Digital Asset Management is another big gap. Customers may praise SharePoint in various ways, but no one can allege that SharePoint has strong DAM functionality. (For more details, consult our DAM Report).

To make up for SharePoint's lack of muscular DAM features -- such as large file storage, transcoding, and transformation -- customers usually look at a separate DAM product. Increasingly common in Microsoft-centric enterprises is using SharePoint as a front-end to a full-fledged functional DAM back-end -- so that when you need transcoding or other non-SharePoint functions, it's there behind the scenes. DAM vendor ADAM has the longest-running SharePoint connector, and it's been widely used, albeit with largely mixed results.  

Another widely used offering is MediaRich for SharePoint, by software vendor Equilibrium. It's different from ADAM's connector approach in that MediaRich is not a freestanding product. It requires and rides on the services/functionality provided by SharePoint, such as user management, search, and workflow. It works with both SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint 2010, providing the functionality around metadata, transformation of images, and transcoding of audio and video that SharePoint alone lacks. 

The question you need to ask yourself is, do you really need or want your digital assets to be managed via SharePoint, or is it better to take a DAM-specific path and leave SharePoint to manage documents?

If you're already using SharePoint and are looking for DAM functionality, evaluate whether your requirements are best met by an add-on like Equilibrium or whether you'll need a separate DAM product. Much of this will be dictated by the user experience you want to deliver: if users are accustomed to using SharePoint for internal document management, it may make sense to manage those documents together with digital assets, if business workflow requires it. But SharePoint isn't used elsewhere in the enterprise, it should not be the first tool that should come to mind for standalone DAM. 

Let us know if we can advise your decision-making.

But what should a marketer's technology toolkit contain?  If you were only to follow what WCM/WXM vendors promote, you're only seeing a small part of the picture.

In fact, Digital Marketing can mean many things depending on the context.  If you are a marketer, you might want to:

• Create and update your web sites
• Personalize and optimize your interactions with users
• Build landing pages
• Acquire, profile, prioritize, nurture, and manage leads
• Create, manage, and measure the effectiveness of email and other digital campaigns
• Monitor and gather intelligence about your brands
• Engage with people via social media
• Mobile-enable all this interaction
• And so on...

Consequently, you can find many types of tools that claim to provide “Digital Marketing.” If you map these capabilities to tools, you will need one or more of the following and probably some others too:

• Content and Experience Management tools for Web Content Management, Digital Asset Management, Site Management, and Personalization
• Lead Management tools
• Campaign Management tools for creating and managing campaigns using email, social media, web, and mobile
• Social Media Monitoring and Intelligence tools
• Landing Page Management tools
• Combinations of many of the above in self-styled "suites"
• And so on...

As you can imagine, there's a panoply of tools out there. In our forthcoming advisories and research, we will try to de-mystify the highly crowded and fragmented digital marketing marketplace.

As with our other reports, we will also provide a methodology for mapping business needs to technology alternatives, as well as a roadmap for evaluating digital marketing vendors.

Biggest changes have come around acquisitions (e.g., HP), and a fast-moving Red Line (a.k.a., Collaboration & Social), as well as a number of key entrants in the Digital & Media Asset Management segment.

For higher-resolution JPG and nicely-printable PDF versions of the map, visit
http://www.realstorygroup.com/vendormap/

Hope you find it helpful!

• Multi-database support
• Upgraded search functionality with support for auto-completion and stemming
• Update notification and single click updates for Joomla! as well as any extensions

These features represent another step in Joomla's long, incomplete journey to try to become more amenable to enterprises. But before you get all excited and start thinking of using Joomla! for, say, your enterprise intranet, keep these points in mind:

1. While Joomla! announced added support for databases other than MySQL, in reality, it only adds support for Microsoft SQL Server. In fact, Microsoft's influence is quite visible (and is probably good for the project), and the new version also supports Microsoft Windows Azure. Support for others databases (Oracle, et.al.) remains in the works. As with all issues related to Joomla!, how soon extension developers update their code to take advantage of new platform capabilities will actually dictate how much you can adopt those capabilities. Many extension developers will update their code but many will not, so you will need to make sure the extension you want to use supports the database you want to use.
    
2. As for the search engine, it's really a core extension. So all you need to do is activate this (it's disabled by default). However, you will again need to make sure extensions are updated to take advantage of new search functionalities. Even if they are, there will be some issues in terms of managing the current search module's existing index alongside the new index.
    
3. And finally, for single click notifications to work, you will again need to ensure the extensions are updated to incorporate that.

So, overall, the new features are indeed useful, especially in an enterprise context. But a lot depends on extensions you plan to use and so make sure you plan well in advance. Consult the Web CMS Report for more details on potential gotchas here.

Finally, if you are upgrading your existing Joomla! installation or plan to deploy it for a new initiative, this would be the time to push extension developers to update their code.

Avid is primarily known as a provider of audio and video production technology (Media Composer, Pro Tools, etc.). In early 2010 Avid acquired a German company called Blue Order for its media asset management software, called Media Archive. As 2011 drew to a close, Avid announced the release of Interplay MAM 4.0, the first major release since the acquisition. We've lifted up the hood and taken a detailed look inside. 

