The "creating cross-platform content" session at the NAB Show highlighted the challenges of truly integrated ad production. For example, TV is a linear medium while web/mobile/tablets are interactive. As advertisers increasingly create content simultaneously for multiple media, there are new and different scenarios that  Digital & Media Asset Management products have to support.

Take for instance, Honda's Good Reasons campaign from September 2011. In a series of TV spots and online videos, actor Patrick Warburton promotes the reasons to buy a Honda and directs viewers to online shopping tools. What's interesting to note is the setting: all the action is happening inside the website frame, with different page elements being pointed to or moved around. Producing this calls for exact synchronization between online elements and the offline shoot. From a DAM perspective, this requires maintaining the associations and linkages between different video / audio parts and image assets so as to be able to package them together.

Another example that highlights the complexities of integrated production is the Coca Cola "Move to the Beat" campaign for the upcoming London Olympics. Music Producer Mark Ronson travelled to 5 countries in different continents to record the sounds of sports while aspiring Olympians practice. These beats, instead of the regular music beats, are used to create the "Anywhere in the world" theme song. Here are more details.

A project like this involves multiple different partners and contractors spread across different countries, complex project management and co-ordination, content security and access controls, asset tracking, as well as different types of workflow both in the production phase as well as when the campaign is running.

As they say in the ad world, "Great ideas need landing gear as well as wings." I'm afraid it will be a rough landing for integrated campaigns with many of the DAM products in the market. Currently, many of them are built to support simple, linear workflows across a single medium. You’ll likely have to employ multiple systems and stitch them together yourself to support integrated scenarios that span across channels / platforms.

But in integrated advertising scenarios I can see the seeds being sown for the next generation DAM systems that customers require.

Pixelboxx and their product PrimePack is disciplined and organized, as you might 
expect from a German-engineered 
product. 
Pixelboxx Prime Pack grew from its
 roots of a Fast-Moving Consumer 
Goods (FMCG)-oriented media 
asset management product to a more 
broad offering.

One of the interesting features about this DAM product is their Intermedia Fotoficient module, which (like FlipFactory) acts as a transcoding and rendering engine. The approach of foregoing FlipFactory (which is being used by the majority of DAM vendors we cover) and building its own engine is rather unique.

Unlike Razuna and Picturepark, which also started out in the region adorned with the Alps, Pixelboxx is barely stretching out beyond the DACH region, or beyond primarily serving the German-speaking market. The entire product is very German-centric; despite the utilitarian and minimalistic interface, using it may make you wish you had taken that German class in college.

To be fair, Pixelboxx is trying to establish itself in the UK market via a partner channel, which right now counts one system integrator that is selling and customizing the DAM product. However, it is decidedly too early to speak of Pixelboxx as a global company, but time will tell. You can get the full and real story on this vendor in my detailed evaluation.

Many factors account for the ubiquitous role that video plays in the contemporary enterprise. Whether it’s a movie studio’s cinematic masterpiece, a broadcaster’s news clip, an animation studio’s cartoon, a university’s lecture, or video content in support of an agency-created brand strategy, video has become quite commonplace. From a consumer standpoint, the power of broadband, the capabilities of hand-held devices, and the recognition of the power of video all contribute to the explosion of video assets. Enterprise production and distribution of time-based media (video in particular) calls for specialized technology to support the process.

We're increasingly asked about CDNs and OVPs by our customers who are in the process of selecting a DAM or a MAM system, so in this Advisory Paper, we provide essential definitions and vendor categories, as well as present key factors to consider when selecting Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) and Online Video Platforms (OVPs).

As always, please feel free to send me your questions.

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 reasons are not too difficult to understand. External websites that feature customer interaction are considered a priority, especially for ecommerce environments.  If your customers can't find what they're looking for, then that is bad for business. 

To be sure, searching and providing navigation to an external website is not usually cheap or easy either. But it has one major advantage over internal search: the data wants to be found, and is typically structured, stored, and tagged accordingly.  Most of us are familiar with the very granular and typically very accurate faceted search provided on today's large shopping sites. Search in this environment works well and there is a growing market for it.

Internally focused Enterprise Search remains, as the awful phrase goes, the poor stepchild. Searching multiple internal silos -- full of unmanaged and unstructured information -- is typically a hard, expensive, and disappointing task to undertake. 

So guess where all the Enterprise Search vendors want to focus their efforts these days?

You can't really blame them of course, not the least because the needs of ecommerce and external websites extends far beyond Search.  Being able to find a replacement fridge drawer on the Samsung website (as my wife did today) is scratching the surface of what could be done. As Mike Davis of Ovum said at the recent European Enterprise Search Summit, "Firms like Tesco drive their business from the data on your loyalty card, but they want to know more about you than your transactions."  Ultimately its all about context. As we have said many times before, the context for structured data is often found in an unassociated unstructured file.

