Commentary

Content is the new gold

Ron Miller — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 08:32:31 -0500

As we watch the war waged by the planet's biggest content owners to control their product, it has occurred to me that content is the new gold. It makes even more sense when you consider that people who try to take it are called pirates.

The legendary pirates, the ones made famous in movies like "Pirates of the Caribbean" (make sure you buy on it on Blu-ray or DVD and don't try to steal it from Pirate Bay) wanted to take gold from the legitimate British business men sailing along the high seas.

The difference here is that the pirates of old wanted to build a treasure stash, while today's pirates apparently want to take the content from the owners and give it away for free--making their money the Internet way via ads.

But the means by which the big Hollywood content owners hope to shut down the modern day pirates is the equivalent of closing the shipping lanes to shut down the gold-seeking pirates.

Whether it's the presumably dead and buried SOPA and PIPA legislation or the now rising ACTA treaty, the big content owners are so hell bent on saving their content from pirates, that they are willing to destroy the shipping lanes--the free flow of information on the Internet--to stop it.

Talk about throwing the baby out with the bath water.

What we need to do is find ways to manage that content better, to present it in ways that make it easy to purchase legally. In fact, Chris Brogan had a blog post last week that addressed this very issue. If you want people to buy content legally, you have to make it easy to buy it legally.

And that means instead of fighting the Internet, you embrace it. Increasingly, services like Spotify, Netflix and a myriad of others that provide content for a single reasonable monthly price are driving people toward legitimate content channels and away from pirate content sites.

Yet in spite of the evidence that making content available reduces piracy dramatically, Tristan Louis points out in his blog post that Hollywood is holding back its biggest titles from streaming services, and in its own way actually encouraging folks using legitimate channels to seek other means.

iTunes proved one thing beyond doubt: If there is a legal, reasonably priced alternative people will flock to it.

And that's not all. PaidContent.org reported on a preliminary study by Amazon.com which suggests that the Amazon Free Lending library might actually be increasing sales. That's right: By giving away content, Amazon is driving sales of other content. Fancy that.

And that's what the Content Tyrants (because we really need a good name for them) need to understand. We all hate having our content stolen. There isn't a content creator on the planet who likes having their content used without their permission, but at the same time we recognize the value of sharing on the open Internet.

Our primary purpose here is to discuss content and content management. If we can find ways to manage and deliver the content to users in legitimate ways, while making it easy to share and link to that content, everyone wins.

But if we shut down the shipping lanes to save the gold, everyone loses. It seems simple enough to understand, yet the Content Tyrants seem hell bent on saving their gold at any cost with little understanding of how to use the Internet to actually drive legitimate use of their content. Arggh! - Ron

Google Wave might have been Google+ 1.0

Ron Miller — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 12:18:02 -0500

There has been a lot of controversy this week around the inclusion of Google+ content in Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) search results. Whether you agree with this approach or not, it got me thinking about just how pervasive Google is making Google+ in the Google services ecosystem and just how much it might be fulfilling the vision of the now defunct Google Wave.

As you may recall, Google Wave was launched to much fanfare in May 2009. Content geeks everywhere waxed poetically about its potential as an all-encompassing communications platform, which you could even embed in a website absent the client. What was not to like?

I even went so far in my 2010 predictions to predict big things for Google Wave.

I couldn't have been more wrong because by August, Google Wave was history. As Dan Keldsen said in an interview at the time, it was undone by a number of factors including an interface he said, the Google Wave team referred to as an experiment, a throw-away. And looking back, that appears to be the case.

And as 2010 closed, Google Wave was open sourced and delivered to the Apache Foundation.

And the story might have ended there, but it didn't. Instead Google launched Google+ in late June last year and with it, seemed to move beyond the experiment that was Google Wave into an engaging social interface.

While it wasn't everything Google Wave had been, it had enough of the best elements of a unified communications platform to be much more useful. The use of Circles helped provide a way to filter content based on how you manage your friends and followers.

It also integrates nicely across services. You can see how many reactions you have to your Google+ activity regardless of whether you're in GMail, Google Reader or Google Docs and you can even share links and status updates across these different sites without explicitly opening the Google+ client to do it.

Hangouts provide a way for multiple people to talk in a semi-private chat-style room complete with voice and video.

It doesn't appear to be as open and extensible as Wave was, but Google must have known it had to simplify to get this to work well out of the gate, but like Google Wave, it's clearly still very much a work in progress.

In a sense, it shares a lot with its Google Wave forebear, which now appears to be as Keldsen pointed out, a first draft for what would be Google+.

While I would still like to see the ability to embed conversations from Google+ into a website, to incorporate all comments on a post to include the ones on the site itself and the ones offsite on Google+, this may be something that comes further down the road.

For now, judging from the hue and cry about incorporating Google+ into search results, I'm guessing there would be a similar backlash if Google made Google+ portable in this fashion.

However Google+ evolves, though, Google developed Google Wave to see what was possible and built Google+ to be a social tool for everyone--not just a few content management geeks like me.

And that's precisely why it's proving to be so much more successful than Google Wave ever was, even if the two systems seem to share some of the same DNA. - Ron

Customer Experience Management still has a ways to go

Ron Miller — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 09:22:09 -0500

Customer Experience Management is a term we've seen bandied about over the last 18 months or so as a way to describe new web content management functionality that moves the focus of WCM from pure content creation and management to a greater focus on the customer.

That means giving marketers more than just the means to create and edit content--although that's still a key factor here of course--but it also puts more emphasis on analytics and helping marketers understand the customers as they navigate the company website in order to provide the most meaningful content based on what you know about them.

This ability to shift the content based on the customer's experience on your site, has developed the moniker: Customer Experience Management.

What this comes down to is the customer path through your website should drive the content. As Scott Liewehr pointed out at the Gilbane Conference last month, if he goes to the same restaurant every Friday night with his family, and deals with the same hostess, he has developed a reasonable expectation that she knows him and will act accordingly. If she suddenly acted like she didn't know him and his family it would be off-putting.

For Liewehr the web experience should have a similar dynamic. If you come more than once, your company should develop an understanding of that visitor based on his or her experience on the site and you shouldn't necessarily offer the same content you would for a new person on your site who has never visited.

One trend that is driving this change is analytics. And analytics can give you deeper insight into your customers providing at a minimum, what pages they've visited, what has interested them and so forth, but it takes more information than that to be meaningful.

In fact, there's still a big gap between people's cognitive abilities and a website algorithm. My favorite example of this is Amazon.com, which remembers what you bought and makes suggestions based on that knowledge. Although sometimes that can go too far.

