Many commentators compare Drive with Dropbox and to some extent Microsoft's SkyDrive and Apple's iCloud. However, you should remember that you have many, many more choices.

On the face of it, most such services appear similar. They usually provide:

• Space for storing files (free up to a limit and then for-pay based on tiers)
• Syncing files with your various devices so you can access them on the move

However, once you move beyond the "mine is bigger than yours" debate, you will notice there are subtle differences among these services.

At a high level, I see four categories of services here:

1. Consumer oriented: Services like iCloud, Dropbox, and SugarSync are really focused on end users and have built some differentiating features. Dropbox, for example even has a Linux client and SugarSync allows you to sync any folder on your desktop and not just the one dedicated folder that most other services mandate.
    
2. File shares with document creation: Google Drive and Microsoft SkyDrive fall in this category. They are still focused on end consumers but allow more than just file sharing and storage. With Drive, you can edit and create documents using Google Docs, while with SkyDrive, you can access Microsoft Office WebApps.
    
3. Enterprise Focused: This category includes services like Box, Huddle, Oxygen, Citrix ShareFile, Glasscubes, Skydox and many others. These really focus on the enterprise segment. Box (like most others in this category) for example, provides granular controls for administrators to maintain access control for files and directories.
    
4. File shares with light collaboration: This category includes tools such as Alfresco and eXo which have traditionally focused on other enterprise needs (Alfresco does Document Management while eXo is a Portal platform), but have now started offering a cloud service that has some bit of file sharing. You could also consider SharePoint Online / Office365 in this camp.  These tools, however, typically lack advanced capabilities, such as file sync across devices.

Doubtless some of these services could be placed into multiple categories, and some will eventually evolve to provide services focused on more than one category.

But if you are an enterprise evaluating these sort of services for your needs, remember to look beyond the hype. Our forthcoming Cloud File Share evaluation research will look at such issues more closely and provide detailed evaluations of these vendors. Meanwhile, if you have any feedback on these categories, please feel free to contact me or leave a comment below.

As you have already heard a gazillion times, converting capital expenditure into operating expense is a key value proposition of cloud computing. Yes, but customers need to understand that cloud vendors have different payment models which can eat into any such potential benefits. For example, a cloud vendor may offer deep discounts if you pay upfront. But does not paying upfront (for a long duration of say 2 years) equate to a kind of capex? Also, almost all cloud vendors ask you to pay the monthly bill in advance, while enterprise customers typically pay in arrears for non-cloud purchases (e.g., 45-60 days after service provisioning / invoicing) -- so there is an interest cost to paying in advance.

These may seem like very small leaks in the savings bucket, but lopping off a few percentage points from a large base of spend means tidy savings.

Media companies are starting to pay particular attention here.  You may not think of it usually, but computing costs comprise a very big portion of movie budgets, particularly when the film involves out-of-this-world animation and special effects. A big line item in the estimated budget of $280 million for Avatar is the IT costs. You can imagine the compute power that goes into movies these days when the Kiwi company Weta's data center is counted among the Top 200 super computers in the world. Weta also created the special effects for King Kong and the Lord of the Rings trilogy. The new recipe for hit movies may well be “star power plus server power.”

Strategic Blue, a UK start-up whose founders have a finance background, is trying to bring smarts from the world of trading to optimize cloud purchases. The company is a cloud broker and dealer. It keeps track of the financial terms of different cloud providers and tries to offer you better terms and conditions by serving as a demand aggregator and may alleviate some of the issues discussed above. Note that you deal with the cloud provider directly for support and SLAs. 

While the rest of the media industry is still trying to figure out the cloud, the finance folks at movie studios are evincing a lot of interest in such models, loosely based on the portfolio theory of modern finance. As they say, but now in a good way: In Hollywood, the really creative people are the accountants, perhaps?

Even if you're not in show business, keep an eye out for opportunities to optimize cloud procurement. If you decide to use an intermediary, be sure to fully understand any commercial / technical trade-offs and the implications on flexibility. And in the end, don't forget to negotiate.

In other words, a predominantly micro-blogging oriented software without other collaboration oriented features / applications risks becoming a social ghetto. Yammer often becomes such a social silo today: employees can take notice of different conversations happening in the enterprise, but to act upon them and to get any meaningful work done, they have to shift to different applications / systems.  In short, easy to talk, harder to act.

