Many commentators compare Drive with Dropbox and to some extent Microsoft's SkyDrive and Apple's iCloud. However, you should remember that you have many, many more choices.

On the face of it, most such services appear similar. They usually provide:

• Space for storing files (free up to a limit and then for-pay based on tiers)
• Syncing files with your various devices so you can access them on the move

However, once you move beyond the "mine is bigger than yours" debate, you will notice there are subtle differences among these services.

At a high level, I see four categories of services here:

1. Consumer oriented: Services like iCloud, Dropbox, and SugarSync are really focused on end users and have built some differentiating features. Dropbox, for example even has a Linux client and SugarSync allows you to sync any folder on your desktop and not just the one dedicated folder that most other services mandate.
    
2. File shares with document creation: Google Drive and Microsoft SkyDrive fall in this category. They are still focused on end consumers but allow more than just file sharing and storage. With Drive, you can edit and create documents using Google Docs, while with SkyDrive, you can access Microsoft Office WebApps.
    
3. Enterprise Focused: This category includes services like Box, Huddle, Oxygen, Citrix ShareFile, Glasscubes, Skydox and many others. These really focus on the enterprise segment. Box (like most others in this category) for example, provides granular controls for administrators to maintain access control for files and directories.
    
4. File shares with light collaboration: This category includes tools such as Alfresco and eXo which have traditionally focused on other enterprise needs (Alfresco does Document Management while eXo is a Portal platform), but have now started offering a cloud service that has some bit of file sharing. You could also consider SharePoint Online / Office365 in this camp.  These tools, however, typically lack advanced capabilities, such as file sync across devices.

Doubtless some of these services could be placed into multiple categories, and some will eventually evolve to provide services focused on more than one category.

But if you are an enterprise evaluating these sort of services for your needs, remember to look beyond the hype. Our forthcoming Cloud File Share evaluation research will look at such issues more closely and provide detailed evaluations of these vendors. Meanwhile, if you have any feedback on these categories, please feel free to contact me or leave a comment below.

Of course, one of the most satisfying parts of building with Lego is the interoperability of the parts, the way they snap together with a real feeling of rigidity. You can mix and match parts from different kits to create your own designs whenever inspiration takes you. I do wonder whether if that's why I took to being a developer with great enthuiasm.

A few weeks ago, before the London weather decided to bring us a year's rainfall in less than a week, I spent a sunny weekday lunchtime catching up with an old colleague. Before long, conversation turned -- as it generally does with nerds -- to development. One thing that came up in that discussion stuck with me: "I wish people would remember that APIs are not Lego."

Software vendors are very fond of APIs. So fond that they often see the mere existence of an API in their product as a fait accompli in and of itself. However, what this really means in practical terms is, "We're giving you a way of making our product work with others you might already own employing code you'll to have to build and maintain yourself. Oh, and it's going to be pretty-much proprietary. Maybe you'd like to buy some training?"

Not only are APIs certainly not like Lego, they are not equal. Talk to a developer and you'll find out pretty quickly that they range from the well-formed and functional to the fiendishly complex and arcane. Then ask about the documentation. Then probably buy them a beer to recover from having to relive personal nightmares.

The chances are that every piece of software you purchase is going to have to work with a range of others that you already own. Unlike Lego, they won't snap together simply. You'll have to tease them in place via an integration.

The good news is that you probably know well in advance how you like this to work at a business process level -- e.g., content from System A should be sent to System B under circumstances XYZ --- long before you start any purchase cycle. This should become one of your test scenarios that you can subsequently use to help decide which supplier offers the best  technical fit. (Vendor fit is another thing.)

So when you ask "How?" and a prospective supplier answers with, "...via our extensive range of APIs," be sure to request documentation to illustrate their answer. And then validate with developers or with your systems integrator. 

Whilst accidentally treading on a Lego brick in bare feet is one of life's more painful experiences, relying on an unknown and untested API to meet a critical need to your business can bring about much more lasting pain...

We recommend that you make Content Migration a part of your overall project and start planning for it from the very outset. This will allow you analyze your content and make improvements to overall content quality. You will also have better chance of keeping your project on track and avoid any major cost or schedule overruns.

