I just wrote on why we need Content Management for effective Case Management.  It really is more of a background into defining the challenges.  Now I am going to focus on how Content Management vendors can help solve this problem.

This is a little like closing the barn door after the horses have escaped.  Most of the vendors out there have announced Case Management strategies.  After my comments on EMC’s approach, many have felt that I thought that Content Management vendors should stay out of Case Management.

That is completely wrong.  They need to be involved.  So lets talk about the how…

What the Community Needs

So, what do we, the implementers, need from Content Management vendors.  Two words.  The first word is flexibility.  The second word is where it gets tricky…simplicity.

You didn’t think this would be easy did you?

Why flexibility? Simple, I need to be able to leverage my existing investments and to configure the system to reflect the types of solutions I am building.  As I’ve already discussed, for all their similarities, there is a lot of variety in the Case Management world.  There is no one-size-fits-all.

Here are the problems I face regularly when I tackle Care Management:

• Matching data schemes with legacy data models
• Synchronizing relevant data
• Synchronizing security between systems
• Creating a record of a case, not just the content for that case
• Working directly with external constituents, both people and organizations (not just through email)
• ONE interface that is intuitive
• Not having to redo everything when one product needs to be upgraded

As you can see, there needs to be a lot of poser and flexibility in those Content Management products.  The thing is, a lot of companies have been providing that flexibility for years, many with more than enough power.  The issue has been, and continues to be, simplicity.

This is where it all falls apart.  In my experience, the client rarely knows exactly what they want the first time out.  The first prototypes are usually torn apart in the review session.  That’s fine.  After I learned that this was actually normal for a Case Management system, I stopped getting upset.

One rule is this: If it takes a lot of work to create the first version of a Case Management system, then it usually takes a lot of effort to change the system.  If you change a component system, you usually need to ask for more budget.

Things need to be simpler.  More configuration, less customization.  More standards-based integrations, less vendor specific APIs or interfaces.  Do you know one of the beautiful things about using CMIS in to solve a technical problem?  You don’t have to worry about deprecated calls or changing your code when the CMS changes.  That is a very nice benefit for those of us doing the work (or managing it).

So that leaves the question, what do we want?

When All You Have is a Name…

Let’s face it.  There is no way that I can evaluate, personally, every Case Management offering out there in the CMS market.  I have a day job that frequently spills into the evening.  I have to look at approaches and strategies from each vendor, mix in the existing systems at a client, and createa short-list.

In general, configuration is better than customization.  The ability to customize needs to always be there, but the more that can be done through configuration, the quicker the implementation and any subsequent changes.  Configurations also tend to survive product upgrades which much less pain.

To classify approaches, here are some generic terms.  It is important to note that some companies use a term for marketing purposes that may not reflect what they actually provide.  This can be good or bad.

• Frameworks:  These are nice.  They offer pre-built starting points.  They are very flexible and provide a nice starting point.  They also tend to need more customization versus configuration (though mileage will vary).  This is still much better than starting from scratch.
• Solutions: This tends to be a more complete offering.  Many scenarios can be handled through configuration, though customization is still required for many options.  Often, the difference between a “solution” and a “framework” is just a question of the maturity of the offering.  Solutions take more time for a vendor to develop as they get feedback from clients.
• Product: This is taking it too far usually.  This can become too rigid and not offer enough flexibility.  That said, products aimed at specific types of cases, like correspondence management or insurance claims, can do quite well.  These should be confined to 3rd party integrators and ideally should be based upon a vendor framework or solution.

For those offerings, the key is that they are built upon an Enterprise Content Management platform.  The need to manage the content is the reason that these vendors are in such a good position to capture this market.  It is important that the focus of the company remain Content Management in order to continue to be a viable platform for Case Management and all of the other solutions needed by the community.

After all, not everything is a case.

It has been a month since I talked about CMIS, and that was focused on celebrating the release of 1.0 and the AIIM Demo.  Well, the time has come to look to the future and start thinking what we need out of CMIS to help where we need it…the future.