Now, Yammer is taking baby steps towards enabling document-centric collaboration. It has acquired oneDrum, (a UK based company with less than 10 employees) for an application that lets multiple users edit Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files at the same time. According to a Techcrunch report, the oneDrum features will get added to Yammer in a few months time.  In theory the user experience for collaborative editing will go something like this: folders corresponding to your Yammer groups get created on your desktop and any edits you make to the files in the desktop will get synced to Yammer as well as your coworkers in those groups.

In this day of the cloud and GoogleDocs with their models of centrally hosted documents, a peer-to-peer fileshare model does feel a bit quaint. Certain questions about architecture, network capacity, security, and scalability also come to mind, but I'll hold them back until we see the product in action later this year.

Essentially, this acquisition signals Yammer's intent to break out of its silo and expand its footprint into the bigger world of enterprise collaboration, where documents, workflows, and business processes rule roost. That is already a crowded field with both

• Traditional collaboration vendors, who're busy applying fresh coats of social paint to their software
• Social platform / suite vendors, who also have a head start over Yammer in this respect

Only time will tell if Yammer can acquire new stripes and become a social software suite, but it won't be an easy transition.

To that end, Google has won a handful of big deals, but in discussions with some larger early adopters, a hype cycle appears to be playing out:

1. Customer leadership gets excited about "Cloud"
2. They make a big splash by outsourcing key functionality to Google Apps
3. It turns out later that Google's approach doesn't always work well for the entire enterprise
4. Customer quietly dials back to core GMail offering, plus perhaps a few related Apps

This hasn't happened to every large Google Apps customer -- and other vendors frequently hype their wares too -- but it has repeated itself in several cases.

This hype cycle most recently played out with City of Los Angeles, who as it turns out received a $250k discount to help sway others that Google could sweep large enterprises. I missed some of the fall-out that transpired during the winter holidays, but the intrepid Mary Jander did not. Read her detailed exposé here.

Subscribers to our Enteprise Collaboration & Social vendor evalutions know that Google's critical early architectural assumptions have bequeathed Apps with a legacy of suitability for some small- and medium-sized business scenarios, but also made it less amenable to major enterprises.

To be sure, Google Apps could present a good fit for you, especially if you crave GMail. But don't just "go Google" in some quixotic attempt to cloudify your business or wipe your aging IT investments away in one swoop. Consider Google Apps like you would any other vendor's offering -- which means: test first, test broadly, and test competitively against other solutions. Let us know if we can help.

Think of these acquisitions as Photoshop layers and filters that go into the composition of a very complex picture of the product known as the Adobe Digital Marketing Suite, which incorporates approximately 17 SaaS-based distinct products under its roof. Sounds complex, right? It could prove be a goldmine for Adobe and its partner channel, but a very dark tunnel for its customers.

Adding to the complexity is Adobe’s data-driven digital marketing approach. It’s not surprising that Adobe has 27 data centers around the world and processes six trillion transactions (e.g., a mouse click) a year. More Big Data doesn't mean better data, or better marketing decisions. Software is as important as the processes and people. Despite much automation that machines can do, any Omniture customers will confirm that you still need analytics geeks in addition to marketers, IT, and other members of your organization.

Complexities aside, there was a lot of insightful talk at the Summit – particularly, the ideas about Digital Self (your profile and how it can be utilized by marketers), predictive insights, adaptive content, social analytics, and getting technology out of the way of marketers. A myriad of announcements were also made. Let me highlight a few:

• Launch of "Adobe Social," based on the Context Optional/Efficient Frontier acquisition, with the idea of social publishing, monitoring, engagement, ad buying, and analytics
• Predictive Marketing: Leverage historical data to predict future results and uncover behavior patterns for better targeting
• Launch of CQ 5.5: Updated version of the Web Experience Management (WEM) system with more meaningful integrations into Scene7, Search&Promote, and SiteCatalyst
• New eCommerce features via a partnership with hybris
• Adobe Discover addition of cross-visit analytics across multiple online properties.

One of the areas that Adobe is still not caught up on yet is Digital Asset Management in the context of digital marketing. “Expect us to step up,” said Kevin Lynch, the company’s CTO, as Adobe plans to further its CQ DAM and Scene7 products.