In our recent advisory briefing, Start Your Content Migration Planning Early, we lay out what migration activities you need to plan or execute at each stage in a project, from team selection to piloting.

This advisory is for subscribers to our Collaboration, DAM, ECM, SharePoint, Search, CMS or Portals streams.

For more about content migration, you should also check out our earlier advisory, A Guide to Successful Content Migration in conjunction with this one.

On May 9, we'll be conducting a webinar that will answer those questions and shed light on:

• How you should think about cloud options for your technology solutions
• Creating a mobile strategy that actually improves, rather than hinders, the customer brand experience
• Why implementing social tools without a proper business strategy can lead to disastrous results

You can register for this free webinar here. 

This webinar will be a preview of many of the topics that we will be discussing in depth at this year's info360 conference. In NYC on June 12-14, we'll be presenting a number of sessions including:

Social Workplace Market Overview 2012

Keynote: Consumerization of IT

Acronym Soup: ECM, WCM, CMS, WEM, CEM, DAM Dissected

The Right Way to Select Enterprise Collaboration Technology

DAM (Digital Asset Management) 101

Understanding the Marketing Technologist Toolkit

How to Negotiate the Right Price for Enterprise Software

The Advance Rates to the conference are available until May 4. We look forward to seeing many of you in New York!

Consider that:

• Mobile has been a big driver of cloud
• Tablets (iPad in particular) have become increasingly prevalent within enterprises
• Enterprises are paying more attention to cloud and mobile

Since Box wants to become more enterprise-y, it has taken advantage of these trends, witnessed most recently by its announcement a new offering called OneCloud.

First a little techie lesson: each application on an iPad has its own file system -- a sort of a sandbox that other applications can't access. What this means is that if you create a document using iWork, it is stored in iWork's filesystem. If you wanted to edit it later with say Quickoffice or store it in Evernote, you couldn't do it (or let's say it's not trivial to do so). So there's no shared file system and nothing like a (Mac) Finder or (Windows) Explorer that allows you to navigate the file system on your device and open files as you'd like to. This kind of sandboxing has obvious limitations in the way iPad can be used productively.

Box released its OneCloud offering last week to try to solve this problem. It wants to become that shared file system that all other applications can access. For now, Box offers integration with 30 apps, albeit with a tighter integration among just four. Box calls the latter "premier apps," meaning you can do a bidirectional or as Box calls it, a round-trip integration between these apps and Box. You install these apps from within Box's iPad client. Think of it as a virtual operating system within iPad's iOS.

This is an interesting attempt, although certainly not the first one of its kind, despite what Box's PR would have you believe. For example, another cloud file sharing vendor, Oxygen also provides integration with 3rd-party apps, including with those that Box announced. Oxygen, in fact exposes itself as a WebDav folder, which basically means you can use it with pretty much any application.

At this point, Box's approach seems cleaner and more user-friendly. But it also means that for optimal benefit, you have to always be connected to the Web -- not a big deal for most but certainly a big deal for many countries (including India) where unlimited mobile data plans are either a farce or painfully expensive.

Many tools want to be that single repository for your enterprise. Alfresco attempted this with its own Cloud offering and integration with Dropbox to target mobile and iPad users. Now, even though Box still lacks quite a few essential features required to manage enterprise content, it has staked its claim to be a single repository of all your content with OneCloud. We will see how this latest attempt to consumerize enterprise systems pans out.

By the way, we will review Box, Oxygen (and a few other vendors) -- including how they differ in approach -- in our forthcoming Cloud File Sharing Tools evaluation stream.

As I mentioned in my recent blog post, the big guns were present and correct in logo form. Oracle, EMC, and IBM cropped up regularly with reference to infrastructure, alongside Quid and Connexcia building on top of Lucene. A great deal of time was spent discussing relational databases versuss NoSQL schema-less data structures and Hadoop / MapReduce clusters.

So much so, that you'd get the impression that the business case for Big Data was a done deal.

In the details of the discussion was a clue: Big Data was defined as "workloads that we just couldn't handle before." Big Data's three-Vs of variety, volume and velocity certainly provide a framework around which the IT- literate can debate. However, it wasn't until the discussion turned to practical business scenarios in which this horsepower could be utilized that things got really interesting.

