CMS Watch Oracle Feed

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...

High Stakes for Documentum

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Wed, 28 May 2008 20:47:00 -0400

CMS Watch principal Alan Pelz-Sharpe headed to Vegas last week to participate in the annual EMC World show. Amid partying storage sales guys and dazed content management developers he witnessed a Documentum product line-up getting increasingly eclipsed by other EMC offerings. For EMC it's a reasonable bet, but for Documentum software customers, the stakes are high indeed...

Enterprise Search Vendor Landscape, Circa 2008

tregli@cmswatch.com(Theresa Regli and Adriaan Bloem) — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 00:16:00 -0500

You might be tempted to select enterprise search vendors for your shortlist based on their supposed "leadership" status in the market -- status either conferred by analyst firms or assumed by the vendors themselves. However, CMS Watch analyst Theresa Regli argues that you need to look more closely at product and vendor alike -- and understand where both are headed -- to properly evaluate your longterm risks and opportunities in an evolving marketplace...

Enterprise Portal Marketplace: 2008 Vendor Risk Profile

jb@boyeit.dk(Janus Boye) — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 00:01:00 -0500

It is all too easy to identify vendors for your shortlist based on their supposed "leadership" status in the market. But CMS Watch contributing analyst Janus Boye argues that CIOs, procurement officers, and other technology leaders considering investments in enterprise portals should carefully examine the risk profile of prospective vendors to help identify the right "fit" for their needs.

Enterprise Search: Trends for 2008

bloem@radagio.com(Adriaan Bloem) — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 18:05:00 -0500

What's new in enterprise search? Very much and very little, argues CMS Watch Contributing Analyst Adriaan Bloem. Based on just-completed market research, Adriaan concludes that enterprise search customers and vendors alike are still grappling with key usability and technical challenges. But 2007 saw substantial marketplace ferment, and 2008 is likely to bring more...

Enterprise Content Management Marketplace: Opportunities and Risks

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 15:09:00 -0400

Buyers looking at strategic ECM investments can find product research from CMS Watch and other analyst firms, but, Alan Pelz-Sharpe argues, you need to look beyond the tools to the vendors themselves. And here, Alan finds that some of the biggest and well-known vendors are undergoing substantial change right now, at some near-term risk for their customers...

A short tour of ECM case studies

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Fri, 30 Sep 2005 11:52:00 -0400

Tony Byrne reports on case studies from Vignette, Hummingbird, EMC, Stellent, and Percussion at the AIIM Solutions Seminars, and finds that much can be learned from what was said -- and not said -- at the show.

With XML, Do You Really Need a Traditional Database?

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Thu, 19 Jul 2001 00:00:00 -0400

Software AG, makers of the Tamino XML repository product, think you don't. They are integrating Tamino with a growing number of XML-aware CM products. The latest is Intranet Solution's Expedio...
See the Intranet Solutions Release

More portal news from Oracle OpenWorld 2008

info@jboye.dk(Janus Boye) — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 13:04:00 -0400

In case you were not among the 43,000 delegates this year at Oracle OpenWorld 2008, Oracle did reveal interesting details on WebCenter adoption, progress on BEA integration, and also on their enterprise portal strategy and roadmap.

As readers of the Enterprise Portals Report know, WebCenter is an impressive offering for developers, but unfortunately offers very few out-of-the-box services for business users. According to Oracle, WebCenter adoption is growing, and many of the new projects include integration to the vendor's "UCM" (formerly Stellent) offering for content management. System integrators are now beginning to build practice areas around WebCenter, as they go through initial project cycles.

If any existing BEA customers thought that Oracle would rest on the portal laurels, they clearly were wrong. Since the updated portal strategy was announced a few months ago, ALUI became a part of WebCenter Suite. As of this week, WebLogic Portal is now also a part of WebCenter Suite, so that new customers can mix and match among the four portals in Oracle's offering. Oracle claims that most BEA engineers have been retained at Oracle, which now has more than 25,000 developers on the payroll.

On the roadmap is the delayed 11g release, which is now scheduled for H1, 2009. 11g is currently in an on-going customer beta program. Among the themes for 11g are social computing, collaboration enhancements, and better standards support. Later in 2009, Oracle expects to introduce support for IBM WebSphere as an application platform, perhaps in a move to help its sales force sell WebCenter into traditional Big Blue accounts.

Finally, while SharePoint is indeed changing the portal landscape, many customers here in San Francisco and the very large Oracle ecosystem reminded me that there is still a thriving enterprise portal market outside (above?) SharePoint. I even met some who decided not to go through the difficult upgrade from SharePoint 2003 to SharePoint 2007, but instead decided to shift to Oracle WebCenter.

Other customers, meanwhile, are headed in the other dirction; see for example my commentary from earlier this week: Questioning Oracle's Portal Leadership.

Questioning Oracle's Portal Leadership

info@jboye.dk(Janus Boye) — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 14:47:00 -0400

Today finds me in San Francisco for the annual Oracle OpenWorld mega-conference. Oracle claims 43,000 delegates, representing a 5% increase from last year, although according to my report from last year, they also said 43,000 in 2007. But at that size who's counting?