Adobe spans across multiple categories in our forthcoming Digital Marketing evaluation research, with very few rivals that can boast a comparable set of capabilities. I can think of Salesforce, Google, IBM, and maybe Oracle in terms of breadth. While Adobe doesn't exactly hold a monopoly in this space, their mantra is, “to be the standard for the way digital marketing and advertising is created, managed, executed, measured and optimized.”

The issue is whether you're really best served by doing digital marketing the Adobe Way. Adobe's Digital Marketing Suite is a complex panorama of technologies, with some layers still unrealized. A dizzying array of tools is typically not the ideal first step for solving real business problems.

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.

Razuna is interesting as one of the few established open source DAM products in the marketplace. Yes, there are many open source DAM players in the market, but not many are mature.

With roots in the DACH (Germany, Austria, Switzerland) region, Razuna is expanding its reach, and now sees deployments in Scandinavia, the United Kingdom and the United States (albeit with only one partner in the latter case). What you may find interesting about this product is its three-way licensing model: true open source under AGPL, commercial open source (like Nuxeo), or SaaS (like Widen).

Razuna is a web-based DAM focused on simple brand management. Focus is good. The not so good part is the UI: You may find yourself getting a little dizzy the more advanced work you do, overwhelmed by an array of one too many tabs and actionable items.

There’s a lot more I could tell you.  But, you'll just have to read more about Razuna in the detailed evaluation in our DAM report.

Have you worked with Razuna? What are your impressions?

I'm not referring here to Yammer's now famous "freemium" approach of getting your colleagues hooked on a free version and then upselling a more enterprisey edition. The real problem is this: employees signing up by virtue of having an enterprise email address believe that the free version of Yammer is an enterprise-sanctioned and perhaps even enterprise-managed solution.

This is of course a complete delusion, albeit a totally understandable one.

As subscribers to our Enterprise Collaboration and Social Software research know, Yammer's free version is a legal conundrum for the typical large enterprise. In discussions with senior leaders from among our enterprise subscribers, a recurrent theme has emerged about the constant efforts they must take to educate colleagues about the platform.

Savvier enterprises whose employees have taken to the free version emphasize that their public social media policies apply to Yammer, rather than their internal collaboration policies. That means, for example, that you shouldn't share sensitive data or documents via that channel. Busy employees may not always ingest that message. And at a time when many industry gurus don't recognize the difference between external social media and internal social networking, you can understand why some of your employees may not grasp the nuances either.

At the same time, we don't counsel our subscribers to kill off Yammer eruptions either. Enterprise social networking is hard enough to nurture without suffocating it in the crib. (On the other hand many Yammer experiments end up suffocating on their own for some very specific reasons, but that's another story...)

You need to understand the implications of the free version, and do what you can and should do to mitigate risks until you come up with a sanctioned, supported alternative. That alternative might well include licensing the paid version of Yammer, though in the event, you'll want to review your agreement very closely, since like many cloud providers, Yammer's enterprise edition SLA isn't so hot either.

Other collaboration and social computing providers are watching the Yammer model closely. The more free services the get targeted at enterprise employees, the more you need to educate about acceptable use. Better yet, devise a roadmap to get out in front of those needs. Let us know if we can help.

There are clear advantages to the SaaS WCXM model: get rid of the extra IT support overhead and the burden of installation, maintenance, hardware support. In the same breath, SaaS WCXM vendors are failing to pervade the WCXM marketplace.

We’ve seen some M&A activity in this segment in the past year, but little meaningful product development.  For more details, consult our recently updated 2012 WCXM "Cross Check" marketplace analysis.

Now, if you're evaluating a cloud WCXM supplier (either SaaS, managed hosting, or true cloud), you might be thinking about things like data security risks. Security is important, but other requirements may emerge as equally salient. For example, your WCXM system will likely need to “talk” to other pieces of software in your enterprise ecosystem. At least from our experience, as integration requirements get more sophisticated, SaaS vendors increasingly fall short, particularly when it comes to the layer of experience management functionality in addition to good ol’ web content management.

But I'm also curious about your experience. Have you been evaluating or experimenting with cloud-based deployments of on-premise WCXM solutions? Or worked with a true SaaS WCXM system? I’d love to hear about your victories and challenges.

