will have entered a new era.

Meanwhile, we should expect to see an intermediate, bridging phase with the delivery of micro-kernels, pre-populated with different pluggable, hot-deployable services, hosted both locally and in the cloud with content openness and federation in mind.

Next Episodes: the saga continues

We can now see how composite content platforms will serve both as development foundations and as a production runtimes to develop your next generation of content-rich applications be (a web site, a portal or a 2.0 kind of applications).
Next time, I will go into more detail about:

• Development and integration tools needed to foster the rapid assembly of composite content applications.
• Illustrations of content-rich applications which can be developed on top of such content composite platforms.
• Products and Tools that let you manage all your content assets across all your sites and applications.

The long-awaited convergence among application servers, portal frameworks, social services, and content stores is becoming a technical reality, giving rise to such terms as “Content–enabled Enterprise Portals”, “Content Application Servers” and, finally the widespread use of “Composite Content Platform”.

As Lars Plougman from the Dachis Group recently noted, organizations are now looking for an integrated framework which best combine application and content integration. IT departments, digital agencies and system integrators need an enterprise-grade, service oriented, pre-assembled platform with which they can easily assemble web parts, foster content reuse, mashup processes, surface information, and better manage user interactions. Ideally speaking such a platform should even allow power users to create solutions on their own, without the need from any outside IT assistance.

But what is it really about?

The 4Cs Manifesto

From the sixties Marketers learn and use the 4Ps of the marketing mix. Information Management Professionals should now also be able to rely upon their 4Cs manifesto: Content, Composite, Context, and Contributors, as shown in the following diagram.

Content:

Content is the oldest of the 4Cs, and certainly the best mastered, even if it has suffered for years from a strong vendor lock-in situation and a lack of content interoperability standards. All sorts of Document Management Systems, Record-Management Systems, Digital Asset Management Systems, Case Management Systems have been developed and sold over the last years to manage the wealth of many types of digital assets.

Content is key. But content was captured and jailed like a robber rather than being fluid and omnipresent like the air. As mentioned by J. Brooke Aker, “when it comes to searching internally for information, we ask around the office and then run a search on the company network – fingers crossed and hoping for the best.”

We are assisting to a slow transition from Content Lifecycle Management to Information Management. We should then see the rise of a new generation of more intelligent and federated Content Platforms which will be able to better exploit the substance (aka the meaning) of every content item rather than only focusing on its type or persistence.

Composite:

The next of the 4Cs, Composite, refers to content and application mashability, a recurring industry topic. As noted by Chris Keyser, the lead architect for Microsoft's Global ISV team, “Composability is a paradigm shift in computing from brittle, monolithic, developer-centric applications solving one particular problem, to agile, contextual, user-driven applications.”

A decade ago we believed that federating and aggregating small applications at the presentation layer (Portlets/WebParts) would be enough to satisfy the needs of information workers. However, it was soon found that aggregated, side-by-side views, was no match when it came to developing the next generation of rich internet applications. With increased openness in content and data interoperability, easier to use web oriented architecture, and simple to use mashup tools, organizations want now to rapidly create their own custom composite applications.

Context:

Web Content Management and Publishing frameworks were long considered a marginal playground for script kiddies. But as the Web becomes the primary information vehicle, publishing, rendering, and personalization frameworks are playing a more and more crucial role within every organization. The evolution of content consumption practices and the multiplication of devices are pushing the industry from mono-channel site management toward context-aware publishing. Delivering the right information at the right person at the right time on the right device through the right application is becoming much more challenging than simply broadcasting information on static web pages. Context-aware information delivery and context management are among the hottest topic for the future.

Contributor:

With the advent of the 2.0 economy, every application is getting socialized. Every user, from active editor to passive reader, directly or indirectly contributes to a system. We currently best value user-generated feedback, but machines do not care – a system might attribute more value in knowing what your friends are currently reading, than in excessively promoting real-time trivialities exchanged in a discussion stream.

But managing all social interactions of individuals and groups are still in its infancy: user segmentation, crowd aggregation, targeted audience management are getting more important with the recent rise of social media. Social Network Analysis and Social Intelligence are rapidly gaining momentum. An incredible number of new applications can be derived from better exploiting all these passive or active user interactions – something that systems only start to exploit.

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This 4Cs manifesto needs to be converted now into a range of services, protocols, and storage interfaces to form the base architecture to more rapidly develop next generation of content-rich, social-enabled, process-driven, and contextualized web sites and applications.

This is what we will present in the upcoming blog post: “The rise of Composite Content Platforms”.

