The reason is not difficult to find.

Many Portal tools have built some basic capabilities for managing content. In the same way, many Web Content Management tools have built capabilities for managing web site experience and thus evolving into what we term as Web Content and Experience Management (WXCM) offerings.

Because of this convergence (at least in terms of broad features), there are cases you could employ either a portal tool such as IBM WebSphere, Liferay, Microsoft SharePoint or many of the tools we evaluate in our Portals and Content Integration stream, as well as use a WXCM tool such as Oracle Fatwire, Adobe Day, Sitecore or one of the other 42 tools we evaluate in our WXCM stream.

Nevertheless, while it may be theoretically possible to swap a portal or a WCXM tool, usually one offers a better fit than the other. You must consider the subtle differences between these two types of technologies, since each one provides a different approach to building and managing digital environments. You should also understand that there are rare occasions when you may need both a portal and WCXM platform.

In our recently released advisory briefing,"Portal or Web CMS: Which One Makes Sense for Your Use Case?," we explore this very topic and provide some guidance on when to use which approach. The table of contents for the advisory is as follows:

• Key Takeaways
• Introduction
• Example Dilemma: A Self-Service Employee Intranet
• When to Use Portal Technology
• When to Use a WCXM System
• Summary
• Additional Notes

The advisory briefing is available to our Portal and Web CMS research stream subscribers.

Consider that:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Those are important topics, but I think an even bigger to-do for enterprises is to bring the right skill sets to bear. One key skill set to engage here is enterprise architecture.

If you examine the individual applications and platforms that employees access to complete work every day, you end up charting myriad of different systems in the typical enterprise. Some of these may be loosely aggregated within a portal, while others may not. The digital workplace concept, though, helpfully turns the table around by looking at it from the standpoint of the employee, rather than the enterprise. There's clearly an opportunity to apply well-known user experience methodologies -- such as User Centered Design (UCD) -- to improve your colleagues' effectiveness here.

But as you dig deeper into the employee digital experience, you'll discover more than just clunky, freestanding applications. You'll find:

• Information and process flows that span multiple systems
• Siloed data and content
• COTS vendors pushing their own separate mobile apps
• Diverse security and information access needs

Cataloging and understanding the business value of all these systems is the job of an enterprise architect. If you are trying to transform your digital workplace, then you'd do well to engage your enterprise architecture team -- you have one, right? -- in reconstructing the pieces into a greater whole.

Just remember that the point is not to re-arrange boxes and arrows to work your way forward from back-end systems to employees, but rather to re-arrange what happens on your colleagues' screens by working your way backwards. Is it too simple to say, UCD + EA = New Digital Workplace ?

If you're an enterprise architect tackling some of these issues, I'd love to hear from you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fortunately, portal platforms offer multiple approaches to addressing this challenge. The trick is to decide which approach makes best sense for your scenarios. These approaches differ from each other in terms of cost, ease and speed of implementation as well as in terms of the range of scenarios they can address.

In our recently released advisory, Eight Ways to Integrate Content into Your Portal, we examine different ways - ranging from completely decoupled ways to very tightly coupled ways of doing just this. The table of contents is as follows:

• Key Takeaways
• Introduction
• Eight Integration Approaches
• Displaying Integrated Content
• Conclusion: Which is the Right Option?
• Additional Notes

The advisory briefing is available to our Web CMS and Portals & Content Integration research stream subscribers.

EntropySoft, a content integration and migration vendor, has released a new connector for Twitter. EntropySoft already has a set of connectors that get OEM'ed into various packaged content and document management systems, many of which we cover in our evaluation reports.

This new connector enables enterprises to access content (tweets and other information) stored in Twitter. EntropySoft says the primary objective here is to archive those tweets in a corporate archiving system. Once the Twitter content is in one of your own repositories, you can do pretty much anything that the target system allows you to do -- such as declaring tweets as records and applying retention policies on them.

Many organizations have been experimenting with various alternatives for managing their employees' tweets. Some enterprises, for example, employ their Web Content Management system or a Portal-type application as a tweeting interface, so that they can subsequently manage those tweets as content in their larger application. By using a connector-based approach, in contrast, employees can tweet using any of their favorite tools but those tweets can still be brought back into an internal system for subsequent management.