Five years or so ago, my kids were into Star Trek and I made several purchases of Stark Trek merchandise as gifts. To this day, long after my kids have left the Star Trek stage far behind and moved onto other interests, I still get Start Trek suggestions. First of all, it wasn't even for me and second of all, people change.

This would be the equivalent of Liewehr walking into the restaurant with teens and the hostess offering crayons and a kids menu because that's what he needed years ago. Humans can recognize that. So far, computers are not as good at this.

So Customer Experience Management is really just at the very edge of what it could be. Managing customer experience and providing meaningful content makes all the sense in the world, but we need to get to a place where you can make better use of the information you're gathering and delivering the most meaningful content you can. So far, I think the term probably has more juice than the product offerings, but the potential is there is if the technology can catch up with the promise. - Ron

The technology elite is not the norm

Ron Miller — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 11:22:03 -0500

As someone who closely watches technology, it's oh so easy to get jaded and to think that what's normal to me is ordinary to most people in the world, but the fact is that I'm part of the technology elite, and I'm more the exception than the rule.

Take smart phones for example. We who carry our smart phones with us and can't imagine life without them might think that everyone feels this way, but guess what, you and your friends are the isolated case here. In fact, Royal Pingdom reported last month that while there were 5.9 billion (yes, that's billion) mobile subscribers worldwide, just 13 percent were smart phones.

According to Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) there is somewhere in the neighborhood of 6.8 billion people in the world, and while it's entirely likely that there aren't close to 6 billion mobile phone users, the numbers are informative. There are a ton of phones out there, but in spite of the wild success of Android and iOS, smart phones remain just a smidgen of the worldwide market.

A recent Pew study found that 35 percent of Americans had a smart phones, so if you bring it closer to home (at least for me), we have a third of users carrying smart phones. That means that 2 out of three people aren't carrying them.

How about email? If you follow content management, you probably are firmly convinced it's dead, but it's not even close. In fact, it's doing quite well, and as more people carry more mobile devices including smart phones and tablets, that's just as likely to increase as not.

In its latest numbers from last year, Royal Pingdom actually found that 107 trillion emails were sent in 2010. That was up from 90 trillion in 2009. Of course, almost 90 percent were spam, but even when subtracting for the menace that is junk email, that's a lot of communication going on by email.

If that's not enough for you, consider that Sara Radicati of The Radicati Group predicted continued growth for email, in a May 20011 report called Email Statistics Report, 2011-2015. "The number of worldwide email accounts is expected to increase from an installed base of 3.1 billion in 2011 to nearly 4.1 billion by year-end 2015. This represents an average annual growth rate of 7 percent over the next four years," Radicati wrote.

And for those of you who believe Enterprise 2.0 collaboration tools will supplant email, the evidence just isn't there to support that notion yet, no matter how much sense it makes.

Most of us who follow content and content management issues are probably among the technical elite. We talk to each other. We read each other's content. We go to conferences together and listen to one another's presentations. We live inside a technology bubble, but it's important to understand that most people live in another world entirely.

And it's those people you have to keep in mind as you look ahead. You can't continue to make assumptions about the world based on how you use technology. You have to look at the masses of people outside the technology elite and find ways to communicate with them on their level with their tools, the way they use technology--or you risk making a huge strategic blunder. - Ron

It's going to be all about mobile in 2012

Ron Miller — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 09:57:25 -0500

Rather than do a bunch of predictions this year, I thought I would focus on one area that I believe is going to have a profound impact on content and content management in 2012--and that's mobile.

A couple of recent articles confirmed for me what is inherently obvious to anyone who watches the content publishing industry: More and more of your content is being consumed on mobile devices, whether that's a tablet or a smart phone.

That means, if you're not prepared to go mobile with your publication, you're already behind the new publishing model and you need to play catch-up fast.

First of all, your print audience is probably getting older. The seemingly sweet spot for demographics is the young audience between 18 and 34. If you want them, paper is definitely not going to lure the demographic gold because young people don't read newspapers.

Not only that, but for the first time a survey by the market research firm eMarketer found that adults spent more time on their mobile devices each day than they do with print media. The study found that mobile usage jumped an impressive 30 percent compared to last year and topped an average of 1 hour per day for the first time.

So how did print do? Well, better than I would have thought. But at 26 minutes a day it's less than half of what mobile is now getting, but when you throw in the Internet as a separate category, it comes to an average of 2 hours and 47 minutes per day. TV and video still dominate with 4 hours and 34 minutes.

It's important to keep in mind that sometimes TV and video watching happens on the Internet and on a mobile device, so it's not a clear delineation, but it's evident that print is fading fast as people move to the Internet and increasingly to mobile devices.

In addition to that, we have the explosion of tablet devices, led in large part by Apple's (NASDAQ: AAPL) iPad. Yet in terms of pure media consumption--whether we are talking about books, newspapers and magazines. or movies and music--the Kindle Fire and to a lesser extent the Barnes Noble Nook are going to be important players moving forward.

While speaking at the Gilbane Conference in Boston in December, Ektron Chief Marketing Officer Tom Wentworth gave a presentation called "Thinking Mobile First," in which he argues that mobile should drive content and design considerations.

All of this means that as publishers who have traditionally produced print products or even had a web presence, you have to be thinking about how mobile affects your publishing model, and you need to be looking at solutions that help you create content once and use it across print, web, tablets and smartphones.

This may not be as simple as it seems given the different screen sizes and operating systems, but there are solutions to help you do just that. Wentworth gave a demo, in fact, of how BostonGlobe.com, uses HTML5 to provide a flexible template that adjusts automatically to screen size. You can try this yourself by going to the site and seeing what happens as you reduce the browser window size. You'll notice it goes down to two columns then one column and the content, including images, always adjusts.

Wentworth pointed out early in the presentation that according to Gartner research, combined sales of smartphones and tablets will be 44 percent higher than PCs in 2011. That gap is only likely to grow in the coming years. If you're just thinking about web publishing, you're probably not doing enough.

Your digital strategy--you do have one, right?--has to include mobile devices because increasingly that's where readers are most likely to access and view your content. That content of course needs to be compelling, but you also need to plan for multiple screens.

Whether you choose to go with Wentworth's "Mobile First' strategy is going to be your decision, but he's right that you need to be thinking about mobile and it has to be up front.