Here's a selection of some viewpoints expressed in the room:

• The longer and louder that we discuss Big Data, the more the public are aware of the volumes of data that are stored about them; therefore privacy becomes paramount
   
• Today, the easiest way to justify a business case for a Big Data project is to fold the effort into a storage consolidation program, rather than tout the benefits of data analysis, (even though that analysis is potentially hugely valuable for the business)
   
• Data quality and source management remain big open questions, especially with extra-organizational information. Pre-existing "data quality" tools can address structured data integrity, but when you bring in, say, external social media data, these tools may not suffice

Valuable as this debate was -- especially to an audience of architects and information nerds (like me) -- it did make a  comment on the subject resonate in my head, that for many at this stage in its lifespan Big Data is "...a clever toolset desperately looking for a purpose..."

Whilst some organizations with well-considered information architectures may be able to jump right in and find real benefits right away, for many (or most) others, Big Data remains at least at present, puzzlingly opaque.

So don't feel bad if you don't have a strategy.  It's a work in progress for everyone.

I am conducting a free webinar this Wednesday that will help you make sense of different content technologies. In this webinar, I will look at the requirements for a range of scenarios while explaining the differences among web content management (WCM), document management (DM or ECM), portals, collaboration, and digital & media asset management (DAM & MAM) systems.

The webinar will be fast and informative. I invite you to join me. If you have questions that you want addressed in the webinar, please feel free to email me, leave a comment below, or tweet me.

Webinar details: 7 March 2012 at 12:00 noon EST (17:00 UTC).

Register for the webinar.

Yet I remain a bit puzzled as to why the service has gone live at all, since it's clearly far from complete, usable, or reliable. The fact that it took four weeks to build what is essentially a simple web app is all well and good (even though it repeatedly delivered error pages in my test). But the real value that in this sort of application should derive from quality of the information it delivers. Currently the quality of that information is dismal.

From what I can gather 250 firms submitted information on a total of 1500 services they could deliver to the public sector, and all of them have gotten duly listed on the site.

That was the first red flag, and indeed further investigation reveals that as of now not one of those services has been tested or certified in any way at all; the claims have just been taken as verbatim. Even so, Cloudstore allows you to circumvent thorough tendering processes through the Official Journal of the European Community (OJEC), yet cannnot guarantee whatsoever the quality or fit of the services it promotes. 

I found:

• Services offered that run on products that do not meet Government standards
• A dominance of the usual major IT suppliers, claiming to offer almost anything (regardless of actual expertise)
• Many well known and experienced government IT suppliers missing
• Currently no details on what future accreditation will actually mean or demand of a supplier or service

This last point in particular concerns me deeply. Surely it seems fair to assume that "accredited" services and suppliers will have had their organization vetted, that they are viable and solvent, that they have experienced and reliable products and support, and that they meet technical standards.  Buyers will also want a solid understanding of these criteria and how they were met. Surely this is the basic due diligence that any buyer has to undertake? Yet I found no indication here of what accredited status will mean, how it will be administered, and how it will be checked and maintained.

I had high hopes for this system. Perhaps it was just a really bad idea to launch it now, long before the real work has been done.  To my mind this store should not have gone live until all the services and suppliers had been thoroughly vetted and assessed. Expert reviews of the remaining suppliers and further research of the market to ensure that a wide array of viable options is actually represented (rather than just those that have volunteered themselves) also seems necessary.

Until that time, this has little more value than a search on Google or Craigslist, and comes with potentially more risk of those, since it intends to help you shortcut necessary selection steps.

I'm all for speeding up and removing unnecessary bureaucracy from the procurement process, which is actually a one focus area of our business; but to repeat, the web application itself is not the important thing here. You can label it "cloud" and get more buzz, but at the end of the day it's the quality and veracity of the information delivered that matters most.  That information is nowhere near ready for consumption right now.

Oracle has been promoting its MoveOff scheme, offering a 100% license credit for those who make the move from Documentum to its Oracle WebCenter Content platform. Likewise  Alfresco offers free workshops to enable you to move from Microsoft SharePoint to its platform. Laserfiche also offered a 100% trade in allowance on existing ECM system if you moved to their platform. 

