If you have missed out on these reports...

...then you find them here:

The Diverse and Exploding Digital Universe
"In this EMC-sponsored white paper, IDC calibrates the size (bigger than first thought) and the growth (faster than expected) of the digital universe through 2011."

AIIM Market IQ on Enterprise 2.0: Agile, Emergent, and Integrated
"This study of 441 end users (performed in January 2008) found that a majority of organizations recognize Enterprise 2.0 as critical to the success of their business goals and objectives, but that most do not have a clear understanding of what Enterprise 2.0 is. This 80+ page report, which contains over 70 figures, covers Enterprise 2.0 from all perspectives including technology, business drivers and market dynamics."

Lost & Found: A Smart-Practice Guide to Managing Organizational Memory
Found via Bill Ives, who describes it as follows: "...the Canada School of the Public Service has crafted a good overview of knowledge management (in the context of organizational demographic changes) and has some useful examples of common approaches/techniques...//...The focus is on public but the report provides a good introduction for fairly broad consumption."

Future of Media Report 2007
This report describes the evolving convergence media landscape. Michael Pick and Robin Good provides you with a short overview.

Open Source Web Content Management in Java
"...provides an in depth analysis of seven of the leading open source Java web content management platforms. Written for technical decision makers, the report breaks down the open source marketplace and describes various categories of open source software and where they are most effectively used. The report also provides a framework for understanding the cost and risk implications of selecting an open source platform over commercial software"

...and here are some online readings:

IBM Social Computing Guidelines
"In the spring of 2005, IBMers used a wiki to create a set of guidelines for all IBMers who wanted to blog. These guidelines aimed to provide helpful, practical advice—and also to protect both IBM bloggers and IBM itself, as the company sought to embrace the blogosphere. Since then, many new forms of social media have emerged. So we turned to IBMers again to re-examine our guidelines and determine what needed to be modified. The effort has broadened the scope of the existing guidelines to include all forms of social computing."

Sun Guidelines on Public Discourse
"Many of us at Sun are doing work that could change the world. Contributing to online communities by blogging, wiki posting, participating in forums, etc., is a good way to do this. You are encouraged to tell the world about your work, without asking permission first, but we expect you to read and follow the advice in this note."

This week in links - week 19, 2008

"Alfresco's Social Computing Slant Shows ECM's Evolution" by George Dearing:

"I had an interesting discussion with John Newton, the co-founder of Alfresco, recently...//...Newton makes everything sound so damn easy when he talks about enterprise content management. And when's the last time you heard the words 'easy' and 'ECM' in the same sentence?"

"If you take into account the way information increasingly lives inside and outside the firewall, ECM becomes even more complex. Companies now have to figure out how to consume and create content in both environments, something Newton says Alfresco accomplishes by adopting a 'content-as-service' approach. He argues that most enterprises lay out their palette of required services based on the need to create content. The focal point shouldn't be centered so much on the ECM suite, he argues. It has more to do with looking at 'how the Web browser can help knowledge workers do their jobs.'"

[Newton:]"'Content services should just be accessible wherever knowledge workers are. We shouldn't be forcing workers to go into these ECM suites. In our view, collaboration spans far more than ECM.' "

Hear, hear.

"E2.0 Fundamentals" by Jeremy Thomas:

"As Dion Hinchliffe says (and as I have written before), 'Discoverability isn’t an after thought , it’s the core'...//...Organizations need to embrace the fact that their data will be federated. Sure, workers will put their documents in “wiki X”, but they’ll also put them on the file share, in content management systems, and on email servers. Data that cannot be found is useless. Enterprise search will unlock data and increase the propensity for information (and the knowledge workers who create it) to be discovered. Discoverability leads to recognition, and recognition leads to increased participation. Enterprise 2.0 must be approached holistically."

Hear, hear. Again.

"Report says enterprise mashups on the rise" By C.G. Lynch, CIO.com:

"A new Forrester report says that enterprise mashups, while not yet a panacea for connecting all the dots of corporate data, will help companies (and their employees) mix and match information to help them do their jobs better. According to the researchers, vendors will provide tools for business users to build a mashup on their own with no programming experience."