If your core audience is heading for mobile devices--and all this research seems to point to just that--it only makes sense that traditional print and web publishers need to make a bee-line for mobile in 2012. If you're not there yet, I'm not sure what you're waiting for. - Ron

This is our last issue of the year. We will return the week of January 4, 2012. The FierceContentManagement team wishes you the happiest of holidays and thanks you for reading our content every week.

A look back at my 2011 predictions

Ron Miller — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 14:05:26 -0500

Oh boy, I'm so excited. No really, it's the end of the year--you know, that time when we make predictions about what's going to happen in the coming year. Try not to get too overwrought.

But before we subject you to yet another year's worth of predictions, let's take a look back at last year's predictions, shall we, and see just how well we did.

It's dangerous, I know, but it's probably more fun than predicting the future because you can see just how wrong I was.

How'd I do?:

Mobile governance will mature
I'm not sure how much maturity we saw, but I'm guessing probably not a heck of a lot. Many more companies surely hopped on the mobile band wagon, but most people are having enough trouble figuring out governance in the cloud, never mind on mobile devices. While I can't say for sure, my gut tells me it didn't happen.

Enterprise 2.0 will see lots of M&A activity
I said it seemed inevitable and I was right. Maybe there wasn't quite as much as I thought there would be, but I'm betting it's still going to happen, just at a slower pace than I previously believed. We saw a couple of players come off the board though including VMware buying Socialcast and Cisco buying Versly among others. There were rumors floating as the year ended about SAP buying Jive, which is scheduled to go public this week, but nothing official as yet.

There will be a high-profile legal case in the cloud
Here's one where I was wrong, wrong, wrong. No getting around it. While there may be some high-profile case at some point, it didn't happen in 2011 in spite of a number of a high-profile outages. At some time, this prediction has to come true, but sadly (for me at least), not this year.

ECM will continue to commoditize
This one was broad enough, that you could make an argument that it "continued." Yeah, yeah, that's it; but whether we saw a broad trend in this regard, I'm not so sure. Surely, the base-level content management services continued to commoditize, but we have yet to see the wide-spread adoption of CMIS that I thought would spur this trend on.

There will be a high-profile ECM merger
Hooray! I got one right, but it wasn't what I thought it would be. EMC didn't sell Documentum. As far as I know, it didn't even try to sell it. Nor did Open Text buy Autonomy, but Oracle bought Fatwire and in a much higher profile deal HP got Autonomy for a whopping $10 billion.

I'm not afraid to say when I'm wrong, and that's a good thing, because apparently I'm wrong a lot. Nonetheless, we'll subject you to the same exercise again simply because it's the end of the year and that's what we do. Be sure to look for our 2012 predictions in next week's issue, which will be our last issue of the year. - Ron

The great Big-Data scare of 2012

Ron Miller — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 14:13:49 -0500

It's coming and it's big. I mean really, really big. It's so big you should be afraid, very afraid because your database can't handle it. It's the attack of "Big Data" and it's coming soon to an enterprise near you.

That's the message that was being fed to us at the Gilbane Conference last week, but as far as I could tell, Big Data could be the biggest hype fest we've seen since, well, cloud computing. Now, I know I've written about both these subjects quite often, but I'm growing skeptical over the Big Data idea and here's why.

As I sat and listened to the experts wax away about Big Data in a session last week at Gilbane, I was taken aback. While the speakers--Peter O'Kelly, principal analyst at O'Kelly Associates, and Hadley Reynolds, managing director at Next Era Research--were highly knowledgeable on the ins and outs of Big Data, neither ever actually defined it.

At one point, O'Kelly actually made fun of the idea, saying it was "really, really big." The only hint of what that meant in real terms was a Forrester report which stated anything under 50 terabytes wasn't big--anything over, well, that's big.

But when we got to the Q&A session at the end, moderator Kathleen Reidy from the 451 Group asked the key question. Since every CMS uses an underlying relational database to manage content, and since the speakers had made it clear that relational databases couldn't scale to meet the needs of really Big Data, what did it mean to content management companies?

Well, it probably doesn't mean much because when you think about it, how many companies are dealing with more than 50 terabytes of data. Oh sure, the Googles and the Facebooks surely are, but your average enterprise? Probably not so much. And if most companies aren't dealing with it, surely the content management vendors don't have to be worrying about their databases all that much--at least in the context of expanding to accommodate Big Data requirements.

In fact, Lubor Ptacek, vice president of strategic marketing at OpenText, thinks there are probably maybe 50 to 100 true Big Data customers and companies like IBM are probably targeting them. He says that the big customers will probably be popular online services like Google and Facebook who need to understand this data to drive their business models. Most other companies won't be dealing in numbers like that any time soon.

That's not to say that companies won't want access to Big Data. They probably will, but they won't need to deal with it on that scale in their own data centers. Instead, they will probably use Big Data services like data.gov and data.com. And if Tim Berners Lee has his way, we will all being sharing data in the same fashion we share links on the web.

However it plays out, this much I can predict: Big Data will be the big buzz word of 2012 and pretty soon we're all going to be sick of hearing about it (if we aren't already).

For all the hype, however, much like the cloud, there's buzz around it for a reason. How we end up using that data will probably have less to do with your IT and data center, however, and much more to do with tapping into public and private Big Data stores to combine it with your own data to try and build advantages for your business. - Ron

The cloud is so much more than hype

Ron Miller — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 23:17:24 -0500

By now, you may be sick of hearing about the cloud. After all, the hype has been inescapable over the last few years. Microsoft has reduced it to a silly slogan, "To the cloud!" But the cloud is much more than a marketing term. It's a set of technologies that introduce a new strategy for your company to handle computing. The term itself stems from network diagrams that portray a set of services running in a cloud, as the graphic below clearly illustrates.

But that's the technical view of it. At its simplest level, the cloud creates a series of services running on someone else's servers. It could be storage space on Amazon Web Services or a computing platform on top of Salesforce.com or it could be an application as a service like Google's Gmail.

The cloud removes some complexity from the installation, configuration and overall management of an application. Since it's not stored on-premise, you don't have to worry about installing it or updating it. Once you sign up, it's good to go and whenever there is an update it happens automatically on the vendor's side.

Of course, for all of this convenience, there is a price. The cost in this case is less control over your content. When it sits on servers that are not owned by your company, you lose some control over it. You have to trust the vendor to secure your company's data, and you have to build an understanding up front for addressing governance issues, such as how quickly it will respond to an eDiscovery order.

You can always use the service level agreement (SLA) to define the terms of your relationship with the vendor, but as you'll see, it's not always a simple matter to get a vendor to make changes to the basic agreement. You have to decide as an organization just how much you are willing to give up to go the cloud.