MerlinOne, meanwhile, sits at a completely different place in the market. A tiny company with roots in the newspaper and print publishing market, MerlinOne remains one of the few DAM vendors wedded to a thick client, while the rest of the industry moves on has moved on to web-based interfaces. We found the system capabilities somewhat limited compared to other DAM vendors we cover -- albeit targeted to the company's core customer base -- and we outline why in detail in our report.

You can download a free sample of the vendor evaluation report here.

It's a question that many of our advisory customers have been asking us, so we decided to answer it in briefing format.

Cloud-based file-sharing services have obtained some traction, even among larger organizations, because of ease of provisioning and mobile access, as well as for exchanging files with external parties. At least five major providers now target enterprise customers for hosted file sharing: Box, Dropbox, Huddle, Oxygen, and ShareFile.

Just today in fact when talking with a major industrial manufacturer, the excitement and possibilities of working with such suppliers was tempered with concerns over their readiness and maturity to deal with real enterprise needs. To quote this prospective customer, "All these vendors tell us they work with big enterprises, but when we speak to them it feels like it's the first time a real enterprise has asked real enterprise questions of them..."

Certainly cloud providers are here to stay, and if employed in the right circumstances can bring real benefits, but it's still early days as our research paper details.

But now Jive has IPO'ed, and customers have reasonable expectations about understanding where the company will go after transitioning beyond it's venture-fueled youth. Financial analysts seem to expect more of same regarding the company's stock price, but if you know us, then you know that we don't focus on that. What matters is vendor "fit" for you the software buyer.

And in that regard I think Jive's biggest challenges going forward will prove institutional. Jive's a "tweener" vendor: no longer small and agile, but lacking the huge resources to execute globally in way that, say, an IBM can. Moreover, Jive's offerings are divided among significantly different use-cases (external communities and internal collaboration), and delivery models (hosted and on-premise). Doubtless this diversifies revenue streams in  ways that appeal to equity markets, but is this strategy best for customers? I have my doubts. It's very hard to reconcile the inevitable codebase forks.

Meantime, customers have hinted to us that they wish Jive would invest more in refactoring the underlying platform itself. Jive's core, Java-based platform is rich and therefore complicated -- and thus prone to some of same problems that the big players experience. Case in point: readers of our evaluation report know that many Jive customers remain stuck on previous versions because extensive customization can make upgrades unusually fraught.

Of course, refactoring a codebase while maintaining backwards compatibility with a large, diverse installed base is an unusually complex undertaking for any vendor. But now that Jive has grown up, customers should reasonably expect them to be able to pull it off. It's where the question gets called of finding sufficient resources while also scratching Wall Street's quarterly itch. We'll keep watching, on your behalf.

WAVE, Avid and North Plains are three vendors who are debuting a few some functionality they fervently hope will be "game-changers":

• WAVE will roll out a new, very attractively priced version of its flagship MediaBank product (to be called Gold, in late Q1 2012). The new version -- which has an updated UI and moves away from their traditional rich-client focus towards an expanding web client capability -- may bring WAVE into a more competitive position in the mid-market of the DAM spectrum, at a lower price compared to other vendors at the same tier who specialize in Brand Management.
• Just a few weeks ago, Avid debuted the re-branded Interplay Media Asset Manager, which the company is positioning as a kind of default solution for video producers who want a MAM deeply integrated with their video editing suite. It remains to be seen, however, just how deftly Avid will marry the multiple technologies they possess for the media production, management, and deployment process.
• Hot on the heels of their new TeleScope version 9, North Plains has debuted one of the more feature-rich iPad-specific DAM applications. Other vendors are sure to follow suit, or make sure their cross-platform HTML5 browser clients are up to snuff to compete.

These are just a few of the highlights from our 2012 DAM Market Overview. We go through each of the 20+ vendors we cover and assess their current positioning and potential risk they represent to you, the buyer and implementer of these technologies. As always, be sure to let us know if you have any questions.

This latest Market Overview is available to all DAM research subscribers, or may be purchased separately for $875.

MediaBeacon's DAM tool is among the industry's more flexible and standards-based, and though largely focused on brand management scenarios, the company made extensive efforts  to add video management features over the last 18 months.

In 2011, MediaBeacon was without question the DAM vendor I received the most inquires about, but those questions changed markedly over the course of the year. Earlier in the year, it was about features of their software; later in the year and in the first few weeks of 2012, the tone shifted: "Can MediaBeacon keep up with the growth?"

The company gained many new banner-name clients in 2011. However with the exception of Cognizant, their partner channel remains thin given the size of the companies with whom they're closing business. Historically, as we discuss extensively in our Digital & Media Asset Management Report, MediaBeacon's happiest customers were those who worked with Jason Bright directly. As anyone who's taken a basic business course knows, such a model is not sustainable. 

Some Real Story Group advisory customers came to me utterly passionate about adopting MediaBeacon's software, but were unhappy with the level of responsiveness from the vendor. The same was true of potential SI partners, who wondered how much MediaBeacon really wanted to expand their partner channels. Meanwhile, MediaBeacon slowly grew their services team, but not at the same pace as competitors like North Plains or VYRE.