"'Mashups are trying to solve a long-standing business problem, which is combining disparate data sources,' says Oliver Young, the Forrester analyst who wrote the report. 'We think mashups are doing it in a unique way that's more user-oriented.'...//... "It absolutely starts to look like BI,' Young says. 'Mashups will eat into that market.' Forrester defined a mashup in the enterprise as "custom applications that combine multiple, disparate data sources into something new and unique."

This week in links - week 18, 2008

"Of shoes and money …. and information" by JP Rangaswami:

"...mysteriously, we somehow manage to create an environment where we jealously guard information; where we seek to create and extend power as a result of this jealous guarding; where we then exploit this power in all kinds of ways, some less abhorrent than others (but all abhorrent, at least to me)...//...Once we impute value to information, we create a reason for people to have secrets. To hide things.And then it’s a downward spiral."

"The costs of reproduction and transmission and storage have dropped remarkably, and that changes many things...//...But there is a bigger change. A change brought about by the digital world. Now we can archive and retrieve information, search and find it. This has never happened before. And it is huge...//...Information is changing. And it is becoming more valuable to us all by becoming less valuable to any one of us."

"We should concentrate on providing good service and good product, concentrate on providing that service honestly and diligently. And the money will flow. Not by hoarding information, but by freeing it up. Collaborating with each other, within the firm, with our customers, with our partners, with our markets. Even with our competitors"

"Why IT Might Be in Big Trouble — Again" by Mark Smith:

" My assessment might be a little harsh, but my experience in the last six years analyzing organizations across all industries and company sizes provides insight to a serious problem. IT has lost touch with reality as they have been disconnected from the situation in business and do not seem to be concerned about it. My last blog pointed to the state of business being mad as hell. IT is apparently responding by shifting focus to the management of an organization's data assets rather than worrying or focused about the capabilities needed by business."

"How do you know if you are on a good path in IT and ensuring you are delivering value to business and your IT organization? Make sure you have well-defined objectives that can link to business and, just as importantly, to the information and interaction with it across the enterprise. Remember that good management of data assets in a cost-effective manner is one small component of the BI and information management issues in the enterprise."

Finally, in the post"What Type of Meeting is This?" Michael Sampson reviews four types of meetings where it can be better to meet in other ways than in-person.

Collaboration and SOA - more than just buzzwords

I tried to answer a question yesterday that I got sent to me via e-mail from an employee at the client company and who is located in Portugal . To be able to answer the question, I had to request information from two persons in my team, one of them being located in Switzerland and one being located in another city in Sweden. In a few minutes I had answered the question and received an e-mail from the employee in Portugal in which he thanked me for the answer. Thanks to the information in my answer, he could continue with his tasks at hand. As I mentioned something about this conversation to my client sitting almost next to me, he said "Isn't it fantastic? That we can sit here and communicate with people all over the world within a few seconds?"

I had to admit that it is quite fantastic. His question got me to reflect on how surreal my current assignment must have seemed just 20 years ago; I am planning and coordinating activities which involve hundreds of people (editors) all over the world, people who are located in countries such as Japan, Sweden, USA, Russia, China, Portugal, and France. I have direct contact with well over fifty of these people, primarily via e-mail or phone. We meet once a year on a conference and then never travel to meet face-to-face.

The project team that I am managing and which is responsible for rolling out new IT solutions to the markets (which we must help all the editors need to learn, prepare and launch) consists of a handful of people. We are partly co-located, but some of the team members work from other locations. We mostly communicate via phone or e-mail and when there is a need for us to meet in a more structured way, we use a web conferencing tool (WebEx from Cisco). We basically never need to travel to get things done. Often, it is just not a viable option. In addition, the corporate policy says that travelling should be avoided for environmental and cost reasons whenever possible.

Although we have much more to do to become more efficient in communicating and collaborating with each other, it is interesting that our biggest headache is not about communicating or collaborating within the project team, with the editors or with all stakeholders in different organizations. No, our biggest headache is the one we get from the constant battle we have to fight with the IT legacy. The problem with the IT legacy is, as usual, that it was not originally designed for the current requirements and that is almost possible to change. The short version is that it is a very complex and lengthy process to get things out to the market (or even at all). Add to that that the inflexible IT legacy adds a lot of extra friction between the ordering organization and the organization supplying it with IT solutions.

