Wikis have gained substantially in popularity since they first appeared some ten years ago. Today, nearly everyone thinks wikis are decidedly cool...in theory. You just launch them, then people will gravitate to them naturally, edit them with ease, and therefore find just the right information whenever they need it, right? Well, not really, argues J. Boye's Dorthe Jespersen. If you don't anticipate -- and address -- some common wiki myths, you put your project as risk for "empty wiki syndrome."

Two noted content management gurus, Bob Boiko and Erik Hartman, are preparing an annual publication called "Information Management – Global Best Practices" -- and have issued a call for papers. They describe it as "..a compilation of high quality best practice guidance, written for and by experts in the Information Management field around the world....a yearly library of case studies and derived wisdom that guides professionals through their most challenging activities." Seems quite useful! (Full disclosure: I'm on the advisory board.) Look for the first edition to come out later this year.

Quarterly results have never been so closely scrutinized as they are right now. Tony yesterday contrasted the varying fortunes of Interwoven and Vignette. Today we get news from EMC that it boosted revenues in 2008, exceeding many Wall Street expectations. In fact storage and information management vendors in general are expected to do relatively well in this downturn as information volumes are not shrinking they are only growing, and as data remains blissfully unaware of '"recessions'." That's the good news . The bad news is that EMC plans to lay off 2400 people. As an ECM watcher I want to know exactly how EMC's CMA (Content Management & Archiving) division fared before projecting my thoughts out too far, but my suspicion is that they have done OK -- and that they will continue to be an ever more strategic and important part of EMC's market strategy. But laying off so many people in such a bad economy despite recording huge revenues (nearly $4B a quarter), will do little to improve EMC's image. For though we often suggested adding EMC|Documentum products to our clients' short lists, our own experiences and those of our EMC customers reflect back an often harsh, tough, or callous (take your pick) approach to business on behalf of the vendor. It's an image many EMC employees are quite brazen about and proud of -- but it's not heartwarming stuff, and plays out badly with many of their customers and the industry as a whole. The fact is that 2009 and will be a tough year for some businesses while others will thrive. It's always the way -- in tough times the biggest fortunes are made. And in these tough times, task automation, litigation, and self-service will become mantras. Firms that sell solutions to meet those specific customer needs will likely do well. Yes it's a tough world, yet those who plan to capitalize on other peoples' distress, can choose to do so either callously or with modicum of humanity.  It would be good to see a bit of the latter come into play as the year progresses.

After cruising along as $200m/yr companies through middle part of this decade, Vignette and Interwoven appear to be headed in opposite directions financially -- and perhaps in other ways as well. Kas originally tracked this story last summer and a year ago. Earlier this week, Vignette released preliminary Q4 2008 financial results that indicate a steep drop from Q4 2007, and ominously, a shrinking percentage of license (as opposed to services) revenue. This makes several poor quarters in a row, and the company recently reduced staff by 10%. Meanwhile, Interwoven pre-announced a profitable Q4, with top-line revenues that come close to doubling Vignette's. What's going on here? On the surface, both companies started out as mirror images of each other: Web CMS vendors who raised serious capital during the dot-com boom, then survived the 2001 bust with enough cash to acquire several other vendors of adjacent technologies, in an attempt to become major "ECM" players. From there they took different paths. Interwoven acquired some healthy document management and e-marketing vendors, but left them independent to pursue their own markets, even if it meant that customers could not really look to Interwoven for a comprehensive "suite" solution. The company made only incremental improvements to its flagship TeamSite product, but re-oriented it towards higher-end, B-to-C scenarios. Web CMS Report readers know that TeamSite's underlying architecture is ancient compared to Vignette's, but remember that the best technology doesn't always win in the marketplace. Interwoven's rising stock price has enabled it to purchase other income streams, most recently with Optimost. As for Vignette, after the bust they completely rewrote their WCM product in Java, inaugurating some difficult years for the company and customers alike. Vignette also acquired document management, collaboration, and portal vendors -- all Java-based -- in the hopes of creating a unified ECM platform. At the time, I thought this strategy superior to Interwoven's, but history has proved me wrong. Today a prospective Vignette customer still has to purchase several different products for a complete solution, and with some exceptions, they remain insufficiently integrated. Of course, you shouldn't select or drop a vendor based on stock price fluctuations, and Vignette's balance sheet remains strong. But I can't shake a nagging feeling that something will happen with Vignette this year...perhaps an acquisition by a larger vendor. For customers' sake, I hope that any suitor would be interested in Vignette's actual technology, and not just its maintenance revenue stream.

