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What Next for Web CMS Vendors?

kthomas@cmswatch.com(Kasman Thomas) — Thu, 9 Oct 2008 00:01:00 -0400

After two years of feverishly adding social applications and AJAXy interfaces, Web CMS vendors have come to a crossroads, argues CMS Watch analyst, Kas Thomas. They are slowly figuring out how to co-exist with SharePoint -- but don't expect other major innovations in 2009, says Kas, as vendors look to back-fill architectures and squash proliferating bugs...

Microsoft to support jQuery 24/7

kthomas@cmswatch.com(Kas Thomas) — Wed, 1 Oct 2008 00:01:00 -0400

Ordinarily, the last company on earth I'd expect to support open-source JavaScript libraries is Microsoft. By "support," I mean providing 24/7 product support through Microsoft Product Support Services (PSS).

But guess what? Hades has apparently frozen over, because according to Microsoft's Scott Guthrie, "later this year" Microsoft will begin providing 24/7 PSS support for jQuery, the popular open-source JavaScript library.

Microsoft's seemingly unusual move here stems from its recent decision to bundle jQuery (unmodified, not a forked version) with Visual Studio as part of Redmond's official development platform. "Going forward we'll use jQuery as one of the libraries used to implement higher-level controls in the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit, as well as to implement new Ajax server-side helper methods for ASP.NET MVC," says Guthrie.

This is certainly welcome news for the AJAX world (which owes its existence to Microsoft, who introduced the XMLHttpRequest object in Internet Explorer 5.0, back in 1999). Libraries like Dojo and jQuery represent a kind of programmatic Switzerland for the AJAX world, shielding programmers from disparate browser behaviors that otherwise tend to make AJAX programming problematic for the non-ninja. Microsoft could easily break Dojo, jQuery, and the rest of AJAX-kind if it were to make (further) unwelcome changes in the way IE supports things like DOM and XMLHttpRequest. The fact that Redmond is on board with jQuery means the status quo will probably be preserved. Or at least, that's the signal it sends.

What will be interesting to see is whether Microsoft begins bundling (and providing 24/7 support for) other open-source products... and keeps its promise not to fork people's code. Is jQuery the beginning of a trend? Or the beginning of the end? We should know more in a few months.

In the meantime, perhaps the dearth of Ajax controls that we cited in SharePoint Report will be addressed sooner rather than later.

Three continents, one SharePoint story

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 08:01:00 -0400

SharePoint has been on my mind a lot recently, not least because we have been undertaking more research on the product and its usage in an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) context.

I've also had the unusual opportunity to speak to integrators, resellers and buyers on three continents over the past couple of weeks. The questions I asked may not have been scientific, or statistically meaningful, but they have at least been consistent. For example when I talked to buyers I asked:

Does your organization currently use SharePoint?
Does your organization currently use any other ECM systems?
Are you planning to replace any existing ECM systems with SharePoint?

The responses have been almost universally identical whether asked in India, Europe (the Netherlands), or the US. Almost all hands in the room go up for questions 1 & 2, and none at all go up for question 3.

Almost everyone licenses SharePoint at some level within their organization, almost everyone already uses legacy ECM systems. Almost no-one is planning replace these legacy systems with SharePoint.

Discussions with integrators and channel partners have also been consistent. The marked enthusiasm of the channel just a year back for SharePoint as a "Documentum or FileNet killer" has gone. In its place is the dawning reality that SharePoint is exceptionally good at a one thing -- group and department level document collaboration. It's not that it can't perform other services, it can - but they are not its sweet spot.

The other dimension -- which should have been abundantly clear a year ago -- is that you use SharePoint primarily for Microsoft Office documents (hence the name Microsoft Office SharePoint Services) and not for all the other content types and structures a typical enterprise encounters.

So if you remember back to the start of 2008 when we predicted that "SharePoint enters the valley of disappointment," it was a statement of some hyperbole -- and has in sense been proven at least half wrong. SharePoint buyers and users are not disappointed, they are in the main very happy when employing MOSS for sharing Office files.

Our prediction though proved to be correct though in another sense, inasmuch as the push to sell SharePoint as a replacement to ECM systems has to a large degree stopped -- a good thing for buyers, for in that direction lay serious disappointment. The fact is that buyers typically do not replace systems, be they ECM or otherwise. The growth in the data mountain and the ever changing demands to the business mean that IT adds to and attempts to enhance what is already there, rather than rip and replace. Into this reality SharePoint finds itself with a strong role to play, one that other ECM vendors have attempted in the past without success, and the Microsoft is perfectly suited for: collaboration sharing and management of Office files. It seems we underestimates the buying community, and over-credited the effectiveness of the channel marketing spiel.