There are some challenges that you'd need to address with the latter model, though. Besides the practicality of considering tweets and more generally social content as records, there are also issues of ownership and legality related to extraction of tweets from Twitter and archiving these in your own systems.

In any case, the ability to access social content via such tools has many uses. Many of the products we cover in our various reports -- such as Document Management and ECM tools like Alfresco and EMC Documentum as well as search engines like Endeca and Exalead -- turn to with EntropySoft to supply connectors within their products. We don't know yet if they plan to use this new Twitter connector too but if and when they start using it, it could become marginally easier to search, index, and archive social content from within your existing systems.

While all these Portal-like scenarios have common aspects, they are also vastly different from each other. Consequently, there are multiple ways, ranging from out-of-the-box tools (many of which we cover in our Portals  as well as Web CMS Reports), to custom solutions to build such applications.

In our recently released advisory briefing, Alternatives for Building Portal-Like Applications, we explore different ways of building Portal-like applications and offer advice on which approach to choose for your specific requirements.

Here's the table of contents for the advisory paper:

• Key Takeaways
• Introduction
• What does a Portal do?
• Alternatives for Building Your Portal-Like Application
• Conclusion

The advisory paper is available to our Portals, Web CMS, and ECM research subscribers.

Just as Microsoft has its own very distinctive approach and definition for ECM, so too does Oracle.  In fact as time goes on, Oracle's approach to ECM is becoming more individual and distinctive.

Firstly, Oracle places ECM as a piece of the IT infrastructure (as a set of shared content services) rather than as an application. Those at Oracle who do talk about ECM in terms of an application go as far as describing Oracle ECM as a "WebLogic Application" -- referencing the heavy-duty appserver+portal that Oracle acquired via BEA. 

The good news for Oracle is that this approach sets its ECM toolset quite apart from those of most other vendors, and it is a sell that can resonate well with IT folk.  However, it leaves those at the business end of the equation quite cold.

Secondly, and quite distinctive to Oracle, is that they would like you to place your documents and records in a database -- their database -- rather than a file server. Traditionally this approach has presented problems in terms of performance, both in high-volume situations or dealing with large individual files.  It's the same problem that many Microsoft SharePoint buyers face when storing content in SQL Server. 

In this latest release though (11g), Oracle is pushing harder to make the database a suitable storage location with the advent of a new product/feature called "Secure Files." Oracle has made improvements to how it reads and writes files (improvements we detail in our Oracle ECM evaluation chapter). These improvements theoretically match the performance of writing to a file system. I say theoretically as we have not yet spoken with anyone who moved their Oracle system from a traditional set-up to the database using Secure Files. If you have done so please let us know; we would love to talk to you (in confidence of course).

Positioning ECM functionality as simply another set of services in a broad middleware-oriented infrastructure makes sense for Oracle, since middleware and infrastructure is their business. Of course as a buyer this may or not resonate with you, and frankly for many of you it will not.  ECM is as much as set of processes and procedures for changing the way we work as it is a set of technologies. Oracle often comes up very short when it comes to the former, diverting important business change discussions toward speeds and feeds. 

So if you are shortlisting Oracle ECM, you need to very carefully consider who will implement the system and work directly with you, since a technical success alone will account for nothing.

All that said, for the first time Oracle ECM Suite 11g can claim to compete with the likes of EMC Documentum and IBM FileNet at the high end of the transactional document management market -- if you can get their new architecture to work.

Our detailed product evaluation of Oracle ECM Suite 11g is now available to our ECM stream subscribers.

Vendors are especially excited, such that Product X is no longer a WCM offering but a "WEM Suite" now. But you should be forewarned that in their quest for improving presentation management, vendors are soft-pedaling many core CMS concepts which haven't really seen a lot of innovation in recent times, and this, too, could impact your website visitor experience.

The services that make up the "E" part have been around for a long time, including: analytics, multi-variate testing, landing page management, CRM integration, personalization, template management, social functionality, and so on.  So, we are witnessing a natural progression and not something drastically new. The big difference now is that -- while these features tended to come separately in the past -- the trend now is to more tightly integrate them with traditional WCM services.  In many cases, these additional features are natively provided by WCM vendors themselves as part of a larger package.

