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.

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

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.

Community venues are fast evolving. In the public sphere, the action has transitioned largely (though not completely) to public social networks, where innumerable sub-communities have emerged. Intra-enterprise investments, not surprisingly, have followed more slowly. However, we're seeing enterprises of all stripes paying greater attention to internal communities as key applications within the digital workplace.

But just what constitutes a community? And why is the answer important?

For starters, it's important to distinguish between a community versus simple interaction and feedback. If I comment on an article within my local newspaper website, am I joining a community? The newspaper might think so, but I don't, and it's my opinion as the poster that matters here. A community is something more than a collection of threaded comments -- however valuable those are in their own right -- and that "something more" is where added business value lies.

Intranet guru Jane McConnell defines communities as "Groups of people with a shared interest or practice, who communicate, exchange ideas, and collaborate." This is a great starting point, and I'll extend it with a short list of characteristics that I think make for a real community. If I'm missing some, please chime in with your comments.

Communities have explicit membership. Membership is more than just a login or even a profile, but a sense of belonging and commitment, which is much harder to define but extremely important. One sign of a real community is that members have actively annotated their profiles (with picture, interests, and so on). This in turn conveys obligations for community "owners" to understand members' commitment and manage accordingly -- i.e., with a deft hand that allows membership broad leeway to define where the community goes. By the way, for a great resource on this very issue, consult The Community Roundtable.

Members visit regularly, even without prompting. Members want to participate regularly, to see what the community is up to. Sure, signalling and alerts from the system are essential, and people will want to commune around useful new content, as well. Still, I find it interesting that on media and sports sites, readers will comment on new articles, but communities tend to form around particular stars or personas. Perhaps there are lessons here for internal enterprise communities.

Members have the ability and inclination to connect directly with each other. The nature of those connections will vary, and large communities need to account for a variety of different member-to-member interaction services. Member-to-member interaction separates true communities from workaday user generated content.

Note that I'm not suggesting that digital communities are the shining future of intranet and web interaction. There is a place for ad-hoc interactivity and many people simply don't want to join yet another community, either at work or outside work. The absence of a community does not mean you should forgo the possibility for pervasive interaction with you, the site owner.

Nevertheless, I believe communities are an increasingly important phenomenon, especially within enterprise firewalls. In fact, this phenomenon is one of the key reasons why savvier enterprises are reluctant to commit wholeheartedly to SharePoint (which famously lacks key community services), even as they leverage SharePoint's ample document-sharing and workflow services.

In any event, it's an area we are covering much more closely in our Enterprise Collaboration and Social Software vendor evaluations. And I'm still trying to better understand all the nuances. So keep those questions coming...

Single-source and multi-channel publishing are often two important requirements of a content management system. While these are rather common features now when publishing to more than one web-based destinations (such as an Intranet and a public-facing web site), it has never been easy to publish to print and web using the same source.

There are many reasons for this. For example (thanks to @pranshuj for sharing these): proper typesetting - hyphenation and justification, text wrapping, and font control (e.g.. Kerning) work differently in print than they do on the web. The way graphics are handled by browsers and more broadly the way editing, sub-editing, page composition works is also different for print and web. Finally, the tools of the trade and the process of handling advertisements for web and print is quite different.

Because of these reasons, the two systems have usually been different and often result in a lot of duplication in content storage, workflows and other aspects. Many content management systems have tried to address this but have only been at best partially successful.

Sitecore, with its acquisition of Pectora seeks to address this old but very important gap. With more and more people now consuming even the print content on their digital devices (such as iPads), addressing this gap will provide a good differentiation for Sitecore.

However, remember the two worlds are still very different sometimes in terms of processes, tools and stakeholders. So while the new tool will provide an integrated setup with "connectors" (which can have varying levels of effectiveness), it remains to be seen how successfully this gap is bridged and if other WCM players follow suit.

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.

So why don't we review MarkLogic in our Search & Information Access research? It's a fair question to pose, and some of our subscribers do ask, often after talking to MarkLogic salespeople.