I personally both understand and stress the importance of separating the concepts of SOA and web services, one being an architectural style and the other being a technology that can be used for implementing a SOA. Still, I must admit to that web services are excellent for demonstrating key SOA concepts as well as for demonstrating the potential benefits than an organization can get out of SOA. SOA and web services go hand in hand. Even though I now work on the business side and not on the IT side, with people coming from a marketing and business administration background instead of an IT background (I have a combination of both), there is now a common understanding between the ordering organization (“the business”) and the supplying organization ("the IT department") that SOA is the way to go. SOA is no longer just some mysterious or over-hyped buzzword. Why? Because we have all seen a SOA in action.

For a small but essential part of the current solution, core software functionalities and content are now provided to consuming applications via web services. On top of the web services layer, different user experience applications can be designed and developed. Fast. And it can be done by external parties. The latter is virtually impossible today for other parts of the IT platform, even though the task is mostly about presenting existing things in a new way. They will have to navigate in a very complex IT environment and sometimes make changes all the way back to the legacy systems – which of course cannot be changed within the time-frame of the project, so you end up having to scope out functionality and content which would be valuable to end-users. To sum up, new solutions can be delivered much faster since core functionalities and content can be easily reused and thereby shortening development time AND since external capacity can be used to deliver them.

I am absolutely convinced that the keys to empowering enterprises today is to better support communication and collaboration between people and to increase the agility of their IT systems. Improving communication and collaboration is to me a low-hanging fruit since the tools and technologies are out there, although it is a big challenge since it has more to do with people and changing their existing attitudes and behaviors than it has to do with technology. Increasing the agility of the IT systems will in most cases be a costly and potentially very lengthy process, but it is an inevitable investment enterprises need to make if they are to compete on a global and rapidly changing market place.

Can you tell the difference between EIM and ECM? Really?

Do you find it hard to make a clear distinction between the concepts of Enterprise Information Management (EIM) and Enterprise Content Management (ECM)? If you do, I ensure you that you are not alone. In this post I will try to make the distinction a little bit clearer by using good-old communication theory and a simple (maybe even naive) analogy. To start with, let’s look at the current “official” definitions of the two concepts.

Although there is no agreed upon and hence no official definition of Enterprise Information Management, one of the best I have found so far is this one from an article in DMReview.com by Iain Kiernan where EIM is defined as:

"the processes, technologies and tools needed to turn data into information, information into knowledge and knowledge into plans that drive profitable business action."

When it comes to ECM, the official definition from AIIM defines ECM as:

“...the technologies used to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver content and documents related to organizational processes. ECM tools and strategies allow the management of an organization's unstructured information, wherever that information exists.“

Already here, it is quite easy to see that ECM is more technology-oriented than EIM. But what else is different? The distinction is still not really clear and communication theory might come to help here.

Communication theory defines communication as “a sender transferring a message containing information to a receiver”, information being a message that is received and understood (Wikipedia.org). In other words, information is the end result of a cognitive process in the head of the receiver. It is not something that actually exists on the paper which the message was written on. In a digital world, what is processed by the receiver is a message carried by more (data) or less structured digital content (text, images, sound, video…). When the message that the content carries is interpreted and understood by a receiver, it turns into information. This information can then be turned into knowledge (one definition of knowledge defines it as "the confident understanding of a subject with the ability to use it for a specific purpose if appropriate", wikipedia.org).

With this in mind, we can conclude EIM and ECM focuses on two different things in a communication process:

• EIM focuses on identifying receivers and understanding their information (and kwowledge) needs so that effective messages – messages that are understood by the receivers and create the intended effect (action, or absence of action) – can be created and delivered to them in the right time.
• ECM focuses on how to capture, manage, store, preserve and deliver content (carrying messages) to identified receivers.

To clarify even more:

• EIM is about creating efficient messages intended for specific receivers (persons or roles), while ECM is about capturing these messages as content.
• EIM is about knowing who needs to receive the message and when they need it, while ECM is about knowing the name and address of the intended receivers and deliver it to them as required by the sender.
• EIM cares about the message being interpreted, understood and creating the desired effect, while ECM cares about the content – whatever it might contain – being efficiently and securely delivered to the address of the named receiver.