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?

Telligent Systems, a vendor of social software to enterprises, announced that it has acquired San Francisco based Leverage Software. Leverage also is focused on selling social networking software for enterprises but follows a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model.

Different enteprises have different preferences for running their software applications -- behind the firewall, on-demand, or some combination of both. Employee-facing functionality would seem to favor on-premise, but not always.  On-demand versions of software typically boast more frequent updates.  While on-premise versions might get a major overhaul only once a year (or every three years...), hosted versions tend get updated much more frequently. This can be useful in rapidly evolving sectors such as the social software field.

Not surprisingly, then, social software vendors follow a variety of approaches. For example, Broadvision offers only a SaaS version, OpenText Social Communities is available only as an on-premise solution, while Jive and Microsoft offer both SaaS and on-premise versions.  And so on.

With this small acquisition of Leverage, Telligent can tell investors and the market that it now offers an on-demand solution. Telligent says that Leverage has an iPhone app for social functionality as well, so the mobile box gets checked. Finally, both Telligent and Leverage products are built off the Microsoft tech stack, which might bode well for future integration.  Analysts have taken note and are gushing over all the buzzwords.

For you the customer, the reality will not likely be so rosy. New features from acquired vendors appear in marketing brochures long before they appear on your screen. Telligent has acquired a revenue stream, but now must add a new product line to an already somewhat unweildy set of incumbent offerings.  Also, it's not easy to operate SaaS and traditional delivery models in tandem.  I'm not worried about the vendor here; I'm concerned about you the customer.  Don't trust the initial "roadmaps" that get marched out. 

The enterprise social software suites marketplace is relatively young and we can expect to see more M&A activity in the coming years as larger and mid-sized vendors try to cherry-pick oppotunities. We'll keep looking out for your interests...

In recent years, the drumbeat has been for SaaS-based WCM vendors. By renaming themselves "cloud" vendors, the thought went, surely now they would sweep aside all those incumbent, fuddy-duddy, on-premise solutions. Recently Gartner declared a "big shift" towards cloud WCM for a vendor webinar.

Here's what I think: Not gonna happen.

Are SaaS-based solutions more popular than ten years ago? Yes. Have they reached liftoff in the marketplace? No. Let's look at three of the bigger players we evaluate in our Web CMS Report:

• Clickability: sold to a CDN vendor with venture investors taking a bath; future a bit uncertain
• CrownPeak: working on its first major UI overhaul in nearly ten years, and suffering from a meandering roadmap
• OmniUpdate: doing relatively well in the market, ironically by focusing intently on a very specific niche -- higher education in North America; other WCM vendors are also succeeding in higher ed

Meanwhile, many if not most traditional WCM vendors are doing quite well. Among mid-market and select open source projects, doubling or tripling their customer bases in recent years.

The more interesting development, I think, is the broader trend on public websites for outsourcing both development and hosting, as internal IT and development resources struggle to keep up with fast-moving technologies and marketing needs. Note that managed hosting for, say, Drupal or Sitecore is not the same thing as a native SaaS-based solution. But for many customers, it's a happy medium.

The majority of buyers often don't even consider the SaaS option for WCM. Unfortunately, there are still a lot of myths and red herrings surrounding the concept. On the other hand, I also understand when customers, particularly larger enterprises, look out over the WCM supplier landscape and conclude that SaaS vendors are not the strongest reeds in the pond right now...

• CrownPeak
• e-Spirit
• HP/Autonomy (Interwoven)
• IBM Web Content Manager
• Limelight Networks (formerly Clickability)
• OmniUpdate
• Plone
• TerminalFour
• TYPO3

What can you glean from this collection of updates? The marketplace remains vibrant, with big players and small, commercial and open source, on-premise and SaaS offerings -- all trying to innovate, albeit with varying degrees of success...

As always, our WCM evaluation stream subscribers can download the updated chapters and comparison charts immediately. If you've never seen our reviews before, you download a free sample here.

Just a year ago, SharePoint was practically the sole contender in light document management scenarios; now the environment has changed substantially. With heavy investment funding, Box is rapidly positioning itself as a SharePoint contender, going so far as posting a billboard in Silicon Valley stating, "Box.net vs SharePoint -- Sharing should be simple. Challenge us..."