With Oracle's acquisition of BEA, I was in particularly interested to hear about their latest enterprise portal developments. In the opening keynote by Charles Phillips, President and Chuck Rozwat, Executive Vice President, Product Development, they did make some relevant announcements:

A new beta release of the much-discussed but only marginally-deployed WebCenter Suite (which has seen several delays), as the product gets moved to Oracle WebLogic as the default application server
Fusion Middleware for Cloud Computing, based on Amazon Web Services
Oracle Beehive, a new product for enterprise collaboration, that Oracle has built from scratch with integrated security (via the SealedMedia acquisition). According to Oracle, Beehive has already been adopted by a few customers, including the European Space Agency

Enthusiastic Oracle managers also claimed market leadership in many areas, including enterprise portals, something that IBM has traditionally claimed. I don't know how they come up with this, but I do urge buyers not to put too much emphasis on any vendor claiming such a mantle.

While this week is indeed exciting for everybody in the large Oracle community, it still seems like very few customers have adopted WebCenter Suite, Oracle's strategic portal platform for the past year at least. It certainly can't be WebCenter Suite that's "leading the market."

Also, in my interviews with users of Oracle Portal (the "old" portal), it seems like quite a few are upgrading to Microsoft SharePoint, instead of going for Oracle. Interesting times indeed!

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.

SAP looks to India for ECM?

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 00:23:00 -0400

Is SAP slowly moving into the ECM space? It's a question that has been asked so many times over the years that it has become something of a "chestnut," as we say in England. For if you are ever at a loss as to what to chat about with people in the ECM industry, SAP is a surefire conversation starter.

SAP was (allegedly) going to buy Open Text on many occasions, but as of today still have not. They were (allegedly) shocked when Open Text bought iXos ( a firm that focused almost exclusively on providing content and archiving software for SAP), but did nothing about it. They were (allegedly) going to buy German vendor Saperion, but didn't. Once Oracle moved in to the ECM space with their acquisition of Stellent, fine ECM minds asserted that SAP would be forced to respond, but they didn't.

But now SAP does appear to be doing something: they are considering buying a 15% stake in Indian ECM vendor NewGen. Could this be a prelude to a full acquisition? Well it could be and it wouldn't be a bad choice, though it may take Euro- and US-centric observers by surprise. At CMS Watch we always try to take a very global view of things and have been following NewGen since the birth of the ECM Suites Report. It's a product that would potentially be a good fit for SAP -- and one that could likely compete well against the likes of IBM and Oracle with the marketing and sales push that SAP could give it.

But who knows...a 15% stake sounds a lot, but to SAP 15% of NewGen is small change. (SAP's venture arm has also invested in search vendor Endeca and open source ECM supplier Alfresco.) What we do know is that it keeps the rumor mill busy - and reminds us that from the outside SAP may appear to doing nothing in the ECM space, but they clearly are aware of ECM, and they probably do have plans for the future, even if they haven't shared them yet.

As a buyer of an ECM system to handle content and archiving loads from SAP, it's not as if you are short of options; almost every major ECM vendor can provide relatively out of the box integrations with SAP, and some even have dedicated groups to support such integrations. So an entry by SAP into the ECM market will likely not present a sea change for buyers, but it will certainly be interesting fodder for industry observers.

Oracle doesn't eat its own blog food

apoorvdurga@gmail.com(Apoorv Durga) — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 12:52:00 -0400

Via numerous acquisitions, Oracle has built up a formidable collection of products that they sell for Portals, Content Management, Web 2.0, and other content technologies. As a result, customers find considerable overlap in functionality and often there are multiple options for doing same things. Consider blog services:

Oracle WebCenter page lists "...services such as wikis, blogs, discussions..." as one of the benefits

BEA AquaLogic Pages (now part of Oracle) touts "Drag-and-drop simplicity for creating wikis, blogs and basic Web applications"

Stellent had a blog module even before it got acquired by Oracle

So its perhaps a bit surprising that when it came to their own blogs, Oracle chose to migrate to Six Apart's Movable Type.

We had cautioned about lack of a decent blog functionality in Oracle stack in our recently released Enterprise Social Software Report 2008. Well to be fair to Oracle, they are not the only ones -- many other product vendors use 3rd-party blog and wiki products for specific functionality. Blog migrations are never easy, but Oracle seems to have pulled it off successfully.

So if you are a buyer of similar technologies, remember that:

If a product vendor is selling you a suite that claims to do everything, be very cautious and ask for real life examples and demos
A product suite might not be the best option; keep your options open and consider point solutions for specific requirements

It's quite possible that Oracle uses one of its own blog packages behind its firewall. But when ECM vendors put their trust in best-of-breed tools for high-profile, publicly-facing sites, perhaps there's a lesson there.

When portal platforms aren't true SOA

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 12:38:00 -0400

In our Enterprise Portals Report evaluations, we point out that vendors who tightly couple their portal offerings to other pieces of their underlying platforms can't call themselves truly Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) -ready. This has been a problem for the MOI (Microsoft, Oracle, IBM) portal offerings in particular, which have historically seen dependencies at multiple tiers: appserver (all three), database (Oracle Portal -- now deprecated), and even operating system (SharePoint).

As you might expect, MOI portal product managers sent us testy responses. Suggesting a portal product is less than "fully SOA-enabled" evidently touches a raw nerve with vendors. We replied in turn that savvy customers believe SOA is more about the flexibility and opportunities that loose coupling affords, and less about, say, available WSDL files.

Thankfully, now we can just point them to this handy posting by ZDNet blogger Joe McKendrick, "Ten ways to tell it's not SOA." (Hat-tip to Dion Hinchcliffe.) In particular, check out #8, and this commenter's useful extension of the notion of "platform."

Portals can indeed play an important role in your SOA strategy, but only when they don't make you lock in to other proprietary platforms.