Web 2.0 transforms enterprise content management

Sometime over the last year, we witnessed a transformation where content management became less about storage and maintenance, and more about action and collaboration. At the heart of this change was the emergence of Web 2.0 tools in the enterprise. At the AIIM show back in 2007, John Newton, CTO at Alfresco, was one of the few people talking about the impact of Web 2.0 on content management.

Newton recognized, well before many of his colleagues, that Web 2.0 was about to overtake the enterprise, and that IT departments stuck on outdated content management models were going to get swept aside. He predicted correctly that content production was moving away from the company's servers and onto web-based tools; content management vendors needed to find a way to deal with this.

Of course, by the time AIIM 2008 came around, you couldn't talk to a vendor without hearing about Web 2.0 and collaboration. What's more, Microsoft Sharepoint, a tool built by Microsoft specifically for collaboration, was suddenly seen as a content management system. The concept of collaboration and content management had somehow morphed in a single year.

That's why it's so interesting that Salesforce.com, a customer relationship management company, bought Koral, a content management company with firm Web 2.0 roots in Spring 2007. Tim Barker, senior director/product management for Salesforce Content, says that as the Salesforce content management component has developed, the goal has been to deliver content directly to users where they work using Web 2.0 tools to help them find the best content.

"Users want content delivered into a CRM app to help the sales individuals," Barker said. "As part of this, we use the 'wisdom of crowds' to build up a profile of the content that is most used or highest valued by the users. This helps us guide users to the most relevant content."

Barker adds that when a company places content blindly in a repository, it loses some value. "I think standalone content 'vaults' as a software service will struggle, they are so far removed from the business applications."

Salesforce seems to recognize, acutely, the vision that Newton articulated back in 2007 that there is life outside the firewall and you need to make content available to users where they work. It's important to note that Salesforce, as a CRM tool, is aimed squarely at Sales and Marketing, not the entire enterprise. Still, what it offers has broad implications for ECM as well. If you need proof, look at EMC's announcement last week for Documentum ECM 6.5. The release was peppered with talk of Web 2.0 and collaboration.

If your company is still working on the old model, there's no need to worry. There will always be a long period of transition from one era to the next, but it's clear that the torch has been passed, and that ECM involves more than simply handling storage and maintenance tasks. It also has to enable workers to share and collaborate, or it's not terribly useful. - Ron