You don't have to look far to find examples. Clickability, one of the hosted WCM vendors that we cover in our WCM evaluation research, recently announced a new module called Website Marketing Accelerator (WMA).  It's targeted at B2B marketers, enabling them to focus more on visitor segmentation and targeting. Other vendors such as IBM, Day, Fatwire, Open Text-Vignette, Autonomy-Interwoven, SDL, Sitecore, Alterian, EPiServer, et. al., have also been promoting their so-called WEM capabilities rather than core content management functionality. Some of them have gone as far as changing their product names.

You can understand this new emphasis because in many scenarios, content managers want to manage the consumption and interaction experience -- and not just the production process. Also, experience management includes the sexy stuff: personalization, Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), Social applications, User Generated Content (UGC), and other Web 2.0 stuff, while core content management services entail less fancier features, such as authoring, workflow, library services, and publishing.

If you are new to Web Content Management, don't assume that vendors and consultants have figured the basic stuff out. In fact, as an industry we have not really solved some fundamental content production problems:

• Online authoring for most people, most of the time, is still a buggy and sometimes painful process
• It is still difficult for business users to create and participate in workflows
• Publishing from one environment to another still remains one of the most trickiest aspect to master
• Caching of web content remains a black art
• Issues related to standards and formats still plague the industry; You don't know if you'd be able to watch your home videos in 5 years time or not or whether the fonts and styles as you know them today will exist or not
• Many more challenges of content production, such as those related to multi-site management, content reuse, deployment, and so forth still remain tauntingly difficult

Don't get me wrong. It's important to manage visitor interaction, and often the best people to do this are content contributors and publishers. But you should know three things:

1. In the early days of WCM, systems typically followed the current all-bundled-in-one-system approach, and the long-term results were not always positive: reduced capabilities at system edges and and architectural inflexibility led to various knots that were difficult to untie.
2. Your WCM vendor may not be the right supplier for the varied services they are peddling today. Template management, native to your WCM tool? That's a good candidate. Blogs and wikis? Maybe. Testing and analytics? Probably not.
3. Above all, good content lies at the heart of good services and a constructive customer experience.

Vendors differ markedly in how they approach the "E" part. The pros and cons of your various choices constitute a large topic in itself, something that we cover in detail in our online Fundamentals of Web Content Management Technology course as well as our WCM evaluation research. So, call it WCM or WEM. The acronyms don't matter too much. Just remember: there is no point in having a great website front-end with content that's stale or fails to engage users in its own right. Get the production part down, or your visitors won't stick.

Some background: I participated in an interesting workshop at the 2.0 Council last week where one of the big debates was -- inevitably -- the tension between behemoth collaboration platforms (especially SharePoint) vs. point solutions for social computing behind the firewall. I'm sure that debate will recur at the (excellent) Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston next week.

It's an important debate, but one that yields few simple answers. I don't subscribe to the presently fashionable argument that platform vendors will rule the Intranet of the future.

One interesting data point here is how many major software vendors use other (nominally competing) smaller vendors' products. Some examples:

• Oracle uses Jive Software for its OTN forum services
• Back when BEA was an independent company its developers used Atlassian's Confluence wiki (and I'd guess still do), despite the fact that their AquaLogic group had developed its own wiki package
• Some Microsoft developers continued to use Telligent community software long after MOSS 2007 was released (perhaps they still do), while Redmond's "Office Live" team also employs Telligent for its public Workspace Community (including wiki and blog services)
• Meanwhile, among big ECM vendors, Open Text's Social Media product team communicates via a Wordpress blog, and EMC is a large Jive customer internally.

I won't soft-pedal integration and other challenges associated with licensing point solutions, but there's a role for niche software on your intranet, extranet, or public communities when it gets the job done better than a larger, unified platform. Many platform vendors seem to agree.

Moreover, these comparisons and decisions hinge on more than just current feature sets. When customers who contribute to our Enterprise 2.0 vendor evaluations tell us they prefer best-of-breed vendors, it's the smaller vendor's focus and ongoing commitment to that particular service that often come up as the most important rationale for their choice. In contrast, when is Microsoft going to upgrade SharePoint again? Not until 2013.

So, in social computing as in other market segments, there's no pat answer to suite vs. best-of-breed. I don't like saying "it depends" any more than you like hearing it, but....it really does depend on your situation.

Should you consider Mashup offerings for building Portal-like applications?  And if so, when?