But is Box.net really a SharePoint killer? If not, what does its rise tell us about how enterprises are (and are not) utilizing SharePoint? I am a cheerleader for no one, but cloud-based simple file sharing services such as Box.Net will likely play an increasingly important role in major enterprises.  I'd also welcome hearing your thoughts -- particularly interested in your experiences using hosted file-sharing in larger enterprises.

Truth be told (and despite the hype), SharePoint 2010 isn't truly multi-tenant either. Though it's far ahead of its predecessor, the current version of SharePoint in O365 still has plenty of warts. For example, Microsoft announced a "new" feature of SharePoint Online in Business Connectivity Services (BCS).  Terrific!  The trouble is that BCS is a feature of SharePoint on-premise and Online is just catching up. 

During the keynote demo, Microsoft demonstrated BCS.  They showed a SharePoint Online application connected to SQL Azure that produced some nifty charts.  The demo got applause, but prompted Jeremy Thake from AvePoint to tweet: "Why use azure worker role to submit vote & not straight in #SharePoint list? 'coz we can!'"  Unfortunately, the real answer is that BCS only supports connecting to a web service (specifically a Windows Communication Foundation or WCF service).  As a result, this other web site (the Azure worker role) actually "shimmed" the SQL database with web services to enable the connection.

Beyond BCS, the story is quite uneven.  For features like Word, InfoPath and Excel Services, Microsoft has crafted a "value-added" subscription model (pay more, get more).  Other services, like managed metadata (a major feature of SharePoint 2010) are simply unavailable.  And, as I’ve mentioned, in the BCS case, Microsoft had to cripple the service to make it cloud compatible.  In the end, despite the new 2010 architecture, Microsoft was unable to effectively manipulate their service applications to truly understand multi-tenant environments; the services simply can't differentiate one tenant from another within the same farm (though if you have a private farm, the architecture works relatively well).

That said, no could argue anything other than SharePoint is poised to compete effectively with Google apps and other low-cost alternatives among individual professionals and small businesses.  Pure on-premise implementations were out of reach for the vast majority of small businesses and, certainly, individual professionals.  O365 falls into both the "it just works" and "it's good enough" categories of technology favored by SMB customers. 

Other so-called "SharePoint Killers" have been beating the cost, complexity or adoption drum (or all three) to differentiate themselves from the behemoth on-premise enterprise SharePoint product. Unfortunately, many of these products merely compete with SharePoint along one or two functional dimensions (like simple file sharing or light document management). However, their arguments hold less credibility in an O365 world, where the cost per user for enterprise-class e-mail (Exchange), internet-based collaboration (SharePoint) and real-time messaging (Lync) legitimately starts at $6 per month. Moreover, all of the services packaged in O365 are quite well integrated into the most widely adopted desktop productivity tool on the planet -- Office. 

So for the Davids of the SMB market, Goliath is calling and he's looking a bit more trim. For the larger enterprise market, SharePoint in the Cloud still has a ways to go....

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.

But back to that troubling issue of the OEM business, because that is the real sticking point for all us technology watchers.  Leo Apotheker wildly stated that Autonomy had "a strong cloud based solution set" and Autonomy claims that over 400 software companies are building applications using Autonomy IDOL.  Well first off I am not sure what this strong cloud based solution set consists of...is it the archiving solution from Zantaz that Autonomy acquired? Surely not as that would contribute a tiny fraction toward this valuation. As for the 400 software companies building applications on IDOL, in effect embedding (OEM) IDOL, we just can't find them.  What we can find is a lots of people using basic document filtering widgets (KeyView) and some using the old Verity K2 search engine, but hundreds of software firms using IDOL? They are nowhere to be seen, at least by me, and I watch pretty closely.

In my gut, I think this deal may still get derailed.  If not, the negative repercussions could be huge for HP and its shareholders.  As for those contemplating buying Autonomy products, I hardly need to state that you would be very well advised to defer any purchases until this potential fiasco has finally settled down and we see where the pieces finally land. 

Hence my advice is, "buyers beware."

Autonomy was the darling of the UK tech sector.  And the darling of investors, too, since from humble beginnings the firm has grown to just short of a$1 Billion in revenue, while consistently profitable.