From a pure content management perspective, the cloud provides some real advantages. The installation and configuration of on-premise content management systems is not a trivial matter. It takes a lot of work and you can remove that pain by choosing a cloud solution. The cloud also greatly simplifies content access, allowing enterprises the ability to let employees create, edit and access content wherever they are, regardless of the device (assuming you or your vendor have created apps or have browser access for a given platform).

But ultimately it comes down to your own comfort level. This eBook explores some of the issues you'll encounter as you consider cloud content management solutions--regardless of the type of cloud service you are considering.

The cloud offers many advantages, but it's important to consider where cloud solutions excel and where they come up short before you go with a cloud vendor.

This commentary is excerpted from the latest FierceContentManagement eBook, "Don't Fear the Cloud". For more information, download the eBook here. - Ron

Copyright law has gone so wrong

Ron Miller — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 12:40:34 -0500

Anyone who has been following the Software Online Piracy Act (SOPA) hearings can see what happens when industry heavyweights meet clueless politicians. Bad legislation ensues, and that's what we're seeing play out here in the worst possible way.

In simple terms, as this infographic illustrates, SOPA would enable just about anyone to request a site be shut down for claimed copyright violations and it could quickly escalate. At hearings last week before a Congressional committee, SOPA opponents were upset when all of those testifying except Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) supported the bill.

It's a classic case of bad legislation, written by people who lack even an iota of understanding about technology or the way the web works. But worse, it shows that copyright law has completely lost its way. As a writer who works for publications and gets paid for it, I understand a need for some sensible ownership guidelines. I've seen my work copied verbatim without so much as a link back to my original post. It's upsetting, but this proposal is so far over the top, it has the ability to literally break the Internet.

In fact, VentureBeat reported last week on a speech by Vint Cerf, one of the original Internet architects, saying that the government had gone way over the top in shutting down websites in the name of copyright protection. He went on to say that Internet freedom helps everyone.

He wasn't alone. Speaking at the Forum d'Avignon last weekend, Neelie Kroes, VP of the EU Commission responsible for the Digital Agenda, said copyright should be a basic legal framework for artists to create freely. "Legally, we want a well-understood and enforceable framework. Morally, we want dignity, recognition and a stimulating environment for creators. Economically, we want financial reward so that artists can benefit from their hard work and be incentivized to create more," said Kroes.

It's hard to argue with that perspective. She went on to say, "We need to go back to basics and put the artist at the center, not only of copyright law, but of our whole policy on culture and growth." Amen, sister.

The trouble with current approach to copyright is that it has become a hammer for the likes of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and other trade groups to try to eliminate competition from Internet channels--something that's not going to happen. Time to embrace the new reality instead of fighting it.

As Kroes pointed out in her speech, the stringent laws have done little to stem the flow of piracy and have given the very notion of copyright a bad public perception--probably not the outcomes legislators were hoping for.

The problem is that instead of protecting those individual artists that Kroes referred to, the legislation is clearly designed to protect the corporations and to stem the flow of information on the Internet (intentionally or not).

So, what we have now is proposed legislation that would take a situation such as when the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was shutting down websites earlier this year, and make it even easier for virtually anyone with an axe to grind to sue any website for copyright violations. And should you think I'm being melodramatic, look at copyright and patent trolls who make a living filing nuisance law suits.

This could spiral out of control very quickly and it has little to do with protecting copyright. Nobody wants to be plagiarized. We all want to be free to make a living, but the Congress has no business writing customized, one-sided dream legislation for the MPAA, and that's exactly what this is.

It's time to take copyright out of the hands of the corporations and put it back in the hands of the artists and writers for which it was always intended. And let's all hope SOPA goes down the drain and Congress finds a bit of common sense for a change--because if it doesn't we could all be going down together. - Ron

eReaders are alive and well, thanks very much

Ron Miller — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 08:51:26 -0500

Remember when some joker predicted the end of eReaders a while back--oh, that was me. In the words of the late, great Gilda Radner playing Emily Latella, "never mind." New research suggests that eReaders are not only doing well, they are dare I say, thriving.

What accounts for this change? There are a number of factors including improved technology, rapidly dropping prices and a growing market for eReader-tablet hybrid devices that cost far less than higher end tablets from Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL), Samsung and Motorola.

Let's start with some research. Juniper Research is predicting that 25 million eReaders will be sold this year alone. By 2016, the research firm expects sales to exceed 67 million units. That doesn't sound like a dead technology, does it? Not really.

Another major factor driving eReader technology is rapidly dropping prices. As I wrote way back in 2009--okay, 2009 wasn't that long ago, but it's eons in technology time--Forrester Research found that in order for the eReader market to really take off, the price needed to drop substantially to under $100. Well that has happened in spades as there are now sub-$100 versions of the Nook, the Kindle and the Kobo Reader with Kobo and Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) driving down the price by including ads, or what they call "special offers."

Meanwhile, the line between what we think of as an eReader and what we think of as a tablet is clearly blurring. Amazon and Barnes and Noble have come out with low-end Android tablets, which provide a cost-effective alternative to the iPad. While these devices aren't up to snuff in terms of hardware, they do offer a range of features beyond eBook reading and I expect that's going to be more than enough for many of the less discerning among the buying public.

In the future, we will start to see alternatives to the LCD and e-ink technology. While LCD offers more vibrant colors, it sucks battery life. E-ink is much more power-friendly, but there is a delay in page turns and it's black and white. Sounds like Hobson's choice, but it's what we've had up until now.

The MIT Technology Review reports this week on an alternative display from Qualcomm called Mirasol, which is supposed to offer the best of both worlds, a colorful responsive display that doesn't drain the battery like LCDs. The question is how much Mirasol displays will cost in relation to the other options and when it will finally come to market--and that is not clear, even though the promise of Mirasol has been around for some time.

For now at least, it looks like the technology we have is going to be in place for a while, but as the prices for these devices continue to drop, more people are going to be tempted to buy them. If you're looking at a holiday present, a device that's around (or well under) $100 is going to be very attractive.

And finally, in spite of the birth of the tablet/eReader hybrid, it seems that some people are looking for devices that are more geared to reading. As great a device as the iPad is, at least one technology journalist felt that compared to the stand-alone Kindle, it might not be the best eReader on the planet, even though you can certainly consume eBooks on it.

Whether Barnes and Noble or Amazon ends up losing that edge as they make the transition to tablet with eReading capabilities remains to be seen.