We examine these and other related questions in our latest advisory, "Complementing Portals with Enterprise Mashups." Our Portals stream research subscribers can download the paper, as well as comment or ask questions directly on the page, after logging in. 

We will also be expanding our Portals research to include more of such content integration and aggregation mechanisms as Mashups and Gadgets. If you're a technology buyer, feel free to let us know if there's something important you think we should cover. You can leave a comment below or if you are a subscriber, you can also provide input via private discussion forums.

At the core, both enterprise and federated search are about accessing, indexing, and querying diverse and dispersed repositories. Enterprise search is very specifically about searching within the enterprise, which may include an externally-facing web site or extranet(s). 

It's often the case that an enterprise search tool can come across repositories that already have their own search engine that's created its own index. Assume for a moment that you elect  not to have your enterprise search engine re-index all that content itself.  Yet you want to expose items from those repositories.  In this scenario, when the initial search engine is trying to return results from those repositories that are already indexed, it can do one of two things:

1. Directly query those indexes created by other search engines in real-time, or
2. Trigger those search engines to provide results, and in turn aggregate what it collects into a single, enterprise-wide results set

That's federation: leveraging the indexes and potentially the query results of other search services within your enterprise.

However, I've heard some vendors use the terms enterprise search and federated search interchangeably -- which creates confusion.  A scenario where an enterprise search tool crawls other repositories itself and builds an index based on that content in all its unstructured glory is classic enterprise search, even if your vendor calls it "federated search." 

Obviously federated search sounds quite attractive, especially in an environment where enterprises have licensed multiple search products or employ various information management systems that embed their own search facilities.

In practice, however, comprehensive federated search is quite difficult. Even more than with “regular” enterprise search, security becomes an important issue, particularly when multiple indexes or engines follow different security models. Also, in scenarios 1) and 2) above, it can become extremely hard to de-dupe, merge, and provide comprehensive relevancy rankings in a reasonable timeframe for the searcher. A bottleneck in one repository can gum up the overall results.

While hosting a search seminar with Martin White of Intranet Focus in London a couple of years ago, he drew an excellent representation of these federated search challenges, and I have since transformed it to PowerPoint and use it often in my presentations about search technologies. 

Here at Real Story Group, we've added more detail to our search vendor evaluations regarding how vendors handle this highly complicated scenario. Despite the challenges of federated search, there is promise in these technologies, especially those approaches that rely on other native-search engines to provide the core results, and serve as basic aggregators.

To quote:

For many customers, initial success with community and collaboration solutions has inevitably led to the old problem of multiple silos of information, services, and user experiences. First, the quality of search applications erodes quickly. Then employees start to get confused by isolated and disconnected application services, such as multiple profiles, activity streams, tag sets, discussion forums, and so forth...

There are serious sociological challenges to improving the way teams network and collaborate in large, distributed work environments. I think as an industry we're starting to get a better sense for the technical challenges as well. (Other analysts and consultants -- like Dion Hinchcliffe, Mike Gotta, Oliver Marks, and others -- have been publishing some important thoughts on this topic.) Right now, I believe most vendors have not yet caught up to where many of their larger customers want them to be.

For a deeper critique of individual vendor offerings, you can consult our Collaboration and Community Software vendor evaluations.

From the introduction:

An important, yet rarely acknowledged architectural and product development shift has transpired over the past couple of years in the content technology marketplaces we cover. The debate has shifted from "Suite vs. Best of Breed" to "Platform vs. Product." This is partly a natural evolution in vendor marketing as technologies and marketplaces mature. Yet this shift also has profound implications for you, the customer. Beyond the normal criteria of cost, functional fit, and vendor fit, you need to assess a tool's position on the Platform-Product continuum against internal needs and capabilities.

The three-page briefing offers five specific steps your enterprise can take today to make sure you make the best technology choices for near-term and long-term success. To subscribe to our research so that you can receive advisories like this, contact us here.

The 'Records Management Services Technical Specification' provides a standard for the Federal US Government, but just like DOD 5015 this might well have much broader reach and value outside of Government. In essence this is a SOA (Services Oriented Architecture) specification that provides a framework for defining and ultimately re-using web services throughout an enterprise to provide full end-to-end record lifecycle management.