To answer it, my colleague Theresa Regli and I wrote an advisory paper "Is MarkLogic an Option for Enterprise Search?" It describes what enterprise search is; what MarkLogic is; and why MarkLogic isn't enterprise search.

Subscribers can download the paper here.

What could have been a snoozefest in fact turned into a full-on attack of the value and promise of Cloud Computing. At one point the panelists had the audience laughing out loud at the "joke."

Some quotes from the panel:

"Everybody wants cloud like access to content, but they also want tangible ownership of their content"
"The people in Egypt had a hard time reaching the Cloud recently..."
"The Library of Congress putting everything into the Cloud is remarkably naive"
"There is justifiable and important paranoia regarding the Cloud if you are an archivist"

I can't say I am in agreement with the panelists. At The Real Story Group, we ourselves use various hosted options, several of which leverage a true Cloud-based infrastructure.  You should notice, though, that like most pundits, our firm is much smaller than the typical enterprise.  Nevertheless, we regularly recommend hosted offerings for customers where it makes a decent fit.

That said, I don't see customers clamoring for Cloud options, or buying into the dream to the extent vendors and their paid-for pundits would have you believe. Yes adoption is growing rapidly, but so does anything from a low base point.  Cloud most definitely has its place and its value, and I for one happily champion those, but the visceral resistence to the very idea in some quarters stems from equally valid reasons. 

Consider Google GMail, the poster child for Cloud. In the past year alone GMail has had the following "adventures:"

• Erased 150,000 users emails and contacts in Feb 2011
• Multiple outages in 2009/10
• Exposure of 176 million user contacts with the ill-fated launch of Buzz

I single out GMail simply because it is by far the most quoted Cloud-based application in any corporate discussion, even though it is a full-blown SaaS application, rather than a more narrowly-focused, infrastructurally-oriented Cloud service.

The Cloud is no silver bullet. As long as Cloud -- in all its various and sometimes opaque incarnations -- gets pushed to customers as the answer to all their dreams, buyers will remain rightly skeptical.

We'll be undertaking much more research in the coming year into Cloud, particularly the criteria you need to consider when comparing on-premise, off-site, and hybrid options across various application layers.  But the one thing we won't be doing is cheerleading for one delivery method over another, since as of today they all have their rightful place.

That question has been asked every year for the past decade, and though in early 2008 we stated that DAM was "always the bridesmaid and never the bride," it seems at least it's on a serious date. Pure-play DAM vendors like North Plains are expanding services teams, ADAM landed a few big-name clients in 2010 and grew its team by 20%, MediaBeacon added a raft of new functionality to its software, while Autonomy and OpenText are attempting to keep their longtime MediaBin and Artesia customers via an upgrade to major new platforms. 

The action and growth in the DAM world can in some part be credited to SMBs outside the media, advertising, and broadcast industries taking up an interest in this area. We have subscribers in the non-profit, medical, and government sectors who have started to ask how they can better manage their photographs and video, in particular, and are educating themselves in the discipline of DAM, as well as vendor weaknesses and strengths.

Meanwhile, longtime DAM system users from the M&E or ad agency world are looking at taking the next step - be it upgrading their DAM to a more modern, multi-faceted tool, or turning their system into something outward-facing to service customers or other 3rd parties. 

Our 2011 DAM market analysis takes a look at these trends, and delves into depth on how each of the 20+ vendors we cover plays a part.  Stay tuned - if you're not already managing multimedia or brand assets, you will be soon.

Frankly, I wonder what took them so long. After all, what good is content if it cannot be delivered and consumed? In my opinion, aligning content management and delivery should always have been a key use case.

Nevertheless, better late than never. In our research and among the vendors that we cover, we see three broad patterns for enabling this convergence:

1. Single product: In this case, you use the same product for both Management and Presentation. Many WCM vendors have built presentation capabilities and conversely, many Portal vendors have built content management capabilities. While these may not be as good as those found in standalone products, they may be good enough for certain use cases. Examples of these products are:  Plone, Drupal, Fatwire, Clickability, Microsoft Sharepoint and quite a few others from this list.
   