For now, one thing is clear, the eReader market is far more resilient than I ever believed, and the eReader device looks like its going to be around for some time in one form or another--in spite of what I might have written in the past. - Ron

Helping people do their jobs and nothing more

Ron Miller — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 09:40:06 -0500

After reading a couple of blog posts this week, I came to a realization--one that I probably knew before, but was simply driven home by these writers. It doesn't matter what we call it or the technology that drives it, what matters is what people do with it.

The first post, from Rick Tucker at Doculabs, was called "No one cares about content management (no one who matters anyway)." It's a provocative title of course, but the point is that content management is an underlying technology. What matters to end users is that they can create, edit and access the documents they need when they need them with minimum fuss.

Those of us in the business who go to conferences and write about this ad nauseum like to deal with the technological minutiae. That's fine as far as it goes, but it's really not what life is about in the day-to-day world of the average worker who is just trying to navigate all of this technology to get her job done.

The second post was from Lee Dallas at Big Men On Content, called "What the cloud means to real people." Most people don't get the cloud beyond, as Dallas points out, Microsoft's (NASDAQ: MSFT) annoying commercials about it. The cloud is just a meaningless term until you can see it in action. Dallas gives a great example about how he can access a Kindle book on his phone, his iPad and, oh, his Kindle and pick up wherever he left off.

That's the beauty of the cloud. It links our content in a simple way that makes it effortless to go from device to device and have our content waiting for us. And that's all that matters to most users.

The Cloud is a wonderful term, but it comes down to simplicity and access and that's what we have to focus on. It doesn't matter that it involves complex data centers spread across the world or whatever technologies are making it happen. The only thing that matters is that I want my content and I get my content wherever I am, regardless of what device I'm using, so long as I'm connected to the Internet (and sometimes even when I'm not).

And I think these posts drive home an important point about ease of use over technology. As I've probably written here before, author David Meerman Scott is fond of saying, "Nobody cares about your products but you." What he means is you can give a laundry list of features at your presentation and the audience is going to yawn because they really don't care.

What users care about is doing their job and you have to present problems and solutions. When we talk about technology instead of real-world problem-solving we are the equivalent of Charlie Brown's teacher (Wah-wah, wah-wah) spouting meaningless nonsense nobody hears.

Those of us who write about, sell and help people implement these systems would be wise to keep this in mind. The laundry list of features and the the technological detail are all interesting to us, but in the end it's about helping businesses solve a real problem and helping users get their work done. And that's not terribly complicated. - Ron

Search is the key to everything

Ron Miller — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 11:34:15 -0400

As we see the proliferation of services on the Internet with ever-growing stores of content, whether it's Spotify, Twitter or something else, the key to finding information is going to depend on the quality of the search tool the service uses--and it's an area I've found generally lacking.

I've become fond of using Spotify, for example, which has vast stores of music. All you need to do is search for an artist or a song and you should be able to find it, but I've found when looking for something specific (rather than just an artist name), I enter a song name only to find I can't find the one by that name I'm looking for. If I search by artist I have to cycle through the entire catalogue to find the one song I want. It's often a frustrating task.

Twitter is an even tougher nut to crack. Try searching by subject, hashtag or user and you are typically overrun with information, leaving it nearly impossible to get at that one tweet you know you want.

And if you have an Internet-TV connection box like Roku or Apple TV, you may want to search for a single movie, and you have to use each individual service's (rather bad) search tools to find it. Wouldn't it be so much easier to be able to search across the various collections and come back with a set of possibilities that you can use to narrow down what you want to watch?

And this is the same battle that users often fight in the enterprise using today's enterprise search tools. You have these various collections of data that are not unlike the services on Roku. You don't want to open your enterprise equivalent of Netflix, Hulu and Crackle to find the one show you want to see. You want to search across various repositories and get back a set of manageable results.

In the case of the enterprise, we may know that the content is out there somewhere across the vast stores of information, but finding that one document you need may be not be that easy. Sometimes this is a known document and sometimes it's one that you are hoping is there.

Regardless of the quality of these search tools--and some are quite good, mind you--it seems that search vendors are suddenly quite the rage. As you are no doubt aware, just recently, HP bought Autonomy--which is of course far more than a pure search player--for a whopping $10 billion. Oracle followed up by scooping up Endeca. And there's a very good reason or that.

My guess is both companies have hopes of trying to help organizations get some semblance of control of the growing amounts of information in the enterprise. That's because they recognize what I've discovered on my consumer services, and that's the service can be great, and Spotify and Twitter are great services, but the key to my happiness is often finding information.

It's also the key in the enterprise, and until companies solve this dilemma, whether it's on consumer or enterprise services, the quality of the information doesn't really matter if you can't find it.

Search it seems is the key to the problem. - Ron

Retention policies need to balance legal and historical requirements

Ron Miller — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 09:37:25 -0400

Last summer, I wrote a post about the Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) smoking gun email at the Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) trial and held it up as an example of why every company needs a responsible retention policy--because you never know when a smoking gun lies there just waiting to cost your company lots of money.

At the time, I recalled Google's Cyrus Mistry's keynote at AIIM in 2010 in which he said, "everyone gets access to all data and keep it forever." In my August post, I referred to this as a "pie-in-the-sky, keep-everything-forever policy."

Never let it be said that Ron Miller has a firm position on retention policy because I'm beginning to rethink that idea. That's because it's hard to balance the need to get rid of information and the need to retain it as an historical record or artifact. (Interestingly enough as I was thinking about this column, I came across Lee Dallas's post on Big Men on Content in which he refers to that same August post and begins to rethink his own ideas about retention.)

Dallas was looking at retention as an ethics issue, a perfectly valid way to consider it, but after talking to consultant Cheryl McKinnon from Candy Strategies last week at the ARMA International Conference and Expo, I began to rethink my own position that getting rid of mundane stuff like lunch menus from the cafeteria really made sense. McKinnon has a history background and she rightly pointed out that those menus are part of the historical record. If in a hundred years, researchers wanted to know what types of food people ate in the early 2000s at a company called Google, they might be able to do that if the menus existed.

If they had been deleted as part of a retention schedule, then that information would be lost to us forever and so would a part of our cultural heritage.

That's because historical research often involves the mundane such as diaries, household lists and, yes, menus. Just this past summer I was reading the book At Home by Bill Bryson, in which the author uses these types of historical records to try to discover why we live the way we do today. Many of the rooms we take for granted have roots in something that happened in the 18th or 19th century and Bryson scoured the historical record to try and figure it out.