CMS Watch has been accused of being anti-SharePoint in the past, yet nothing could be further from the truth. What we are is pro-informed buyer (which is why we publish the SharePoint Report!) It appears now that the channel was far more to blame for SharePoint confusion and mis-selling, at times than Microsoft itself, though Redmond's liberal use of the term ECM certainly didn't help. It also seems though that many buyers saw through the hype, and have recognized the true value of SharePoint. All I can say is, long live common sense!

CMIS - the new Lingua Franca of ECM?

kthomas@cmswatch.com(Kas Thomas) — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 12:29:00 -0400

It's often said that the great thing about industry standards is that there are so many of them. Now we have one more.

A short while ago, three of the biggest behemoths of content management (namely IBM, Microsoft, and EMC) announced a new standard... one that, if it does indeed become an accepted standard, is supposed do for the content-management world what ODBC and SQL did for the database world. (We've heard that one before, but keep reading anyway.)

The Content Management Interoperability Services specification (soon to be submitted to OASIS) is a set of protocols, exposed via REST and Web Services definitions, for platform-independent interchange of repository content. Using CMIS-defined HTTP calls, you will be able to do standard CRUD operations (create, read, update, delete) against any compliant repository, regardless of the underlying repository architecture.

Notably, CMIS leverages the Atom Publishing Protocol in its REST model (and indeed requires compliant repositories to honor APP, although they can optionally honor additional transfer representations, such as JSON). SOAP is written into the spec as well, for what that's worth.

The press releases around CMIS are loud and proud, trumpeting the spec's ability to enable platform-agnostic content mashups, easier cross-silo federation, rapid application development made possible by a common API, cleaner abstraction of content and content services from application logic, and so on.

We've heard these sorts of claims made before, of course. Proponents of the Java Content Repositories spec (originally JSR 170; now JSR 283) pushed JCR using exactly the same selling points. In fact, with just one exception, the originators of CMIS (IBM, EMC, Open Text, Oracle, SAP, Alfresco, and Microsoft) were the proponents of JCR: They were all, except for Microsoft, on the JSR 283 Expert Committee (and still are).

JCR achieved relatively little traction in the WCM and ECM worlds, though. Why should we expect CMIS to fare any better? After all, if JCR (with the same promoters as CMIS) floundered, why won't CMIS?

The answer could turn out to be quite simple. As I noted in an earlier blog, the main impediment to widespread adoption of JCR has always been the 'J': the dependency on Java. The whole world doesn't run on Java; therefore it was never realistic to think the world would embrace JCR. (Certainly Microsoft was never going to advance a Java standard.)

With CMIS (which is superficially quite similar to JCR and Apache Sling), there is no 'J' in the way. Does that mean CMIS will automatically enjoy the sort of uptake JCR never achieved? Of course not. There are many other potential obstacles to adoption, and even if the standard does gain traction, it's always possible for specific implementations to conflict in unexpected ways or be extended in nonstandard directions (as Microsoft tends to do with standards that it initially gets behind, but later hijacks or subverts in some way).

A short while before he posted his official reaction on dev.day.com, I asked JCR Spec Lead David Nuescheler (of Day Software) what he thought about the seeming collision between JCR (and Sling) and CMIS. His response was that just as the HTTP spec doesn't compete with the Java Servlet spec, JCR does not compete with CMIS. He sees no conflict. In fact, he welcomes the arrival of a high-level content protocol that transcends any one programming language. It's a net win for everybody.

I tend to agree. Here's hoping IBM, EMC, Microsoft, and the others will follow Alfresco's early lead and actually implement CMIS rather than (as they did with JCR) just issue press releases about it.

The ECM Suites Report 2009 released today

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 00:07:00 -0400

Today I'm proud to announce the release of the 2009 edition of The ECM Suites Report. Expanded out to over 400 pages, I believe this constitutes the most comprehensive ECM product evaluation report of its kind. In this edition we have added some new vendors, dropped some old, and revised all 30 product reviews.

This churn reflects a vibrant and extremely healthy global ECM market. As we note in today's press release, there probably has never been a better time for buyers, with a wide range of strong products to chose from, especially in the mid market.