   
2. Multiple products from the same vendor: In this case, same vendor has products for these two aspects and the two products are usually used in conjunction with each other. Open Text  Portal and Web Experience Management (erstwhile Vignette Portal and VCM), and IBM Lotus WCM with IBM Websphere Portal are examples of this. Although the two products are separate -- with their own licensing and infrastructure requirements, and can function as standalone tools -- they work best together.
    
3. Completely different products: In this case, you deploy completely different products for managing content and delivering it. You either use them in a completely decoupled mode or undertake custom integration. Some vendors might offer pre-built integrations or have partnerships that make it easier to integrate but you still end up with completely different sets of products. Autonomy Interwoven TeamSite managing content that is delivered via an Oracle Portal or Alfresco content delivered via Liferay Portal are examples of this scenario.

All of these are valid options and like everything else, there are trade-offs in terms of flexibility, ease of implementation, costs, and resources. For example, while the third option is probably most complex, it gives you maximum flexibility if you have a heterogeneous architecture consisting of one or more of presentation and management systems. We'll be detailing these pros and cons and offering some advice in a forthcoming advisory, but in the meantime, you can check our WCM or Portals and Content Integration research to see which products excel at which option. If you have any specific experience or feedback on this issue, please leave a comment below, tweet me or send an email.

Oracle has a play in almost all the aspects of Enterprise Software: Portals, ECM, ERP, CRM, SCM, Middleware, and Retail. However, e-commerce is one area where it has gaps. Known for its commerce offerings, ATG will nominally plug those gaps and allow Oracle to compete more actively with IBM, who has IBM Commerce and Sterling Commerce offerings for e-commerce. From a nobody in e-commerce, Oracle will now suddenly become a "Leader" in analyst reports.

While ATG is known for its Commerce Suite and targets e-commerce scenarios exclusively, it also has many other components in the platform. For example, it has a pretty decent personalization engine, content management capabilities, features for self service / contact centers, analytics, and many other capabilities. These capabilities can actually make it a suitable Portal platform for many scenarios. In fact, many of its existing customers use ATG as a horizontal portal and we ourselves used to cover ATG in our Portals and Content Integration research until a few years back.

What this means is that, just like with most other acquisitions, there will be huge overlaps with Oracle's existing offerings. You would be forgiven for losing count of the number of Portal-type offerings Oracle now owns, and this will just add to that. It's not yet clear if Oracle will make ATG a part of Fusion Middleware, another component in the WebCenter Suite, or some other group within Oracle.  Oracle acquired BEA in 2008 and Stellent in 2006 and those integrations are not really what I would call seamless. Similarly, it will not be trivial to integrate ATG with other Oracle offerings.

However, within those constraints, it is probably a good news for most customers. For ATG's existing  customers who had been anxious about the company's financial performance, this news will be comforting. For others, there's no change in the near term other than the fact that they'll have a more stable e-commerce vendor to include on their short lists.

Digital Asset Management has grown in importance for us here at The Real Story Group just as it has grown in profile globally as an area of strategic investment for both creative teams and IT. I remember first writing and researching on DAM whilst at Ovum in 2002. My goal was to launch an evaluation service dedicated to the topic similar to the one we run now, but customer tests at that time told us there was no viable market for the research.  In 2010 things have changed dramatically, and DAM technology now lies on many enterprise agendas, in large part simply because marketing has gone digital, and the volume, size, and complexity of digital files has become overwhelming. 

Nevertheless, DAM remains a very poorly understood product area. Many organizations buy unsuitable products or ditch their attempts at buying anything at all due to endemic confusion. Hopefully this conference, my talk on Thursday, and others like it will help in some small way to rectify things.