So, is MediaBeacon keeping up with its growth? At the moment, not adquately. Recently, two of my customers who knew MediaBeacon's technology was a good fit signed with other vendors because they were disappointed in how the pre-sales process went. They figured that that as an actual customer, it wouldn't get any better. Another customer who wants to work with MediaBeacon wonders about finding a team of implementers who really know the tool -- and haven't been happy with the answers from the vendor.

As someone behind the scenes on such product selections, it's been interesting to witness the shift. Still, MediaBeacon sits at a cozy spot in the DAM market spectrum: it can reasonably address small business or agency brand management scenarios, but by the same token, it has the chops to support large enterprise DAM implementations. Yet, impressive technology alone does not turn small industry darlings into software powerhouses. Service and the ability to scale a company, along with that technology, is what opens up that possibility. It remains to be seen how well MediaBeacon will deliver on such big expectations in 2012.   

Yet despite the interest, one area I find few buyers investigate thoroughly enough is that of file encryption.  Presumably you make the assumption that if you are going to pay a third party service to manage your electronic files that they will do so in a safe and secure manner, and most times they will.

Managing data securely involves many things, but one element that suppliers make quite a song and dance about is the fact that they encrypt your documents/data, making it "100% secure." But things are not quite that simple, and you need to ask some more probing questions before taking that sort of claim at face value.

For example:

• Are my documents encrypted whilst "at rest" in your system?
• Are my documents encrypted whilst "in transit" to your system?

In most cases you'll find that documents are not encrypted whilst "at rest," and even where this gets presented an option, there are often sound technical reasons why any hosted or cloud service would rather not encrypt everything all the time, not least of which would be the impact on processing and delivery times of your data. In most cases documents only get encrypted whilst "in transit" -- in other words whilst they are passing through the internet to and from your premises.

You may also want to ask who has access to the keys to encrypt your documents. Is it just you or does the service provider also have access to the keys? That will likely start up a whole new conversation with some surprises, not all of which may be pleasant.

It doesn't matter whether you are considering contracting with an industry Goliath like EMC, Amazon, or IBM, or new upstart like Box, Huddle, or Oxygen. The fact is there are plenty of questions you will want to ask of any service provider before committing to any kind of contract; yet in our experience even simple questions like those above are often overlooked. 

Over the past few of years we have advised many organizations who are considering handing their corporate assets to a cloud-based service, and it's a trend that will surely grow in 2012. It is also one that as buyer advocates we worry about, for buyers themselves need to make the effort to dig deeper.  Suppliers are unlikely to be falling over themselves anytime soon to lift any fog of confusion that currently exists.

Our subscribers will see several new vendors under review as well as an overhauled set of evaluation criteria. More about those in the coming weeks.

For now I'd like to share one of the big themes of the report: customer disappointment with major platform vendors.

Why? It turns out that business units want....ready-made business applications, not the promise of a development platform. And while major platform vendors (IBM, Microsoft, Oracle) can check numerous functional boxes for collaboration and social networking, they don't provide many polished applications out-of-the-box.

Some commentators have suggested that the real answer here lies in broader ecosystems, and I believe there's some truth to that. But "ecosystem" for platform vendors today primarily means armies of systems integrators willing to write one-off extensions to the base code, at no small fee. This becomes yet another dimension to the disappointment customers are sharing with us.

I'm not suggesting that an all best-of-breed approach is nirvana. To quote my colleague Kashyap from our media release yesterday:

To be sure, a mixed vendor strategy presents near-term challenges for enterprise systems architectures, as well as long-term challenges for business users, who may later confront splintered profiles and disconnected activity streams.

The good news is that, in this maturing Enterprise 2.0 marketplace, you have a wide array of plausible choices.

Subscribers can find the latest updates here. To download a free sample, click here.

Not “Drill, baby drill”? More than 25 years ago, Ted Levitt said – “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.” That rings true for even digital marketing or social marketing tools. An enterprise is not looking for social media or other software. Instead, they want to be able to better connect with their target audience and become the brand of choice for them.

Up the engagement quotient: As ad man David Ogilvy said, “You cannot bore people into buying your product”. Enterprises can tap digital / social marketing tools to better entertain and engage their customers and potential buyers. Nike Shout, an application where fan messages posted on Facebook or Twitter were displayed on stadium screens, is an example.

See the video on YouTube or read about it here.

“Develop the art of listening”: Social media tools provide an excellent opportunity to listen to the customer voice and feedback in ways not possible earlier. However, many enterprises still approach the digital medium as a one-way street for sales pitches and lose the opportunity to engage in two-way conversations with customers. We should note here that there is increasing interest among enterprises for social media monitoring tools or “listening platforms” that promise to keep tabs on what’s being said about your brand. For example, see our earlier blog post on Jive’s social media monitor

“Analyze this?” Sentiment Analysis tools that scour social media conversations for positive and negative opinions about your brand are in vogue as well. These tools deploy language processing and data mining techniques to determine the prevailing attitudes towards your enterprise/brand. While this may (or may not) work well enough in a single language situation, we're not convinced yet that these can handle multi-lingual scenarios where different customers speak in different tongues. We, in the United States of India, are even known to employ two different languages like English and Hindi in the same sentence, or even write out a local language in the Roman (i.e. English) Alphabet. The tools may not be equal to the task of deciphering us.