Short List

I’m just throwing a list of business cases that we need support for in CMIS.  Specific features may not be all listed, but I will be listing some to give an idea.  The goal here is to stimulate everyone’s collective mind and think about what we need in the next version.

• Semantic Support: I was working with some interested parties several months ago and realized that I could force many Semantic requirements into the current model.  What was missing was the ability to query off of relationships.  This will allow for more advanced relationship management.  Mind you, more support for that management directly off of the CMIS domain model would be nice as well.
• Records Management: Right now, you can apply policies to a piece of content.  In theory, that policy could be a retention policy.  Some enhancements to policies might be nice in order to identify RM policies versus generic policies.
• Support for Defined Data Models: One thing that was readily apparent when building the CMIS demo was the challenges in managing the same metadata model against different repository implementations of that model.  There were variations in naming and other details.  It would be a great advantage if I could query the repository to determine if they support the needed data model and then just use it.  This happens now when you use the field “cmis:id”. It maps to the real name underneath the hood which isn’t always “id”.  For example, “r_object_id” is the actual field name for “cmis:id” within Documentum.
• Create Content Types: Component Content Application developers, this one is for you! Leveraging off of the previous item, it would be cool if you could, through CMIS, create a new object type based upon a document or folder.  This would allow custom applications to have a generic CMIS script that would create any custom types needed by the application.  This will add an important abstraction for those using CMIS for multi-repository purposes.
• New Bindings: Heard several ideas in the last year.  WebDAV and JSON were two.  If I had to pick one, I’d lean to the latter for creating advanced apps, though WebDAV has the distinct advantage of working well with desktop applications.  The number of overall bindings is only limited by those working on them, so get involved if you want a new one.

I’m sure that there are more, but I think those are the important ones.  It helps the web-heads, the ECM types, and the solution providers.

More on CMIS Needs

While the above section was written based upon what is sitting at the top of my head as important.  I decided to look around and I found some of my notes on what is missing from my discussions with the aforementioned “interested parties”.  There is some more detail beyond what is listed above. Share and Enjoy.

• Hierarchical metadata is not supported by CMIS.
• Tagging is not supported. While an asset can have a multi-value field, it is set by the asset and not by the combination of user and asset.
• An extension of the tagging is the concept of Authority assigned to the tags. This is a more advanced concept. As I have thought on this, the Authority could be handled behind the scenes as Authority can be assigned to a user.  CMIS doesn’t necessarily need to support this in 2.0 as support is needed for this feature in the underlying repository more.
• Support for aspects, or something similar, is missing. While in many ways, this could be represented by a relationship or a policy, the ability to apply a domain map via an aspect to an asset would be valuable.
• Semantic modeling can most likely be achieved through the use of Relationships. Folders is a possibility, but it feels like overloading and there could only be one type of “relationship” between a folder and an asset.
• Given the use of relationships, the ability to Query relationships in the “Where” clause is missing. Something similar to the “In_Folder” command currently present for folders. This should handle most of the conditionals.
• If tagging is added, there would need to be the ability to query not just on the presence of a tag, but on its strength. That would be either absolute (50% taggers used value “X”) or relational (“X” is one of the top 5 tags).
• Aspects also need to be queryable.

Fun notes.  Thought I would add them here to share and build some thought basis.

Is something missing?  Well, then you need to get involved.  If you don’t speak-up and share, then you aren’t in a position to complain.  The CMIS standard’s future is only as strong as

I’ve been talking about a lack of leadership and vision in the ECM industry.  This is evident when you attend keynotes at various conferences.  Most keynotes at industry conferences are focused on what has been happening and what is happening now.  John Mancini’s keynote at the AIIM conference was as close as it gets these days.

Of course, AIIM can’t deliver the future, they can only point to it, so what do we do? We wait. What are we waiting for? Well, I’m not waiting right now.  For your consideration, I present to you a keynote on the future of ECM…..

Once There was a Vision of ECM

[Imagine some basic banter and a joke that only 20% of the audience will get, and only half of them will think it was actually funny.]