So how good are these deals and what's really behind them?

Well for you the customer who is already quite determined to move off a legacy system, a switching offer might make sense, but frankly we have seen little uptake of such promotions.  Moving from one system to another is seldom easy, and can be a high-risk venture. Moreover, upfront license costs are the least of your financial concerns these days: implementation and long-term maintenance costs are where the pocket really gets hit.

In fact at the higher end of the document and records management market few if any ever pay list pricing for ECM software, and many get those licenses for little or even nothing.  At the end of the day it's the maintenance and professional services fees that interest suppliers. So an offer that gives you 3 free years of initial maintenance would be of much more interest and value, but alas such offers are not to be found.

As a buyer you need to be sure that free really means free and that you have fully weighed up the risks of moving from one system to another.  It is something you may need to do one day regardless, but special deals should not be a major factor in your decision-making process. A thorough evaluation of the relative strengths and weaknesses of alternate products, as well as deep exploration of the product and suppliers' relative fit with your organization is what's required -- every time without exception.

Mailroom automation? Really?

OK, so it's not exactly Desperate Housewives or Survivor or Social Business when it comes to juicy topics, but it's important stuff. And in the rush for organizations to leap aboard the latest 2.0 bandwagon, they often overlook substantial efficiency gains or kick them to the side.

What I mean by mailroom automation is simply the immediate scan and capture of data on arrival at your premises. Particularly in situations where transactional documents or any kind of forms -- application forms, invoices, checks, and so on -- get processed. 

Realistically in 2012 there should be little need for keying data from hard copy forms (be that a paper copy or a static electronic Tiff image) manually into any computer application.  Data can be extracted from incoming mail at a far more accurate rate, much quicker pace, and much lower cost, than any team of human clerks could ever manage. Yet we all see overflowing filing cabinets, boxes of documentation, and piles of paper on desks within companies of all shapes and sizes -- even recently-established firms in the tech sector.

So why is this still the case?  Well for one thing I think things are starting to change, albeit slowly. Growing revenues generated by intelligent capture products such as Kofax, Captiva and Brainware suggest a considerable spike in interest. Likewise the emergence and adoption of new providers such as Ephesoft hardly suggests a lack of business opportunity.

But mailroom automation is dull, it isn't sexy, and it's not the sort of project business teams are fighting over to work on.  That's a shame, because if you want to know about real technology ROI (Return on Investment) rather than mythical ROI (based on hope and conjecture), then grabbing that mail at its earliest point, extracting and populating data fields immediately, and applying rules and workflows, will most likely deliver more visible business transformations than most trendy Social, Collaboration, or Enterprise Mobile initiatives ever will.

That's why we research and publish product evaluations in this area, and offer detailed one to one advice on the topic to our subscribers. Encouragingly we are receiving more inquiries from subscribers to talk about just these issues. We ourselves are just starting an internal back file scanning project, and even as a small firm are capturing at an ever earlier point documents and forms. Not new but scanning, capture and the related automation of document based tasks is undergoing something of a rennaisance. 

That being said, there is still long way to go, and I'd love to hear your thoughts and experiences on how to make such projects a higher priority and get the attention they really deserve.

So I came up with three major lessons that seemed worth sharing:

1. Your internal competencies may be the biggest factor in your success implementing technology
2. Every prediction of significant marketplace "consolidation" has been wrong, although M&A activity has proven painful for customers
3. What makes your enterprise unique (and therefore successful) also plays out in how you apply technology

As always, welcome your thoughts in the comments below...

The open source eXo portal platform  released their latest version 3.5 last week. eXo platform is a "portal-like" offering that we cover in our Portals and Content Integration report. It's based on the GateIn open source portal container that eXo co-developed with Red Hat JBoss.

You'll find a few new features in the latest release (e.g., a wiki module), an updated look and feel, as well as various functional improvements. However, as with so many vendors, the focus here is really on cloud and mobile.

First, mobile: eXo released mobile clients for Android and iOS devices. Fine.