Events such as this in Manhattan tend to draw an interesting and well informed crowd, so not only am I looking forward to presenting (20 things, etc. etc.), but also to the interaction and feedback with the attendees.  If you are going to be there, come along and say hello!

• 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

India recently finalized its 3G policy and although we are way behind many countries, it is expected that 3G subscribers will cross the 100 million mark - that's more than the total population of many countries - within 5 years. With one of the lowest rates in the world (20 paise a minute or about 0.5 cents for a 3G video call) and innovations such as the $35 tablet, I don't doubt that estimate at all.  3G will reach where wired broadband could not.

What concerns me though are some of the other challenges that remain largely unaddressed:

1. I don't think the content providers and app developers have understood local pricing yet.  Many of them have their global pricing strucutures applicable here. In fact, many of them have actually priced their offerings higher in India. I am no economist but I also understand that the incremental cost of producing a digital product is miniscule as compared to that of a physical product. A small blog post is not enough to discuss all the intricacies of pricing but the content providers (and also the vendors) should keep their options open for differential pricing as well as pricing which is in line with cost of other things. After all, a customer who pays 0.5 Cents for a 3G video call is hardly likely to pay $20 for a social networking client
2. It is just not sufficient to have iPhone or Blackberry versions of your site if you want your content to be consumed more broadly. You need to be able to have much more fine-grained support for different types of handsets, and not just a few types of smart-phones. We detail why this is important and how this can be implemented in an advisory paper, "Adapting Your Content Management Platform for Mobile Delivery"  for our subscribers.
3. Localization is very important. There are 22 official languages and many more dialects as well as unofficial languages spoken in India. So your content systems should make it easier for users to interact in local languages.  Having a Unicode compliant WCM system is not enough; you also need to have local language interfaces to enter content in users' language of choice. I'm not suggesting that there should be a version of TweetDeck in all 22 languages, but you get the idea.
4. Apart from the language, there are many other unique aspects that these systems should support or enable. As an example, if some of the vendors were to come up with an out-of-the-box accelerator for building Matrimony or Astrology sites -- the two most popular type of web content in India -- I am sure they would have a big customer base
5. And finally, for  app developers, there is a serious lack of support in terms of SDKs, APIs, policies, and documentation for them to be able to create language-specific, localized applications.  As an example, some app stores do not allow you to submit applications that are ad supported. So you can only submit apps that are either free or paid but not that are supported by any alternative business model. If someone wants to develop a highly unique application such as the one that allows tobacco farmers in rural India to participate in tobacco auctions, the only way to make money would be by way of ads (example courtesy @pranshuj)

In one of the conference keynotes, a speaker explained how mobile apps are going to be big. He gave his own example of how he starts his day by checking his Facebook account, prepares for a music concert, books movie tickets, and does a lot of other stuff all using his "smart" handset. While I don't subscribe to this hype - in this case, our friend probably doesn't have a laptop or life - I do believe that there is a huge opportunity waiting to be tapped, and  some of these challenges will need to get addressed sooner than later.

On a related note, I will be speaking about how to manage content for the mobile world in my session at the J. Boye conference in Aarhus. Please feel free to leave a comment or send me an e-mail if you'd like me to cover anything specific.

Though I'm an analyst, not a fortune teller, my best guess is that Adobe will turn Day's DAM into another "boxed" solution, much like the products of their Creative Suite. Under Adobe, Day's DAM will more likely compete with Extensis, Canto, and Xinet for mid-market, lower-priced, and departmental DAM needs, than grow into an enterprise player. As Apoorv pointed out in our first take on the acquisition, Adobe doesn't have deep experience selling server-side software.

Otherwise, Adobe has a lot of work to do on their new DAM product before it can compete with the major players in the DAM space. As a buyer with creative specialists employing Adobe tools on the desktop every day, don't assume that buying Adobe's DAM is necessarily the right choice for you.

Products like Adobe LiveCycle help the automatic generation and dynamic delivery of personalized documents, usually for customer communications such as insurance quotes or e-bills sent by your telco. 