“Fraudian Slip”: As they say, “half of ad dollars are wasted, the trouble is knowing which half.” In the age of pay-per-click advertising, we might as well say that a fifth to a quarter of online ad dollars are wasted due to click-fraud (based on estimates by Adometry, which tracks these things). It remains a cat-and-mouse game with the good guys and bad guys trying to outwit each other. Marketers need to stay alert and keep a close eye on their analytics for any suspicious behavior and patterns.

“TV is not the idiot box in India”: In India, where only less than 10% of the population regularly accesses the Internet, TV remains the influential medium and unmatched in its reach.  Flipkart (the “Amazon of India”) says that they were taken much more seriously once they started beaming commercials on TV. The larger message here is that depending on your situation, online may not necessarily be the cheapest or the most efficient channel.  

“Comment is Content”: Particularly for news and other community oriented sites, high-quality user comments are becoming as important as editorial content. We can second that based on our experience with clients who place great emphasis on the functionality like management of user generated content and community moderation in their social technology selection processes.

“Crisis Response Use Case” We’ve heard excellent examples of the general public and NGO volunteers rallying in the aftermath for the disasters in Haiti and Fukushima. They’ve created “people finder” apps and used social media tools to coordinate the relief efforts. There’s a lesson here for enterprises on having a plan for when things go wrong and be not caught flat footed. Have your public relations crisis plan ready before it happens.

“Greedy Brands” Earlier, companies just wanted a consumer to buy their products. But now they want them to not only buy their products, but be an advocate for them and also help with co-creating the products. From a software products perspective this has seen the emergence of co-creation and open innovation software tools. However, it is not yet clear why the consumers should participate and / or what’s in it for them.

“Did you know?” Finally, we promised trivia and tidbits as well. Here they are:

• Organized Crime is shifting from their traditional vices to cybercrimes -- equally lucrative but less physically risky.  
• The largest social media monitoring enterprise in the world? It could well be the Government of China, whose 40,000 officers analyze citizen postings on the Net  
• The average tenure of a Chief Marketing Officer is only two years, according to Ogilvy; digital / social marketing projects need to deliver results fast, then

That last one must make CIOs -- whose average tenure is a bit more than four years -- feel pretty good by comparison...

- Apoorv Durga and Kashyap Kompella

Having done so many, I tend to approach marketplace overviews with real skepticism, for I can no better predict the next 10 years of the ECM industry than my 12 year-old daughter could. What I can do though is look closely at the events of 2011 and detail where these could lead us in 2012. And that is just what I have done in this report: keeping it real.

So what are our conclusions? Well, some of them should come as no surprise.

• The Document Management market continues to grow strongly despite some fragmentation
• Cloud-based file sharing providers will make an impact in 2012, particularly as an alternative to SharePoint
• The skills shortage we have noted in past years is reaching a critical point

There is much more of course in the actual report, including an updated "Cross Check" chart detailing the relative risk and evolution of ECM vendors.

Each year I write these, I wonder what will be different from the previous years, since this is in some respects a very mature market. Yet there always is change, and 2012 looks set to be one of the most turbulent in a long time.

The reality is that search remains an important element within the information management spectrum, yet big enterprise search projects are thin on the ground.  Most buyers default to whatever search engine is bundled with their enterprise licensing deals (IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, et. al.) and few RFP/Tender documents are issued for specialist search vendors to bid upon.

Nevertheless enterprise search in its broadest sense is a multi-billion dollar industry, and pretty much every enterprise globally makes some use of search technology. So why the lack of visibility and so few major search projects?  Simply put, much of the money in enterprise search is in basic document filters.

Document filters are a core components of search systems. They parse the many different electronic document types (Word/Excel/Pages/Keynote, etc.) used within a typical organization, thus making them indexable, searchable, and more broadly viewable. It is a crucial if basic job, and one that runs in the background -- as technology embedded within other technology. 

Almost every major business software supplier makes use of such filters, and when you stop to consider the vast number of document types and how often they change, you can understand why most software suppliers don't try to built their own.  Rather they license well-maintained filters from Oracle, HP (Autonomy), or ISYS.

Indeed the licensing of filters is so pervasive and lucrative that some argued at the time of HP's $11B acquisition of Autonomy that much if not most of Autonomy's "IDOL" revenue actually came from their Keyview document filters -- rather than their flagship IDOL enterprise search systems. Oracle also retained and grew a very healthy license revenue stream when they acquired Stellent's INSO filters, and independent search specialist ISYS does a healthy trade in filters too. Taken together it is fair to say that filters make up the lion's share of enterprise search related spend. Yet frankly as a technology sector to watch and comment on there is little that is less interesting. What would you rather study and write about, the new Ferrari or the oil filters it uses?

