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

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

You can register for this free webinar here. 

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

Social Workplace Market Overview 2012

Keynote: Consumerization of IT

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

The Right Way to Select Enterprise Collaboration Technology

DAM (Digital Asset Management) 101

Understanding the Marketing Technologist Toolkit

How to Negotiate the Right Price for Enterprise Software

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

We will be talking to our current customers about Media Asset Management tools and trends, as well as meeting with vendors and industry compatriots.

If you're a current RSG subscriber attending the show, it'd be great to meet up. Or if you'd like to find out more about Real Story Group and our research, please let us know as well. You can also find us participating in many other events throughout the year.

If you're a current RSG customer, we'd love to meet up with you (drop me a line).  Or if you'd like to find out more about Real Story Group and our research, please drop into our sessions in London or at any of the many events where we'll be speaking. 

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

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

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

Register for the webinar.

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.

My talk will provide an analysis of the current European Search Market, drawn from our extensive research in this area. If you are in the London area it would be great to see you there. 

Search may be seen as a slow moving market, but you can't say nothing is happening. This year has seen some very significant shifts in the market, not least being HP's acquisition of UK based Autonomy - a topic we will explore in this session. How will that huge acquisition (over $10 Billion US) impact the European sector? Will it open up opportunities or further dampen expectations? My hope is that this will be a lively and provocative session, and as always I will be available to challenge in person afterward - come along, shake hands, and tell me exactly what you think!

While some have criticized our comparing SharePoint to Lotus Notes, I think the comparison is nevermore appropriate.  The two platforms, though different in terms of functionality, are identical in the ways that count: adherents fanatically defending the technology, with a very large partner ecosystem and a committed community developing surprising solutions from generic features.  Like Notes, the real value of SharePoint is well beyond the core constructs the platform provides.  As I have said many times, SharePoint-based solutions generally "look" nothing like SharePoint.  These solutions make inventive use of platform facilities to create something greater and specific to the problem the solution needs to solve.  This was/is true for Notes and it is even more true for SharePoint.  Just look at SharePointReviews or Microsoft's own "solution directory" for a glimpse of the breadth of the add-on ecosystem; this will help you understand the diversity that's possible. Of course, the same predilection for extension and bespoke development got Notes shops into trouble too.

Where the comparison between Notes and SharePoint diverge, in my mind, is the sheer size of the connected product sets from Microsoft (and others) and the potential for SharePoint growth as a result.  The best example is Office.  SharePoint's 120 million licenses sold is an astonishing figure for a collaboration product.  However, when you compare that to a Microsoft-reported 1 billion user population for Office, the SharePoint community seems rather small.  IBM and Lotus Corp before them could never boast such a large productivity tool install base, nor were they able to bring related collaboration tools to as wide a market as Microsoft.

As individuals and organizations of all sizes are increasingly geographically distributed, information workers  (to use Microsoft's vernacular) will continue to drive demand for network-based file and information sharing as well as more real-time and disconnected communication vehicles.  With the launch of Office365 this past June, previously impractical on-premise SharePoint implementations for individuals or small firms become a simple subscription to SharePoint in a shared environment.  More importantly, the subscription isn't limited to SharePoint, since it includes other connected products like Exchange, Office and Lync.  And while all four products are presented separately, packaged as Office365, they start to appear as simply features of a broader productivity suite.  As a result, like Office did for Word, Excel & PowerPoint, Office365 will "drag" SharePoint into a previously inaccessible user population.  In fact, the meteoric growth of SharePoint 2010 (roughly 65 million licenses or about 50% of all SharePoint licenses), could be eclipsed by SharePoint vNext as both organizations and individuals really start to sign-up for Office365.   If we further consider the co-star of the SharePoint Conference, Azure, Microsoft has created what could only be called a very diverse productivity offering.