Can you see the analogy with someone writing and sending a letter via regular mail? EIM is the author who writes a message to an intended receiver, chooses the media which in this example is a piece of paper, puts the paper into an envelope, writes the name and address of the receiver on the envelope and chooses a delivery method that will deliver it to the receiver in the right time and at the right cost. ECM is the postal service that picks up the letter together with a lot of other stuff from other senders, describes and organizes all them to be able to manage and deliver them efficiently and safely, and then delivers them to the addresses on the envelope. The mailman won't stay to observe the receiver when he or she opens the envelope and reads the letter, but the sender of the letter might request a letter back from the receiver to confirm if the message was understood or not.

This week in links - week 11, 2008

"The problem of dark matter in the information universe" by Kas Thomas, Analyst at CMS Watch:

It seems to me IDC may have missed (or at least skimmed over) some important conclusions in its newly released 2008 update of last year's widely cited The Expanding Digital Universe, which tries to outline the dimensions of the ongoing explosion of digital information. Not surprisingly, the 2008 update finds that the 2007 estimate of the world's information content was too small. It turns out the 2007 digital universe was actually 281 billion gigabytes, about 10 percent bigger than IDC thought.

By 2011, IDC says in its new report, the digital universe will grow to 10 times its 2006 size. I suspect that when 2011 rolls around, this estimate will prove an underestimation as well.

It seems there are two fundamental Laws of Information at work here:

• Information is vastly easier to create than to store
• Information is vastly easier to store than to dispose of

I believe we have to tackle this in two ways: Obviously, we need to make it easier to get rid of content. But we must also learn to accept that we cannot get rid of all content which is no longer needed. We have to accept that it is there, but use smart technologies to filter out irrelevant content.

By the way, you can now download AIIM President John Mancini's Keynote from the 2008 AIIM International Exposition and Conference. It is free for download if you register as an AIIM member, which is free of charge (unless you choose Professional membership).

And here's a podcast with Carl Frappaolo, AIIM Vice President, Market Intelligence, who reveals the results of its’ exclusive survey (sponsored by EMC) on content management. From the summary:

"While 99 percent of respondents admitted that unstructured information played a significant role in driving their business processes, most identified major challenges if unstructured information was not readily available as part of those processes"

"Open Networks, Open Platforms Seen As Mobile Industry's Future" by Richard Martin, InformationWeek:

"As the FCC's auction of valuable spectrum in the 700 MHz range winds down, the mobile and wireless industry is entering a new era of open networks and open software platforms -- regardless of the outcome of the bidding in the auction.

'Finally, the Internet is going mobile,' said Jonathan Christensen, general manager for audio and video at Skype. With the open-access provisions attached to the 700 MHz auction, the advent of open platforms such as the Android operating system from Google (NSDQ: GOOG), and the success of VoIP applications like Skype (which now has 276 million registered users), 'a new game begins,' added Christensen.

This new game is marked not only by efforts by large established players like Google and Verizon Wireless...//...but startups like OpenMoko, which is backed by First International Computer and has developed a fully open-source, Linux-based software platform for mobile computing devices."

Is the IT industry finally getting the message?

Apple, Google, Nintendo...what do most of their products have in common? Well, I would say that they are attractive and intuitive to use. Why? Because they have been designed with the consumer / user in mind. They have been designed to be as simple as possible to use, but not simpler. If they would be too simple they would be considered as naive (= not interesting).

Now it seems like the IT industry is finally starting to get the message of simplicity. In an article at DestinationCRM.com, Lauren McKay reports from the AIIM 08 conference and the keynote by AIIM President John Mancini that "The Future of ECM Is Simplicity":

"The iPod. Nintendo's Wii. Google. TiVo. What do these products share in common? Besides their obvious success, all are linked by a single buzzword -- simplicity...//... The implementation of simplicity is key, Mancini told the audience during his industry address at the annual AIIM summit. Yet there's nothing simple about simplicity when it comes to implementing enterprise content management (ECM), he said"

I get all warm inside when I read this. With simpler content management technologies, enterprises might begin to focus their efforts on actually managing content instead of trying to implement and manage content management systems.

Here are a few of my own posts on the subject of simplicity.