So what ever happened to real enterprise search, those mega projects involving federated search across multiple silos of information, that normalize search sets from many different sources and types into a cohesive singularity?  Well those projects still do exist.  But they are rare, expensive, complex, and have a high failure rate.

Enterprise search will always be with us, as a critical component of any information management strategy. But there's the rub: it's just a component, typically dwarfed by other elements and playing a supporting role at best.

The danger here of course is that buyers can underestimate the importance of getting the right search technology, and the burden of maintaining and managing the search environment. When technology is simply bundled into a deal, there's a temptation to ignore it.

Don't ignore search.  Search can be labor intensive, and with a lack of skilled resources can degrade to the point of uselessness over time. Search needs to be taken seriously, and it would be good if it got more of the limelight. But the reality in 2012 is that specialized search technology options such as dtSearch, Solr, Recommind, ISYS, or Funnelback can't and shouldn't occupy the limelight.  The limelight should be on the proper practices and resources needed to manage a search environment and the difficulty most organizations face in obtaining them. Most organizations today already have search technology, it was typically thrown into a deal without any further discussion. It is the ability to fully exploit the technology that they lack.

Not surprisingly, most architects have taken an intense interest in cloud-based computing, across both its public and private (and hybrid) incarnations. These same architects typically also participate in software selection decisions. Then here's what happens: architects immersed in planning cloud-based futures often get surprised to discover how poorly traditional software vendors fit into that world.

Among the unpleasant surprises that can emerge:

• Most off-the-shelf ("COTS") tools are not readily cloudable, or claim cloud-readiness but must be installed in a specific cloud environment (like Azure) and often cannot take advantage of some key cloud benefits, like elasticity and rapid provisioning of new instances
• Many SaaS-based offerings (increasingly favored by business units) do not actually employ cloud infrastructures -- not the end of the world, but requires probing the attendant consequences
• Some self-described "cloud-based" solutions are really just managed hosting services for traditional COTS packages -- in short, outsourcing your datacenter, and not much more (sometimes much less)

Architects looking to engage business stakeholders on the benefits of cloud need to understand that...

1. Non-technical people may have a very different idea about what "cloud" means
2. Vendors coming in to solve business problems may have similarly fuzzy (often conveniently fuzzy) notions

So it becomes all the more important for architects to remove any rose-colored glasses when looking at packaged software. There's a reason why software that's purpose-built for cloud deployments works better in that environment than toolsets struggling through a cloud retrofit. Let us know if we can help you sort it all out.

Social Media Monitoring and Intelligence is an important tool in a digital marketer's arsenal. Of course, digital marketers also require tools for Lead Management, Campaigns (using email, social media, and mobiles), Landing Page Management, and so forth. We club all such capabilities under the umbrella of "Digital Marketing."

If you are a web or a digital marketer, you can source these capabilities in many ways. For example:

• You can consider a standalone Lead Management or Social Media Monitoring tool. There are a huge number of such tools - mostly SaaS based - in the market and this marketplace is seeing a rapid evolution
• Your existing Collaboration, Portal or Web Content Management product provides these. Jive is an example of this (we review Jive in our Enterprise Collaboration and Social Software Report)
• You already use a CRM platform that also provides some such capabilities. Salesforce.com, for example, has started offering Social Media Monitoring capabilities via its acquisition of Radian6

There are many other ways too and whether you  use an existing platform or a standalone tool depends on many factors. This is an emerging marketplace and there are not too many best practices out there. We will provide detailed guidance in a subsequent advisory for subscribers but in the mean time, remember to evaluate such tools with the same rigor as you would any other enterprise tool selection.  Most of these sevices promise quick setup and time-to-market, but you should still take the time to follow vendor selection best practices.

Telligent Systems, a vendor of social software to enterprises, announced that it has acquired San Francisco based Leverage Software. Leverage also is focused on selling social networking software for enterprises but follows a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model.

Different enteprises have different preferences for running their software applications -- behind the firewall, on-demand, or some combination of both. Employee-facing functionality would seem to favor on-premise, but not always.  On-demand versions of software typically boast more frequent updates.  While on-premise versions might get a major overhaul only once a year (or every three years...), hosted versions tend get updated much more frequently. This can be useful in rapidly evolving sectors such as the social software field.

Not surprisingly, then, social software vendors follow a variety of approaches. For example, Broadvision offers only a SaaS version, OpenText Social Communities is available only as an on-premise solution, while Jive and Microsoft offer both SaaS and on-premise versions.  And so on.

With this small acquisition of Leverage, Telligent can tell investors and the market that it now offers an on-demand solution. Telligent says that Leverage has an iPhone app for social functionality as well, so the mobile box gets checked. Finally, both Telligent and Leverage products are built off the Microsoft tech stack, which might bode well for future integration.  Analysts have taken note and are gushing over all the buzzwords.

For you the customer, the reality will not likely be so rosy. New features from acquired vendors appear in marketing brochures long before they appear on your screen. Telligent has acquired a revenue stream, but now must add a new product line to an already somewhat unweildy set of incumbent offerings.  Also, it's not easy to operate SaaS and traditional delivery models in tandem.  I'm not worried about the vendor here; I'm concerned about you the customer.  Don't trust the initial "roadmaps" that get marched out. 

