Chuck Hollis scares me. If you aren’t a regular reader of his blog you’re missing out. He has a deceptively disarming way of painting the picture of technoloy’s future that makes you feel better about the coming apocalypse. Chuck just put out a series of great posts on The Changing Face of Information.  He posts often on VMWare and virtualization in general and for the series he included this post where he argues that virtualization reduces friction in IT delivery.  It makes me wonder, with no friction - how do you hold on to it. Or better - how do you hold on to IT. (more…)

By now some of you have discovered the mission of the BigMenOnContent. To support our mission, I thought it was time to build a consolidated view of the news in the ECM landscape. In the process of adding RSS feeds to all of the top ECM vendors, I discovered something. Vignette offers RSS feeds as a product feature, has no RSS feed on their site.  

Vignette created the standard for syndicating content using the ICE (Information Content and Exchange) protocol back in 1998. Yet for some reason they are ignoring  syndication of their content.  How can a company proclaim “Content Management for Next Generation Web Initiatives” and not take advantage of Next Generation Web?  It’s the old story of the cobbler’s children. Let’s see some great new ideas and showcase them like the old Vignette.

Two years ago Gartner coined a new acronym CEVA, Content Enabled Vertical Applications, and it created some buzz in the enterprise content management space. Now I get a little lost here and have to think about what a Vertical means in software terms. Imagitek, a proclaimed CEVA, offers case management with specializations in contracts and legal documents. So to me this is a horizontal application with vertical customizations. So isn’t Open Text’s LegalKEY Solutions closer to a real CEVA? Rather than getting stuck on the definition let’s redefine CEVA as Content Enabled Value Application.

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Some of the most prominent players in the CMS market (OpenText, EMC/Documentum,et.al.) seem to have all but surrendered collaboration to SharePoint. Microsoft’s market position with collaboration content creation tools (Office) gives them a natural advantage which they have capitalized on in every way. Even extending their message well beyond “free range” collaboration.Now entering the fray is GoogleSites, arguably the best positioned player to take on Microsoft’s recently acquired high ground. This excellent examination of the two by Sarah Perez covers many of the core issues. When I saw the announcement, the first place I went was the terms of use from Google. I won’t recap them here as they are covered in the Perez post but suffice it to say you assume enormous risk using this as a solution for anything remotely important to operations. Is that really a concern? You bet it is.