And so the world of Search enters the world of true analytics and "Big Data."  What has long been the sole purview of Business Intelligence vendors is now slowly starting to be encroached upon by Search tools from IBM, Oracle (Endeca), HP (Autonomy) and a few independents such as Coveo. I imagine we'll still see two different takes at the same problem for a while, but now that Big Data organizations like IBM, HP, and Oracle are taking Search seriously for once, over time some kind of solid hybrid may just emerge. 

Customer interaction and commerce will grow ever more sophisticated, with predictive analytics taking the lead. No doubt we will see the split between Internal and External Search widen even further over the next couple of years, as some Search vendors at least have finally found a truly lucrative niche, and they are unlikely to turn back now.

Though financial details have not been disclosed it is safe to assume that Oracle paid far less than the $10 Billion-plus that HP spent on Autonomy. Oracle's interest seems a bit more focused however, as they are currently growing their online retail capabilities. As such this acquisition fits in neatly with that strategy and logically enhances the functionality Oracle obtained via their prior acquisition of ATG.  I say "logically" because these tools are not boxes in a powerpoint diagram; they are living systems and any post-merger integrations will be painful for existing customers -- as it always is. 

So what has Oracle actually bought? As subscribers to our Enterprise Search Report already know, Endeca has carved out quite a niche in providing unstructured data analytics in the retail sector, with decent -- albeit broadly mimicked -- guided navigation capabilities. With the right resources (important caveat!) you can also scale their product impressively. Additionally Endeca has a pretty good reputation for customer service and for investing in ongoing research and development, in sharp contrast to Autonomy. 

Yet no product is perfect and Endeca has its challenges too. As a system it promises so much in terms of accuracy that there is often a serious pay off in terms of data cleaning, pre-processing, and resource commitment. Endeca is not simple stuff.

Note also that Oracle already has a search engine of its own called Oracle Secure Enterprise Search. SES serves a somewhat different purpose to the Endeca product, but there is definitely some overlap and customers will want to stay wary.  Oracle SES is a pretty good enterprise search engine, with the ability to federate different data sources within an organization, a common but important workaday business requirement. This is distinct from Endeca's analytical approach to delivering somewhat canned queries to browsers, most typically found in online retail settings.

As always time tells the truest story here. Yet it does pose the question: who is next?  There must be a number of Search vendors out there hoping that they will be acquired soon, and hoping even more strongly that they don't get left on the shelf. Search is a very important element of information management, but for years it has struggled to define itself as a standalone product entity, as opposed to being embedded functionality within enterprise applications and infrastructure. Today's acquisition, following hot on the heals of HP's acquisitions and plans for Autonomy, leaves even fewer standalone players.

Recently, I’ve seen numerous organizations churning out massive amounts of content using faux-CMS methods such as:

Content entry: Word-based forms
Workflow: E-mail and phone calls
Content reuse: server-side include files tracked via spreadsheets
Collaboration: shared network drives
Versioning: multiple versions stored on shared network drives
Archiving: PDFs in shared network drives
Deployment: Simple FTP

To their credit, these organizations have done an impressive job of cobbling together a variety of tools and processes to mimic the functionality that comes with most content management systems. In most cases, these homegrown solutions have served these organizations well -- thusfar.

However, the changing demands of content consumers are putting stress on these methods. With increased content demands, more and more production departments are hitting their breaking points and becoming bottlenecks for publishing important content.

Is your organization one of these?  The good news is that in 2011 there are more options than ever for a Web CMS buyer – we cover 44 of the most significant. All 44 of these commercial products and open-source projects have been around for years and have matured to the point where their base functionality could provide operational wins for you. Your challenge will be to find the right partner to support your visions for the next three years and beyond.

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.

• 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

Our Web Analytics vendor evaluation customers know that to some extent, this deal has both companies coming full-circle, since Coremetrics acquired some of its technology from IBM in 2006.

The bigger back-story revolves around a longtime partnership between Coremetrics and IBM to provide specialized analytics services for WebSphere Commerce Server. And indeed, Coremetrics will now become part of the WebSphere group going forward.

And therein lies the first of my concerns for Coremetrics customers. WebSphere exerts huge gravitational force within IBM, but it's also where smaller modules can easily get lost. More generally, do you think IBM wants to sell more web analytics, or more WebSphere licenses?