A hundred years from now, maybe someone will be writing a book called At Work that tries to do the same thing, but if much of the data has been deleted because of responsible retention policies on the part of corporations in the 21st century, much of that record will be lost.

I heard another story while at ARMA about some papers found at the old Tiger Stadium. The stadium, which was replaced several years ago, was scheduled to be demolished. While they were clearing it out, somebody spied an old file cabinet in the corner. After going through it, there were treasures like Ty Cobb's original contract with the team. As the person who related the story told me, if someone hadn't thought to look in that file cabinet, those precious artifacts would have been blown up or thrown away, lost forever.

Which goes to show that we must not only save these records as the Tiger organization did for all those years, we have to understand just what we have as organizations. And instead of looking at this purely from a legal standpoint--that getting rid of stuff you no longer need makes good business sense--perhaps we should be looking at this differently.

The Tigers clearly didn't need to keep an old contract from a long-dead ball player, but they did and it has great significance today to any baseball fan. If they had thrown it out 10 years after he left the organization simply because they had the legal right to, it would have been lost forever to history.

Perhaps we should be thinking about what this means from a historical record perspective as McKinnon has done, and when we do that, Mistry's statement makes a lot more sense.

Unfortunately, we also live in a litigation-crazy world and we need to find ways to balance what to get rid of and what to keep. Painting broad strokes like deleting every email every 90 days might seem like sensible retention policy, but in the long run you may be destroying your corporate memory and your legacy--and you have to consider that as well.

I don't claim there are easy answers to this dilemma, but I do think we should tread more carefully when considering what to destroy inside our organizations, and that perhaps we should start thinking about our impact on history instead of just lawsuits. - Ron

Enterprises need to get past governance turf wars

Ron Miller — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 14:50:49 -0400

I spent a couple of days this week at the ARMA conference, which is the organization representing records management professionals. You get a unique perspective when you hang out with the folks responsible for record keeping in the enterprise because they have a records- and governance-centric view of the enterprise that you don't see at most other conferences.

Not that governance itself is a bad idea. It's not of course. You absolutely must have a set of rules--whether the type of communication is a homing pigeon, a phone call, an instant message, an email, a tweet or a face-to-face meeting.

The problem isn't agreeing that there should be rules, it's getting the various parties inside an organization to come to some kind of consensus about what those rules should be, who should run point on this effort and what technology should be used to enforce the policies (if any).

The trouble comes into play because of typical enterprise turf wars. IT is looking at the problem from a pure technology-implementation perspective. Legal has a different set of priorities than the record keepers and they both don't get IT. It gets almost religious in some places, and that's a problem because when these groups get caught up in turf wars, they lose sight of the main organizational requirement for a set of clearly defined rules.

Not only are these interdepartmental-squabbles obviously counter productive, but they don't really matter. Now don't get me wrong, clearly every organization needs a broad set of polices and rules regardless of the content or the technology, but it all comes down to a common-sense understanding of what's acceptable and what's not.

The goal shouldn't be to control the vast amounts of information flowing in and out of a typical enterprise, because it's just not realistic. You can't do it. Forget about it. You could try to lock it down, but that's even more counter-productive in today's Internet-driven business world and it doesn't work--especially when the Internet is only as far away as the smart phone in your employee's pocket or purse.

The first step is realizing that you can't monitor everything. Instead you need to set clear policies, and if you step over the line; depending on the severity of the violation, you get reprimanded or fired--plain and simple. If you email confidential information, it's not OK. If you tweet it? Still not. If you talk to a reporter about it? Still not. You sign a contract when you join the organization and that policy applies regardless of the technology you are using.

And let's face it, while the various interested parties inside an organization argue over who controls what information and who decides what the rules are, work is still getting done in the trenches. People are using social media and accessing cloud services.

Yes, Virginia, your employees are already using the applications enterprise control freaks are so worried about. They have been using them for a long time. The cloud is so easy to use, it doesn't require the buy in of enterprise powers that be (and that's probably a big reason why they are using them).

So instead of wasting a lot of time and effort trying to stick your finger in the dam of information, think about introducing a dose of good, old-fashioned common sense. Then step back and let the rules take care of the rest. If you have a set of clear, reasonable guidelines, most people will get it. And those who don't, well just show them the door. It's not that hard. It's really not. - Ron

The incredible persistence of email

Ron Miller — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 10:38:59 -0400

After spending a couple of days this week at the SharePoint Conference in Anaheim, Calif. one thing struck me: the incredible persistence of email. Many people, in spite of advances in the browser, continue to spend much of their work lives in Outlook.

In fact, among the many partners showing off their wares on the conference floor, was one company that made its living delivering SharePoint content inside an email client. The thinking goes, according to Barry Jinks, president and CEO, Colligo Networks, many users still spend much of their work day inside Outlook. As such, it makes sense to be providing access to SharePoint content where these workers are most comfortable.

Fair enough, and it makes sense in its own way, but wasn't email supposed to be dead? Apparently not if so many employees still spend their days in Outlook. We all know that email has become a very clogged channel full of unwanted spam. Inside corporations, even when email is not exactly spam, there are plenty of "cover-your-butt" emails ccd to you and 50 or 100 of the most important contacts.

Repeat that many times throughout the day and you have a lot of mostly useless email, but as we've known for some time, in spite of its many faults, email remains the de facto way of sharing and socializing inside many companies.

And some knowledge workers like attorneys for instance, might spend most of the day there handling client email and sharing documents with colleagues. If that's the case, having direct access to your SharePoint content without leaving to open another application makes sense.

But in many ways, it makes even more sense to direct these users to the browser where you could set up a SharePoint-centric work page with more advanced social and file sharing tools.

As we move to a more cloud-centric world view, moving these stubborn Outlook client users into the browser would seem to be a more efficient way of interacting with SharePoint.

The fact is, however, that these email-centric users are bound to be a fading breed. As was pointed out time and again at the conference, young people today don't use email at all--a fact I can attest to because I have a 16 year old. He simply never uses it. As these younger, anti-email users make their way into the workforce over the next five to 10 years, we will likely see less reliance on email as a communications method and more on other social tools such as instant messaging and micro-blogging.

As this change makes its way into the enterprise and the baby boomers make their way to the exits, we are probably going to see a more browser-centric approach moving forward, but for now, email persists and it will until those workers who rely on it because it's what they know, move on. - Ron

Correction: The original version of this commentary noted that harmon.ie works in Gmail. However, it does not. The reference has since been removed.

Could on-demand printing save brick and mortar book sellers?