The bigger story is around cloud. The new version of eXo supports multi-tenancy, and can be used by organizations to white-label as a service. eXo says they plan to offer their own cloud service later this year. Calling it User Experience Platform As a Service (UXPaaS), eXo will be offering it as "eXo Cloud Workspace" (currently in private beta). It's not clear yet if their partner JBoss will also provide that service or not. eXo could also end up competing with other vendors who chose to white-label it as their own service, which could get tricky for you the customer.

eXo claims to be the first "cloud ready" portal platform. That's only partially true because their cloud offering will not contain a full set of portal features. In the initial release, the cloud version only offers a subset, under the auspices of what it calls Social Intranet. That's not too bad, though, because it aggregates some useful services: a wiki, discussion forum, document libraries, and shared workspaces. You will also be able to do some development using eXo's web-based IDE. But the more advanced features of eXo's portal platform (such as web publishing) will not be available.

You may note a few similarities between what eXo has done and Alfresco's new release that I just blogged about (both of them, incidentally, are commercial open source platforms).

Both of their cloud offerings are expected to have similar features that include activity streams, dashboards, workspaces, document libraries, and a wiki. Both of them also follow a similar  membership model resembling that used by Yammer, based on your email domain. So for example, I can create a workspace based on adurga @ realstorygroup . com ID, and my colleagues can join that workspace.

The other interesting similarity comes in mobile offerings. Both have chosen to go with native apps and not HTML5-based web apps. They're concluding that for document- and collaboration-heavy scenarios, native still rules over web. Just remember that this strategy can run counter to enterprise bring-your-own-device policies.

While both vendors produce a different messaging, the products themselves contain overlapping features. So the lesson here is to look beyond the marketing hype and check out the real functionality (not to mention the vendor itself!). We will of course dig deeper to uncover the real customer experience, and provide more details in our reports and advisory papers.

The key features and implications for what Alfresco calls its "Cloud Connected Content Platform" are:

• The ability to publish content to external channels, such as YouTube, Facebook, SlideShare, Twitter and LinkedIn. However, you can only publish assets from Alfresco's document library to these channels. This is really different from say publishing a simpler web post to Facebook (unless of course you manage that post in Document Library).
  
  
• A new module to transfer files from Alfresco's repository to a file system.
  
  
• Replacing its Lucene-based internal search with a Solr-based alternative. Granted, Solr is based on Lucene, but now all the plumbing required to make Lucene work gets done by Solr and not Alfresco. This also means you will have to recreate your indexes and many services (such as blog and discussions) that used Lucene queries will now employ database queries. This should not have any impact on your applications themselves, but you should still test it carefully. You also can't use Solr if you employ the old AVM-based WCM or use Alfresco in multi-tenant mode. The latter prohibition is rather surprising given Alfresco's upcoming cloud service.
  
  
• Integration of Alfresco's in-house Activiti workflow engine in lieu of the incumbent JBPM. We have covered this before in our reports and it was only a matter if time before it happened. JBPM is still included in the base package for the time being but will remain disabled by default in new installations. I suspect it will slowly be deprecated over the next few versions. So this would be a good time to think of how you will migrate your workflows from JBPM to Activiti.
  
  
• A new app to access content from mobile devices. For now, Alfresco seems to have focused only on Apple's iOS and mainly on the iPad. This is probably a sensible prioritization because tablets (and in particular iPads) have a dominant share within enterprises. Alfresco is also working on an integration with DropBox, which would offer two key features: the ability to access Alfresco from all the devices that DropBox supports, as well as critical synchronization capabilities for things like document check-out, offline work, and multi-device sync.

There are various other changes too, but as you can probably make out, the big story seems to be around cloud. Alfresco plans to offer its cloud-based offering later this year, based on Version 4. Much of this is really new and by that I don't mean just in terms of technology. For example, their proposed integration with DropBox really tries to marry enterprise functionality with one that is consumer facing. We can't say how this will pan out in organizations but we'll keep watching.

Meanwhile, you should remain skeptical about anything that uses "Cloud" in any way and ask tough questions. Fortunately, there's help easily available. Check out this advisory paper: Are cloud-based file-sharing services too immature for the enterprise?