Adobe's LiveCycle's customers who wanted ECM capabilities had an option of using an embedded Alfresco repository. But now they will also be able to use Day's CRX as well as have tighter integration with Day's Digital Asset Management and Social Collaboration offerings. The announcement does not say anything about whether Alfresco will be replaced by CRX in LiveCycle, so if you are an existing customer of this offering, you'll need to wait and see what the implications may be. 

Existing Day customers may better benefit from the acquisition as they will likely be able to use some of Adobe's personalization capabilities (such as clickstream cloud) in conjunction with LiveCycle as well as have a tighter integration with Adobe's Flash, Flex and other technologies.

The deal will conclude in December 2010 and the FAQ mentions that the current management of Day will continue through 2011. But we recommend you ask for a detailed roadmap from your rep.

The deal also has a significance in terms of the general marketplace. For many organizations, the content lifecycle includes much more than what is "typically" considered part of ECM. In many cases, the end document (e.g., policy or bill) consists of some standard elements such as salutation and greetings along with elements that are specific to you. In the case of a policy, the specific elements could be based on your risk profile or legal terms based on your state or country of residence. In the case of a bill, these specific elements could be new tariff plans or campaigns based on your past history. In these examples, the organization needs to collect information (such as demographics), take it through a business process and then based on some rules, dynamically generate and publish the end result. 

We believe that all of these should be part of content lifecycle and that is the reason why in our ECM & Document Management Marketplace 2010, we've argued that features such as document assembly and dynamic publishing will get increased attention from mainstream ECM vendors in the future. Many other vendors that we cover in our ECM research, such as EMC (with Document Sciences),  HP (with Exstream), Oracle (with Documaker) already have offerings that strive to bring together these two aspects. We plan to include a separate section on Dynamic Publishing and review many such products in our next version of the ECM Report.

As for Adobe and Day, the question that nobody can answer at present is whether Adobe can really sell enterprise-grade customizable software. Their history of selling shrink-wrapped, lower-priced, high-volume software has built the firm into a Silicon Valley giant, but their ability to sell small-scale but very high-value enterprise software deals remains untested. The biggest danger for current Day customers may be that Adobe will want to take the technology, and over time commoditize it into shrink wrapped low-cost functionality bundles. But again, at this stage we can only speculate. And you as a buyer and user of the technology can do no more than act with extreme caution and ensure that any promises made by the Day and Adobe are solid and verifiable.

I'm not going to get into the details of how to add the button -- there are plenty of tutorials on that. Suffice it to say you can either use a simple iFrame, or go all the way using FBML and a Facebook application. The end result will look something like this: click the button below to "Like" the Real Story Group website.

You can do a lot more with the button:

• The "Like" buttons we now append to each blog post will actually like the individual post, not the entire website
• You could make these part of an application; you'd be able to get stats on how well-liked your articles, products, or posts are
• You could also, then, start pushing similar content to Facebook users that liked your content

However, as my colleague Tony Byrne observed, "just because you can, doesn't mean you should." Certainly, when visitors like your content, that means more exposure. But it also means more exposure outside of the context of your website.

In a sense, this is a natural progression from RSS syndication. On this blog, we're well aware that many of our readers don't necessarily visit our site -- they get the content in their feed readers, without our carefully crafted design. (We publish the whole posts in the RSS, not just the abstracts.) That's fine, since we don't make money on advertising around our content -- instead, we're advertising our content.

But obviously, not everybody is pleased with this new reality. Rupert Murdoch is waging a battle with Google "taking his news for nothing." And yesterday, the NYT demanded the Pulse application be pulled from Apple's App Store, since it pulled in NYT content and published it in a different context (the Pulse app).

But even if you're fine with everyone indexing, liking, and retweeting your content, you may not like what happens around it. You might want to see what people are saying about your content, wherever it is they're saying it. You may want to enforce strict rules on how your content looks when it is presented. You may want to add context to it.