Ron Miller — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 12:57:52 -0400

It used to be, if you wanted a book you went to a book store and bought it. If it wasn't in stock, you had to wait while the book store ordered it. It's not exactly news that the book selling market, like so many content sellers, has been changed in a profound way by the Internet. Why go to the book store if you can get it from Amazon faster and more efficiently. But quick-printing technology could be changing the role of book sellers--and could actually save them.

The Wall Street Journal reported recently that Harper Collins made a deal with On Demand Books, the maker of the Espresso Book Machine, which can print a book on demand in just a few minutes. Book sellers can have one of these machines in the store and offer customers this unique way to get a book almost instantly, even when it's not in stock.

This ability to generate a book quickly could give the Internet book sellers a run for their money and could possibly make the local book seller relevant again. Book sellers could not only offer big-selling books, but they could become publishers themselves and feature local authors who might not have access to agents and publishers. Think about a poetry slam at the local book store where the poets could sell their books afterward, or a local novelist who can sell a small number of books after a reading.

What the Internet has always provided content producers is the ability to give consumers immediate (or in the case of Amazon books, faster) gratification than the local book seller. Now, instead of shelves stacked with books, imagine a single copy or two for browsing, then ordering the book at the counter and having it printed for you in a few minutes?

Or if you prefer, loading your eBook reader with the latest books, while supporting your book seller in the process? It's an attractive business model and it could give new life to a business that until recently appeared to be on its way out.

Local book stores have been under pressure for years from the Internet and big box stores like Barnes and Noble, and Borders. But even Borders was forced to succumb to the vagaries of a changing market and was unable to adapt. Meanwhile, Barnes and Noble hangs on with its line of Nook eBook readers, and of course Amazon recently announced the new $199 Kindle Fire tablet and the $80 Kindle eBook reader.

It's all enough to make small book sellers throw up their hands, but by providing consumers with a local brick and mortar alternative, combined with that lost ability to ability to browse the aisles, and instantly print books, it could change the way we interact and think of content selling outlets like book stores.

It's worth noting, however, that according to the Wall Street Journal article, there are only 23 of the Espresso Book Machines in operation at book stores in the United States at the moment with another 30 ready to be installed.

In fact, we've had the ability to write CDs and DVDs for years, but I've yet to see the record or movie industry come up with the idea of on-demand production, probably because their industry associations, the RIAA and MPAA, are more interested in fighting technology than embracing it.

As these two powerful organizations have rejected technological advances in favor of protecting turf, we have seen record stores big and small shut down. But imagine instead of selling just pre-packaged CDs and DVDs, you also sold a cheaper on-demand version, you could have a model to keep retailers alive.

I could also see bands themselves setting up on-demand production at concerts where fans could buy a recording of the show they just saw.

It's clear that brick and mortar content sellers have faced tremendous challenges over the last decade, but there are still many folks who enjoy the experience of browsing for a book, movie or record inside a store, and on-demand selling could be just the ticket for resurrecting a dying business model. - Ron

CRM, WCM and E20 merge around social

Ron Miller — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 09:13:53 -0400

When Salesforce bought Assistly last week, it proved the growing importance of social media channels for customer service and highlighted the further blending of customer relationship management (CRM), customer experience management and Enterprise 2.0 when it comes to social functionality.

All three of these disciplines are increasingly about understanding your customers better and communicating with them wherever they are--whether that's the website, social media outlets such as Facebook and Twitter or the good-old fashioned phone call.

As we've seen over the last year or two, CRM has become increasingly social as Salesforce has shown, developing Chatter and recently expanding it to allow it to be integrated with other enterprise software using an open API. And, most recently, by purchasing Assistly, which integrates content from social media services into help desk applications. Assistly isn't the company's only social purchase; last spring Salesforce bought Radian 6.

Salesforce, of course, isn't alone in making CRM social.

Meanwhile we are seeing Web Content Management take a turn toward customer experience management. While this often has to do with providing more customized content when users come to the company website, it also is about understanding your customers better and that includes what they're saying about you in social channels.

This brings us to Enterprise 2.0 software, which is increasingly moving from just providing an internal social communications outlet to offering channels to communicate externally on social networks and providing ways for your customers, suppliers and partners to communicate with you.

If this all sounds to you like it is beginning to overlap, it does to me too. It got me thinking that perhaps the three technology areas, which up to now have been mostly separate, are beginning to blend or at a minimum that the lines between them are beginning to blur--at least where customer engagement on social channels is concerned.

At its core, CRM is about managing the customer relationship. Up until the development of the social variety, that meant recording engagements with the customer, such as a phone call or visit, or keeping a record of basic information about the company, contacts, type of customer and so forth.

Web content management is about managing website content, increasingly within a marketing context. As the focus shifts to marketing, it's natural that there would be some overlap with CRM, which after all is a tool for sales. Sales and marketing usually work hand in glove inside organizations (or at least they should).

Finally, Enterprise 2.0 has mostly involved providing social channels inside the enterprise--a way for companies to allow their employees to collaborate in a similar fashion as they have traditionally done on the open web. More recently, this has shifted to include two-way communication outside of the company firewall as well.

While the three areas clearly cover different aspects of a customer relationship, it's also clear that there are increasingly areas of overlap as social communication grows in importance across all three areas. And as that happens, the lines between these applications are getting more hazy. - Ron

Against all odds, eBook readers thrive

Ron Miller — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 09:59:59 -0400

As more multi-function tablets enter the marketplace, it makes sense that eReader devices with the sole purpose of reading electronic books would begin to drop off, but IDC is predicting that a substantial discount on black and white eReaders could keep the market going strong this holiday season.

In its latest report on tablets and eReaders, IDC reports that tablet shipments, to no one's surprise, grew at a hefty 88.9 percent year over year. IDC also wrote that while eReaders took a 9 percent seasonal dip, it's forecasting big things for the stand-alone devices this holiday season.

That's because IDC research director for mobile connected devices, Tom Mainelli is predicting that reader makers will cut prices in a big way as the holiday shopping season approaches. "We expect major vendors to offer their current-generation black-and-white eReaders for less than $100 by the holidays," Mainelli said.

You may recall that I've been calling for a $99 eReader for years as a way to stimulate the market. Of course, the market has done quite well in spite of the fact that mainstream eBook reader makers such as Sony, Amazon and Barnes & Noble have not gone that low yet.