One of the more interesting threads that I've read recently was on the Web Analytics Association Yahoo! Forum. Called Why do we still need Omniture?, the discussion's starting point was based on how Omniture could differentiate itself in light of Google Analytics new features. The ensuing discussion had dozens of posts with most of the focus on reporting features and capabilities. But it was what didn't get mentioned that caught my attention: data usage as a differentiator. (This is a topic we explore in the Web Analytics Report.) Google and Yahoo! use the data they collect from your website as fuel to develop new products, services, offerings and marketing programs. Omniture and all other fee-based vendors do not use the data they collect. To be fair, both Google and Yahoo! clearly state how they use the data in their Service Agreements. Then again we all know about carefully reading the fine print. I just find it surprising that folks tend not to mention data usage as a differentiator in the many World vs. Google Analytics/Yahoo! Analytics discussions or vendor evaluations that occur. The question for you is: does "free" makes it OK? For some enterprises the answer will be "no."

Today we release our Digital & Media Asset Management Report 2009. In this new edition, we've greatly expanded our coverage of Minnesota, USA-based MediaBeacon, a pioneer in XMP, and a small but savvy company that's frequently competing with the larger corporate muscle of Open Text's Artesia and Interwoven's MediaBin. There are quite a few new trends in DAM for 2009, which we'll explore in this blog over the next few weeks, and which we cover in-depth in the report. As we point out in today's press release, the most significant one we've seen is what we're calling "the disappearance of the middle class." Small team/workgroup-style DAM tools typically sell for US$2,000-5,000, while the enterprise-class DAM & MAM tools are rarely acquirable for less than US$150,000-$200,000. This situation is serious a problem for buyers who need more from their DAM system than a simple digital archive, but don't have six-figure budgets. In these tough economic times, enterprises are looking to buy only the features they really need, at a predictable price point. Because the costs involved in a full-feature, licensed solution may be prohibitive, some buyers are turning to fixed-price hosted DAM, or stretching their workgroup-level solution -- perhaps from the likes of Adobe, Apple, or Microsoft -- beyond its capabilities.

After 4 years of growing and energetic conferences in Denmark, the next stop for the J. Boye Conferences is in Philadelphia from May 5 - 7. There are already about 20 confirmed speakers from around the world, including the CMS Watch team, but to make it a practitioner event, I am still searcing for a few more case studies for the track on web content management. In these changing times, I find it partcularly interesting to listen to honest presentations from practitioners that share lessons learned and perhaps even some unsolved challenges. In case you are interested, please contact me directly at jb@jboye.dk. In any case, hope to see you there...

Recently I've been thinking about two packages we cover -- DotNetNuke (DNN) in The Web CMS Report, and Telligent Community Server in the Enterprise Social Software Report -- in the wake of the rise of SharePoint. Leaders of both platforms go to great pains to point out that they don't compete head-to-head with SharePoint. There's some truth to that. DNN and Community Server are fundamentally pre-MOSS efforts, developed at a time when Redmond was not putting much attention to developing packaged applications off its once cutting-edge .NET 2.0 platform. These were tools where developers could go to town with the latest frameworks and approaches. In the case of Telligent, many of those developers reside at Microsoft itself, which continues to use Community Server for some public forums (e.g., www.asp.net) and blogs, especially in the Windows and Office Communications Server groups. But SharePoint 2007 has of course really surged. As we point out in the SharePoint Report 2009, one of the more notable (if not frequently noted) dimensions of MOSS is that it represents a .NET 3.0 development platform, taking advantage of newer .NET services such as master pages and the Windows Workflow Foundation, among others. Now you get the sense that developers in the DNN and Community Server communities are feeling a bit left behind. Still, .NET 2.0 remains a kind of refuge for those module developers who don't want to learn 3.0 or are suspicious of some of its constructs (in particular master pages for templating or skinning). As a customer, you don't need to be a snob about this. DNN and Community Server should not be immediately dinged for lacking .NET 3.0-based services. And I think Redmond was wise in its approach to .NET where the later versions are functionally additive (rather than reconstructive). That said, I can't help but wonder about the future of both products. Migrating them to .NET 3.x won't be simple, which means potential turbulence for you the customer. [Update: 04 January 2008 -- several kind people have corrected me with respect to master pages, that they actually started with .NET 2.0. However, the point still stands that they are new to MOSS, and not used at all in Community Server or DNN.]