The enterprise social software suites marketplace is relatively young and we can expect to see more M&A activity in the coming years as larger and mid-sized vendors try to cherry-pick oppotunities. We'll keep looking out for your interests...

I know however that I am in the minority -- in previous jobs I have argued with fellow managers about the educational qualifications of the people we hired. ("I don't care if she's a certified PMP, has a PhD, and 5 other professional certificates. Has she ever actually managed a large, successful project? Can she inspire a team? Is she an effective communicator?") Education only gets you so far: what matters in my book is real experience and results. (Note, I have 3 PhDs in my immediate family, so I may now be uninvited to the holiday events.)

Recently I had an advisory session about web content quality control with a large, global Real Story Group research customer who adopted a new web content management system a year ago. They wanted to establish a culture of quality among their web content managers, and champion those who not only understood the system designed to manage dozens of global websites, but also possessed a certain level of experience and inherent attitude towards quality.

I suggested adopting a six-sigma-like / karate-oriented "belt" system that, after a base level of system training, was focused on levels of experience-based knowledge and, equally important, positive attitude and focus on content quality. 

Here's a short summary of a longer deliverable:

WCMS yellow belt:

• Has taken 3 days initial WCMS training, is willing to ask for advice, proactive curiosity about WCM and how it works

WCMS blue belt:

• Minimum of 3 months using the system, showing inherent interest in the "health" of the system, proactive constructive attitude about content quality
• Understands the ramifications of content type changes, tagging, and other content editing tasks
• Takes responsibility at at a local level and derives improvement ideas for both the site(s) and the WCMS from experience

WCMS black belt:

• At least 6 months using the system, daily exposure to the WCMS, experienced as an admin
• Omniscience of the "big picture" of how the WCMS effects sites, knows and understands why it's important to do things correctly, encourages others to maintain quality 
• Leads, delegates, and maintains content quality at a global level

One key question came up during the planning: "should we hire or promote someone into the black belt role?" Promote, promote, promote. Again, since this is about real-world experience in a particular environment and a particular company, it's like learning a language. Even if you learn to speak Spanish in Madrid, that doesn't cut it in Mexico City or the Andes. Black belts vary from dojo to dojo; the same should be true for WCMS black belts.

As such, there were many more criteria specific to the organization that defined these different levels, which I won't share here. Creating an operational framework that rewards system users based on their real-world experience, dedication to web content quality, and proactive attitudes towards system and content improvement is one way to make WCM a core part of how your team is evaluated. This approach can be adopted regardless of what platform you use, and also adapted for other types of technology.

As always, let us know if you need help.

We will provide more detailed guidance about these in a future advisory paper, but in the meantime, here are the key points to consider:

1. Which Devices to target: This obviously depends on your target audience and what constitutes a mobile device for you. While simple cell phones, PDAs, smartphones, and tablets are quite obvious, what may be less obvious are devices such as gaming consoles or even the good old television that can act as delivery channels in some contexts. In my previous organization, I worked on developing a strategy for a hospital that wanted to be able to stream patient data on a linux-based handheld device carried by docs. Even without going that deep into what constitutes a mobile device, at the very minimum, you will need to decide what kinds of phones and tablets you want to target. This includes both the form factor (or the size) and operating systems (iOS, Android, et.al.). We've discussed this issue in these blogs before:
   • Thinking Holistically Beyond the Smart Phone
   • Android Tablet or iPad
2. Mobile Apps, Web Apps, or Hybrids: There are many ways to develop applications and sites for mobile devices. So you'll need to decide whether you'll stick to browser-based web apps, create downloadable applications, or use both for different use cases. We provide some guidance on which option is suitable for specific use cases in our advisory paper Mobile-Enabling Enterprise Applications: Browser or Downloadable Apps? as well as number of blog posts like:
   • Different Ways for Building Mobile Apps
   • Mobile Apps are Dead. Long Live the Mobile Web
   • Mobile brings site-building tools back from the dead
   • Mobile - the Next Web CMS Frontier
   • DAM and mobile: should you go with a dedicated mobile app?
3. Existing tools or new ones: You probably already have numerous enterprise applications that  provide some sort of capabilities for building mobile applications or web sites. For example, many Document Management vendors provide device specific applications to access a subset of functionality provided by their tools. Similarly, for a mobile website, you could possibly use your existing Web Content Management (WCM) tool or a Portal tool. Alternatively, depending on your scenario, you could invest in a sophisticated mobile middleware framework:
   • Advisory: Adapting Your Content Management Platform for Mobile Delivery
   • Blog: An iPad for DM and RM?
   • Blog: FileNet P8 on your iPhone
4. Managing content for mobile site and related architectural Issues: Publishing a mobile site will raise additional issues related to content duplication, publishing, workflows, and presentation. So you will need to have a handle on technical issues such as:
   • Do you employ a separate repository for mobile content (and this duplicate content) or do you use a common content repository?
   • How do you publish content from your regular web production environment to mobile environment?
   • Do you repurpose or recreate content?
   • How do features such as in-context editing and rich text editors work for mobile websites?
5. What happens to existing websites and content:  You obviously would not want to throw away your existing site, especially if it was not developed a long ago. So it'll be important to understand how you'd reuse existing content or mobilize an existing website. There are many approaches and tools to do that but if you've followed some basic principals of content management -- such as separating your content from its presentation -- you should experience fewer problems here.