• Just think S.I.M.P.L.E.
• The Curse of Portal Software
• Enterprise Wikis and Permission Management
• Expensive Things Must Look Advanced
• What Users Say They Want Isn’t Always What They Need
• Why Folksonomies Work

I'll end this post with my favourite quotes about simplicity:

"Simplicity means the achievement of maximum effect with minimum means."
(Dr Koichi Kawana, designer of Japanese gardens)

"Simplicity is a virtue."
(Ingvar Kamprad, founder of IKEA)

"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler"
(Albert Einstein, a smart guy I know)

Bridging Data And Content For Enterprise Information Management (EIM)

Enterprise Information Management (EIM) is a concept with potential for improving business management and operations. Its key purpose is to manage enterprise information assets across enterprise and application domains.

Information assets are based on data and content which means that successful EIM needs to bridge the traditionally separated areas of Data Management and Content Management. Both areas have been oriented to the production side of data and content including techniques for creation, integration, administration, access and delivery. Data and Content Management also work with e.g. security, quality assurance and consolidation into master sources.

But there are some differences, as plainly described below:

• Data Management has its roots in managing data for process workers and users. Data Management has followed the evolution of Enterprise Applications which have required high-volume transactional data.
• Content Management has its roots in managing documents for information workers and users. Content Management has followed the evolution of the web which has required the aggregation of multiple types of media.

There is also a difference on the consumption side of data and content. Data Management is often complemented with Business Intelligence, which concerns gathering and analysing data for business decisions. Content Management goes well with Enterprise Portals that offers multi-channel delivery of digital content.

The gap between Data and Content Management is very inefficient both from an IT and a worker/user perspective. So, Data Management and Business Intelligence must be better combined with Content Management and Enterprise Portals to enable the potential for EIM.

What is missing? Where should we start?

Enterprise information assets are fundamental to EIM, according to the definition above. Therefore an EIM approach should include the following key activities:

• Creation of a strategy that provides a unified direction for utilizing information assets (data and content)
• Definition of an architecture with a common blueprint for information assets (data and content)
• Establishment of an administration that continuously govern and improve information assets (data and content)

What is your experience?

Estimating the Value of Content

If you empty your pockets and there's a lighter, a pen, the keys to your home and your wallet - what would you care about putting in a safety deposit when you go swimming?

Estimating the value of content is key to efficient content management. Depending on how valuable the content is, it needs to be managed differently. Content that is estimated to be very valuable for the business should be considered as assets and managed with the same care as other kinds of assets. Content that is more or less worthless should be terminated - if it worth the effort to terminate it. Simply speaking.

Seth Gottlieb shares some very sharp insights on this subject in his post "CMS Business Case":

"There has been an enormous amount of writing and discussion about building a business case for a CMS and I don't have much to add other than to say that most of what I have heard is totally wrong ...//...In my opinion, the business case discussion should be around the content itself - not the technology used to manage it"

"At cmf2007, Bob Boiko's keynote talked about how we are not yet in the information economy because we have a hard time determining the value of content and the markets for trading information are primitive. Content managers are put into the subservient role of having to post everything that they are given. I would tend to agree with him. I do not feel like companies are any better at deciding what content to keep than the parent of a prolific three year old artist. In fact, I feel like the parent has the edge because he has a finite amount of refrigerator door space."

Very well said by both Seth and Bob Boiko.

Finally, here are some of the posts on this blog related to the subject of content value:

• Perspectives on the Value of Content
• 8 Insights about ECM for the CIO
• Looking At Content Quality From Different Perspectives
• A Process Perspective On Content Production
  

Will Web 2.0 Drive Knowledge Management?

Knowledge Management has a history. I wrote my first report on this subject back in 1996. Knowledge Management was then defined as a systematic approach to manage corporate knowledge to achieve business value. It is a general definition that still has merits. Some research and practices back then focused on managing knowledge assets with information technology and others on the dynamics of organizational collaboration.

Common practices to create, manage and transfer knowledge have been:

• Communities: Collaborative groups that span across organizational boundaries.
• Best-practice: Reusing knowledge via work descriptions, offerings and similar.
• Knowledge maps: Map knowledge to specific work processes or situations.
• Knowledge profiles: Describing knowledge workers’ roles and resources.

The above practices have often been enabled by means of content and collaboration technologies such as messaging, e-mail, document management, portals, enterprise content management, search and the like.