Also, as we argued with Adobe buying Omniture, it's not clear that IBM knows how to run a true SaaS operation, as opposed to than selling and supporting software. The particular ways that Coremetrics works will create some specific challenges for Big Blue here.

We'll keep watching...

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.

To give a practical example, a healthcare professional will need awareness of all the documents related to a particular patient. These documents and records are sorted and managed through their lifecycle as a "Case" even though they may reside in different locations, have different owners, other relationships, and different retention policies.  Other individuals may also need to interact with these documents for the purposes of billing or insurance. Same documents, different purpose. There may also be multiple legal and compliancy requirements to attend to.

In theory at least, Case Management provides you with the tools to pre-define and orchestrate those requirements. Permissions, rules, metadata, and processes all play a part in what can be a highly complex system. 

For some organizations, Case Management applications built from ECM platforms form the core of their business, and more will in the future. The need to better manage the massive volumes of transactional documentation is growing more acute, and Case Management will certainly play an increasingly important role. 

Yet almost more than any other scenario, Case Management demands good information governance and squeaky clean relevant data. Without it everything falls apart. The fact that so many organizations are lacking here is another key reason Case Management is not as widely deployed as it could be. 

Selecting the right software to meet your Case Management needs is difficult, since everyone claims to do it,  but very few do it well.  The nightmare scenario for a buyer of a Case Management system is to buy a vanilla ECM software system and then just bring in a .NET or Java developer. You are not only buying technical functionality you should also be buying deep and very specific domain expertise, and without the right combination of the two you can be in trouble quick.

ECM vendors such as Hyland, Objective, Open Text, EMC, Autonomy and IBM all have deep expertise and knowledge in the particular industry sectors that they design systems for (Pharma, Legal, Government, Intelligence, Healthcare, Insurance,  Law Enforcement, Retail etc). They know (mostly) what works and what does not, and they understand industry specific business processes right down to the task level. You are paying as much for that knowledge, as you are for their software.

Assuming though that you do have your document house in order, and already utilize Case Management, there are some interesting developments on the near horizon -- most notably the use of business intelligence and analytics tools to extract further value from what is already a rich information set.  Consider the possibilities of early fraud and discrepancy detection or new and emerging trend analysis from the very rich data within your documents.  BI has long been locked solely into the 20% of data that is structured in the enterprise, and is a valued tool set. But very large and clean volumes of documentation that have been given a tight structure can be mined these days too, and those documents theoretically at least, represent the other 80% of the data we deal with in business.  In fact some organizations are already starting to use tools like Cognos, Hyperion, and Business Objects in Case Management deployments, and they are liking what they see.

And remember it's our job here to ensure that technology buyers make the right decisions via the use of our research, and one of the best ways for us to do that is to continuously talk with buyers and users who are at the coalface.  So if you are an organization that is using Case Management along with some kind of BI tool, then  I would love to chat with you in confidence to hear more about what works and what does not just drop me a note and we can chat.

Ironically, it's early days for a combination of technologies that have been with us separately for many years. Yet this could prove to be a very good long term marriage.

Now, this team understood the technicalities of document and records management just as well as I did. My “aha!” moment came when I suddenly realized that not one of them had ever actually managed information for a living. Not one of them had ever been in the position of an end user, sitting there day in and out trying to manage, or even frequently access business-critical information.  

Fortunately during the same engagement I was able to speak to a wide range of actual end users of the current system, and quickly realized that they they in turn, had no concept at all of such concepts as “check in/check out”, or “a single source of truth.”  But they did know an awful lot about how to manage information; in some cases they knew a lot about how to manage information really badly.

In this project, we were able to actually bring both sides around the same table (figuratively and literally), and facilitated the conversation so that each began to understand the others' frustrations and hopes.  Both sides learned a great deal, and though peace was not brought to this particularly fractious environment, they took some great steps toward avoiding all-out war.  

I say it all too often, but it has never been truer: regardless of whether you buy a full ECM Suite from the likes of EMC or IBM, buy document and records management solutions from HP, Objective, or Laserfiche, or even opt for the SharePoint route, you will fix precisely nothing with the technology itself.  Change comes from understanding and adroitly changing the underlying business requirements and structures, along with both current and future business processes.  

With a little bit of our help this organization did just that, and though various technical and organizational teams contributed, the most important work they did was to attempt to understand their information management problems holistically. 

They took the brave and liberating position that:

• I can only see the world through my own eyes
• So, please tell me how you see the world
• Together we might see something very special indeed

Ultimately they embarked on one of the most successful information management projects I have witnessed in many years. For even though the project is ongoing, the initial changes have achieved more than most projects could dream of.  The only sad part to this tale is that the old document management system they had previously used and had come to despise was never a part of the problem.  The shiny new (and very expensive system) eventually was not really a technical improvement -- it just started getting used properly.