After spending a good amount of time talking to technology customers in Europe during the last quarter, I've concluded that attitudes towards enterprise social computing tend to be quite different on the eastern side of the Atlantic, which seems doubly significant since most (though not all) social software vendors hail from North America. Of course, it's dangerous to make continent-wide generalizations, and to be sure, customer adoption and approach does appear to differ from southern Europe (e.g., Italy) versus the Nordics and UK. Nevertheless, here are some of the qualms I picked up in Europe that simply don't get voiced as frequently in North America: There is greater concern about social software such as blogs introducing new silos of information and compounding information overload at a time when findability and compliance represent greater IT challenges than participation More pervasive union regulations circumscribe what employees and enterprises can do, and what employees can share The broader issue of personal and professional privacy -- which is hardly unique to Europe -- looms larger and carries more legal weight There feels like less inclination to meld personal and professional topics and personae (as so many social networking tools do), which has come up when global companies have experimented with using Facebook and the like for intra-enterprise networking None of this has stopped European enterprises from experimenting with social computing as their peers elsewhere have done. But there is greater skepticism, and we are already seeing that European customers sometimes find North American suppliers overly zealous and insufficiently sensitive to different legal and cultural barriers.

November brought bad news for all Livelyzens. In a brief blog post, Google officially announced that they would shut down Lively.com in order to "prioritize our resources and focus more on our core search, ads and apps business" Lively was one of many services that came from the Google Labs environment. The service was released in July 2008 and introduced an innovative, 3-D social platform, where users could build their own interactive rooms and embed them into web pages. But only 4 months later Lively was discontinued, leaving the active user community in a sad state. As a response to the sudden lock-down, the community has created an online petition, which many have signed, adding comments like "Lively has given me so much - please don't shut it down" and "Lively is more than a chat in 3D. [...] it is a world of feelings." All a little sad really, in so many ways... Yet while the shut-down is indeed sad for the many users, it is also a timely reminder that You need to be careful with any beta release. Vendors -- including big vendors more often than not -- sometimes discontinue offerings The case with Lively illustrates that Google is a business just like any other and that businesses need to make money. As they themselves write on their blog: "[...] we've also always accepted that when you take these kinds of risks not every bet is going to pay off. That's why [...] we've decided to shut Lively down at the end of the year." In a future Google in the Enterprise Report, we will take a close look at Google based on our many on-going conversations with customers about their experiences. Thanks go to my colleague Peter Sejersen for his eagled eyed analysis of the Lively situation. And If you would like to contribute and share your thoughts, we would both still like to hear from you. Please contact us directly at jb@jboye.dk. I look forward to hearing from you!

I recently had the great fortune of taking a holiday trip around the diverse and beautiful country of South Africa. For a stage of the trip, in a remote area of northern Kwa-Zulu Natal, my husband and I had a Zulu guide and translator, which allowed us to explore the communities more in-depth and converse more freely the locals. Most of the schools and homes in this area (including our translator's) had no electricity or plumbing; in these parts, it costs approximately 300 ZAR (about US$30) to send a child to school for the year (including textbooks). Most people don't own cars, so oftentimes groups of people stand along the side of the road waiting for a ride. And while they wait, they tap away text messages on their mobile devices. It was then I learned the Zulu word uma-khala-khukhwIni, which translates literally as "thing that rings in the pocket." In a country where unemployment hovers around 25%, men in rural areas tend to leave for several weeks at a time to work near a city, then come home with money and things for the kids, like mobile phones. Those who don't have electricity go to a general store in town to plug the phone in and charge it. These kids may not have running water, but they can look things up on Wikipedia. Naturally I was curious about the economics: how could these kids afford to rack up SMS messaging costs in an area where wealth is still largely measured by cattle, and public education only arrived after the fall of apartheid? It turns out that the communication happens via a service called MXit, a free instant messaging software application that runs on GPRS/3G mobile phones with Java support, and native to South Africa. MXit doesn't charge for sending and receiving person to person messages, and while some service providers charge for GPRS/3G data cost, these costs are comparatively minuscule, about 1 ZAR cent, or one tenth of a US penny. In other words, the next time you buy a beer in London or Moscow, it's worth about 8,000 text messages to a kid in rural South Africa. We mentioned in our 2009 predictions article that mobile analytics is going to become increasingly important in 2009 -- but for still too many companies, a mobile strategy isn't even on their radar. Smart companies have the foresight to think about content distribution beyond the technology elite, those of us sitting in our offices with PCs and dollars, euros, or pounds sterling in our wallets. As wealth grows in places like China, India and South Africa, where mobile phones far outnumber PCs, you'd be wise to do the same.