To Facebook, of course, it's not so much your content that has value, but the relationships between people and their likes. This becomes part of their Social Graph (which has little to do with graphs, but is all about mapping social networks). There are a couple of sites that make use of Facebook's API to show you what your friends like (such as Like Button). This gives some sense of what kind of information Facebook is gathering. If there's anything Facebook itself likes, it's becoming the central hub of all of these relationships. And of course, so would Google, Twitter, Yahoo, LinkedIn, and many others.

In effect, this means your carefully crafted online publication is under your control, but not your content. As soon as you publish it, it rides off into the sunset, and it may, or may not, live happily ever after. Be careful not to imagine your websites as some sort of non-linear books, nicely bound in leather and sent to known subscribers. If you still want to use paper as an analogy, imagine it as a stack of sheets blowing away in the wind on a busy street. It's going to be difficult to manage that experience.

Of course, these aren't physical pages, and there are many ways to trace them, regroup, and stack them. But it's important to think about the mechanics of content flows across the internet, instead of just pushing out your publication.

Facebook's "Likes" might be a good place to start finding out what that's going to mean for your Web CMS, and perhaps more importantly, for the content you're managing. Traditional content management concepts like "placeless" content, canonical templates, and the separation of content and presentation now take on a much broader meaning. Our tools and our content will need to adapt.

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.

Both these applications run on FatWire's Content Server platform that we cover in our Web Content Management research. Although FatWire claims you can deploy these products independently, I am skeptical of the value proposition of running them independently even if it were possible. Both these products tie into Content Server via FatWire's "WEM" -- not the marketing acronym that is getting popular these days -- but an integration framework the company released sometime back. This framework essentially allows you to create applications on top of Content Server and provides features like single sign-on, unified interface, and a single administration window. Just like Drupal, FatWire wants to target those social use cases that are driven largely by content.

However, don't assume that adding a new product such as Community Server onto your Content Server installation will in itself convert your existing application to a community platform. Technical and functional considerations might require you redesign your application. In our WCM evaluation research we lay out some important architectural options and considerations for managing user-generated content (hint: neither FatWire nor Drupal's approach is ideal).

FatWire's Gadget Server is based on Apache's Shindig project. It allows you to create gadgets based on Google's Open Social standard. Your site visitors then can pick and choose the gadgets they want and personalize their interface. As of now, there are only a few gadgets available out-of-the-box, and the percentage of visitors who will actively modify page functionality or layout tends to be very low.

Perhaps more usefully, the new module now provides an additional delivery channel to FatWire content because you can embed an Open Social gadget on any web page, including those not driven by FatWire, and therefore more easily distribute content.

Nevertheless, you may be disappointed to learn that these gadgets are only for site visitor related functionality and not for editorial functionality, at a time when many competitors are employing gadgets to offer different content contributors the exact functionality they need, in lieu of struggling with one complex interface that everyone uses.

In any case, just like with Community Server, consider architectural implications carefully before deciding whether you want a completely gadget-based front end or a hybrid front end where only some functionality gets driven by gadgets.

Frankly speaking, the new features offered by these products are not very complex to implement. You could always create a new asset type, such as "comment," and associate it with another asset type such as "news" to achieve the desired functionality. In fact, FatWire has been offering a separate Blog module, free of cost, for some time. What's more important in my view is the the new administrative and configuration capabilities to manage these modules from a familiar interface. You can also take advantage of some of Content Server's scalability and integration services with these new products.

Overall, both the new products provide a useful set of features. With Community Server, FatWire is probably playing catch-up, since this functionality has been offered by many other products for some time. With Gadget Server, FatWire becomes one of the very few vendors to offer in-built gadget services that allow you to run third-party Open Social Gadgets on your infrastructure.

We're working on a deeper critique of these two new modules for our regular Web CMS updates to our subscribers.

As such, I thought I'd take the time to explain.