If there is one thing in particular this latest research has shown us, it is that SharePoint did not (as many predicted) kill the ECM market, but rather the ECM market has embraced SharePoint -- and we are all the better for it.

Of course there are some stinkers out there, and as buyer you need to exercise caution, but we hope the advice, critiques, and "insider" detail we provide in this report will help mitigate your risks.

As always, if you're a subscription customer, you'll automatically receive your copy shortly.

The ECM Suites Report 2009 released today

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 00:07:00 -0400

As always, if you're a subscription customer, you'll automatically receive your copy shortly.

Microsoft SharePoint and the CMIS standard

shawn_shell@consejoinc.com(Shawn Shell) — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 18:54:00 -0400

In case you didn't read the blog entry about CMIS by Kas, Microsoft, EMC, and IBM recently announce that they, along with other vendors like Open Text and Alfresco, have submitted a new content integration standard to OASIS. This new standard should enable disparate content management solutions to exchange content in a more standardized way. Presumably, this standard will enable organizations with multiple content repositories manage and present (to various applications) those repositories as a virtual content store.

If history is to teach us anything about Microsoft's behavior, it would seem logical that Redmond will likely release a SharePoint "accelerator" to take advantage of this new standard. As we've pointed out in the SharePoint Report 2008, SharePoint is not particularly well suited for certain content management functions (e.g,. hardcore document management, document imaging, etc). As such, I suspect that Microsoft may take a similar approach with firms like Open Text and EMC as it has with its other partners: continue to build and support SharePoint's core services and let others figure out how to apply those services in given scenarios. As you probably know, both Open Text and EMC today boast about their SharePoint connectors, providing long-term document retention and archiving, while SharePoint continues to act as the dynamic collaborative space to create those documents.

Going forward, with CMIS, this could become more "out of the box" between SharePoint and other tools, as opposed to a varying bevy of 3rd party add-ons. In the long run, it could potentially eliminate companies like Vorsite from the integration space.

Standards being what they are, we'll have to wait and see what actually happens. For CMIS to help with your SharePoint implementation, both Microsoft and the other vendors in question would have to support it in code as well as their press releases. Today, there are no implementations available for any of the products involved. As such, it remains to be seen how much support any of the participating vendors will really provide, let alone their partners or clients. That said, this is an interesting step and could lead to a far more unified content management approach and certainly more traction for SharePoint, since it would no longer be required to "carry" the whole ECM stack.

Archived SharePoint Webinar

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Mon, 8 Sep 2008 11:19:00 -0400

If you missed our one-hour SharePoint Webinar last week, never fear -- there's an archived version available here. The Q&A was really eye-opening...lots of great questions!

On the last slide we offer a discount code to the full-day SharePoint Symposium in San Jose, CA, later this month. Hint: you can fast-forward the player...;-)

ADAM Software debuts SharePoint connector for DAM

tregli@cmswatch.com(Theresa Regli) — Mon, 1 Sep 2008 14:48:00 -0400

There's a number of reasons SharePoint doesn't cut it for enterprise Digital Asset Management: file size limits, and crude facilities for transcoding and metadata management, to name a few (we mention several more in our evaluation of MOSS as a DAM tool in The Digital & Media Asset Management Report). Much like search vendors Coveo and Mondosoft spent several years building a business on compensating for weaknesses in Redmond's old search services, pure-play DAM vendors are now attempting to compensate for the flaws in MOSS as a DAM.

Belgian vendor ADAM Software, which boasts Microsoft as a customer, recently debuted a SharePoint connector, and has put together a rather informative movie showing what the user experience of using SharePoint as a front end for ADAM is like. Along with Interwoven's Media Bin, ADAM is one of the few .NET-based DAM platforms on the market, so it's a bit of an arranged marriage between SharePoint and ADAM, perhaps.

If you're already using SharePoint as a simple image library, but need to kick up your capabilities towards real enterprise DAM, ADAM's connector could well be worth testing in your own environment. Note, however, that though the connector stretches SharePoint's DAM capabilities, it only does to a point. Depending on your requirements, you still may need to accept working outside of SharePoint for more advanced DAM functions such as management of video and other time-based assets.

Small step towards addressing SharePoint's replication problem

shawn_shell@consejoinc.com(Shawn Shell) — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 12:13:00 -0400

Microsoft announced yesterday through a TechNet blog entry that they have released an update to the SharePoint administration toolkit. One key piece of new functionality is a profile replication engine. In short, this new tool will enable customers with geographically distributed My Site and Shared Services farms to replicate profile data across those farms.