Almost all our business is now online to some degree, and though we employ many people to take calls and process transactions, the reality is that most of our customers come to our website as a first point of interaction with us.  It all may look slick to the customer (we hope), but frankly behind the scenes it's not so neat and efficient. There are many manual and inefficient processes in place, and moreover what once looked good on the web is now starting to look dated, as customers have ever higher expectations of web experiences. They are also beginning to demand near instant response times.  Hence we are starting a project to overhaul our current web presence and make our current operations much more efficient as a result.

Such requirements seem specific enough, but depending on who is leading the project and their understanding of the IT technology world in general it could finally emerge in a tender/RFP (Request for Proposal) in any one of many different forms, with different products and suppliers in the mix. Depending on your orientation, you might define the effort as:

An ECM Project, with a vendor providing a complete platform of workflow, integration, web  and application development functions, with the likes of EMC-Documentum,  OpenText ECM Suite, Oracle WebCenter Content, or Alfresco under consideration*

A WCM Project, with specialist tools to build and manage complex/multiple website environments, targeting vendors like Coremedia, Sitecore, Episerver, or perhaps a dozen more*

A Portal Project, with the focus on building a dashboard application to expose back-end business services in a friendly way, via platforms from vendors like IBM WebSphere, JBOSS, or Liferay et. al.*

In fact, the same project could also get framed in terms of Ecommerce, CRM (Customer Relationship Management) or even BPM (Business Process Management) technologies.

And there's the rub: not one of these approaches would necessarily be wrong, since there is, as the awful phrase goes, more than one way to skin a cat.  You could very legitimately examine a wide range of different valid shortlists, each as capable of meeting your needs as the other.

Yet there remains a need to compare apples with apples, and hence as advisors and industry analysts we sub-divide technology sectors into comparable segments (we call them "streams") and label them. This makes great sense when addressing a very specific need, such that solutions can be compared and tested side by side.

But increasingly buyers' needs are overlapping. Particularly in the world of large WCM projects, your choices aren't as clear cut as they once were.  The key word here is more:

• More complex integrations with back-end business applications
• More sophisticated analysis of website and customer data
• More frequent triggering of complex internal business processes

Sure we still see plenty of simple brochureware, marketing-style sites out there, and they will continue to grow. But in tough economic times, organizations need to do more with less -- and empower their customers to do more themselves -- requiring more automated and integrated web-based interactions than ever before.  When subscribers access our research they increasingly pull product evaluations from across different research streams. And when we engage with them on analyst support calls, it's common for us to first spend time refining project definitions to ensure that a suitably broad range of options get considered.

It all makes for interesting and often difficult times, where buyers must be ever better informed.

*Of course there are many many more technology options to consider in each of these groups, literally hundreds, and it should go without saying that you should ignore "market leader status" and pull together comprehensive shortlists for your own project, based on thorough, independent research of products that actually meet your specific needs.

Worklight is a platform for developing mobile applications that enables you to build different types of mobile apps: HTML5 based-web apps, hybrids, and (especially) pure native apps.

Our research subscribers know that IBM already offered a "Mobile Portal Accelerator" for building mobile-optimized websites. The Mobile Portal Accelerator is targeted at WebSphere Portal customers and is also well integrated with Big Blue's Web Content Management offering.

What you may not know is that IBM actually licensed some technology from a 3rd-party vendor, Volantis, to build that accelerator. Then Volantis was acquired by Antenna Software last year.

I don't know yet if that acquisition resulted in some restrictions in IBM's usage of Volantis' codebase and led to them to buy Worklight. I hope that's not the case because Volantis (and hence IBM's mobile portal accelerator) are fairly sophisticated tools for building browser-based mobile apps (as opposed to downloadable apps). While there's some overlap with Worklight's features, Worklight clearly specializes in downloadble apps and not necessarily browser-based apps. Either way, there's possible disruption here for WebSphere customers.

We will keep tracking this. Meanwhile, if you are an IBM customer with mobile ambitions, make sure you fully understand the road maps of both these offerings.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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:

1) "Bring Your Own Device" policies will push HTML5 adoption for mobile access to enterprise applications
This has definitely happened, although HTML5 adoption remains quite incomplete.

2) Content-rich customers will rebel against Web CMS marketing spins
The key phrase here is "content-rich." We've definitely seen some disappointment among high-volume publishers (e.g., media), who don't want e-marketing and other corollary services from their WCM vendor.