If there are lessons to be learned and shared here they are no more than:

• Ensure both the business and the technical team are equally engaged in any document management project.
• Pay special attention to the needs, views and insights of those who will use the system every day -- proxy representatives of the business may not be one and the same
• If you have an information management problem, start from the assumption that it is due to bad information management practices, not technology
• If you need a helping hand, think of us here a the Real Story Group ;-)

So in summary, let me remind you of what some very clever Swedes once said...."knowing me, knowing you...aha!"

SDL's streak of acquisitions is something I recently checked up on while writing the Tridion review for the Web CMS Report 2010. Notwithstanding its ever-expanding portfolio of products, you shouldn't forget that in essence, SDL is largely a translation services company (rather than a software company), with the revenue from those services fueling expansion in the software market. After having added translation services companies, and then translation management software companies, the focus the past few years has been on XML and component management companies.

At first glance, adding Fredhopper's "marketing and merchandising optimization software for e-commerce" to that portfolio makes little sense. However, SDL sees it as a logical move, moving from multi-lingual consistency (translation), to brand consistency (XML and component management). And SDL Tridion, which accounts for about a third of SDL's revenue, is now going to be the connection between that side and online marketing plus e-commerce.

In fact, Tridion has already announced "SmartTarget," which will use Fredhopper in combination with Tridion's personalization and statistics. Combinations like that are all the rage now in Europe (Sitecore's Online Marketing Suite and EPiServer's partnership with Mediachase come to mind), perhaps because targeted marketing and e-commerce across several countries and languages is, in fact, very hard to do.

So how good is Fredhopper, anyway? Well, the company (now to become SDL's "eCommerce Technologies" division) certainly has some impressive customers; mail-order companies like Otto and Neckermann are household names here in The Netherlands and Germany (and in fact, Otto Group is "the second largest e-commerce business in the world behind Amazon"). Unfortunately, Fredhopper's results on, say, the otto.nl site are less impressive. For example, I entered "tshirt" as a query; then refined on "men's wear"; and then refined on "suits". I got two results for my faceted, refined query. A hat and a belt.

Of course, a solution is only as good as its implementation. When I asked SDL about my Otto example, they suggested trying the same query on another Dutch site, which renders much more relevant results. And I doubt a U.S. vendor like Endeca (famous for its e-commerce implementations) would be able to do better. In fact, Endeca also lists the Otto Group as a reference, but tellingly -- Endeca's implementations are in English, only. But it illustrates that marketing and e-commerce across multiple languages and countries is still very challenging.

So the acquisition probably makes sense for SDL and Fredhopper. However, make no mistake: SDL still isn't a one-stop-shop with complete off-the-shelf solutions integrating all its technology flawlessly. For you, the customer, it's still going to be a lot of hard work to get it all working together right.

Let's first consider the positive implications: eXo will gain an audience outside of Europe.  And the JBoss Portal will have some nice new applications (content management, collaboration etc) to add to what was a fairly sparse framework.

As with any merger, the details could become inconvenient for existing licensees.

However, I have bigger doubts that Red Hat will really make the most of the opportunity, and I wonder if the likely outcome of the merger is really what buyers and implementers are even looking for in 2009. It is a merger that makes sense for eXo but maybe not so much for those in need of an enterprise portal.

If we exclude MySQL from the discussion, JBoss (acquired by Red Hat in 2006) and Red Hat, are by far the two biggest vendor names in the open source world. They are the names that come up most often in enterprise procurement discussions as alternatives to the likes of IBM and Oracle. Be it the Application Server, BPM, Directory Services, or indeed their own longstanding version of the Linux operating system -- RedHat and JBoss are synonymous with open source for the enterprise.

But the JBoss Portal has never really figured in that equation. What should have been a direct competitor to IBM WebSphere and the Oracle WebSuite and WebLogic portals, was seldom seen in action. And adding some functionality to the product is unlikely to really change that situation.

I am not favoring commercial systems such as those from Oracle or IBM over commercial open source systems such as Red Hat.  In fact, buyers deserve a truly level playing field from which to chose from, but currently that is not the case.

In fairness to the open source community, it's not for lack of trying. Just in the past year the Liferay open source project hooked up with an enterprise-level vendor (Sun Microsystems), only to see what looked like a very promising and competitive product emerge (GlassFish), and be then thrown into doubt after Sun's agreement to be acquired by Oracle.  Who knows how that one may resolve itself.