Buyers of its technology though have been less enthusiastic, regularly citing a firm that is arrogant in its dealings with customers, confused roadmap messages, and technology (particularly the core IDOL platform) that is overly complex and expensive to use.  Moreover the firm has grown primarily via acquisition of various overlapping products, followed only weeks later with boasts that the new product has been "integrated via the IDOL platform." That common statement that has been the root of many a joke within the IT community. If only integration were that easy!

In reality, HP has bought quite a mixed basked with Autonomy, from Records Management (Meridio and CA) to Document Management (iManage), Web Content Management (Interwoven) to DAM (MediaBin) and more, plus of course the core search engine IDOL that Autonomy is best known for.

On the other side of the equation is HP, a hardware and services firm that has had very little success with software.  On one hand, I can see the appeal from HP's point of view: some new technology and an interesting customer base made up of regulated industries with a particularly strong underpinning organizations involved in defense, intelligence, and law enforcement.On the other hand, HP's acquisition of records management vendor Tower a few years back resulted in the software dropping off buyers' radars.  Add to this HP's past history of severely rationalizing the workforce of acquired vendors and I am at a loss to see where the enthusiasm comes for this deal.

For potential buyers of Autonomy's many product offerings it makes good sense to take pause and wait until things have thoroughly quieted down and the full fall-out from the deal becomes clear. For those already invested in Autonomy products likewise I advise you to tread with caution and watch carefully which products will continue to get the love, and those that look set for longer term neglect. As for those invested in IDOL specifically, there is a chance that this technology will find a future enhanced by the input of the famed HP Labs, and that "meaning based computing" could ultimately get realized in practice, and not just marketing sheets. But that will take time, and is far from assured.

The key factors to watch in the meantime will be in terms of account management and technical support -- neither of which were Autonomy strong suits in the past, and both likely change in the coming year.  I don't take pleasure issuing such a negative viewpoint, but from a technology buyer's perspective it's hard to see the positives.

So if you are a web publisher and want to use your Web CMS for publishing to social channels, what should you do?

Many site owners will want to press their CMS vendor or open source community to build specific integration paths to enable publishing out to these social networks. Most tools that we evaluate have at least begun to answer this call.  But that's not really a scalable model in my opinion. What happens when another social network becomes hot, and you need to publish to that too? What happens -- as is often the case -- when a network changes its APIs?

Instead, you should take a step back and take a more long term approach. Out of the box integration with individual networks is fine, but insist on an integration framework that allows you to add additional social networks or channels in future. The framework should allow you to add a new external destination but also provide core plumbing services such as security, logging, exception handling and reporting in a consistent way across all social (or other) channels -- rather than one at a time.

Also remember some basics of multi-channel publishing.

Many Web CMS products provide in-context (and inline) editing capabilities that enable you to write new content within the visual context of your website. However, if you are pushing selected content to Facebook and Google+, you have multiple contexts and experiences, so you will want to think in a more agnostic way. Therefore, whenever you ask vendors to demo their slick inline editing interfaces, make sure to spend enough time evaluating the usability of their traditional, form-based interfaces.  In a multi-channel world, you'll be using them more often.

You should also evaluate how the tools segregate presentation from raw content. This becomes important especially if you use rich text editors and allow your content contributors to apply styles on content. This will become problematic when published to multiple social networks. So ensure that there is a clear separation between presentation as well as content.

Your content contributors should understand that if what they write travels to multiple other channels, they really have to be more disciplined about using styles, rich text editors, and inline editing interfaces. (BTW, I could say "mobile" instead of "social" and end up with the same advice.)

Finally, remember that with growing number of external destinations where you can publish content, more than tech integrations, you need to have a true interaction strategy in place. Don't auto-publish blindly; as my colleague Tony says, "Because you can, doesn't mean you should."

Clearly, this is going to put some customer IT departments in a bit of a pickle in the near future. The latest version of Internet Explorer, IE9, only runs on Vista and Windows 7. The upcoming version 10 (which has already been shown in a first version, with Microsoft apparently speeding up the release cycle) will only run in Windows 7 and 8. If your enterprise is still on Windows XP (and the latest figures suggest around 60% still do), once IE10 comes out, you're out of luck. And that's probably going to be early next year.