GilbaneSF 2010: Future of Open Source CMS Session

This blog post is a wrap-up of the GilbaneSF 2010 debate on the “Future of Open Source CMS” (#fosc on twitter) with Geoff Bock (Gilbane Group), Ian White (The Business Insider), and Jahia’s inputs from an Open Source Content Management vendor perspective.

You will find below the presented slides and a summary of the main topics we covered during the debate. This blog post will be followed by a couple of others over the coming months detailing the most important paradigms: the future of Open Source CMS. We will consolidate all these entries into a whitepaper available for download next fall.

Today, it is hard to define what an “Open Source CMS vendor” is, since virtually every CMS vendor uses open source in its products, contributes to open source, or provides services around open source. Additionally, most, if not all softwares are dealing with “Content” in one way or another.

To get a clearer picture of the future of Open Source CMS, we need to approach the topic from two different angles:

• The Future of CMS
• The Future of Open Source

1) Future of CMS: Composite Content Platforms vs Content-Enabled Applications

CMS is a strange beast whose definition is broad and uncertain. CMS mostly implies two different audiences: techies (CIOs; CTOs; and developers) and practitioners (marketers, information Workers, and lines of business). From this perspective, it is evident we are not dealing with a single “system,” but rather two.

CMS: Content Management Services or Content Management Solutions?

The former stakeholders are looking for a “content platform”, the latter, for finished products and solutions to solve some of their content issues.

As Wikipedia notes:

Application software is contrasted with system software and middleware, which manage and integrate a computer's capabilities, but typically do not directly apply them in the performance of tasks that benefit the user. A simple, if imperfect analogy in the world of hardware would be the relationship of an electric light bulb (an application) to an electric power generation plant (a system). The power plant merely generates electricity, not itself of any real use until harnessed to an application like the electric light that performs a service that benefits the user.

For a long time, CMS was a simple mixture of horizontal infrastructural libraries combined with vertical applications, without any clear segregation of duties. Most CMS solutions available today are still based on this monolithic approach.

Recently, the industry-led (think JCR or CMIS) massive standardization and interoperability effort was coupled with a push to quickly prototype and launch rich content-enabled applications. This combination led to a greater separation of content platforms and content-enabled applications.

Towards Composite Content Platforms and Content-Enabled Applications

Even though the term “composite” has existed for quite some time, only recently did it gain traction, due to its role as the cornerstone of SharePoint 2010, actively pushed by  Gartner as a replacement for the older and more limited CEVA term.

Content particles are becoming increasingly granular and structured. Moreover, there is an ever-increasing need to rapidly assemble, cross-link, enrich, and combine heterogeneous content objects. Therefore, the term “composite” sounds convenient and appropriate.

Composite Content Platforms are tomorrow's ECM 2.0

The nice thing about composite content platforms (call them content application servers or content management platforms if you prefer), is that they act as dynamic content containers or as content runtimes, which can run content composite applications. The next generation of composite content applications will be even more dynamic. They will not only glue cold content together, but also will natively inherit from the merge of application servers and content stores, and create hot actionable content-driven applications.

Of course, a simple website could be considered a composite content application (in which case your httpd server could be seen as a kind of first generation and lightweight composite content server). However, composite content applications can also scale to more complex content-enabled applications requiring advanced business processing schema, strong business integration, and heavy personalization requirements.

All these composite content applications can produce and publish massive amounts of content and data, which need to be correctly managed. And here come the usual content management product families (WCM, DMS, DAM, RM…) that will help manage this deluge of information for all the content-enabled applications.

This platform/product split is quite common, at least as part of the high-end enterprise spectrum of the CMS market niche.  It is rapidly moving down and impacting all other sub-segments.

Some recent examples:

• Day CRX vs Day CQ WCM or DAM
• SharePoint Foundation 2010 vs SharePoint Server 2010 Editions
• Alfresco Content Application Server vs Alfresco WCM, DMS, RM
• Nuxeo EP vs Nuxeo DAM, DMS, Case Management, …
• Exo/JBoss GateIn vs Exo Extended Services (DMS, WCM,…)

Due to their historical focus and inherited technologies, some of these frameworks or content foundations, are still driven by a portal-centric approach (e.g. Exo), a document-centric approach (e.g. Nuxeo, Alfresco), or a web-centric approach (e.g. Jahia, Day). However, we can assume that there will be a rapid consolidation towards a universal set of core value-added services able to nurture and enrich any content asset, be it a web page, a document, a record, an email or a scanned fax.