3) Microsoft will turn to partners to fix SharePoint shortcomings
Yep. It's an old story. As a SharePoint version ages, Redmond stops arguing that it's feature-complete and encourages customers to seek out supplementary tools from partners.

4) The top end of the Web CMS market will be redefined
This happened. OpenText/Vignette and IBM continue to fade. EMC gave up on Documentum Web Publisher, Oracle is effectively deprecating its UCM (neé Stellent) WCM in favor of its new FatWire acquisition, and the future of Interwoven TeamSite/LiveSite has gotten even dicier with HP's acquisition of Autonomy. The big boys, long fading, have almost disappeared, getting replaced by a bevy of more focused alternatives.

5) Intranet community managers will adopt public social functionality
We've definitely seen more of this, though it's still not pervasive.

6) SaaS vendors will try to separate from "The Cloud"
Nope, we were wrong. If anything the opposite: SaaS vendors have uniformly embraced fluffy Cloud terminology to ride that wave of hype. This was the case even among those SaaS players that don't actually employ Cloud-based technology.

7) Buyers will have a greater acceptance of newer standards
In some cases (CMIS, HTML5) yes, but in other cases (activitystrea.ms, OpenSocial) not so much, yet.

8) Case Management will become the leading application from high-end ECM vendors
Absolutely. Case management actually constitutes a family of applications relevant to many different types of organizations. It's where much of the non-SharePoint ECM action lies today.

9) Digital Asset Management vendors will greatly expand video management capabilities
This happened, though perhaps not as heavily as we predicted. It remains unclear whether traditional DAM players have the chops to compete effectively with more video-oriented vendors.

10) E-mail will remain the world's de-facto enterprise document repository and workflow system
Alas, we were correct. Companies ditching e-mail remain very much the exception and not the rule.

11) Portal software will increasingly produce services for other portals
Hard to know exactly. Major enterprise software gets talked about more than implemented, but portals seem the opposite. Enterprises who have committed heavily to portal technology continue to invest in those platforms -- or perhaps more tellingly -- in the systems around those platforms. Yet more enterprises are getting comfortable with multiple portals, including "portal lite" applications.

12) Specialized talent around managing content will begin to migrate out of large corporations
This is an organic trend that's difficult to track, but we saw increasing evidence of it last year, as consultancies and integrators desperate for more talent continued to comb the ranks of enterprises for experienced specialists. There's no recession in information management technology right now...

By my count, we were about 9 out of 12, or 75%. Not bad, not awesome. About the same rate as previous years -- and a reasonable co-efficient to add to our 2012 predictions. Look for those new predictions from us in the next few days....

It is an important question that we probably don't ask enough, and buyers might want to ask the same of ECM (Enterprise Content Management) suppliers. Yes, seriously...

Take for example EMC Documentum. Their motivation is driving their storage and cloud business. On the other hand Oracle with its newly named WebCenter Content product wants to drive its database and business application businesses. And IBM FileNet is focused on complex business process management and the associated consulting and support services.

Cliché maybe, and certainly I am oversimplifying here, but you don't have to scratch far below the surface to know that I am in principal correct.  They may all be ECM players at the high end of the market, but what got them there and keeps them there is different in each case.

Each time I return to researching for our product evaluations and advisory services  (currently focused on Search, ECM, and Cloud File Shares) I initially think "They all look the same as one another!"  And from a distance they do. They have been designed to do the same job as one another, and to sell in the same markets.  Marketing and messaging staff move between one similar supplier to another, and in time it can be hard to hear clearly through the noise.

But once you get your finger on what really drives each firm the differences start to reveal themselves. Full-blown ECM systems are complex and are typically made up of many interlocking modules, so identifying the differences in approach and their strengths and weaknesses, as we do in our product evaluations can take a lot of work.  But even seemingly simple services such as Cloud-based file sharing systems like Huddle, Box.Net, and Dropbox have more differences, flat contradictions, and individual DNA than a casual glance might suggest. Buyers who would take plenty of time to understand the nuts, bolts, and DNA of an ECM system are well advised to do the same when considering seemingly low cost, low stress Cloud services. Otherwise you could be in for some nasty surprises.