Red Hat now has an opportunity to fill that gap, and to give enterprise buyers a more competitive open source option. But the only way to do that is to build a truly enterprise-level portal framework, not by adding new widgets. The problem before wasn't a lack of functional bells and whistles. it was a lack of direction and depth.  Merging with eXo doesn't in itself fix that.

Of course, it's not my job to advise vendors, it is to advise buyers.  My current advice to buyers has to be to tread with extreme caution in the world of enterprise portals. As subscribers to our Enterprise Portal research well know, with Oracle now effectively owning 5 of the 12 major portal offerings and somehow attempting to make sense of them, IBM on the verge of a major upgrade, Vignette acquired by Open Text, SAP losing almost complete interest in the space, and open source alternatives either falling short or themselves going through a period of upheaval, it is a market that is full of treacherous waters to navigate.

Within that service we cover XML authoring tools: the software for creating and editing highly complex documentation, be it DITA structured technical documentation, complex translation work, or product information designed for multiple re-use. But our research goes beyond the editing and authoring options at the front end, and evaluates all the leading CCM (Component Content Management) tools that have been designed to manage the publishing and workflow of these complex XML document components throughout their lifecycle.

On other occasions we separate technologies into different categories, where others may have bundled them together. An obvious case here is our Web Content Management research and our Enterprise Content Management Suites research. Just in the past fortnight I have been asked by more than one person why we have two subscription services for the same technology. Well the simple answer is that it is not the same technology: the technology to manage outward (web) facing content and sites, versus the technology to manage inward-facing (documents and files) content and filing systems is quite different. But nevertheless it is a very fair question to ask, because to someone outside the industry (and even some insiders) that distinction is not always obvious.

Confusion can come about due to vendor branding strategies or a plethora of nebulous acronyms used within the industry. For example Interwoven (recently acquired by Autonomy) did a good job of branding their WorkSite (document & files) offering quite separately from their TeamSite (web content) offering. Other vendors such as EMC Documentum or Open Text use a single brand moniker (such as "digital media") to cover all their content-focused software offerings regardless of each component's specific purpose, while in other instances product names can even be synoymous with the firm's brand, as with ADAM and Sitecore.

Then there is the issue of acronyms. We use the term ECM as it is the most commonly used term for document-based technologies, however in different regions and industry segments ECM is referred to as EDMS, EDM, EDRM, Document Control, IM, IDM even KM. As an advisory firm we have to call our research and services something, and we are faced with picking and choosing amongst a myriad of terms, typically choosing the most well-known term currently in use.

Our job at CMS Watch is to make sense of the complexity of the technology offerings out there for you, the buyer - and that can be a challenge at the best of times. We believe it's safe to say that we have more research available to our subscribers on content technologies than all of our competitors combined. But volume, depth and breadth is not all that separates us from our competitors, we are in addition avowedly a firm that follows the market rather than "makes" it. Thus, we don't try and come up with new acronyms, terminology or market segments, we don't cheerlead for the industry or get involved in market sizing, we stick to the basics of evaluating current release products side by side and evaluating the importance of current trends.

So here is my challenge to you. We evaluate over 200 products and sub-divide those into 10 subscription services, which in turn are sub-divided into about 5-8 sub-categories each. We try to use common terminology so that you the buyer can relate to and locate the research that meets your needs, but that does not always work as well as it could. So if you find the product evaluation(s) you need, but locate them in a place - or grouped in a way you find 'surprising' or 'interesting', let us know. Tell us how you and your colleagues perceive these technologies, what you call them, how you would categorize them differently, how you explain them to your internal clients or project teams. Truly we would love to hear from you as this industry remains a dynamic and very moveable feast at times....

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.

You see, as money moves away from bricks and mortar stores, investment moves similarly to the online experience. And this trend to the web is just as true in non-profit sectors as it is in retail. In downturns, more people head to higher education, as governments continue their move to e-government practices and everyone looks for ways to reduce costs. Getting the customer to serve themselves rather than involving costly manual processes should be a no brainer.

Yet such projects typically involve WCM, Search, and ECM technologies and increasingly also Analytic and DAM tools too. But above all: Enterprise Portals -- where one of our evaluation scenarios is "Self-service Portal."

None of these technologies are simple to procure, develop, implement, or run. And if you get things wrong, then self service and automation can backfire, destroying customer loyalty, and boosting exception-handling costs, rather than reducing expenses.

Nevertheless, many business cases in 2009 will focus on self-service -- often as a knee jerk reaction, sometimes as part of a longer-term, planned strategy. If you or your company are considering such a project, then we hope you will make full use of CMS Watch's services to help make that task as simple and as cost-effective as possible, and to lower the risk of failure.