Should everyone run out and adopt SharePoint?  No.  While I firmly believe we have not yet seen the crest of SharePoint growth, buyers should continue to carefully weigh what tools make sense for them.  Remember that SharePoint 2010 remains the same product it was two years ago (minus some modest updates through service packs).  It is not best of breed in most functional categories.  And while Office365 may have made SharePoint technology practically available to more users, the SharePoint portion of the O365 feature set still has meaningful limitations when compared to on-premise SharePoint. 

This year's SharePoint Conference consistently delivered the "steady as she goes" message and Microsoft effectively reminded everyone why SharePoint has been a success.  Office365 was a very clear highlight and even the limited announcements (like the addition of BCS in SharePoint Online) implicitly and explicitly hints at the underlying strategy Microsoft has adopted around these products.  However, my previous advice still holds: when evaluating SharePoint across a single use dimension like web content management or business intelligence, you're unlikely to find it effectively competing with pure-play tools.  SharePoint's real value is and will continue to reside in its breadth of functionality and connections to other Microsoft tools like Office and Lync; these are very compelling attributes to be sure.  If your organization needs to implement an intranet, an extranet and an internet site (or some combination), SharePoint may be a good fit to help consolidate technology platforms and skillsets.

That's a platform view, however, and often business stakeholders want something more practical. For a pure-play, single dimension tool to solve a singular aspect of your content management challenges, like web content, you'll be best served to carefully evaluate other tools alongside SharePoint to ensure the best fit.

Kurt DelBene (Microsoft President of the Office Group) fielded harsh criticism regarding the lack of "new" information or big product announcements during the conference. His response was blunt: our product teams haven't been sitting around for two years, it's just too early to share.  In fact, Microsoft went out of their way to focus on what the core product does today and "remind" everyone in attendance (some 7,500 people) that SharePoint 2010 is still thoroughly relevant.  Jeff Teper (VP, SharePoint Product Group) even went as far as to claim that he didn't want anyone at the conference to walk away and say "I didn't know SharePoint could do that."

On balance, this message isn't exactly a disappointment.  In my experience talking about SharePoint as well as building solutions on the platform virtually everyday, it's not all that hard to miss less-used or less "popular" features.  SharePoint, as I've said before, is a vast software platform that can be used to develop many different solutions.  Consultants, like customers, tend to focus on those features and functions that support common business scenarios.  Less frequently used features often get forgotten.

For example, most firms are familiar with Excel Services; it provides a way to surface an Excel workbook in a web interface and enable some limited editing.   This service has been around since SharePoint 2007 and it works well.   However, what is less used is the REST programming interface (introduced in 2010) for accessing both charts and data in that workbook.  With this interface (which is merely a series of URLs), you can dynamically or statically embed an Excel chart (or other data) in a blog post, Word document or PowerPoint presentation without programming.  You can also keep that embedded chart in sync with the source chart in that workbook without having to do more than update the workbook.   While I've seen many customers use Google or Yahoo for creating dynamic charts, SharePoint buyers have this capability in-house and don't seem to know it.

It's easy for gurus to get frustrated by the lack of news, but for SharePoint customers, I think the messages that Microsoft is promoting for this conference are relevant, even if predictable.  Many enterprises are still struggling with SharePoint 2007 or just starting to deploy SharePoint 2010.  One typical SharePoint customer I spoke with has had their 2010 solution in place for only five months, while others are just starting their migration.  Too many customers have multiple technologies simply sitting on the shelf; you should look at what you already own before buying the next shiny object.