1) The "core" application is the interface (usually web-based, but sometimes a desktop client) that employees within an organization use to upload and manage assets. It often has a wide breadth of functionality, some of which is visible (or not) to those end-users based on their rights.

2) The external or "self-service" application is usually a pared-down version of the core application. It is only accessible via the web and tends to be leveraged by users external to the organization. The functions tend to be limited to download, upload, and other simple transformation functions that allow agencies, partners, or customers to easily and securely access digital assets in their desired format. 

3) The administrative application is for the system administrator to configure, manage, and specify how people will access #1 and #2, review analytics of how the system is being used, and so on.

Where the confusion often starts is when, as is often the case with DAM products, #2 looks completely different from #1. This is where it's important to note that most DAM products are a platform: that is to say, highly malleable and open to customization. That includes the interfaces. So when a vendor is showing the core application and then switches over to the external or as they sometimes call it (to further confusion) "portal" application, chaos ensues.

"Wait, what am I looking at now?" says the brand manager. I often then find myself drawing boxes and arrows illustrating what's behind and in front of the firewall, and having to say, "you can make the interface look however you want it to." Internal brand managers sometimes feel their external suppliers should have the same user experience they do, while others could care less -- as long as the task is accomplished.

If you're looking at DAM systems, it's important to examine and test the core/internal, external, and administrative applications. If you don't want to perform a lot of customization, be sure to get clear information on what the default configurations are, and test those default UIs with your use-case scenarios. Some vendors neglect their admin interfaces as if admins don't care about usability. Sometimes external applications are overly complicated, or over-simplified, depending on how much functionality you may want to offer to external agencies and partners. 

And, since that external application often comes at an additional cost, be sure to determine if you really need it. I've seen some brand managers recoil in horror, saying some "fancy" external application isn't necessary.  For them, putting the completed assets on an FTP server for external partners to access would be just fine. 

We review the differences among these applications, and how they affect overall DAM pricing, in our DAM research stream. 

• Autonomy/Interwoven TeamSite: Do the actual improvements in V7 match the hype?
• EMC|Documentum Web Publisher: Into the long good night...
• CoreMedia: Various minor improvements
• Escenic: Still just for media companies?
• WordPress: When does it work (and not work) as a CMS?

If you are a subscriber, you can read or download all the updated evaluations here.

BT Mosaic boasts extensive rich media services, in that their (SaaS-based) offering stretches beyond Digital Asset Management to production facilities, and most importantly digital distribution.  BT Mosaic's customers are able to make use of BT's (British Telecom's) network expertise to link and push content throughout global broadcast networks.

BT Mosaic was an interesting spin off from BT, one that had done fairly well commercially while building up it's network reach and services. Most likely Tata will continue to support BT Mosaic's focus on media companies, but I would expect Tata to absorb elements of the Mosaic services  and start to offer this into broader enterprise IT offerings.

There will always be a market for standalone DAM software, meeting the needs of marketing departments for example. Rich digital media is making up an increasing percentage of enterprise content, and it's only going to grow.  Not only is it easier to create digital media these days, but the demand and expectation is growing exponentially.  Digital media is becoming pervasive and needs to be managed alongside and in lock step with all our enterprise content, not as an exotic exception.

The next couple of years for DAM will be fascinating to watch, as one way or another Digital Media is going to continue to grow in importance far beyond its traditional uses and constituents, and become a key element of any Enterprise Information strategy.

Here's an example that's been tried around the world with varying success.  Say you're running the web presence of some medical organization. As such, you have information on how to deal with various diseases, both on a general level (hygiene and disease prevention) and very specific (what to do when a flu breaks out).

Suddenly there is an outbreak of a new disease; let's say the elephant flu. You could prepare a news bulletin, which would automatically appear on information portals for medical professionals, consumers, etc. -- all the sites targeted to specific audiences for which this news might be of interest.