Content can be seen as a seed of knowledge. But extracting the knowledge and acting upon it require first, that people need to interpret the content to understand the intended information and second, people need to ponder the information for knowledge to emerge. As argued in a former post:

“Content can be managed with the means of (information) technology, but we cannot manage information and knowledge with technology alone since information and knowledge are created and exist only in the heads of humans.” (Back to Basics - Defining Data, Content, Experience, Information And Knowledge)

For Knowledge Management to succeed in an Enterprise it is, for the above reason, essential that appropriate roles, cultures, incentives etc are in place. This will encourage a knowledge sharing environment (knowledge market) necessary for better innovation, smarter services, increased learning, higher productivity etc.

So, what can Web 2.0 technologies and practices add to Knowledge Management?

Web 2.0 is fostered in an agile, open and distributed atmosphere. Recent social trends embrace more open collaboration where content is created and shared in self-organizing networks and communities. This attitude may be what is missing in many failed Knowledge Management initiatives, where company workers have been reluctant to join forces and share what they know.

Web 2.0 technologies for user generated content (e.g. wikis and blogs) and metadata (e.g. social tagging and bookmarks) will simplify the production and consumption of content. Other technologies such as feeds, mashups, web services, ajax etc will have a role in developing a more flexible and richer web user experience more suitable to the needs and preferences of knowledge workers.

Social interaction (e.g. profiles and social networks) has possibly the largest potential in adding something innovative to Knowledge Management. Knowledge workers may market their knowledge and interests and passively or actively strengthen their relationships across company borders.

I think it is safe to conclude that Web 2.0 will drive Knowledge Management to another level.

Thinking on building an electronic archive?

Looking from a governmental perspective, not only more and more information is created by or sent to our governments electronically. The share of content that is corresponded between governments and citizens on paper is decreasing. Content that is created by or received by a Swedish government is a public record and hence the need for stable archive solutions is increasing as well. How do we make sure that the information stays "in shape" throughout the remaining of times then? There are many issues to take in consideration, and there are many models to follow to get the help as well.

During my participation in projects concerning electronic archives I have found though that there are few good implementations to look at for help. And as archive solutions are using and displaying their full functionality and benefits first when some time has passed and the theories have been tested in real life, we are still in the beginning of the lifecycle of these solutions. Good practice isn't really in place yet, so to speak. There are however some findings that should be considered if you are planning on starting a project for e-archiving your information. In my experience, these are the three most important findings for a project to take in consideration.

1. Run the archive project "by the book"
I mean this in every considerable way; that is documentation, modelling, requirements specification, project staffing, budgeting etc. For example, there has to be a solid design model as a foundation for the information model and data model to be defined upon. Information and data will change over time and the foundations of the business and the business rules are less often subject to change. An example of the difficulties is the entity "client". Often, different departments within the same organisation have different views on what a client is. For this to be solid, the design model should only take in consideration the relations to other entities. And skipping this in order to cut a corner will create problems further on.

2. Develop and adopt a method for how you manage new content
In order to keep the information model and the data model as solid as possible, you should develop a method for how to take new content into the archive. From the example above, how do we manage the entity "client" for this new system since it has a different view on what a client is than any of our other systems? Well, with a solid design model and a method of defining the properties of the "new" client as a part of our already developed information model, the new system should be easier to fit into your solution. The thing here however is to realize that there is no perfect model, only ways of putting cubes into round holes without using too much violence. But remember though, the design model has to be solid.

3. Implement a cross functional information process and a process owner
Since the archiving process begins when content is created by or received by an organisation, the archive function has to be a part of a function that looks on the information through its lifecycle and not through organisational constructs. The archive function has to be regarded as a key stone in the information lifecycle and the information process. Today the archives are however often regarded as the things that happen to the information when the business doesn't need it anymore. Archiving issues hence are often considered when it's too late.

Basic Content Services And Web 2.0

Consumers today are the first to get cutting-edge technology. Therefore enterprise technology adoption is increasingly driven by people from outside of the IT department. Changes in social practices also require a more agile way of exploiting new technology.

Basic Content Services (BCS) and Web 2.0 technologies follow these trends. They are both responses to a general call for improved communication and collaboration but are at the same time simpler in functionality, easier to deploy and available at lower cost. But where do they differ?

Seen from an enterprise perspective they target slightly different types of workers, namely:

• The information worker : Characterized by ad-hoc or semi-structured team collaboration
• The social worker : Characterized by personal relationships, knowledge transfer and participatory communities

BCS meets the needs of low-end and enterprise-wide Document Management, meaning support for creation, management (library services) and sharing of office documents for information workers. The produced documents are often relatively static and long-lived intended for consumption within a controlled context.