A few interesting tid-bits did emerge:

• Redmond announced a partnership with WebTrends to bolster analytics.  SharePoint 2010 has some basic analytics in the box, but they're just that: basic.  The WebTrends deal sparks hope that we'll see higher-grade analytic capabilities not only around the typical internet-facing sites, but also deeper insight into internal behaviors as well.
• Office 365 is getting more functionality.  Microsoft is finally adding support for Business Connectivity Services in the cloud.  This means that customers on SharePoint Online can begin to connect their O365 SharePoint sites to external data sources, assuming that data is Web Service enabled.  While BCS isn't a new feature to SharePoint, it is bringing O365 and the on-premise versions closer to parity.
• Kurt DelBene seemed to suggest that Microsoft is also evaluating different release cycles; they want to commit to a quarterly release cycle on O365 and may experiment with new ways to deliver features for on-premise implementations outside of the typical 36-month cycle.  He was, however, careful to say they don't have anything formalized and are still working on the details. (We've heard this before.)

Outside of the reminders and some minor announcements, Microsoft was again promoting its ecosystem.  This is something I and others at RSG have discussed at length; SharePoint has an enviable collection of independent software vendors (ISVs) that build add-ons, systems integrators that develop customer implementations, and a developer community that virtually no other platform can equal.  As such, Microsoft did a bit of promoting both during the conference and through a blog post welcoming folks to the conference.  With a Microsoft-reported 700,000 developers and more than 1,000 ISV solutions (read: add-ons), the momentum seems to continue to build around the product.  That post also included some interesting statistics on the customer base, including a breakout of pure SharePoint 2010 licenses.

While pure-play vendors will continue to outshine SharePoint in specific functional categories, the platform continues to maintain a unique market position based on the breadth of functionality and depth of its ecosystem.  SharePoint 2010 can be a viable answer for many different problems, but there's still much to be learned about the platform before we all start musing about SharePoint 2013.

It's been over 10 years since I first came across SharePoint and so much has changed in that time. Changes both in terms of the products, but also in terms of buyers and market expectations. I think SharePoint is approaching something of a crossroads, one that users of the platform may be more aware of than Microsoft and its partner channel. The times they are a-changing...and SharePoint has evolved in ways nobody could have expected.

The competition, meanwhile, is far from rolling over and giving up. In fact it has adapted remarkably well. 

That's the theme of this webinar -- who is buying SharePoint in 2011, why are they buying it and when might this Microsoft steamroller of success finally begin to run out of steam? I hope you join me for the webinar and also join in with the Q&A session following.

The conversation will continue in more depth in Washington DC on 2nd/3rd November at the SharePoint Symposium. It is an event I am looking forward to very much, as along with our partners at KMWorld, we have structured a conference with not only truly outstanding speakers and sessions, but also a great and friendly opportunity to hang out, mix and share with your peers.  Of course I know not everyone will be able to make in person to the DC event, but I do hope you can make it to the webinar next week...it's going to be an interesting one.

Lisa, as well as many other speakers with a wealth of DAM experience, will also be joining us at the Chicago event. I'll be talking about the latest insights from our DAM research, including DAM performance on tablet devices, advances in DAM collaboration, and as always, the state of the market. 

For a deep-dive into DAM technology, be sure to attend my half-day tutorial "The Fundamentals of DAM" on Monday, September 12th.

Hope to see you in Chicago. 

Your questions about the DAM market have been pouring in; as a result over the next quarter we're adding coverage of the vendors you've asked about most. Subscribers will soon have RSG research on Avid’s Interplay MAM (the technology acquired via Germany-based Blue Order), Adobe's Scene7 (not a DAM in the traditional sense, but often a key component of many companies' brand management), celum's & Elvis' DAM offerings, and others — as well as the latest market trends. Irina Guseva and I are also looking deeper into the vendors that specialize in SaaS DAM, including MerlinOne and Widen.

I hope you'll join me, Irina and many DAM / MAM practitioners at the Henry Stewart DAM Conferences in New York or London next month. We'll be teaching a half-day tutorial on the Fundamentals of Digital Asset Management — a deep dive into the "how" of the technology — on June 7th in New York and June 23rd in London. You can get a $100 discount by using the code REAL at checkout.

In the meantime, please keep your questions on Digital & Media Asset Management coming our way. 

