Top content management stories so far in 2010

I'm about to head out on a three week hiatus from FierceContentManagement. My colleague, Sharon Fisher will be taking over in my absence and keeping the home fires burning while I'm gone. As I embark on my summer break, I thought it would be useful to take a look back at the top stories so far this year in content management.

CMIS passes

Earlier this year CMIS, the Content Management Interoperability Standard, easily passed its vote and became an OASIS standard. After several years of discussion and development, the standard became a reality and companies began developing tools on top of this standard to take advantage of the ability to communicate across repositories, regardless of the vendor, such as Generis's new iGoogle CMIS gadget. Look for more products as the year goes on.

HTML5 debate

If you are managing a website, this debate could have a profound effect on the underpinnings of your website in the years to come. Steve Jobs brought this to the forefront with the Flash-HTML5 debate as I wrote about in "Maybe Steve Jobs was right about Adobe," and later in "Time for Apple and Adobe to bury the hatchet on Flash." As my about face, shows, there are no simple answers here, but as Char James-Tanny pointed out in her recent (and very popular) guest post, "Are you ready for HTML 5?," there is a lot more to it than how you build Flash-style content.

SharePoint 2010

It's hard to mention top stories of 2010 without mentioning the growing influence of SharePoint in content management. Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) released its latest version to much fanfare earlier this year, and as it proliferates it's actually changing the way other vendors develop and market their products as I wrote in "Are we witnessing the end of ECM as we've known it?" People seem to have a love-hate relationship with SharePoint, but you can't deny its popularity or its growing clout in enterprise content management.

The case management phenomenon

This first came to my attention in May at the EMC World conference in Boston when EMC announced a new name for its flagship ECM product, Documentum, and announced it was changing its focus to case management scenarios. This was quickly followed by subsequent announcements from IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Nuxeo, enough to suggest we are seeing a real trend here. We had Lee Dallas of Big Men on Content write about it in "From content to cases" where he explains in detail the history and motivation behind the move to case management.

Focus on business process

When I was at AIIM in the spring, one of the trends that jumped out at me was the growing focus on business process. Suddenly, it was no longer simply enough to provide a place to store content, vendors needed to provide meaningful ways to use that content. It's no coincidence that as we see this growing link to business process that more vendors are putting together case management packages as explained in the previous entry. See our One on One interview with ActionBase CTO Jacob Ukelson, in which he discusses the importance of creating process from content.

That's a quick overview of the year so far as I've seen it. How about you? What are your top stories so far this year in content management? Leave a comment and let me know. - Ron