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.

The Europe edition of the Creatasphere Digital Asset Management conference in the Hague brought together DAM customers, vendors, and consultants for a few days.  Bringing this event to Europe is fitting given that quite a few leading DAM vendors that we review in our evaluations are European.

For those of you who missed it, here are the Top 10 take-aways, culled from both formal presentations and informal chats.

1. DAM is gaining mindshare in the C-suite.  Historically considered to be a “niche within a niche,” DAM projects are slowly but surely coming onto the radar of the CXOs. In particular, CMOs and CIOs are paying more attention as DAM initiatives shed their silo orientation and get integrated with larger enterprise systems. The times they are a changin’, but departmental implementations still outnumber the enterprise wide implementations.
2. Big is not necessarily better: Large content management vendors seem to be reluctant players in the DAM arena, so much so that their DAM offerings come off as a kind of step child.  Big ECM vendors don’t seem to sell DAM on a stand-alone basis but always as part of a larger solution.  More often than not, when a large ECM vendor ingests a specialist DAM vendor, the DAM product languishes without regular releases, product enhancements, and well-defined roadmaps
3. It’s not raining clouds:  This is perhaps one of the few technology conferences where cloud-washing and hype were not present. Neither the vendor presentations nor the customer examples referred to the Cloud in a big way. If any, we heard that the cloud adoption for DAM solutions will be slower than other segments of the technology industry because of security, control, and secrecy concerns. 
4. Jury still out on Mobile DAM:  The role of mobile devices for content consumption is well understood and such support is currently available in most DAM products. However, when it comes to content creation cycle / workflow, it’s a divided house. We’ll have to wait and watch which of the DAM capabilities (e.g. only approval vs. full blown functionality) users demand and vendors will add to their products. 
5. DAM is still learning how to be social: There is a lot of client interest in using some “social” functionality in their projects but as of now, DAM products are not brimming with social features. We still have a way to go when it comes to “socializing” DAM products.
6. Emergence of CollabFlow:  Workflow is linear. Step 1, Step 2, Step 3... Creative work on digital assets may need to side-step this rigidity to let a hundred flowers bloom and thousands sparks fly, and enable multiple, unstructured contributions. You want to hang a piece of art on the wall, invite comments and touch-up based on feedback. Loosely speaking, “collaboration” enables this dynamic nature of creative work. Users want more of collaboration. In the final analysis, it’s not going to be an “either-or” between workflow and collaboration but both will co-exist as the situation warrants. 
7. Sorry, but the future is not supported: Museum curators and national archivists, tasked with preserving assets for posterity, rightly worry whether today’s formats will be supported in future.  On the other hand, digitization increases access to assets manifold and that in itself may be a compelling reason for DAM projects. As to preserving for the very long term, a multi-pronged approach that involves both digital and analog is a safe bet. The cost of preserving assets through time by continuously upgrading to newer formats is to be kept in mind as well. No easy answers here – only time will tell.
8. Meta-Meta Data:  Content may be king but Context will be emperor. We can almost think of “context” as supercharged metadata  on steroids – as users expect personalized digital experiences to be served fresh in real-time, DAM systems will have to work with multiple other applications and data residing in them to enable the relevant context.
9. Search is still singular:  Despite the notions of immediacy of content and personalized contexts, the single most important functionality demanded and used by customers remains search.  Users not being able to find the assets they need, when they need them, is generally the genesis of the business case for a DAM solution.  Search is a key subsystem that we review in our evaluations.
10. Cool but really useful?  You already know that you’ll use only a tiny fraction of the features available in any software. Do the next-gen search features being added to DAM products like search by shape, search by color, and search by concept fall into this category? Outside of some specialist use cases like crime detection forensics etc, are they really required when good ‘ol metadata can do the trick?  One definite use (for the vendors, of course) is the dazzle factor in the product selection process. 

Welcome your thoughts on other trends in DAM.

The answer people always prefer is of course, "Actually quite a lot, we've been working in this sector for a while."  By sector I mean industry "vertical," such as manufacturing, retailing, banking, insurance, healthcare, and so forth.  If you understand my business you are a part of my world; if you do not then no matter how clever you may be, you will always be an outsider.

That's basic, yet in the world of content management it's not a message or practice that is commonly followed. Most vendors try (with mixed success) to sell to anyone and everyone.  They argue that the technology is "horizontal" as opposed to "vertical," and that it will work equally well in any industry.  There is a validity to this argument, particularly in the world of web publishing.