One of my favorite little phrases is "double edged sword" and I found a perfect application for it recently, the discussion of "incumbent vendors" -- those whose product(s) you're already using.   Imagine you have been using a particular vendor's technology for the past 5 or 10 years. It could be EMC|Documentum or Open Text or any one of the 197 other products we evaluate. I'll just call them Vendor X. But now it's time for an upgrade, or even a replacement of that technology. It did what it was supposed to do at the time, but now technology has moved on and it's time for a refresh. So you're kicking off a major project and starting up the RFP and shortlisting process. On the one hand, being the incumbent, Vendor X is at a real advantage to supply this new technology over anyone else. They have an existing relationship with the IT group, procurement department, and at least some business users. So they know you and they know your business to some degree.  Equally important they know your IT expectations and limitations. Of any vendor they are the ones to beat, and should be able to not only pitch, but price at a point that will make you smile. On the other hand, they are now the "old" supplier and as the Eagles once so perfectly put it, "wooo-hooo... everybody's talking 'bout the new kid in town." Whereas by default the incumbent comes with baggage. For nothing is ever perfect, and the last few years will have had its ups and downs, and of course it's only human to focus on the downs. Put it this way: if you think its time to upgrade or replace, then you likely think of the incumbent as dated. Another twist in that two-way relationship is that you know a lot of dirt about Vendor X -- dirt you don't know about their competitors. The maintenance calls that were never properly closed, the bugs, the eventual fixes, and the license fee hikes. In that situation, who would want to be the incumbent? Sometimes incumbents are going to win regardless, but it's not always an advantage. The key here for you the buyer is that incumbents require a particular type consideration. So, when automatically adding Vendor X to your shortlist, or conversely when deciding not to add them, make sure you come to the decision in a balanced manner, that you have looked at both sides of that double edged sword.

I recently received an interesting survey from Steven Ashley, senior research analyst at Robert W Baird & Company, a financial services firm. The survey tried to figure out the analytics tools employed by the 500 most heavily-trafficked websites around the world as of early December, 2008. The report found that a surprising 45% did not use any web analytics software at all, but it turns out the surveyors were just looking for JavaScript tags, when -- as Web Analytics Report readers know -- many companies use logfile- or sniffer-based architectures (in part because they want to capture information and devices where JavaScript doesn't work). So the report surely undercounts actual usage -- by how much, I don't know. Our anecdotal research suggests that a growing number of large enterprises in fact are taking a hybrid approach, and this is forcing vendors to adapt, as well as supporting new entrants in the marketplace. Anyway, it's impossible to tell who's "number one." Nevertheless, the survey offers some interesting nuggets among the collection of sites that do employ JS tags. I won't reveal all the goodies here; you'll have to ask Baird for a copy. One stat worth noting: Baird found seventy websites with Omniture tags, while all other paid analytics vendors -- WebTrends, CoreMetrics, et. al. -- totalled only fifty sites combined. Again, not all vendors use exclusively JavaScript. Omniture actually experienced a net decline of four websites from Baird's Q3 survey, interestingly in large measure by losing five SiteCatalyst sites to free services like Google Analytics. Conventional wisdom held that Omniture would see more abandonment of its acquired HBX line instead. In any event, Ashley remains quite bullish on Omniture stock, and noted its growing revenues throughout 2008. That income doubtless came from additional customers beneath those top 500 busiest sites, but also from what Wall Street praises as "increasing the yield" from existing customers. I think you know what that means.