Oh, and we'll be presenting on a number of topics at the conference itself. Please join us as we share some of our latest research findings. You can view the session schedule here.

If you'd like to join us and haven't registered yet, you can sign-up here. Enter E211G before March 11th at checkout to receive $300 off registration. After March 11th, enter C211G for $200 off registration.

We are looking forward to meeting and talking with you!

The info360 expo has broadened to cover "information management" more generally, which I think is very wise. There are several implications here, but most importantly the event will add coverage of data-oriented services to its traditional emphasis on content technologies. In the real world these lines are blurring, and those of us on the content side have a lot to learn from gurus like Cindi Howson, Colin White, Mike Ferguson, and Mark Madsen.

At info360 next month in Washington DC, my colleagues and I will be leading a day-long workshop, "An Insider’s Guide to Selecting Content Technologies." It's designed for business analysts, enterprise architects, program managers, or IT leaders who need a no-nonsense primer on how Social, Content, Portal, SharePoint and related technologies really work (and often don't work), as well as how to make the right vendor choices in confusing marketplaces.

At Interop in Vegas, I'll be leading a similar workshop, "A Fresh Look at Content, Collaboration, Social, and Portals: Enterprise Information Technologies for Today's Knowledge Worker." Here again, if you're looking for practical explanations and skeptical view of the key players, this is the place to get it.

I hope you can join us at either event.

I thought I'd share our answer for those who might be wondering the same:

1. First, we talk to customers like you. Your experiences with vendors and technologies form the bedrock of our research and analysis.
2. We debrief consultants and systems integrators who work with multiple competing offerings. They are typically in an excellent position to contrast different vendor approaches.
3. We do real, in-depth demos with vendors, and not just PowerPoint-fueled "briefings." Where it makes sense and adds value, we will test tools hands-on ourselves.
4. We track the same customers, integrators, and vendors for years at a time. This gives us a unique longitudinal perspective on trends and tendencies.
5. We rotate analysts covering a particular tool from time to time, to bring fresh perspectives to vendors and platforms.

If you are a customer, consultant, or systems integrator of one of the more than 150 content technology vendors and products we cover and would like to share your experiences, we'd love to talk to you. Just contact us for details.

We'll also have a booth at the show, so please stop by and say hi.

Organizational challenges to enterprise-wide collaboration and social networking systems are well documented. What's less well known are the technical hurdles confronting customers looking to extend to enterprise-wide deployments. We've recently isolated ten common shortcomings you might encounter with vendors large and small. From yesterday's release:

Customers should remember that many of these products matured in departmental environments, so in addition to investing in essential governance, adoption, and education programs, organizations seeking to support enterprise-wide collaboration and networking should carefully simulate large-scale conditions before committing to any single vendor.

You can also download a sample from our Enterprise Collaboration and Social Software Report.

Like every year, Real Story Group will present several sessions. If you want to do a deep dive into the social software marketplace, then attend my colleague Tony Byrne's tutorial on "Insider's Guide to Evaluating and Selecting Social Software." You will learn about the social software marketplace, important features and services, key categories of vendors, and key vendors with their strengths and weaknesses.

On Wednesday, I will be doing a session on issues related to "Managing Content in a Mobile World." Everyone knows there's something of a revolution happening in terms of mobile access to content. So instead of boring you with more statistics and trends, I will take a more hands-on approach and explain what it takes to have a more inclusive strategy to deliver right content to right people on the right device.

Tony will look into his crystal ball on Thursday and take you through trends in the WCM marketplace as we head into 2011. If you are in early stages of evaluating WCM for your needs, this session will be helpful for you to get a quick dope on how the WCM marketplace will fare in the coming months.

So, I hope you will attend our sessions. We'll be around in any case. So even if you can't attend the sessions, just drop in and say Hi. 

Like Henry Stewart's conference in New York, Henry Stewart's Los Angeles show will feature a wide range of case studies and panels about DAM technology and implementations. I've always appreciated Henry Stewart's focus on the end-user perspective, and this show is no exception.