Nevertheless the more complex the underlying business process the more the need for somebody who understands your business, My goal here is not to give business advice to sellers of technology, but rather to posit the opinion that buyers are quite right to have a heavy bias toward those that understand their specific industry.

True, most organizations are nothing like as unique as they think they are. Once you have seen one transactional document process you have to some extent seen them all. Likewise one media heavy website is much like another.  Further, the underlying technology used in these situations may have different branding, but they tend to be very similar at core. 

The difference and the value is in detail.  Whether you call it a document, content, a case item, a record, or a deliverable matters. Whether you navigate via product types and sub-types or locations and offerings matters.  As a buyer you want your content management system, sites, and services to be better than your competition; you also want it to be comparable to the competition.  Familiarity matters.  You want to work with a supplier that you can understand, that has an intimate understanding of your world and concerns.  Suppliers you can have conversations with, and and built a long term relationship with. 

The horizontal approach to selling and buying technology makes a lot of sense in the consumer world, but much less so in the enterprise.  The one size fits all mentality seldom works, though that does not stop a lot of suppliers from pursuing any and every opportunity no matter how far outside of their typical market reach and comfort zone. 

It's why we at the Real Story Group consider vertical expertise to be an important factor in our ECM product evaluations, for example.  A vendor might have a great technical solution but zero knowledge of the insurance sector (for example) will often rule them as unsuitable to a insurance-focused buyer.  Speeds and feeds are important, usability and functionality equally so, but a simple and genuine understanding of a buyer's world has just as much, if not more importance in the technology buying process.

• Help manuals for your products or services
• Electronic bills sent by utility service providers
• Insurance quotes and policies

Dynamic Publishing is a catch-all phrase and is often referred to in context of various disciplines such as Component Content Management, Automatic Document Assembly, Document Output Management and Document Automation. In our recently released advisory, we explore Dynamic Publishing Systems and what what their capabilities should be. We also explain how these should be considered not in isolation but in the context of your wider Enterprise Content Management (ECM)  initiatives. To quote from the advisory:

Don't consider DPS in isolation: Dynamic Publishing should not be considered as a standalone system. Content and documents that are within the scope of Dynamic Publishing are often subject to the same stages and processes as any other content, such as publishing workflows, version management, archiving and so forth. Hence, you should consider Dynamic Publishing as part of a broader content management initiative. It is very important that the DPS you select has basic ECM capabilities (repository services), or provides connectors to integrate with external ECM, search, and portal tools.

Here's the table of content of the advisory paper Dynamic Publishing Systems -- A Technical Overview

• Key Takeaways
• What is Dynamic Publishing
• Functional Requirements of Dynamic Publishing
  • Content Assembly
  • Rendering, Transformation, and Conversions
  • Graphics Support
  • Process Management
  • Output Management
  • Multichannel Translation Management 
• Key Advice

On the surface, this is a run-of-the-mill strategic acquisition. Dassault has built a business around its 3D technology, and now has a software suite to accommodate the whole conceive, design, realize, and service PLM process. It's become one of the most major vendors in that business (with revenues of €1,251m in 2009) and has enough cash to move from a recently announced OEM partnership to a full-blown acquisition in less than a month. Exalead has been pushing "SBAs" ("search based applications") built on top of its CloudView search infrastructure. There should be plenty of opportunities to integrate that search technology into the PLM cycle.

But there's a little bit more to it than that. The press release struggles to pithily convey it, quoting Yvan Proteau of Yellow Pages: "The combination of these entities will help organizations like ours create better user experiences based on the delivery of information and data in an innovative manner that leverages the latest in 3D technology that consumers have long demanded."

Wait... what? Are we going to see a Yellow Pages iPhone app that uses Exalead to understand what mood you're in, and then uses Dassault technology to display suggested restaurants in 3D?

Actually, they're already halfway there. Yellow Pages recently launched the Urbanizer app, which uses Exalead to recommend places based on your mood. And Dassault has created 3dvia, where users can build 3D environments on-line.

Both companies have a history of generating revenue out of their core technology, and then branching out in all directions from that. For Dassault, the bread-and-butter is 3D and PLM; but it also created 3dvia, and invested in community & collaboration vendor blueKiwi. Exalead's main business is enterprise search; a few years ago, mostly indexing Lotus repositories, and more recently, building larger (and more custom) enterprise integrations. But Exalead also built a large public web search engine, indexed the French President's speeches, and powered an iPhone app.