As subscribers to our ECM Suites research know, RM technologies are often limited in their reach to particular repositories or systems. The theory here is to provide some common web services that can be utilized wherever RM functionality is needed, regardless of location, and to enable truly centralized RM. It's a lofty but important goal, and frankly RM as of today is not a consideration in most SOA architectures. If this succeeds as a standard that could start to change.

I for one hope it does succeed, but without further studying the documentation and seeing it tested in the real world we can't know for sure how well it might work or be adopted. Nevertheless, it is an interesting development and one we will watch with interest.

EMC has made a developer edition of Content Server freely available, and they have also provided a similar free developer environment for xDB. At the same time, each free developer edition will have an accompanying online community that provides code samples, tutorials and full documentation.

All in all, this represents quite a significant turnaround for EMC Documentum and one that is to be applauded. I can speak from personal past experience of the nightmare of finding basic technical advice regarding Documentum releases, and being reduced to scouring the web for potential (and often unreliable) information. This announcement will also provide a sigh of relief for those who have had to pay license fees for Documentum development environments. More importantly it shows EMC 'opening the kimono' (as that awful phrase goes) more widely than we might have expected.

We often comment that Microsoft has also gone from being a secretive firm (even about current releases) to (in the case of SharePoint) a very positive level of openness, community support and involvement. As always it will be time that decides the success of the EMC initiative, but I suspect it will be just as successful as Microsoft's community initiative around SharePoint, as there is an established, vibrant and very sizeable Documentum community out there who have long awaited this day.

Well, the short version of Google's explanation is that Wave intends to provide a modern alternative to the aging paradigm of email (the long version is on YouTube). If you've been following the Social Software & Collaboration space, you could recognize it as a collision of Twitter, IM, and blog comment threads.

It already has a pretty slick interface, even in the sneak preview, including pretty neat stuff like a new, learning spell checker, and real-time translation. Working from there, it adds functionality to collaborate on "Waves" much like you can in Google Docs (editing with multiple participants). The microblogs can then evolve to blog posts, and continue to grow into sort of a wiki: you can string waves together (each with its own sharing settings) to collaborate in larger documents. From the UI side, this is probably the main innovation -- a chain of short Waves becoming the larger content items, rather than a blog post or wiki page being the originating source for discussion. In doing research for our Social Software & Collaboration Report, I see many products attempt to become similar endlessly spouting fountains of content.

So perhaps the most interesting innovation is on the developer side. Google freely admits it doesn't really know what Wave will become, much like Twitter's inventors never thought their microblogging tool would become the epicenter of a myriad of mash-up tools. Completely unlike Twitter, however, Wave is very much prepared to have developers extend it as a platform and mash it up to their liking. It supports gadgets (effectively allowing for highly customizable mini-interfaces), and introduces bots (running on "the cloud"). This means developers, through the API, can take waves and channel them as they wish. I could imagine a couple of developers taking Google's service and building something much like a Facebook or LinkedIn.

Wave was started by the Rasmussen brothers, more widely known for creating what would become Google Maps. Maps' success has been its uptake by developers -- so it's unsurprising they would take the same approach to Wave, and first release the preview to a select group of developers. That way, they seem to hope it will already come with a bunch of applications built around it when it officially launches.

That seems like a sound tactic, and certainly Maps has been able to avoid the slow descent of other Google acquisitions (like Sites and Blogspot). On the other hand, you shouldn't forget that not everything Google creates itself is a success (everyone active on Orkut please raise your hand). And it's slightly worrying that Wave appears to duplicate, then tries to one-up existing services (favoring its own technology over Google Spell, Google Translate, etcetera), while competing with others (like Google Talk, Docs and Sites).

But probably most worrying should be that Wave mostly lays out a field of dreams. "If you build it, they will come" may be overly optimistic, since why would you build with Wave if there are no users yet? And does Wave have enough appeal in its current form to attract a crowd if it opens as mostly a promise of cool stuff to come? From an enterprise perspective, if you balk at the explosion of sites that SharePoint facilitates, and are cautious about the lack of governance in Google Apps, the Waves rippling beyond your pond should be worrying.

For a theater filled with Googlista, warmed up by free Android phones the day before, this may already look like the perfect wave. The rest of us may want to ride out the storm first: if it turns out to be a wipe out, you'll be happy to be a spectator on the beach.