Content Lifecycle Services such as versioning, file plans, workspaces, content types, searching and querying services, interoperability services, mashability services, Social Services, persistence-independent storage services, etc. are becoming commodities.

As open source commoditization is actively ramping up and rapidly extending its borders, competitors must decide whether to horizontally extend the level of content services offered as part of their content middleware (e.g. archive more volume, support more load, add new value added content enrichment services), or to go up the value chain and provide new lines of content-enabled products and applications to solve the needs of various business lines. Usually, both expansion strategies are pursued in parallel.

Four main trends are emerging:

• A rapid growth of built-in content enrichment services available for any type of content assets
• Improved content interoperability services at the data level (OpenData; PortableData; CMIS; RDF…)
• The need to quickly assemble, reuse, mashup and reuse existing content assets within various content-enabled applications
• A tsunami of information, which needs to be correctly assessed and managed.

With the rise of composite content platforms and content-enabled applications, we should see a shift from monolithic CMS towards better fractioning ones:

• Composite content platforms which will serve both as a development foundation and as a production runtime for content-enabled applications
• Content applications, which could be rapidly developed and run on top of a composite content platform
• Content management products, which will let users best manage their content assets across all their content applications.

Ideally, the next generation of composite content platforms should ensure a level of data openness and interoperability, aligned with the current CMIS, OpenData and other DataPortability trends.

The goal of this new generation of Composite Content Platforms will be to offer a wide range of content enrichment services, while ensuring proper data interoperability and freedom. Ideally, composite content applications will become more standardized and portable, much as web applications became more standardized during the last decade. However, such a standardization process would take at least 5-10 years. Data Portability will therefore become one of the key purchase criteria.

2) The Future of Open Source: Properly defining the limits of Open Core

The line between proprietary and open source software has become increasingly blurred, as open source software is embedded in proprietary products and extensions. There is also plenty of confusion about the term “community”: community builds, originally based on the unstable development branch, are now promoted as “Freemium” editions for viral marketing purposes. Besides, the scope of  “core” features tends to be slowly but surely pared back to boost sales of newly created commercial extensions.

So what can we expect of “Open Core” software vendors? How can we better define ethical and fair boundaries both for open source communities and vendors, while ensuring a reasonable level of open source “purity”?

Simply put, more than 70% of open source contributors are now paid professionals while all open source commercial vendors look for ways to monetize their initial investments. This makes perfect sense, as any commercial entity needs to generate revenues, to pay employees and reward their shareholders.

The Open Core business model is only the latest in a long series of commercial open source business models. Over the past two years, it has rapidly gained momentum. But it is also facing heavy criticisms (cf Gartner or InfoWorld). The model is more and more considered just another type of “Shareware 2.0” or, at best, a lightweight, limited and free SMB edition of the vendor’s main product offering.

Essentially, there is nothing wrong with the Open Core approach and it has existed for years, even if it was not marketed under these terms. It comes down to how the vendor or the community defines the notion, including the scope and the “raison d’être” of the core vs the vendor’s product derivatives.

In today's landscape, we can discern several common pitfalls:

• Unclear core boundaries: there is no clear delineation between features that should remain in the open source core vs those reserved for commercial product derivatives.
• Community Development editions vs Freemium marketing editions. Builds for developers and early adopters are often mixed up with "Gratis" editions to promote and evangelize a product line.
• Community Open Source vs Vendor Controlled Commercial Open Source. Often the underlying intentions of the original contributor regarding its core are unclear. Is it to keep control over the project, or let the community drive development?

In practice, an Open Core strategy often leads to the following consequences:

• Endless debates: Defining the scope of the core vs the one of the proprietary product derivatives is a frequent source of contention both for the vendor's employees or between the vendor and the community.
• Cannibalization of offers: Often there is little marketing distinction between the Core and Commercial Editions, in which case cannibalization normally occurs, to the detriment of the Core.
• Community Exclusion: Vendors tend to favor their proprietary derivatives of community contributions, and shift their focus to value added enhancements rather than the enhancements to the Core.
• Customer FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt): Customers often desire to buy software based on a free open source community project, but in the end revert to a classical vendor lock-in proprietary scenario. They are uncertain about the future of the Core, its maintenance, its migration path, its upgrades, and finally about its product roadmap  driven by the product strategy of the commercial derivatives.