Better still, since you've already built up a large repository of information, it would be easy to launch an elephant flu theme site: just define the kind of content you'd want in there, and hey presto, with one click you've got an entire site with all the information (http://www.allaboutelephantflu.org). Content specifically on the elephant flu, but also the more generic topics on how to deal with a disease or whom to contact.

You can imagine why this is a compelling concept. Which is probably why I've seen attempts in many different areas, ranging from media companies, governments, product marketing companies, and insurance companies.

But, I said, elusive dream. Many have tried (I count myself among them), and many have failed (unfortunately, I can't really discount myself entirely from that group, either). That's because there are three major problems when you've actually implemented the infrastructure to do it. Since this is only a blog post, I'll pick the most obvious one for now.

The content needs metadata for this to work. Many will tell you that "people won't tag." No, seriously, they won't tag content with the right labels, add the right metadata, or correctly categorize, "even if threatened with being fired." And even if they do tag, it will be haphazard and inconsistent.

This is a very real problem. But at the same time it's complete nonsense. Because if this were the case, why would people meticulously tag and file their holiday snapshots on Flickr and Facebook? Somehow, in their spare time, they do identify the people in a picture, add keywords to a shot, give it a meaningful title, and actually describe it. Without having to be threatened with being fired, or even having to be beaten with a stick.

Partly this is because they get the feedback that makes it worth their while to do so. If you identify your friends in a picture on Facebook, they (and then their friends) will immediately find it and start commenting, which creates a positive feedback loop to tag some more. More importantly though, it's really easy.

If you get back to work the next day, and have to laboriously click ten times, scroll, add, categorize, while thinking what the right category within the taxonomy would be, it all feels like an insubordinate amount of trouble to go through. In most WCM systems and implementations (and dare I say it -- most ECM implementations are much, much worse) it's just too much trouble.

Fortunately, I'm beginning to see some change. There are now quite a few ways in which CMSs can make it easier on your editors to identify the content they're producing:

• Using a "free-for-all" folksonomy, where you can just quickly type in a few keywords. The problem of course, is that the tags will often be wildly inconsistent and ambiguous. Check a tag cloud near you for tags like "New York," "NY," "newyork," and of course, the typo that got away, "new yok." This can be made easier by type-ahead auto-completion of tags. Some systems will start listing suggestions as you type, and helpfully, with some, what you type doesn't have to be the beginning of the tag ("york" will also suggest "New York.") The auto-complete effectively normalizes the tags (i.e., at least all of them will be "New York.") It may still be ambiguous and inconsistent, but at least for many purposes, it'll be workable.
• Using suggestions. Usually with the help of an embedded search engine such as Lucene, the system comes up with tags and related links for your content (based on similar content it finds.) At first, this will need quite a bit of training, but the great thing is that the more content is accurately identified, the better the system gets. The suggestions can be used to completely automate the process, but since you'll still have the original author at hand in the editing screen, you can take advantage of this and ask them to validate the suggestions as they are saving the content. That's a lot easier than having to think them up themselves.

It's still more common to see any folksonomy functionality smoothly integrated into Social Software, and auto-categorization or auto-classification is an area where Search & Information Access systems are usually way ahead. But a few web CMSs are making headway into this territory, as well. For GOSS, which has mostly customers in the UK government, its ability to suggest related content, and categorize it in the IPSV (the Integrated Public Sector Vocabulary) is a unique selling point, and the company has been honing this for the past few years. Hippo (who, incidentally, recently won a large Dutch government account, so there may be a pattern there) is working on releasing similar functionality this fall.

There are others with such capabilities; but at the same time, many are lagging. A system that hides keywords and categories on the fourth tab, three items down under "metadata," and then makes users jump hoops to enter the information isn't likely to help. And some products are so thin on metadata, no amount of customization is ever going to make it work for your users. Carefully check before you buy.

But the good news is that if you share this dream of at least partly automating a metadata- driven architecture, the metadata part of that dream can be realized. Of course, that means there are at least two other major hurdles to take -- but that's enough for now.  I'll return to this topic again...