Ten years ago, the term Enterprise Content Management was created.  There was no magic pill or working product.  It was just a vision of one repository for all of the content in the organization.  One place for web pages, documents, images, and records to reside and be managed together.

It was a solid vision. The industry seized upon the vision and charged forth.  Over the next few years, through acquisition, development, and combinations of both, several companies built “complete” ECM platforms and proceeded to sell them to anyone and everyone.

As the vision was “realized”, vendors competed among themselves to see who could have the biggest and most complete platform.  New needs would arise and they would all rush to “check-the-box”. There was, and is, a continuous race to be “more” complete than any other vendor.

The platforms grew and became more complex.

Not all ECM implementation succeeded, but lessons were learned and best practices were gathered. Everyone in the industry continued to move forward from pure momentum, thinking that the goal had been achieved and that all that was required was to get better at implementations.

Meanwhile, the world changed.

Enter the Changing Reality

When ECM was first conceived, people created content, it was published, and then nothing else happened until it was time to update the content.  Then came the 2.0 world.  The world at large went from consuming content to interacting with content.

This was a new mindset for the Content Management world.  Instead of one author, or a few authors working together, content now evolves over the course of years through the input of any number of people.  Discussions about content has become information worth managing.  The line between structured and unstructured information is fuzzy and no longer back and white.

As the nature of content changed, it has grown at an exponential rate.  This isn’t a new phenomenon, but the sheer volume of increasing digital information is starting to push the boundaries of what is possible with existing ECM architectures.

The need to share this information has also increased dramatically.  CMIS was created to solve the information silo problem.  The problem is now changing scope.  The question isn’t how do I have my 3 content systems interoperate, but how do I share my content with my business partners and vice versa?  CMIS is great, but how do we manage security?  Access and control of content is a problem when you don’t manage the identities of the people directly.

The ECM community hasn’t been unaware of these changes, but in the quest to do everything, we lost the one quality that is most necessary in the 2.0 world.

Agility.

The Ideal Use Case

Let’s take a step back, or to be more precise, a step forward.

Imagine, if you will, preparing for a meeting as a follow-up to a conversation that you just had with a prospect.  You are working with your colleagues to create an agenda.  You are doing this from the subway from your favorite tablet computer connected via your wireless, favorite or not, provider.

Once completed, the agenda is automatically shared with all meeting attendees.  Attendees can comment on the agenda, but only you, your colleagues, and others that you designate  have access to make updates.  All of this is automatically determined by the relationship between the agenda, meeting invitation, and the meeting attendees.

The very act of creating the presentation with your colleagues will involve collaboration around the world on phones, laptops, tablets, and devices yet to come.  Access to the content will be from any device, anywhere.  The theme here is universal access.  This doesn’t just apply to the applications and devices consuming the content.  The content needs to be located in a place that can be accessed from any location.  That place is in the cloud.

Content will no longer be centered around, and managed for, the Enterprise.  Content Management will be everywhere and part of everything.

Omnipresent Content Management, that is the future.

Security will be key.  Everything needs to be secured and in such a way as to not hinder users.  Historically, there has been a direct correlation between security and complexity.  Can you even imagine using a VPN on your cell phone?

Simplicity for the users will be important.  That will take the industry, working together, to achieve.  That means me, you, and everyone reading this keynote.

Where Can Everyone Reach It?

There is a fear in moving to the cloud. You may look at the companies providing cloud-based Content Management, and you think commodity. That is a superficial analysis.  Even so, if you are managing Zettabytes of content, there stands to reason that there is a lot of money to be made providing a “commodity”.

Look deeper. By having all that content in a location where people can readily access it, the benefits grow.  All the gains that are always pitched for Content Management still apply, but now those benefits apply to all content, not just the content siloed in my organization.

With the cloud comes processing power.  The phrase Intelligent Content Management is starting to evolve as a component of Information Management.  Imagine the power that can be applied in the cloud to analyze trends within the content itself. Add to it the benefits of looking at the scope content that can be accessed.

No longer are you just looking at the trends within your organization.  Trends can be analyzed across trusted partners.