Normally, with an acquisition like this, I would caution any current or potential customer to think carefully whether the priorities of new owners will still be with their scenarios. However, both Dassault and Exalead have shown they're strongly engineering-driven, and unafraid to trod off the beaten path. With a new wealthy parent, Exalead is not likely to shut down its more exotic projects as irrelevant extravagances. There will be plenty of search applications for Dassault's PLM, and I'm fairly certain Exalead will hold on to its current customers. But don't be surprised to also see an animated, 3d, mood-sensing Yellow Pages search on an iPhone 4 next year.

The launch of Apple's iPad last week has caught the imagination of armchair critics worldwide:

"What's it for?"

"What a funny name (snigger snigger)"

"It's just a big iPhone"

And so on.  But whether the Apple device itself is a success or not, we seem to be approaching a tipping point for improved user interfaces to manage documents.

Be it the Kindle, Tablet, Nook, or iPad, keyboardless document reader devices are on the verge of becoming mainstream -- at least for consumers. For browsing and reading through large volumes of files, or large documents containing multiple pages (books and libraries), such devices are infinitely more user friendly than the current desktop or laptop paradigm.

Take that one step further and it is logical to reach the conclusion that such devices might work well for reading through airliner maintenance manuals, consulting documentary evidence in court,  searching archives, or accessing a patient's medical records and images?  So while the pundits mock the iPad, I see real potential here for the world of case, document and records management.  That said, I already own too many Apple devices, and may have just drunk too much Apple-flavored Kool Aid. But surely it can only be time before some enterprising vendor starts to deliver secure organizational and access applications for these devices.

I for one wish them luck, for as somebody who has spent his career digging through virtual crates, accessing electronic files that I then need to print to actually read, I know for sure that there has to be a better way.

There are at least two different ways that software can specialize: Functionally and Vertically. Functional specialization -- sometimes referred to as "horizontal" specialization -- entails targeting a particular, well-known business use-case, such as e-discovery, that spans multiple different industries. Verticalization happens when a product gets tailored for a specific market "vertical" or industry segment, such as Manufacturing. (Verticalization typically implies functional specialization of some kind as well, but different industries beget different types of functional needs.)

In the opposite direction, some vendors try to create omnibus platforms, making a product or product family more broadly capable, and therefore theoretically applicable to many different verticals and business scenarios. This can be an effective strategy, but at some level is the opposite of specialization. An example of this in the WCM world is Ektron's Web CMS, which started out essentially as a rich-text editor and has broadened, functionally, in a manner that would make the designers of the Swiss Army knife proud. Many other WCM and ECM tools have followed a similar path.

The search marketplace has been quite different. Our latest Search & Information Access Research has found such specialization more the rule than the exception. In fact, it is a major -- maybe the major -- industry trend right now.

For example, when a vendor such as Recommind continues to tailor its products in ways that favor addressing enterprise e-discovery use-cases and the legal marketplace, that's an example of of both functional and vertical specialization.

Other examples of functional and vertical specialization in search are legion.

• Endeca continues to pursue categorization, clustering, and other techniques particularly relevant to the online-retail market (and the intelligence community, as well).
• Surfray is striving to differentiate itself as the "SharePoint search solution."
• Adobe Omniture's SiteSearch has concentrated heavily on an analytics-rich approach to search that appeals to marketers.
• Sinequa, with its emphasis on linguistic analysis, continues to tout its prowess as a multi-repository "knowledge access tool," applicable for KM use-cases and the law enforcement sector.
• Coveo and ISYS, meanwhile, continue to strengthen their capabilities in multi-client (palm/lap/desktop) enterprise search. Coveo, in addition, continues to beef up its BI capabilities; it now offers a search solution tailored for call-centers.

For more examples, consult our newly updated Search & Information Access Research.

Of course, the trend towards specialization search is not universal. Mega-vendor Autonomy offers a dizzying array of diverse search and access tools. Even then, Autonomy increasingly emphasizes "meaning-based computing." I'm not sure what that term means, but we've seen demos for functional use cases like e-commerce.

Overall, we view specialization as a positive trend. It means search vendors (and presumably their customers) understand that search is not really a one-solution-fits-all problem. Search is as much a knowledge-discovery problem as it is a problem of "looking things up." It's about finding things you didn't necessarily know existed. And the tactics for doing that are as varied as the information world itself. There is no one right way to find something, so it stands to reason there is no one general-purpose system that can do it all. Getting the right search solution in place means first and foremost understanding your needs. And that's something we can help you with -- through our research and consultation. Don't hesitate to call on us when the time comes.