I'll be moderating the track for those new to DAM, as well as presenting a full-conference session about the latest advances in DAM technology - and why you should be skeptical of them. Following the two-day conference, I'll also teach a half-day seminar on how to select and procure a DAM system, with an in-depth look at the DAM marketplace. 

I hope those of you on the west coast of the US and beyond will join me for what is sure to be an interesting event! Receive a $100 discount on the currently published price for registration if you use the code “REAL” when registering.

Who are the key players? What sort of supplementary tools might you need? And perhaps most importantly of all: what are the pros and cons of going outside Redmond for key services?

I'm going to take a stab at some answers to these questions in a complimentary, vendor-free webinar on Friday, 22 October.

Register for the free webinar here.

Hosted by KMWorld, the webinar offers a modest preview of some of the insights you can glean at the "SharePoint Symposium" 17-18 November in Washington, DC. Hope to see you there!

His last slide argued that the old adage "content is king" is no longer true -- instead, "contact is king." That statement made a lot of sense at this conference, and was reiterated somewhat less eloquently by other attendees. If the event's all about mobile and social, why should there still be such a focus on content management?

Well, while Peter's talk was very insightful, let me be blunt about it. He was wrong about content. It's easy to think that in the totally interconnected, web 2.0, social, digital world, contact rules. However, without content, contact is nothing.

Without content, we're reduced to cavemen going "uuuurgh" at each other. A lot of social media is about pointing each other to interesting content. In fact, strip a Twitter feed of its shortened links, or take the shared pictures, videos, and blog posts out of Facebook statuses -- and "uuuurgh" is pretty much what you end up with. Without content, we're reduced to liking, or retweeting, grunts.

It's true social media isn't about that one handwritten manuscript secured in a monastery anymore. (The iPad is just drawing out publishers' hopeful belief they can still, somehow, imprison us in those middle ages where the medium would guard the monopoly.) You shouldn't just "publish out" your content to the web as if it were a book going to the printers. You can't just let your content sit there and wait for it to find an audience, or push it out and expect it to be consumed.

But that doesn't mean you should simply "go social" and care about contact only.

The truth is, networks remain very much about content -- about enticing people with information. Content doesn't live in one place anymore. No, it flows back and forth along new paths and channels, passing through the Googles, Facebooks, and Twitters that are vying to be the number one hub for the streams. But that just means it's become more complicated to manage -- not that you should give up on it and focus on the raw streams, instead.

In a digital age, content is the most valuable thing you've got. Forget about the content, and you'll eventually find yourself stuck in a lonely cave, discontentedly howling at the moon. Instead, manage your content -- and be part of the information age.

But of course, you should certainly buy Peter Hinssen's new book. If only to prove my point. And when you do... don't forget to tweet about it.

Some potential topics include:

• Should community managers have to worry about information lifecycle management?
• Should social be an application, or a layer? Should you socialize existing applications in lieu of creating new social applications?
• Tools: suite, platform, or best of breed?
• Is SharePoint the future of collaboration?
• Is video and voice the future of social computing?

What else do you think the audience should debate? Feel free to post below. Or better yet, join us in Santa Clara and offer your opinion in-person...

I'll share the latest trends in Enterprise Portals, Search, Collaboration, Social Networking, Web Content Management, and SharePoint ecosystem tools, as they relate to Intranets.

I'll also be offering some perspectives on what's ahead for 2011. The webinar is on 4 October, 2010 at 2pm, ET.  Register here.

I'll analyze the social software marketplace and offer an approach for selecting the right social software tools for your requirements. We'll also have a look at several examples in order to better appreciate some of the concepts. This workshop is based on our Community and Collaboration evaluation research, though I've customized it based on examples in the Indian context.

So if you're attending, please come and say hello. My session is on Wednesday, 29th September, but I'll be present there all three days.