There are many more considerations -- such as information architecture and user experience in a mobile context, content migration, alternative development approaches, and so forth. Yet, addressing the key starter issues above will give you a good launch point in your mobile roadmap.

What has been your experience and what are the key issues you've faced? Please feel free to comment below, email or tweet me.

The project in question has weathered some turbulence – execution delays, budget overruns and most critically, lack of end user enthusiasm for the delivered solution.  

At the surface level, they seemingly did everything right and all the boxes can be safely checked off. However, careful reflection reveals that they ended up where they ended up and not where they wanted because of the disconnect between Marketing and IT. In this instance, marketing drove the project with the assistance of a 3rd party integrator, and the internal IT team was not fully on-board till very late in the game. Important issues like global training, scaling up, ongoing support and service levels were left as an afterthought.

Suffice it to say a sound DAM (or for that matter, any IT) project requires all stakeholders to be aligned from the beginning or else you'll end up with bad karma, and a system that is not fully adopted.

In addition to our cornerstone evaluations of technology vendors, in our DAM Report you will also find sage counsel about the pitfalls that you'll encounter during your DAM project life cycle. While attaining DAM Nirvana is a difficult goal, we at RSG do our bit by at least pointing you in the right direction.

Had any enlightenment of your own recently? Tell us about your experience.

We're particularly interested in candidates based in northern Europe, UK, and North America. But for the right person who truly gets what we do (and how we do it) and thinks they can knock our socks off, well then, we're less interested in where you live.

Find more details here.

SharePoint licensees seeking to deliver on the promise of social networking and more advanced collaboration applications must therefore choose among three alternative approaches to close the gap:

1. Complement
2. Supplement
3. Extend

Each alternative carries specific benefits and demerits in terms of cost, time to market, long-term adaptability, mobile enablement, user experience, external access, and other dimensions. This recent briefing carefully examines the pros and cons to help you make the best decision.  It concludes with an analysis of a bonus fourth option -- do nothing and wait for SharePoint 2013 -- as well as a handy comparison chart to guide your decision-making.

It's available to our Collaboration and SharePoint research stream subscribers.  If you're not a subscriber, you can also purchase the briefing à la carte.

To give you a bit of a historical perspective, SDL’s initial offer of 80p-a-share was rejected by Alterian in October, citing “undervaluing the company’s position and its future prospects.” While SDL was busy upping the offer, the struggling Alterian, in the meantime, announced workforce cuts from over 400 people to around 260, attempting to pretty up for the acquisition and reduce annual expenses by about £10.6 million.

Now, SDL has a Web CMS product called SDL Tridion (via an earlier acquisition). Alterian has a Web CMS product as well: Alterian Content Manager, having downsized from three CMS products, killing the Morello and Immediacy brands. The WCM collision, however, is not the most beguiling part of this romance.

In early 2011, SDL has stepped onto the path of what it calls "Pervasive Engagement Management" (a flavor of Web Engagement Management) with the release of SDL Tridion 2011. The release included integration with Netbiscuits (for mobile websites and apps production and delivery) and a new product developed internally called SmartTarget (based on the acquisition of Fredhopper technology). In addition to that, SDL Tridion piled on another new product – the Online Marketing Explorer – and yet another interface to master. All in all, SDL Tridion boasts a hodge-podge of tools that -- even once mastered -- still may not provide a rounded offering of value to customers.

What is most interesting to SDL, then, is Alterian’s marketing suite -- social media monitoring, marketing analytics, and campaign management.  More services to add to the stew.  So the first reason for concern for any current and future customers is that SDL Tridion as a web content management system runs a big risk of turning today's small whale into full-blown bloatware.

The second risk falls to Alterian's WCM customers. The two vendors' web content management businesses are not complementary, if only from a perspective of slightly different customer segments that they can serve.

Let’s just hope that both parties will handle product overlaps more gracefully and transparently than Alterian’s earlier approach: quietly taking their two more junior offspring behind the barn and strangling them. Customers looking for a less gruesome outcome should explore carefully whether SDL follows a clear strategy in words as well as deeds, evolving product maps in a manner that doesn’t send licensees of either CMS product into swirls of panic attacks amid lingering rumors.

On the other hand, there’s also the fact that SDL and SDL Web Content Management division have been trying to expand its partner channel for quite some time now, and licensees still struggle to find qualified implementers of SDL Tridion 2011, let alone prior versions of the product. Alterian boasts a network of approximately 150 marketing services partners, systems integrators, and agencies, which SDL may use to provider greater coverage of services -- assuming they can ramp them up in any reasonable timeframe.

The acquisition is not expected to close until early 2012.

This is our sixth year in a row doing this humbling exercise. If you'd like to see how we've done previously, you can view past predictions here: 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, and 2007.