Open Core Main Success Criteria

We can try to solve some of the classical Open Core issues with a series of best practices:

• The Open Core should be of a real utility to the target market audience, and shouldn’t lock further usage or initiatives to the other vendor’s product lines. Open Core is not about confining customers in a closed shell --it's about promoting an open kernel that will help seed other initiatives and attract a long term community.
• It should be evolutionary, despite the initial wishes of the main contributor to follow its own independent product roadmap.
• It should not intentionally degrade stability, scalability or enterprise-grade features to boost conversion rates to commercial offerings.
•  Last but not least, there should not be an overt conflict of interest with the vendor's other product lines lest the value proposition fall back into the Freemium/Shareware2.0 camp, despite the presence of the source code.

The value proposition and scope of the Open Core product offering should be clear to all stakeholders. Most importantly, users should be able to foresee a future for this Open Core product beside the extensions, derivatives, or additional lines promoted by the original vendor.

This leads us to the following suggestions:

Suggestion #1: Better distinguish your product branches

First, let’s not confuse Freemium offerings aimed at practitioners with development builds for code contributors or early adopters. The term “community” normally relates to the crowd source collaborative aspects of an Open Source project (free speech), not that it is gratis (free beer). Releasing some community builds does not prevent a vendor from simultaneously offering Freemium editions of its various product families.

So why are so many Open Core software vendors trying to redistribute an unstable version of their product as a promotional resource, in the hopes of converting users to stable and enhanced commercial editions?

Second, most vendors need to improve the transparency of their Open Core strategies. The vendor should clearly state which of its products aim to become a community-driven open source Core, and which it will more strictly control with dual GPL/Commercial licenses, or even more proprietary licensing schema. There is no shame in being a Commercial Open Source vendor in 2010, so vendors should be candid about their position.

Suggestion #2: Keep your Core away from possible conflicts of interest

The second suggestion is to clearly delineate the scope of various product lines, to avoid any long-term product cannibalization. This not only helps to clarify the audience and the scope of features, but also the entire roadmap for each sub-product. The only sure way to do this is avoid all direct conflicts of interest between your core kernel and your product derivatives. Ideally, the Core should have a long-term perspective which encompasses the vendor's commercial derivatives. Organizations, or competitors, should be able to reuse, leverage and extend your core. Co-optition should be made possible.

Common bad practices are the following:

• Enterprise-grade features or scalability limitations. This classical marketing tactic associated with vendor lock-in is not viable in the long run, as it creates conflicts with the community and can finally force the vendor to fork the core and maintain two distinct branches.
• Features required by the community (or even contributed by the community) that are deliberately placed in proprietary extensions (or not committed back into the Core by the vendor).
• Refusal to loosen control of the Core: The vendor keeps full control of the Core and does not grant committer access to any third party.

A frequent underlying cause of these bad practices is the lack of clear product boundaries vis-a-vis the Core, leading to severe conflicts of interest.

Suggestion #3: One size does not fit all

Now that Open Source business models are better understood by developers and customers, more vendors are using various open source strategies as part of their product families.

For example, one could combine a community-based Open Core released under a business-friendly license, associated with some hybrid GPL/Commercial derivatives, combined with some other proprietary extensions.

The “purity” of an open source vendor no longer has much meaning in 2010. Rather, we should speak of the purity of a given open source project, be it a Core, a library, or an entire product line. As vendors continue to adopt more hybrid strategies, the various levels of “purity” should be assessed for its particular product offerings. 100% pure Open Source vendors should start exploring various licensing models and apply them distinctly to each of their sub-products. As a result, these vendors will develop a more global and valuable Open Source business model. Customers will have to understand a vendor’s entire open source strategy before rushing to deploy the core or on another sub-product.

This trend underscores the need for vendors to avoid Open Source FUD to their customers. The company's open source business model should be rather simple to explain, and clearly state the value proposition for all the stakeholders.

We can summarize this chapter by listing the following key points:

1. Open Core vendors tend to create confusion by mixing their Community with their Freemium editions, and their stable with their development branches.
2. Most Open Core vendors do not clearly delimitate the kernel from their product derivatives. This usually creates severe conflicts of interest.
3. Open Source vendor purity has largely lost meaning in 2010. Purity should be assessed on a project-by-project basis, and the vendor's entire open source business model should be clearly communicated to customers.

3) Applying the Open Platform paradigm to the CMS industry

Let’s now try to combine the first chapter, Future of CMS, with the second one, Future of Open Source, to envision how Open Source CMS could evolve over the next few years:

• Composite Content Servers, Content-Enabled Applications and Content Management Products will be better differentiated, and split into distinct product lines.
• An Open Core CMS strategy makes sense, especially if the Core becomes the Composite Content Platform. Such an Open Core strategy will avoid long-term conflicts of interest with the Content-Enabled Applications or the Content Management Products delivered on top.
• The community of Open Source developers always tends to favor infrastructure and middleware initiatives on finished and ready-to-use software products. We should therefore assist the fast rise of new hybrid business models with some open-sourced Composite Content Servers for techies, released under a business-friendly license, combined with dual-licensed or even proprietary content applications and content management products for practitioners. It is wise to separate communities of techies and practitioners.