The ECM platforms as we know it will be living in the cloud.  There will still be some industries that utilize private cloud structures, but the platforms will be globally accessible.  Platforms will interoperate via CMIS, and applications will be developed independent of the platforms.

This independent development of applications will give us back something that is missing from the industry.

Agility.

That is the key to having a shot at surviving in the future.  Without it, we may as well step aside.  I don’t know about you, but I for one am not going to step aside.

Stop the New Silos Before They Begin

We are at a turning point in the Content Management industry.  The last turning point came with the advent of ECM ten years ago.  We decided to end the content and organizational silos that were springing-up everywhere.  While there are still separate systems, we now have the tools to have coordinated management of content within our organizations.

Now we have silos between organizations.  Sometimes that organization is your family.  The lines between work and people’s personal lives has been blurring for a long time.  The line is almost imperceptible.  To succeed in this world, we need to have the pieces meet so they can be accessed by everyone, anywhere.

So my question to you is a simple one.  Are you going to just keep moving in the same direction, trusting that you will get to where you want to be, or will you step back, survey the landscape, and realize that the future is in a different direction?

The news today?  CMIS is now an official standard! I’m pretty stoked about the whole thing.  When I started this blog, after I got through my initial list of topics, it was the desire for a SOA-based standard for ECM that provided the desire.  Now that my desire has been met, almost three years later, what will I do for inspiration?

Simple, push for CMIS 2.0! In all seriousness, that is a post for another day. I want to focus on the actual release of the standard and the Demo where you can see it in action.

Stage One Complete

I’m not going to say “Mission Accomplished” for many, MANY, reasons.  I am going to say that I am pretty happy with the progress and would like to savor progress for a few days.  74 companies voted for the standard, making for 23% acceptance (15% is the minimum required).

John Newton wrote a blog post about his Irrational Exuberance on CMIS.  It is a great post for anyone with doubts to read.  I don’t think his exuberance is irrational.  While the future of CMIS is not carved in stone, I think the forward momentum is great.

• Alfresco has a supported release for CMIS, their Community Edition 3.3.  Support for the Enterprise Edition is planned for this month.
• EMC has announced that their latest early release candidate is the actual release candidate.  CMIS will be part of the core platform in their 6.7 release at the end of this year.
• Microsoft announced that the CMIS Connector for SharePoint will ship as part of the SharePoint Administrator Toolkit by the end of June 2010.  This will include using SharePoint as both a consumer and supplier of content.
• Day Software has announced their release of CRX 2.1 with full CMIS support.

Other official announcements are likely to follow quickly now that CMIS 1.0 is final.

For more information, check out the recent post AIIM 2010 CMIS article on Fierce Content Management and my 8 Things You Need to Know About CMIS article on AIIM’s Digital Landfill.

Want to See CMIS in Action?

STOP!!!  This is more than just a plug for you to play with the demo.  I am offering you a chance to download the code and play with it yourself.  You can even point to repositories that weren’t officially supported for the demo

Here is what you need:

• Object Model: This is a spreadsheet that describes the object model. This is what each vendor used.
• Source Code: This is Visual Studio 2008 project (you can try and see how it works in VisStudio 2010 trail).  All of the code is in C#.  I have removed the host servers and the authentication information from the CMISCalls.cs file, but if you look in the setConnectionInformation method, you can see where you need to go.  Note that if you want to add a sixth repository, you will need to make edits in the DefaultSearch.aspx.cs file.  If you try that and need help, leave me a comment.
• Documentum DAR File: This is the object model for the Documentum repository.  Just load it up and away you go.  You can get Developer Edition for free and then download CMIS separately.

If any of the vendors wish to make their repository that was used for the CMIS demo publicly known for everyone to use, please leave the necessary information in the comments below.

So the iPad has arrived, creating with its arrival a new market for devices that are small and easy-to-use enough to avoid carting your laptop around, but more usable than existing mobile devices.  Of course, you can argue that the disadvantages are precisely that you cannot put it in your pocket, and that it isn’t as easy to use as a laptop with a proper keyboard and mouse.