As readers of the SharePoint Report 2008 already know, replication is something that SharePoint does not natively support today. In fact, the issue of replicating content across SharePoint farms is something that enterprises have been requesting since SharePoint 2003. Clearly Microsoft has finally begun to address portions of the problem -- albeit for user profiles and not content. We can only hope that true content replication (and not just SQL log shipping) becomes a reality in the next release. If Microsoft wants to play in the enterprise, it will have to address truly global implementations and the fact that not everyone will have OC3-level connectivity among their different locations.

What You Need To Know About Search in SharePoint 2007

info@jboye.dk(Janus Boye) — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 11:42:00 -0400

Search is important to most SharePoint projects, but unfortunately it is also something that causes quite a bit of frustration as well as confusion.

I'm very pleased to be talking on this exact topic in London on September 15 at a Henry Stewart conference on The Latest Thinking on Optimising Enterprise Search. In my talk I'll cover some of the usual pitfalls and also share some recent project experiences (both positive and less positive) with SharePoint's search functionality.

At the conference I'll be joined by a global team of noted enterprise search gurus including James Robertson, Adriaan Bloem and the Martin White. I'm also looking forward to two interesting case studies from the BBC. I'm sure I'll learn much during the day and hope to see you there!

Virtual SharePoint?

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 13:54:00 -0400

Last week Microsoft announced new licensing arrangement for its products, including SharePoint Server 2007. In particular the new licensing scheme will support those who want to virtualize their server environment, since in the past enterprises taking this route were somewhat punished financially. All in all the new approach is a good one and buyers should be happy. At the same time this raises questions about how many people actually want to virtualize their server environment, and what if any the drawbacks such an approach might present.

We have written often about the frequently viral spread of SharePoint, in whose wake there usually comes a big expansion in server farms. Hence it may make sense to consider virtualization for large distributed SharePoint environments. You can theoretically run the same processes at the same speed, with far less hardware, power usage, and costs. However you also need to consider that not all security systems support virtualized environments, and that some virtualization systems suffer from performance and CPU usage problems, issues that can be very hard to track back to their roots in a virtualized environment. You should also consider that virtualization software cannot bend the law of physics; you need to realize that popping everything on one machine dramatically reduces the number of I/O's for network resources, memory and CPU ( they now all share the same I/O), and in some cases you will see performance drop.

At a pragmatic level you should not see virtualization as a cure to SharePoint viral growth. SharePoint proliferation issues stretch way beyond hardware issues, and into compliance, governance, and productivity. Nonetheless, running SharePoint servers farms on virtualized hardware is a sound thing to look into, and the improved licensing makes it even sweeter to consider.

So don't count me among virtualization nay-sayers. However, good IT management and good SharePoint practice and governance I like even more.

Plenty of choice for buyers in ECM's mid-market

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 08:52:00 -0400

Laserfiche is an ECM vendor we have been watching and writing about for a while, and our coverage of them in The ECM Suites Report is set to extend this year as we evaluate their new Rio offering. To some it may seem crazy for a mid-tier vendor like Laserfiche to expand their offerings in the wake of SharePoint, as there is a popular myth that SharePoint has all but finished off the ECM mid-tier. But a close look at the Rio offering shows us that there is thankfully no lack of innovation or useful products to compare, contrast, and chose among.

The new release from Laserfiche builds on its long history of records management and imaging, but adds deep integration with SharePoint. More importantly, with its set of connectors, Laserfiche now provides (relatively) out-of-the-box integration, along with an elegantly distributed architecture for capture and document management. Though these strengths might not seem as sexy as the name Rio suggests, these are product features that distinguish Laserfiche from many of their competitors, and add real value to many larger SharePoint environments.

We urge you to investigate the mid-tier of the ECM market for reasons such as these. As a buyer, you should never simply default to the big 4 or 5 'top right' vendors. ECM mid-tier vendors such as Laserfiche, Nuxeo, EVER and Objective often provide a better technical and cultural fit for you and your organization. They are also often the least turbulent of vendors, with healthy revenues, large (over 25,000 in Laserfiche's case) well-established and supportive customers, and a settled corporate culture - all important strengths in difficult economic times.

Plenty of choice for buyers in ECM's mid-market

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 08:52:00 -0400

Plenty of choice for buyers in ECM's mid-market

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 08:52:00 -0400

Plenty of choice for buyers in ECM's mid-market

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 08:52:00 -0400