Today we release our half-day online education course about Digital & Media Asset Management (DAM) technology. As we learned over the last 9 months of research into the DAM market, speaking with DAM project leaders and creative professionals around the world, many teams struggle to determine the optimal way to implement DAM technology. The course walks students through important information to understand prior to implementation in order to mitigate risk, including: key administrative and system management services, roles and groups and how security is managed, scalability, capacity and bandwidth challenges, the value of specific DAM standards. The online course includes sessions on: Introduction to DAM Asset Creation, Assembly & Delivery Services DAM Architecture & System Management Services DAM Implementation Scenarios DAM Vendor Landscape and Trends As the course leader, I hope you'll "join me" as I walk you through the world of DAM, and please e-mail me if you have any comments on the course or our Digital & Media Asset Management Report.

Sitting through countless vendor demos to clients over the past couple of years, I've noticed a trend -- at least among Web CMS and Portal vendors -- of sales engineers ("SEs") emphasizing sales over engineering. In the typical vendor pitch you'll see one or two vendor account reps (a.k.a. salespeople) who are mostly there to set the stage for the actual demo, given in turn by one or more SEs. Increasingly I find SEs somewhat removed from actual implementation details (except what they've customized on their own laptops). While comfortable issuing jargon about "persistence layers" and "dynamic cache invalidation," they don't always have much depth on the mechanics of how their tools actually work behind the scenes. Deeper questions frequently get added to the dreaded (and usually unfulfilled) we'll-get-back-to-you list. Or requests for details get side-tracked with a digression about successful Customer X or Customer Y -- the way a product manager would talk. At some level the problem is us. If we don't create scenarios or specific questions that require technical depth, vendors will respond accordingly. Vendors also fear that a knowledgeable engineer (a.k.a. geek) will lose the attention of key business decision-makers in the room. Sizzle sells, and SEs with sizzle tend to get more S....if you let them. I've often thought the best combo for a vendor demo team contains a salesperson, plus a professional services consultant (who can talk to real implementations), plus an engineer with substantial depth on the product. In any case, if your project is important, specify the type of team you want to see, and signal to the vendor very explicitly what you want them to demo and the expertise you expect them to bring. Then test, test, test. Our evaluation reports and educational seminars detail further how to create a test-based selection process.

The ECM world is dominated by EMC, Open Text, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle -- all big vendors with equally big publicity machines to keep their brands and "story" right, front and center. But of interest to me these last couple of months has been the news from lesser-known vendors such as Nuxeo and SpringCM. Different news from each to be sure, but evidence that mid-market vendors should be watched closely by buyers as those suppliers often have a more resilient and detailed ECM strategy, they just don't have such big marketing machines to explain it with. So firstly Nuxeo. They released their first packaged application to provide functionality for correspondence management (mail, invoices, contracts etc) in late 2008. With a second planned application for mid 2009 in Digital Asset Management. Why is this interesting news? Well Nuxeo is one of only three serious ECM open source options (Alfresco and KnowledgeTree being the other two) -- and the one that most closely follows the traditional open source model of a vibrant, community-driven framework/platform approach to software. Added to this sign of corporate maturity (packaged applications), reportedly big revenue growth in 2008, and planned expansion into North America for 2009 -- it's evidence of open source growing as a real and credible option for ECM buyers. Secondly SpringCM, who throughout 2008 has been announcing an ever broadening SaaS alternative for ECM. Their partner network is expanding, as are the number of industry-specific applications that those partners have built on the SpringCM platform. Many customers have asked me about SpringCM in 2008 and for a small firm they have certainly caught the market's attention. They probably deserve their day in the sun. Their smartest moves in 2008 were offering free Records Management functionality, and their decision to push SaaS ECM as a development platform, an approach that flies in the face of most people's understanding of SaaS. But it's equally an approach that gets SaaS on shortlists and begins to establish it as a potential alternative to on-site options. Nuxeo and SpringCM are not alone in setting the ECM pace at the mid market level. As ECM Suites Report readers know, Objective released one of the more cutting-edge, SOA-based ECM packages in 2008, and of course Alfresco continues to steal some headlines away from much bigger rivals. All in all a good market for both vendors and buyers -- with lots of options currently available. Vendors continue to differ widely in their offerings, with growth (and accompanying research and development investment) the norm, even in this challenging economy. All good signs for those planning ECM investments in 2009.