First, let's dispense with the idea that there is such a thing as a universally "best" or "leading" CMS. Instead, different vendor offerings "fit" better or worse against individual business scenarios. And of course your budget, architecture, and locale matter too.

So, let's consider the following specific case: you're the Intranet manager for a car parts manufacturer. You're looking to implement a Web CMS for your Intranet, and you've narrowed the choice down two vendors, both with local offices and competent consulting partners, both bidding approximately the same price. Do you prefer Vendor A, whose CMS has gotten implemented several automotive companies? Or Vendor B, who knows little about car parts but whose CMS offering was built primarily for Intranet environments?

For web content management I don't believe your industry matters very much. If it did, there would not be 30+ individual Web CMS vendors and open source projects with installations in the U.S. federal government space, and nearly that many among U.K. public-sector agencies. You'll find a similar breadth of WCM suppliers active within other verticals, like higher education, health care, and financial services.

Note that the situation is completely different in the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) marketplace. By ECM I'm referring to imaging + document management + records management. Document-oriented technologies are very process-oriented, so requirements can become very industry-specific. Consider the example of Autonomy (formerly Interwoven) Worksite, a product purpose-built for the legal profession. Moreover, resellers will frequently take a broad ECM platform and re-wire it for a particular industry. Consequently, in our ECM vendor evaluations -- in addition to functional and business scenarios -- we focus on the vendor's "fit" for twelve different industries ranging from Insurance to Pharmaceuticals.

Many Web CMS vendors will disagree, pointing to their industry-specific "solutions." Usually this entails turning off or on various modules, and serving the result up as a single license package. In my experience, when a vendor claims strong industry expertise, it is usually because they have honed their marketing and sales approach to succeed in that space, rather than offering very much that's functionally germane. Vendors who target your industry may know how to speak your vernacular, but that won't count for much after the vendors' account rep and sales engineers leave, and you go into development on what will become (I hope!) a 5+ year investment.

To be sure, I believe it's helpful to consult with your industry peers when selecting any technology. Joining a community of like-minded customers also has value. However, this gets out of hand when, as one U.S. university explained to me, they selected an obscure CMS package simply because they saw that an ivy league school had implemented it.

Selecting the right CMS tool for your enterprise means balancing a variety of different requirements, but a bare minimum, be sure you understand:

• What sorts of websites you intend to publish
• Your visitors' needs
• Your operational profile and goals

So, all else equal, if I were that Intranet manager, I'd give the edge to Vendor B. Of course, the best way to know for sure is to test both bidders head to head before signing any contracts.

In any case, I hope our WCM research can help you find the right fit. Good luck with your projects!

Judging by early tweets, the Twitterati love it. It validates their "cool." But truly cooler heads are warning about voluminous spam once this gets out beyond social media insiders to people who have axes to grind and links to promote. [Update: (7am GMT -5) It's happening already.]

Of course, this is not the Mars corporate home page. So my first reaction is, "so what -- it's just Skittles' hyper-caffeinated brand agency buzzing up some thought-leader attention." But my second thought: this is a stunt and not a social media strategy. To be sure, the Skittles Facebook page has potential. If I were them, I'd invest any social media resources there.

Nevertheless, the XHive product will add yet another repository to the Documentum architecture, and will also require significant work to allow it be fully accessible in a web services environment, and to make it more user friendly. It's an interesting move for EMC, whose Documentum group has long taken pride in its own compound document management capabilities. XHive will open some new doors, but you will have to wait some time to see this particular technology set make a major impact on EMC|Documentum's architecture or market approach.

Last time around, re-engineering led to ERP and benchmarked best practices. This time around the dynamics are different. Business agility is the latest fashion. That requires technology to be infinitely reconfigurable, but also highly organized at the infrastructure level to have a chance of working. As business applications try go the Web 2.0 route, surely ECM vendors should be working to support customers via best practices and benchmarked processes. Yet a severe lack of consulting skills in the space, along with an endemic disregard for customers leaves many ECM buyers with complex repository and rules management systems that they have no idea how to configure and use properly. Business agility will drive the next wave of change, and ECM could become a key component in that mix, but only if our industry learns the lessons of history, and works with customers to fully maximize their ECM investments -- supporting them long before and after the Purchase Order is cut.