That being said, the iPad has a growing set of business applications for it – the Apple App Store is being updated constantly with them.  And some of those are tools to allow business folk on the move to work on their content; the iPad will allow users to edit and view documents and work on them efficiently, given the screen size.

So what about its place in the CMS world?  The iPad of course has a browser, and using that you can access any of the web-based CMS repositories that support it; or (doing a thinly veiled plug here for our product) you can use a purpose-built UI that provides multiple repository access, such as our CARA product which leverages CMIS in order to provide functionality on any repository that supports CMIS – and that list is growing.

read more

A while back, I discussed the Three Fundamental Use Cases for CMIS. Since then, there have been some additional thoughts on this topic.  Since CMIS has been officially submitted as a standard to OASIS I thought I would look at a couple of those thoughts.

The first was the EMC presentation on CMIS and DFS from the Momentum Europe in the fall.  It presented four cases, most notably a Migration use case.  This has popped-up in Twitter as well, so it obviously has some mindshare.

The other was a post by The Burton Group, specifically Larry Cannell, on How Will CMIS Be Adopted.  Larry focused on the business applications and had some good thoughts, especially regarding CMIS Clients.

Quick Recap

Not going to go into many details again. Feel free to read the post or check-out the related presentation.  Listing the use cases for reference, they are:

• Repository-to-Repository (R2R): This is where content repositories talk directly to each other.
• Application-to-Repository (A2R): This is where an application that uses content is plugged-into a content repository to handle all content services.
• Federated Repositories (FR): This is where an application talks to many different repositories while presenting a singular interface to the user.

So what else has happened?

CMIS for Migration

This is a two-pronged discussion.  The first is how it relates to the 3 cases listed above.  The answer is classic consulting-speak, It depends.  Why?  It depends on how you build the migration tool.

I could be a stand-alone that takes content from one system and places it in another in one process (FR).  It could export content in one process from the source and use another to import into the target in another (A2R).  It could be built within a repository and just suck content from other repositories (R2R).

So CMIS Migration doesn’t really fit alongside the three, so lets call it a CMIS business application.  That will work as a phrase for at least the rest of this post.

So should you use CMIS for migrations?

On average, I would say no.  Migrations typically involve lots of content.  Performance counts and using lower level APIs can provide a lot of performance gains.  There is also the opportunity to take advantage of performance features that some vendors provide through batch importing.

For example, EMC’s Documentum High Volume Server allows you to do use Batching and Scoping, minimizing database calls and dramatically improving performance.  If you use CMIS, you lose that performance gain.

If you aren’t migrating a lot of content, and don’t need to worry about quick switch-over from one system to another, then you can use CMIS.  In general though, I would say no.  Buy a tool or get some smart developers to write a one-time utility for you.

Blending Architecture and Business Use Cases

Over at Burton Group, Larry Cannell shared some very solid thoughts in his post.  He showed a nice understanding of the standard as well.  Larry shows the same flaw in his list that most people have done.

People are mixing the “architectural” use cases, R2R/A2R/FR, with “business application” use cases.  Putting them in a single list can cause confusion.  Larry was focusing on the business applications of CMIS variety, which is an important topic.  The ones that he listed are:

• Collaborative front-end to a repository: This is basically using CMIS to connect Jive, Quickr, or SharePoint to an ECM platform.  Classic A2R usage.  There is no reason it couldn’t be a FR design in order to work with content stored in multiple repositories.
• Mashups/portals: This is a good one and one that appeals to the RESTful binding of CMIS.  Bringing content into an application with data from others has great value.  For an energy company, having the electrical grid super-imposed on a Google map, with a click on a point allowing them to see service history and manuals on the equipment located there has great value.
• Lightweight desktop clients:  This is one that Larry adds a lot of thought an insight into during his post.  Aside from having a well developed application, there is the possibility of a streamlined security process.
• Migration: This is not in Larry’s post, but I wanted to list it here as I’ve discussed it above and it fits in this list quite well.