But as the line between tablets and eBook readers grows ever dimmer, it becomes harder for stand-alone units to compete with these devices. And harder to decipher what's an eBook reader and what's a tablet. IDC's Mainelli says that the new Amazon tablet expected later this year will be more like the Nook Color than the iPad, meaning IDC will continue to count it as an eReader, rather than a tablet, further driving the numbers for the eReader part of the market--but is that fair?

Fair or not, it's clear that devices like the $139 Kindle fall squarely on the eBook reader side of the equation. It's black and white. It doesn't have a touch screen and its main purpose is to buy and read Amazon Kindle books.

If Amazon suddenly were to discount this device under $100, I'm with Mainelli. They would fly off the shelves in a similar fashion to the HP TouchPads when HP held its now infamous fire sale last month. These were originally $500 items, so it's not exactly the same, but there is a mental barrier that retailers break through when they drop the price for a device like this under $100, and I think that dynamic would be in play for Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Sony if they were to go there.

And the fact is that if one of them discounts the basic black and white eReader, then they all have to follow suit because who is going to spend more when one is available for that kind of discounted price?

One thing that all the manufacturers have to do is gear up for demand if this happens because the last thing they want is to have a run on the devices and then not have them available for the holiday shopping rush.

I'm still not necessarily convinced that stand-alone eReaders will survive in the long run, but if the black and white readers become low-cost commodity devices, they might continue to live on for some time, regardless of the availability of tablets that do so much more than read eBooks. - Ron

With Zagat purchase, Google faces identity crisis

Ron Miller — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 08:32:20 -0400

Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) made an interesting acquisition last week when it purchased Zagat, the restaurant review company, for a reported $125 million. With this move, Google propelled itself from search engine vendor to content producer, and while the purchase might have solved some problems for Google, it might have created others, especially for its lucrative search engine.

Google is a company with a big problem, you see. On one hand, it wants to be the world's search engine and to a large extent that's true already, since it controls vast swaths of search engine market share. But as the world's largest search engine, it's also a huge target, and that means lots of complaints (and even government investigations) about which content gets displayed near the top of the results--not to mention issues around permission to include other companies' content in its results and on other Google services.

For instance, Yelp complained last year when Google started including Yelp reviews in its Google Places service without permission. It's worth noting that Yelp was also complaining when Google threatened to pull all Yelp content from the index because, well, it gets a lot of traffic from Google (well duh!). To complicate matters further, Yelp turned down overtures from Google to buy it in 2009. Google tried every which way to include Yelp in its results (short of paying), only to be pushed aside. Google apparently had enough because it went out and bought its own restaurant review site (so there). Now it has its own competing service, that should resolve the problem, right? Or does it?

In another example, Google couldn't come to terms with Twitter on an agreement that expired in July to display Tweets in its Real Time Search results. As Danny Sullivan reported on Search Engine Land, as the agreement expired, so did Google's Real Time Search feature. But Google did not sit still. Oh no, because it was around this time that Google launched its own social network in Google+, providing a way to access its very own social stream for use in the search results.

Time and again, Google has shown that when it couldn't include other companies' content in its search results, it would find a way to include its own. The problem with this approach though, as Matthew Ingram on GigaOM points out, is that it plays into the hands of critics who say Google is favoring its own content in the results. As Ingram wrote, Google is in a no-win situation. If it favors its own content, then critics will slam it, and when it tries to index aggregated content from other sites, it gets whacked for that too.

I'm not suggesting, by the way, that we feel bad for Google because it's a big company and it can work through this dilemma. It had a cash agreement for a number of years with Twitter, for instance, to get *permission* to include results from the Twitter stream before that agreement expired in July. It might have to forge similar agreements with other large content producers moving forward.

But in the mean time, Google might have to decide if it wants to be a content company or a search engine--and it could find itself increasingly squeezed between these two goals. - Ron

Salesforce Chatter pushes enterprise social into mainstream

Ron Miller — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 09:09:49 -0400

A funny thing happened when Salesforce.com held its annual Dreamforce conference last week. It propelled enterprise social software into the mainstream, and with it further emphasized the importance of external communication to the enterprise social experience.

When Salesforce Chatter was launched last year, it didn't seem like much. It was a stand-alone micro-blogging platform that only worked inside of Salesforce.com. This year the picture is entirely different as SF.com has expanded Chatter in a big way, chiefly opening up the API to work with other enterprise applications and providing a 360 degree social experience both inside and outside the organization.

At the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston in June, I noticed a distinct shift in the enterprise social message--that it wasn't just about communicating internally, but also about building closer relationships with external customers, partners and suppliers.

Dan Keldsen, an analyst at Information Architected who closely follows the enterprise social space, thinks Chatter's coming-out party last week was significant. "This is nothing to sneeze about, and as Salesforce opens up Chatter to be able to integrate into non-Salesforce platforms, like SharePoint, through their Chatter Connect API-integration and Chatter Customer Groups, it more firmly moves Salesforce from 'behind the firewall' (only)-CRM, and into SocialCRM with partners, customers and the ecosystem outside of the typical team (sales/marketing) that would traditionally use Salesforce."

And that's more than likely the idea, but as Keldsen points out, this isn't really anything new. It's something Jive (which recently filed for an IPO) and Yammer, for example, have been doing for some time, and these two companies are focused exclusively on building an enterprise social platform.

But will that matter to enterprise customers?

TJ Keitt from Forrester was certainly impressed by what he saw last week, as he indicated in his Forrester blog post summarizing his Dreamforce Chatter impressions. "What they showed was an elegant, natural extension of their core value proposition as a CRM and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) provider. In a nutshell, Salesforce wants you to use Chatter to connect internal business processes to the external social web in which your partners and customers live," Keitt wrote.

Keitt also likes how Forrester has integrated some of the social pieces it bought over the last year or so including Radian6 for social media monitoring and Dimdim for video conferencing, corporate instant messaging and presence awareness. When you put that all together inside Salesforce's platform, it's a compelling package.

But Salesfoce is not operating in a vacuum here by any means and large players like IBM (NYSE: IBM), Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) and Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) are also pushing hard to be the enterprise choice in this space. Microsoft SharePoint in particular seems to have a leg up because of its ubiquity inside larger companies.

But as analyst Keldsen points out, nobody has a clear advantage here because the smaller companies like Jive, Yammer and Socialtext (to name just a few) have the advantage of being smaller and able to innovate more easily.

What's not clear is how much room there is left to innovate in this market or which company (or companies) will come out on top.

For now, it's unmistakable that enterprise social is not hiding in the background anymore. It's right out front and making noise, and it's up to the various players to sort out who will grab the market share and run with it. - Ron