Applying our conclusion to the Open Source CMS industry, we can now try to draw a general picture of future business models:

Of course, each CM product and vendor is different, so there will certainly be hundreds of heterogeneous variations of this business model over the next few years. But the underlying paradigms should be pretty similar.

I will further detail each of these major paradigms in future blog posts. Meanwhile, please do not hesitate to add your thoughts and comments below.

Future of Open Source CMS

(Twitter hashtag: #fosc)

Last December at the Janus Boye Geneva Intranet Group Xmas Party, Janus Boye challenged me regarding the real added value of an Open Source CMS in 2010 compared to proprietary or hybrid products offers. He wrote a blog post in January about it:

J.Boye – Janus Boye: http://www.jboye.com/blog/

• http://www.jboye.com/blogpost/open-source-what-does-it-mean-in-2010/ (January 10^th, 2010)

While not directly related to the CMS industry, criticism of the Open Source business model came to the fore at OSBC 2009, in a session between Canonical's Matt Asay and Brian Prentice of Gartner.

This discussion resulted in a series of very interesting blog posts:

Gartner – Brian Prentice :

• Open Source’s Reality Distortion Field (March 23^rd, 2010)
• Open-Core: The Emperor’s New Clothes  (March 31^st, 2010)
• Defining & Defending The Meaning Of “Community” – An Open Source Imperative (April 20^th, 2010)

451 Group - Matthew Aslett Caos Theory:

• Winning and losing with open core (March 25^th, 2010)
• Please break our open source business strategy model (March 25^th, 2010)
• Sales and marketing for open source – same difference (April 1^st, 2010)
• Let he who is without proprietary features cast the first stone (April 8^th, 2010)

CMS Vendors’ first feedbacks:

• Business of open source: my take on "open core" - Nuxeo – Eric Barroca  (1^st of April 2010)
• Open source business model - Hippo – Jeroen Verberg (11^th of April 2010)

We can assume that something is broken, or at least unclear, in the Open Source CMS world. This debate is clearly not over as we will have to defend the “Future of Open Source CMS” at the next GilbaneSF 2010 conference.

GilbaneSF 2010: Future of Open Source CMS

The future of CMS is already a hot topic of debate with various CMS experts presenting alternate visions of this burgeoning market niche. Nowadays content is omnipresent, produced by everyone employing a variety of devices. As a result, content management practices are rapidly evolving from traditional, that still many consider complex and elitist, ECM platforms to new generation of Web2.0-E2.0 tools aimed for “Milleniums” born with the web. Content consumption practices are also rapidly changing. Users are flooded by a deluge of information and the attention deficit does not stop to increase. This presents a growing challenge for the content management industry.

The future of Open Source is another hot topic. Everyone, including Microsoft, agrees that Open Source is here to stay. However,  like the notion of "green", the Open Source concepts have been muddled by marketers, VCs, and myriad of software providers who have latched on to the label. Dual Licensing, Open Core and Patron Models make analysts heads spin as they try to figure out what Open Source really is, let along measure its value against more traditional proprietary offerings. To add to the confusion, we are assisting to a convergence of prices among competing proprietary, hybrid, or fully open source solutions especially in the CMS industry that finally are all relying on the same Open Source bricks? So, above all, what added value does Open Source still bring to the table? How does Open Source business models will evolve and stand the best chance for future success?

When we combine both topics, we end up with an explosive mixture. Open Source CMS have the potential to significantly disrupt the market, but lots of new challenges lie ahead :

• Balancing the role of Open Source CMS communities in a world of paid professionals.
• Differentiating techies' needs for a flexible content platform from those of practitioners looking after content-enabled solutions.
• Determining the limits of code co-optition in an already overcrowded market.
  
• Dealing with the fast and disruptive rise of new Content Composites, Mashups or Social/E2.0 technologies.
• Finding the right Open Source Business Models and value propositions that will please all partie.

So, according to you, what is the Future of Open Source CMS? Is it just a late and low-cost follower, or can it significantly disrupt the CMS market, from both, the technological and market share points of view? Will the existing split between Community and Commercial Open Source wither away?