Now it is silly to try and list every business application.  Whenever you think you have a complete list, way to leverage CMIS will show up.  There is no point to such a detailed list.  Capturing representative examples has value as long as whenever someone thinks of a “new” use, you either take time to relate it to an existing one, or acknowledge it as a unique usage of CMIS.

A Parting Thought

You’ll notice that all applications could benefit from A2R and FR architectures.  Why?  Simple, why migrate everything when you can them marked as read-only and still interact with them from the same user interface?  Any new content could be place into the new repository.  As content expires, the legacy repository slowly fades away.

This could be done in a more advanced manner as well.  Think on it for a second. If some content was accessed, it could automatically be migrated behind the scenes.  For a more economical scenario, the migration would only happen if legacy content was modified.

After a while, all active content would be in the new repository.  The other could then be taken offline.  If written correctly, that feature could very well make migrations unnecessary for repositories that are simply being replaced.

I wouldn’t mind not performing another migration.  While necessary at times, they are far from fun.  Give me a good Content Management Assessment project any day.

This is going to be a busy week for me.  I am off to HIMSS 2010 in Atlanta for a two primary reasons (and about a thousand secondary).  The first is to support my Healthcare colleagues from Washington Consulting at the conference.  The second, which will make the first all the more challenging, is to learn more about the vertical that is Healthcare IT.

Before I jump into it, a funny little joke.  When I was in a meeting and we were talking about the trip to HIMSS, someone mentioned HL7. Being one of many new terms to me, I didn’t ask them what it meant, just glanced at them with a curious look on my face.  They told me, and I kid you not, Look it up later. Just remember that there is no HL6 or 8.  Thanks for the help guys. ( I did learn what it was later and actually understood the “7″ reference.)

Haven’t I Heard This Before?

So as I did research to get ready to hit the ground running, I saw a lot of challenges that the Healthcare industry is facing on the IT side.  I had heard most of it from a high level before in news reports and in Information Management/ECM case studies.  I had also picked some information up in planning for this year’s AIIM CMIS Demo.

When you strip out the names of the federal mandates and the acronyms that are common in the industry, I saw a lot words that I understood quite well:

• Interoperability: The Interoperability Showcase is a big piece of HIMSS.  I understand this problem from Content Management.  In fact, as you may have noticed, this is one of my favorite topics to discuss.  Between AIIM’s iECM Committee and all my efforts with CMIS, I think I understand the core needs well.
• Standards: Very related to interoperability, but separate.  There are several standards out there for Electronic Health Records (EHR) and Electronic Medical Records (EMR), not to mention other standards in the Healthcare space.  How do you evaluate those standards for usability, adoption, and sustainability?  Once again, not that much different from the evaluations of CMIS and the ECM standards before that.
• Legacy Paper Records: Wait a second, this I know. You have all these patient records in paper format.  You need them in your EMR and EHR systems.  New records may be electronic, but a patient’s medical history from pre-electronic days needs to be part of the integrated whole.  Scanning of those records, capturing key data elements, and making them available is the same thing we’ve been doing for years just about everywhere.
• Records Management: How long do you keep a patient record?  How do you manage it?  What about records about maintaining hospital equipment?  This is the same problems that federal agencies and companies dealing with SOX compliance have been solving, or attempting to solve, for years.
• Privacy: This is very important.  You don’t want a patient’s health information being compromised.  That is the most personal of your information.  Information needs to be secure, yet shared, all at the same time.  Once again, this is not a new problem.  In the federal government, information about citizens are stored and used all the time.  Personally Identifiable Information (PII) is a source of a lot of auditing and control in many systems.  Even the exact queries that people use to retrieve information needs to be tracked and reported upon.

You know something? Maybe I know a little something about Healthcare IT after all.

Wandering, Learning, and Posting

So I am going to be attending sessions and talking to people for five days down in Atlanta.  I am hoping to define the size of the gap in my domain knowledge, and work towards filling that gap.  I am also going to post notes from some sessions in a similar fashion to my EMC World posts.  I will throw in the following disclaimer:

All information in this post was gathered from the presenters and presentation. It does not reflect my opinion unless clearly indicated (Italics in parenthesis). Any errors are most likely from my misunderstanding a statement or imperfectly recording the information. Updates to correct information are reflected in red, but will not be otherwise indicated.