With a disregard for large enterprise deployments that's typical for Google, the company says, "if it’s been a a while since your last update, we encourage you to get the latest version of your favorite browser," and helpfully provides some download links.

It's just that, well, most IT departments try to control their desktops and what's installed on them, since otherwise it's impossible to effectively support and secure them. It's not up to the individual user to just download and install any executable.

So if your enterprise signed up for Google Apps, this may force IT departments into hasty migrations to new versions of Windows. Or they will be forced to install Chrome for everyone instead (quite possibly that's what's lurking beneath Google's rather naive comment above). If so, there's a whole new game of vendor lock-in about to start.

This is probably not the kind of consequences anyone would expect from a collaboration tool that runs "in the cloud" with the interface "in the browser."  It does, though, speak volumes for Google's assumptions about its customer base.

It should serve as a reminder that procuring enterprise solutions is never simple or straightforward, even if at first blush it would seem that way. Which is exactly why our social computing vendor evaluation research around Google isn't a cheerleading flyer -- but fourteen pages of critical analysis. You may want to read it before committing to a "quick win."

Here's 5 things that you should be considering:

1. What recourse do you have if your private or confidential content is leaked?
2. Is it explicitly stated who can see your content? Obviously you don't want the public or your competitors to get access, but is it OK if employees from your Cloud vendor can get access to all your information?
3. How will your pricing change if you need to scale your services up? And down?
4. What should you expect from your Cloud vendor if you want to move your content somewhere else?
5. What happens if the vendor goes out of business? Is there is adequate and acceptable provisions for migrating your information either back to you, or to another Cloud environment?

We continue to evaluate several SaaS options for Web Content Management, Document Management, Digital Asset Management, and Enterprise Collaboration in our research reports.

We're all learning more and more about the benefits and pitfalls of a Cloud model – unfortunately many of these negative lessons are coming at the expense of real companies. If you are considering playing in the cloud, make sure you have a proper parachute.

Although it's not entirely clear yet what Limelight will do with Clickability, some of the guesses may include: as a true CMS, as an interface for a hosted video delivery platform (transcoding/encoding, streaming, and HD video), or as a central content repository (infrastructure, syndication, and digital marketing) for various other cloud-based integrations (Limelight made other SaaS acquisitions in the last year, including EyeWonder and Delve Networks).

In any case these agendas might present a stretch for those organizations exploring Clickability as a potential WCM vendor.

As one of the long-standing and "true SaaS" Web CMS vendors (Crownpeak is another one), you can't say Clickability has been struggling lately (despite occasional pitiful attacks towards struggling CMS vendors). Nor can you say that it's been exactly prospering.

One fact to illustrate the latter point: Clickability took in $15.3m in venture funding over the years, but sold for $10m. Lesson #1: Investors face deadlines too, and will cut their losses when they can.

Secondly, despite much hype otherwise, interest still remains much greater in on-premise WCM technology, even if many organizations exhibit insufficient resources to deal with full-blown WCM installs. Given that Limelight expects Clickability to contribute only up to $5m in H2 2011 revenues, everyone seems to be very cautious. Hey, even TweetDeck sold for at least $40m on the same day.

As for Clickability, some departures at the executive levels in recent years suggested something was stirring. The CEO (and CTO) Jeff Freund has been quiescent for at least the past couple of years (perhaps busy prepping for the sale), while still formally remaining on the official roster.  Lesson #3: pay close attention to vendor intangibles (we do, in our vendor evaluations).

If you're reviewing Clickability as your next CMS supplier, it might be wise to pause for a bit until things sort themselves out. In addition to the typical cloud concerns (c.f., Amazon data loss), you don't want to deal with post-acquisition usuals -- possible staff cuts, rebranding pains, awkward integrations. Product instability is one of the areas of concern here. Tread carefully if planning to invest in Clickability for traditional Web CMS scenarios.

During most of the past decade, the trend has been to separate these efforts and to employ different CMS technologies for these two environments. However, we've recently seen an uptick in subscriber inquiries revisiting this issue. The extraordinary propagation of SharePoint within intranet environments, combined with the growing adoption of lighter-weight WCM tools for public websites (including SaaS and open source) is prompting some enterprises to consider consolidating on a single vendor.

Last week we published an advisory briefing that lays out the pros and (mostly) cons of such consolidation, to help you make the best decision.