Web 2.0 technologies for user generated content (e.g. wikis and blogs) and metadata (e.g. social tagging and bookmarks) along with social interaction ( e.g. profiles and social networks) meet the needs of low-end and enterprise-wide Content and Knowledge Management, meaning creation, management (aggregation) and sharing of content snippets for social workers. The content being produced is relatively more interactive and short-lived intended for consumption and reuse in an open context.

These two areas will be integrated within a near future and their combined service offerings will be a threat for established monolithic and top-down oriented Enterprise Content Management systems.

Taxonomies and tagging in MOSS 2007

Although MOSS 2007 has many benefits, two of its most apparent weaknesses are its lack of built in support for creating taxonomies for document classification and for tagging documents with user-defined tags.

I have been exploring Microsoft’s SharePoint site and MSDN forums about Social Computing and Enterprise Content Management and can conclude that I found virtually nothing there about taxonomies and tagging. The most interesting information I found was a forum post called “Document Classification Taxonomy in MOSS 2007” which describes a typical business use case that can be supported by classification taxonomies:

“We have approximately 300 different document classifications and we could create a content type for each, but this would require users to scroll through a list of 300 options every time they upload a file. This is not particularly friendly. What I would like to create is a mechanism whereby users, upon uploading a document, are asked the basic nature of the document."

The only answer to that post recommended to either add 300 content types and use many document libraries or to look at a third party tool such as RAPID that I mentioned above.

My exploration of Microsoft’s ECM blog did not either result in much. What I found was a single post from early 2007 (by Adri Verlaan, a developer on the ECM team) which introduces a “Tagging Starter Kit for SharePoint Server” including a “lightweight working prototype”. I quote:

“Currently, the kit allows authors to attach tags to content and readers to specify tags in which they are interested. Using this information for a specified content source, a customized Content Query Web Part shows only the items that match a reader’s respective tags. “

In other words, there seems to be little about taxonomies and tagging from Microsoft. But, are there 3rd party tools available to make up for this weakness? Well, KWizCom recently released a third party product for MOSS 2007, called “SharePoint Tagging Feature”:

“KWizCom SharePoint Tagging Feature enables the tagging of SharePoint content such as documents, list items, pictures, forms etc. Furthermore, with the included Tag Cloud Web Part, SharePoint Tagging Feature enables many new capabilities such as presentation of items according to tags, tagging e-mail alerts, and more..”.

To add support for taxonomies, there is “RAPID for SharePoint” from Artemis Corporation:

“The RAPID 'Taxonomy' Classification framework allows the application of any taxonomy within SharePoint content. An unlimited number of taxonomies can be
created and used within a site to classify documents and list items. Once classified documents and list items can be filtered, indexed and queried using standard WebParts, List Controls and Views. Fully integrated into Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007"

It is hard to tell from these descriptions how capable these 3rd party tools are. If anyone has had hands-on experience of these or equivalent tools, please share.

Enterprise 2.0 vs. Web 2.0 (Chicken vs. Egg)

Some say the web is evolving into another version, often called Web 2.0. Others talk about the evolving Enterprise, and use a similar 2.0 appendix. New technologies enable new ways of working and fresh ways of working lead to technology innovations. Often it is difficult to pinpoint what is the chicken or the egg in this creative process.

How to define Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0? Depending on whom you ask you will most likely get different answers. Useful perspectives in understanding the Enterprise/Web 2.0 phenomenon are:

• Business: Leaders of the Enterprise 2.0 movement are aiming for business models that are agile, open, distributed, on demand etc. These concepts are supposed to contrast to traditional hierarchical and bureaucratic organizations managed using order and control mechanisms.
• Technology: IT people promote that services and content can be reused and re-purposed using techniques such as Feeds, File Sharing, Mashups, Web Services etc. Ajax (Asynchronous Javascript And XML) is the main driver behind a richer web user experience. User generated content and metadata are produced via Wikis, Blogs, Folksonomies and the like.
• Human: The consumer (end-user) seems to be the king when it comes to adopting new practices and technology. Current social trends embrace more open collaboration where content is created and shared in self-organizing networks and communities. </