Bex Huff weighs in on the challenges of ECM 2.0 with some practical advice and warnings.
Enterprise 2.0 is an emerging social and technical movement towards helping your business practices evolve. At its heart, its goals are to empower the right kind of change by connecting decision makers to information, to services and to people. -Brian "Bex" Huff
Now, granted, discussion about ECM 2.0 isn't anything new, I mean we have posts about this going back well into 2007 and farther, but I think we are starting to see some results of this discussion coming around. I would wager the offerings placed before us are still newly hatched, but a year ago it was mostly talk and smoke and mirrors. Several people that are familiar with the Content Management arena are already familiar with the Blog/Wiki capability of SharePoint. SharePoint is often called the "collaborative interface" or "collaborative front-end" by the other vendors who then try to position themselves as a potential backend for SharePoint. Oops…getting off track, that's a discussion for another time.
So, does anyone other than Huff want to wager a description or definition of ECM 2.0? I'm certainly not willful enough yet to do so. As this blog is generally in support of Oracle Fusion ECM (formerly Stellent, formerly Xpedio, formerly…well you get the idea), we would normally focus in that area, however this topic is fairly important to grasp from other views as well. Hence, OpenText defines ECM 2.0 as:
"Enterprise 2.0 Content Management: Provide flexible use of wikis, forums, blogs, tagging, and real-time collaboration. Provide advanced handling of rich-media content, with special emphasis on video, which is quickly becoming the de-facto format for 2.0 style work. "
Well, great. That sounds kind of fun. Honestly, I'm not sure I speak marketing enough to truly discern what "defacto format for 2.0 style work" is subliminally saying to me, but sure we can say that.
What's that? Oh, you have Oracle Fusion ECM and want to do some of this? Right, I almost forgot the basis of the blog. Thanks for bringing me back in. There are a variety of components available for your content server that add enhancements geared towards this discussion. First, you may want to RSS enable your content server. Again, to reference Bex's site you can get the Sample Blogs Component or the Sample Wikis Component off his ECM Library page.
Awesome! So now I can create blogs and wikis in content server just like SharePoint and others? Uh…no. Sorry, I might have misled you. Just a little. The point is, these are sample add-on's to content server that show some of the things that can be done. In truth, these have existed for a good while. If anything, they demonstrate the power of the content server architecture to add new features quickly without a new release. See, OpenText came out with a new release for all this while the folks at what was Stellent at the time kicked these out as a new feature with their component architecture without requiring a big new release and upgrade.