If you find anything of interest in these posts, and are at HIMSS, feel free to reach me on Twitter (@piewords).  I’m looking for people to talk to that will expand my knowledge and deepen my understanding of the Healthcare industry.

Like all industries, there are unique challenges and environments in Healthcare IT.  Like all industries, when you look at the core of the Information Management problem, you see similarities across the board, and lessons that can be brought to bear to solve them.

Going to be quite a ride this week. Stay tuned to see how I fare.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about Box.net.  In case you missed it, I basically called their term for their solution, which I refuse to use again, “market speak” and hype while implying much worse.

A week later, Aaron Levie, the CEO and cofounder of Box.net, was interviewed on Fierce Content Management.  Here he espoused a solid vision for Box’s hosted version of Content Management, though that term was heavily featured, again.

During all this, a very surprising thing thing happened, Aaron contacted me and asked if we could setup a time to chat so that I might better understand their vision.  I accepted his offer.  Our scheduled meshed today and I thought I would share.

Kudos to Box

I just want to send Kudos to Aaron for reaching out.  I wasn’t kind to their term, and to reach out like that, knowing that a second post would likely follow, takes a certain amount of gumption.  For it not to be someone in marketing and be the CEO himself, even more.  The only pre-determination was if the conversation was public or private. He choose public.

That said, character will only get you so far.  You have to deliver and have a direction.  They have a good vision.  They are trying to achieve Omnipresent Content Management now.  They are starting down that road towards realization of that vision.

Oh, they have some rather large hurdles in front of them.  Identity Management is a big massive humongous one, but they, at best, can only be part of the solution as the world at-large needs to have a solution.  They are trying to have the content live in the right places, so that is a start.

Okay, funny part.  I think I sold him on CMIS more than he sold me on Box.net.  My biggest, and probably only, real issue entering the conversation was their marketing term.  Like many, they hadn’t fully grasped the potential of CMIS and how it could actually drive business for them.  The fact that he seemed to “get it” will help them in the future.

Taking it to the Business

It is one thing to enable the populace to share documents with each other.  They’ve already passed Google Docs on that front in my opinion.  It is another thing to support business.  Let’s face it, that is where the real money needed to create a true platform is long-term.

They are trying to establish trust.  They aren’t hiding behind pay-to-play for individual users.  They are also being audited for SAS 70 statement.  That takes a little faith, and a commitment to achieve sound operating standards.  Maintaining that over time, and not letting it be a one-time thing, is important.

Aaron told me that they are seeing solid traction in smaller to medium sized businesses (SMBs), which is think is their current core market.  From experience, non-profits would also benefit.  He also said that they are seeing departmental use in larger organizations.  I suspect that some of those efforts are born out of frustration  from trying to get things done in a bureaucracy (which is itself a solid market niche that can lead to larger footprints).

Is Box.net ready to tackle ECM solutions head-on? No. Are they on the path to get there? Yes.  Will people go with them now because it is simple? Yes.

I wrote a basic ECM checklist back in December.  They are well on their way overall and have basic routing already.  While they are seeking to be broader than ECM and move beyond the Enterprise, and corporate firewalls, they still need to provide the same core technology to serve the broader audience.

That Pesky Term

I did concede one thing to Aaron.  I said that I understood why they used the offending term and why it is a good marketing term.  They are a cloud-based application residing in the SaaS layer.  There is no denying that or the current fashionable use of the word cloud.  They provide Content Management functionality.  I’ll give them that, though it is more Document Management at this point (I think CMS Watch might agree) than Content Management.

I can only hope that the winds of change will force the evolution to a new term in the next couple of years so we can all be spared.  If the term sticks, I will have to get out of Information Management.

Besides, CCM already means Component Content Management.  OCM is cool, but as I said, nobody is ready to offer that yet.

The correct term will be obvious one day.  It just isn’t now.

Disclaimer

Just so it is crystal clear, to you and the FTC, Box.net has given and promised me nothing aside from time.  Aaron did say that he was considering what it will take for me to type or utter their marketing term outside of my nightmares, but that hasn’t happened and it was in jest.

Besides, EMC is a partner of my company and their reps will buy me the occasional beverage.  It doesn’t stop me from issuing a regular dose of brutal honesty to them.

Yesterday, Fierce Content Management published an article that I wrote entitled The Future of CMIS.  I discussed what I see as a very busy, and important, year for CMIS.  It is a good article, at least on the Scale of Pie, and I am not going to be regurgitating it here for you.

Instead, I feel the need to clarify an inconsistency.  In the article I stated [bold added]:

The past year was a good year for the proposed Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) standard. The specification was released for public review and efforts began to build an Open Source implementation of CMIS,  Apache Chemistry. The next year promises to be even bigger…

I even proclaim that The future is now.  That is all well and good, but there is one thing hanging over that statement.  I predicted in my mandatory 2010 predictions post that:

2010 Will Not be the Year of CMIS

These statements appear to contradict each other.  Now I could just say that my thinking has evolved and excuse myself that way, but I’m not.  I’m sticking with both statements.

Tap Dancing to Two Tunes?

How do I resolve such a conflict?  Simple.  I’m going to play with grammar.  2009 was a big year for CMIS.  Nobody can really deny that.  2010 will be a bigger year.  CMIS will either show that it has what it takes to become an established standard or it will become a flash in the pan.

Either way, it will be a big year.  But will it be the year of CMIS?

That is where the fun kicks into play.  I see 2010 as a stepping stone to 2011, which I feel will be THE year.  Only one year can be the biggest year, and I see that as 2011.  That will be the year that more solutions will hit the market and CMIS will move past the early adopter stage.

It is kinda like how an actor can play a James Bond role, but there is only one who is the James Bond.

If all goes well, CMIS will cross the proverbial chasm and become mainstream by the end of 2010.  That said, client interfaces, deployments, and case studies take time to develop.  This will really hit its stride in 2011 when even the last repository holdouts will have to realize what is happening in the market and jump on board.

That will make 2011 the year of CMIS.  2010 is critical because it will lay the foundation for that success.

Or…CMIS could fail, making 2009 the year of CMIS, but I don’t see that happening.  It is in our hands to educate the broader community and make sure that version 2.0 gets started in order to make sure that CMIS realizes its potential.

Open Source DAM Solution For Managing Rich Media Assets Now Available

BOSTON, February 4, 2010–Nuxeo, the Open Source Enterprise Content Management (ECM) company, announced today the general availability of its open source Digital Asset Management offering Nuxeo DAM.

Nuxeo DAM is the latest application based on the Nuxeo open source ECM platform, Nuxeo EP. Nuxeo DAM addresses the complex and resource-intensive demands of managing the rich media assets that companies rely on. Designed to meet the creative and ever-changing needs of marketing and brand managers, as well as the custodians of digital artifacts in education, government, military and cultural institutions, Nuxeo’s digital asset management software opens up new opportunities for the creators, users and consumers of rich media to take control of their critical image, video or audio content.

According to Nuxeo CEO Eric Barroca:

Nuxeo DAM has the same high level of flexibility as its underlying platform – Nuxeo EP – thanks to its extension-point, plug-in infrastructure. Thus, Nuxeo DAM can be adapted and customized to create a new kind of media-intensive content application matching ever-evolving business and creative needs.

Nuxeo DAM is the first application of its kind to meet the currently available draft of the OASIS Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) specification. Nuxeo, along with many other industry leaders such as Microsoft, IBM, and Adobe Systems, is involved with CMIS. CMIS is a proposed standard for interoperability across multiple ECM and web content management systems that is expected to be approved this year. Nuxeo EP, as the underlying ECM platform offering from Nuxeo, includes a CMIS Server, based on the latest CMIS specification, ensuring that packaged applications such as Nuxeo DAM and Nuxeo DM benefit from the interoperability enhancements.

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