Here's our 2012 technology predictions:

1. Big data meets web marketing
Digital marketing systems -- from analytics, to adaptive personalization, to social media monitoring platforms -- generate huge amounts of data. The ability to extract and leverage meaningful nuggets from these vast stores of information represents a persistent but increasingly important challenge for marketing specialists. 2012 will see specialist (typically SaaS...see below) vendors pull away from the pack of integrated WCM suites and other adjacent technologies that implement e-marketing functionality as a simple, add-on service.



2. Enterprise search marketplace opens up...again
The major vendors in this space are undergoing substantial transformation: FAST is getting sucked into the SharePoint vortex; Autonomy is facing an unclear future under HP; and Endeca remains fitful and distracted. Look for upstart vendors to fill the void as they did earlier this decade when the market was more open. In particular, look for specific applications based on the open source platform, Lucene.



3. Social services get called on the carpet in SharePoint
SharePoint has seen stratospheric, often viral growth in enterprises around the world. Licensees are beginning to discover, however, that its lack of contemporary social networking services and polished collaboration applications are limiting its effectiveness and driving business units to self-provision other tools. 2012 will see the rise of a variety of SharePoint-specific, supplementary offerings, from new and existing vendors alike.



4. CRM and CMS on a collision course
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Content Management Systems (CMS) have long been central pieces in the digital marketing toolkit; however the lines between these two systems will continue to blur in 2012. More and more, marketers want to set content and interaction experiences based on customer interaction, so CMS vendors continue to add CRM features, while CRM systems add more web publishing features. In the long run, we think integration is more promising than convergence; in the meantime, expect some messy collisions.

5. Death of the intranet as we know it
Intranet managers still have a key role to play in enterprise collaboration and information management, but employee expectations and the role of the intranet have changed dramatically over the past few years. Savvy companies will focus on the broader employee experience in a mobile, "digital workplace." 2012 will see a significant reallocation of resources from corporate communications to more business-oriented functionality.

6. BPM springs back to life
Process still matters, and workflow applications continue to dominate enterprise document and records management efforts. 2012 will see a renewed interest in good, old-fashioned BPM, as enterprises seek to orchestrate activities across organizational boundaries, including partner and supplier systems.

7. Rich media goes mainstream in the enterprise
Video is no longer an emerging technology for the enterprise. New social initiatives in particular will bring more media into internal systems. To be sure, a gulf remains in production quality (between professional and amateur), and employees will continue to look for increasingly sophisticated capabilities as both media producers and consumers. In 2012, enterprises will respond with specific, rich-media initiatives.

8. Big data blows into the cloud
More and more information management systems are generating or leveraging "big data." Yet, many enterprises don't have the resources, capacity, or expertise to properly store and mine this data. Fortunately, "big data" characteristics (such as unpredictable data inflow rates and the need for elastic processing capacity) make it a natural fit for the cloud. As a result, data-rich applications -- such as social media monitoring -- will increasingly go to market with SaaS-only delivery models.

9. Pervasive mobile-only apps
2011's mantra could have been "mobile first." 2012 will see "mobile first and last," as enterprises develop mobile-only interfaces to certain internal applications without focusing any effort on traditional, web-based (desktop/laptop) UIs. Many of these mobile apps will consist of specialized mashups among existing systems. A key driver here is the inexorable rise of tablets. We'll also see interesting examples where enterprises will tweak business processes to leverage tablets (e.g., in-store tablet catalogs).

10. New job titles emerge
Major technical and operational changes are driving new roles -- often informal, hybrid roles -- within the enterprise. 2012 will see the formalization of some of these roles into broadly recognized job titles. Samples include:

• Marketing Technologist - to master the increasingly complex services around e-marketing at scale
• Social Media Monitor - to interpret, understand, learn from, and respond to the fire hose of relevant activity on public social networks
• Enterprise Community Facilitator - to support localized community managers and foster productive cross-silo interaction
• Enterprise Media Producer - to produce or edit high volumes of video for internal and external consumption
• Director or VP of Digital Assets / Digital Media Manager - formal DAM roles emerge to establish ownership -- not just of assets, but of the systems and metadata -- of DAM and MAM

11. Security fears rise: phones, tablets, portable drives, the cloud -- where is our content?
Nearly everyone is a mobile worker. The proliferation of smartphones and tablets means that employees are walking around with disk drives containing company information. A lost or stolen phone or tablet containing sensitive information will likely cause a backlash in enterprise security departments. We've already heard of some highly regulated enterprises banning enterprise access from employee phones. For many employees, 2012 will bring even more rules and regulations around how they can use their mobile devices and renewed enterprise interest in digital rights management applications.

12. Lines blur between commercial and open source technologies
In the WCM and portal marketplaces, major open source projects are "commercializing" fairly rapidly, while many (though certainly not all) commercial vendors are adopting more open development and support models. This means that in 2012, customers will see increasingly less distinction between commercial vendors and "commercial open source" suppliers. The bigger gulf -- though it remains largely one of licensing -- is emerging between commercially-oriented open source projects and community-oriented projects across the WCM and portal landscapes.

Here is RSG's Alan Pelz-Sharpe to shed some more light on our predictions: