So I came up with three major lessons that seemed worth sharing:

1. Your internal competencies may be the biggest factor in your success implementing technology
2. Every prediction of significant marketplace "consolidation" has been wrong, although M&A activity has proven painful for customers
3. What makes your enterprise unique (and therefore successful) also plays out in how you apply technology

As always, welcome your thoughts in the comments below...

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.

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

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

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

The 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?

Almost all our business is now online to some degree, and though we employ many people to take calls and process transactions, the reality is that most of our customers come to our website as a first point of interaction with us.  It all may look slick to the customer (we hope), but frankly behind the scenes it's not so neat and efficient. There are many manual and inefficient processes in place, and moreover what once looked good on the web is now starting to look dated, as customers have ever higher expectations of web experiences. They are also beginning to demand near instant response times.  Hence we are starting a project to overhaul our current web presence and make our current operations much more efficient as a result.

Such requirements seem specific enough, but depending on who is leading the project and their understanding of the IT technology world in general it could finally emerge in a tender/RFP (Request for Proposal) in any one of many different forms, with different products and suppliers in the mix. Depending on your orientation, you might define the effort as:

An ECM Project, with a vendor providing a complete platform of workflow, integration, web  and application development functions, with the likes of EMC-Documentum,  OpenText ECM Suite, Oracle WebCenter Content, or Alfresco under consideration*

A WCM Project, with specialist tools to build and manage complex/multiple website environments, targeting vendors like Coremedia, Sitecore, Episerver, or perhaps a dozen more*

A Portal Project, with the focus on building a dashboard application to expose back-end business services in a friendly way, via platforms from vendors like IBM WebSphere, JBOSS, or Liferay et. al.*

In fact, the same project could also get framed in terms of Ecommerce, CRM (Customer Relationship Management) or even BPM (Business Process Management) technologies.

And there's the rub: not one of these approaches would necessarily be wrong, since there is, as the awful phrase goes, more than one way to skin a cat.  You could very legitimately examine a wide range of different valid shortlists, each as capable of meeting your needs as the other.

Yet there remains a need to compare apples with apples, and hence as advisors and industry analysts we sub-divide technology sectors into comparable segments (we call them "streams") and label them. This makes great sense when addressing a very specific need, such that solutions can be compared and tested side by side.

But increasingly buyers' needs are overlapping. Particularly in the world of large WCM projects, your choices aren't as clear cut as they once were.  The key word here is more:

• More complex integrations with back-end business applications
• More sophisticated analysis of website and customer data
• More frequent triggering of complex internal business processes

Sure we still see plenty of simple brochureware, marketing-style sites out there, and they will continue to grow. But in tough economic times, organizations need to do more with less -- and empower their customers to do more themselves -- requiring more automated and integrated web-based interactions than ever before.  When subscribers access our research they increasingly pull product evaluations from across different research streams. And when we engage with them on analyst support calls, it's common for us to first spend time refining project definitions to ensure that a suitably broad range of options get considered.

It all makes for interesting and often difficult times, where buyers must be ever better informed.

*Of course there are many many more technology options to consider in each of these groups, literally hundreds, and it should go without saying that you should ignore "market leader status" and pull together comprehensive shortlists for your own project, based on thorough, independent research of products that actually meet your specific needs.

Worklight is a platform for developing mobile applications that enables you to build different types of mobile apps: HTML5 based-web apps, hybrids, and (especially) pure native apps.

Our research subscribers know that IBM already offered a "Mobile Portal Accelerator" for building mobile-optimized websites. The Mobile Portal Accelerator is targeted at WebSphere Portal customers and is also well integrated with Big Blue's Web Content Management offering.

What you may not know is that IBM actually licensed some technology from a 3rd-party vendor, Volantis, to build that accelerator. Then Volantis was acquired by Antenna Software last year.

I don't know yet if that acquisition resulted in some restrictions in IBM's usage of Volantis' codebase and led to them to buy Worklight. I hope that's not the case because Volantis (and hence IBM's mobile portal accelerator) are fairly sophisticated tools for building browser-based mobile apps (as opposed to downloadable apps). While there's some overlap with Worklight's features, Worklight clearly specializes in downloadble apps and not necessarily browser-based apps. Either way, there's possible disruption here for WebSphere customers.

We will keep tracking this. Meanwhile, if you are an IBM customer with mobile ambitions, make sure you fully understand the road maps of both these offerings.

Digital Asset Management is another big gap. Customers may praise SharePoint in various ways, but no one can allege that SharePoint has strong DAM functionality. (For more details, consult our DAM Report).

To make up for SharePoint's lack of muscular DAM features -- such as large file storage, transcoding, and transformation -- customers usually look at a separate DAM product. Increasingly common in Microsoft-centric enterprises is using SharePoint as a front-end to a full-fledged functional DAM back-end -- so that when you need transcoding or other non-SharePoint functions, it's there behind the scenes. DAM vendor ADAM has the longest-running SharePoint connector, and it's been widely used, albeit with largely mixed results.  

Another widely used offering is MediaRich for SharePoint, by software vendor Equilibrium. It's different from ADAM's connector approach in that MediaRich is not a freestanding product. It requires and rides on the services/functionality provided by SharePoint, such as user management, search, and workflow. It works with both SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint 2010, providing the functionality around metadata, transformation of images, and transcoding of audio and video that SharePoint alone lacks. 

The question you need to ask yourself is, do you really need or want your digital assets to be managed via SharePoint, or is it better to take a DAM-specific path and leave SharePoint to manage documents?

If you're already using SharePoint and are looking for DAM functionality, evaluate whether your requirements are best met by an add-on like Equilibrium or whether you'll need a separate DAM product. Much of this will be dictated by the user experience you want to deliver: if users are accustomed to using SharePoint for internal document management, it may make sense to manage those documents together with digital assets, if business workflow requires it. But SharePoint isn't used elsewhere in the enterprise, it should not be the first tool that should come to mind for standalone DAM. 

Let us know if we can advise your decision-making.

But what should a marketer's technology toolkit contain?  If you were only to follow what WCM/WXM vendors promote, you're only seeing a small part of the picture.

In fact, Digital Marketing can mean many things depending on the context.  If you are a marketer, you might want to:

• Create and update your web sites
• Personalize and optimize your interactions with users
• Build landing pages
• Acquire, profile, prioritize, nurture, and manage leads
• Create, manage, and measure the effectiveness of email and other digital campaigns
• Monitor and gather intelligence about your brands
• Engage with people via social media
• Mobile-enable all this interaction
• And so on...

Consequently, you can find many types of tools that claim to provide “Digital Marketing.” If you map these capabilities to tools, you will need one or more of the following and probably some others too:

• Content and Experience Management tools for Web Content Management, Digital Asset Management, Site Management, and Personalization
• Lead Management tools
• Campaign Management tools for creating and managing campaigns using email, social media, web, and mobile
• Social Media Monitoring and Intelligence tools
• Landing Page Management tools
• Combinations of many of the above in self-styled "suites"
• And so on...

As you can imagine, there's a panoply of tools out there. In our forthcoming advisories and research, we will try to de-mystify the highly crowded and fragmented digital marketing marketplace.

As with our other reports, we will also provide a methodology for mapping business needs to technology alternatives, as well as a roadmap for evaluating digital marketing vendors.

Biggest changes have come around acquisitions (e.g., HP), and a fast-moving Red Line (a.k.a., Collaboration & Social), as well as a number of key entrants in the Digital & Media Asset Management segment.

For higher-resolution JPG and nicely-printable PDF versions of the map, visit
http://www.realstorygroup.com/vendormap/

Hope you find it helpful!

• Multi-database support
• Upgraded search functionality with support for auto-completion and stemming
• Update notification and single click updates for Joomla! as well as any extensions

These features represent another step in Joomla's long, incomplete journey to try to become more amenable to enterprises. But before you get all excited and start thinking of using Joomla! for, say, your enterprise intranet, keep these points in mind:

1. While Joomla! announced added support for databases other than MySQL, in reality, it only adds support for Microsoft SQL Server. In fact, Microsoft's influence is quite visible (and is probably good for the project), and the new version also supports Microsoft Windows Azure. Support for others databases (Oracle, et.al.) remains in the works. As with all issues related to Joomla!, how soon extension developers update their code to take advantage of new platform capabilities will actually dictate how much you can adopt those capabilities. Many extension developers will update their code but many will not, so you will need to make sure the extension you want to use supports the database you want to use.
    
2. As for the search engine, it's really a core extension. So all you need to do is activate this (it's disabled by default). However, you will again need to make sure extensions are updated to take advantage of new search functionalities. Even if they are, there will be some issues in terms of managing the current search module's existing index alongside the new index.
    
3. And finally, for single click notifications to work, you will again need to ensure the extensions are updated to incorporate that.

So, overall, the new features are indeed useful, especially in an enterprise context. But a lot depends on extensions you plan to use and so make sure you plan well in advance. Consult the Web CMS Report for more details on potential gotchas here.

Finally, if you are upgrading your existing Joomla! installation or plan to deploy it for a new initiative, this would be the time to push extension developers to update their code.

Avid is primarily known as a provider of audio and video production technology (Media Composer, Pro Tools, etc.). In early 2010 Avid acquired a German company called Blue Order for its media asset management software, called Media Archive. As 2011 drew to a close, Avid announced the release of Interplay MAM 4.0, the first major release since the acquisition. We've lifted up the hood and taken a detailed look inside. 

MerlinOne, meanwhile, sits at a completely different place in the market. A tiny company with roots in the newspaper and print publishing market, MerlinOne remains one of the few DAM vendors wedded to a thick client, while the rest of the industry moves on has moved on to web-based interfaces. We found the system capabilities somewhat limited compared to other DAM vendors we cover -- albeit targeted to the company's core customer base -- and we outline why in detail in our report.

You can download a free sample of the vendor evaluation report here.

It's a question that many of our advisory customers have been asking us, so we decided to answer it in briefing format.

Cloud-based file-sharing services have obtained some traction, even among larger organizations, because of ease of provisioning and mobile access, as well as for exchanging files with external parties. At least five major providers now target enterprise customers for hosted file sharing: Box, Dropbox, Huddle, Oxygen, and ShareFile.

Just today in fact when talking with a major industrial manufacturer, the excitement and possibilities of working with such suppliers was tempered with concerns over their readiness and maturity to deal with real enterprise needs. To quote this prospective customer, "All these vendors tell us they work with big enterprises, but when we speak to them it feels like it's the first time a real enterprise has asked real enterprise questions of them..."

Certainly cloud providers are here to stay, and if employed in the right circumstances can bring real benefits, but it's still early days as our research paper details.

But now Jive has IPO'ed, and customers have reasonable expectations about understanding where the company will go after transitioning beyond it's venture-fueled youth. Financial analysts seem to expect more of same regarding the company's stock price, but if you know us, then you know that we don't focus on that. What matters is vendor "fit" for you the software buyer.

And in that regard I think Jive's biggest challenges going forward will prove institutional. Jive's a "tweener" vendor: no longer small and agile, but lacking the huge resources to execute globally in way that, say, an IBM can. Moreover, Jive's offerings are divided among significantly different use-cases (external communities and internal collaboration), and delivery models (hosted and on-premise). Doubtless this diversifies revenue streams in  ways that appeal to equity markets, but is this strategy best for customers? I have my doubts. It's very hard to reconcile the inevitable codebase forks.

Meantime, customers have hinted to us that they wish Jive would invest more in refactoring the underlying platform itself. Jive's core, Java-based platform is rich and therefore complicated -- and thus prone to some of same problems that the big players experience. Case in point: readers of our evaluation report know that many Jive customers remain stuck on previous versions because extensive customization can make upgrades unusually fraught.

Of course, refactoring a codebase while maintaining backwards compatibility with a large, diverse installed base is an unusually complex undertaking for any vendor. But now that Jive has grown up, customers should reasonably expect them to be able to pull it off. It's where the question gets called of finding sufficient resources while also scratching Wall Street's quarterly itch. We'll keep watching, on your behalf.

WAVE, Avid and North Plains are three vendors who are debuting a few some functionality they fervently hope will be "game-changers":

• WAVE will roll out a new, very attractively priced version of its flagship MediaBank product (to be called Gold, in late Q1 2012). The new version -- which has an updated UI and moves away from their traditional rich-client focus towards an expanding web client capability -- may bring WAVE into a more competitive position in the mid-market of the DAM spectrum, at a lower price compared to other vendors at the same tier who specialize in Brand Management.
• Just a few weeks ago, Avid debuted the re-branded Interplay Media Asset Manager, which the company is positioning as a kind of default solution for video producers who want a MAM deeply integrated with their video editing suite. It remains to be seen, however, just how deftly Avid will marry the multiple technologies they possess for the media production, management, and deployment process.
• Hot on the heels of their new TeleScope version 9, North Plains has debuted one of the more feature-rich iPad-specific DAM applications. Other vendors are sure to follow suit, or make sure their cross-platform HTML5 browser clients are up to snuff to compete.

These are just a few of the highlights from our 2012 DAM Market Overview. We go through each of the 20+ vendors we cover and assess their current positioning and potential risk they represent to you, the buyer and implementer of these technologies. As always, be sure to let us know if you have any questions.

This latest Market Overview is available to all DAM research subscribers, or may be purchased separately for $875.

MediaBeacon's DAM tool is among the industry's more flexible and standards-based, and though largely focused on brand management scenarios, the company made extensive efforts  to add video management features over the last 18 months.

In 2011, MediaBeacon was without question the DAM vendor I received the most inquires about, but those questions changed markedly over the course of the year. Earlier in the year, it was about features of their software; later in the year and in the first few weeks of 2012, the tone shifted: "Can MediaBeacon keep up with the growth?"

The company gained many new banner-name clients in 2011. However with the exception of Cognizant, their partner channel remains thin given the size of the companies with whom they're closing business. Historically, as we discuss extensively in our Digital & Media Asset Management Report, MediaBeacon's happiest customers were those who worked with Jason Bright directly. As anyone who's taken a basic business course knows, such a model is not sustainable. 

Some Real Story Group advisory customers came to me utterly passionate about adopting MediaBeacon's software, but were unhappy with the level of responsiveness from the vendor. The same was true of potential SI partners, who wondered how much MediaBeacon really wanted to expand their partner channels. Meanwhile, MediaBeacon slowly grew their services team, but not at the same pace as competitors like North Plains or VYRE.

So, is MediaBeacon keeping up with its growth? At the moment, not adquately. Recently, two of my customers who knew MediaBeacon's technology was a good fit signed with other vendors because they were disappointed in how the pre-sales process went. They figured that that as an actual customer, it wouldn't get any better. Another customer who wants to work with MediaBeacon wonders about finding a team of implementers who really know the tool -- and haven't been happy with the answers from the vendor.

As someone behind the scenes on such product selections, it's been interesting to witness the shift. Still, MediaBeacon sits at a cozy spot in the DAM market spectrum: it can reasonably address small business or agency brand management scenarios, but by the same token, it has the chops to support large enterprise DAM implementations. Yet, impressive technology alone does not turn small industry darlings into software powerhouses. Service and the ability to scale a company, along with that technology, is what opens up that possibility. It remains to be seen how well MediaBeacon will deliver on such big expectations in 2012.   

Yet despite the interest, one area I find few buyers investigate thoroughly enough is that of file encryption.  Presumably you make the assumption that if you are going to pay a third party service to manage your electronic files that they will do so in a safe and secure manner, and most times they will.

Managing data securely involves many things, but one element that suppliers make quite a song and dance about is the fact that they encrypt your documents/data, making it "100% secure." But things are not quite that simple, and you need to ask some more probing questions before taking that sort of claim at face value.

For example:

• Are my documents encrypted whilst "at rest" in your system?
• Are my documents encrypted whilst "in transit" to your system?

In most cases you'll find that documents are not encrypted whilst "at rest," and even where this gets presented an option, there are often sound technical reasons why any hosted or cloud service would rather not encrypt everything all the time, not least of which would be the impact on processing and delivery times of your data. In most cases documents only get encrypted whilst "in transit" -- in other words whilst they are passing through the internet to and from your premises.

You may also want to ask who has access to the keys to encrypt your documents. Is it just you or does the service provider also have access to the keys? That will likely start up a whole new conversation with some surprises, not all of which may be pleasant.

It doesn't matter whether you are considering contracting with an industry Goliath like EMC, Amazon, or IBM, or new upstart like Box, Huddle, or Oxygen. The fact is there are plenty of questions you will want to ask of any service provider before committing to any kind of contract; yet in our experience even simple questions like those above are often overlooked. 

Over the past few of years we have advised many organizations who are considering handing their corporate assets to a cloud-based service, and it's a trend that will surely grow in 2012. It is also one that as buyer advocates we worry about, for buyers themselves need to make the effort to dig deeper.  Suppliers are unlikely to be falling over themselves anytime soon to lift any fog of confusion that currently exists.

Our subscribers will see several new vendors under review as well as an overhauled set of evaluation criteria. More about those in the coming weeks.

For now I'd like to share one of the big themes of the report: customer disappointment with major platform vendors.

Why? It turns out that business units want....ready-made business applications, not the promise of a development platform. And while major platform vendors (IBM, Microsoft, Oracle) can check numerous functional boxes for collaboration and social networking, they don't provide many polished applications out-of-the-box.

Some commentators have suggested that the real answer here lies in broader ecosystems, and I believe there's some truth to that. But "ecosystem" for platform vendors today primarily means armies of systems integrators willing to write one-off extensions to the base code, at no small fee. This becomes yet another dimension to the disappointment customers are sharing with us.

I'm not suggesting that an all best-of-breed approach is nirvana. To quote my colleague Kashyap from our media release yesterday:

To be sure, a mixed vendor strategy presents near-term challenges for enterprise systems architectures, as well as long-term challenges for business users, who may later confront splintered profiles and disconnected activity streams.

The good news is that, in this maturing Enterprise 2.0 marketplace, you have a wide array of plausible choices.

Subscribers can find the latest updates here. To download a free sample, click here.

Not “Drill, baby drill”? More than 25 years ago, Ted Levitt said – “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.” That rings true for even digital marketing or social marketing tools. An enterprise is not looking for social media or other software. Instead, they want to be able to better connect with their target audience and become the brand of choice for them.

Up the engagement quotient: As ad man David Ogilvy said, “You cannot bore people into buying your product”. Enterprises can tap digital / social marketing tools to better entertain and engage their customers and potential buyers. Nike Shout, an application where fan messages posted on Facebook or Twitter were displayed on stadium screens, is an example.

See the video on YouTube or read about it here.

“Develop the art of listening”: Social media tools provide an excellent opportunity to listen to the customer voice and feedback in ways not possible earlier. However, many enterprises still approach the digital medium as a one-way street for sales pitches and lose the opportunity to engage in two-way conversations with customers. We should note here that there is increasing interest among enterprises for social media monitoring tools or “listening platforms” that promise to keep tabs on what’s being said about your brand. For example, see our earlier blog post on Jive’s social media monitor

“Analyze this?” Sentiment Analysis tools that scour social media conversations for positive and negative opinions about your brand are in vogue as well. These tools deploy language processing and data mining techniques to determine the prevailing attitudes towards your enterprise/brand. While this may (or may not) work well enough in a single language situation, we're not convinced yet that these can handle multi-lingual scenarios where different customers speak in different tongues. We, in the United States of India, are even known to employ two different languages like English and Hindi in the same sentence, or even write out a local language in the Roman (i.e. English) Alphabet. The tools may not be equal to the task of deciphering us.

“Fraudian Slip”: As they say, “half of ad dollars are wasted, the trouble is knowing which half.” In the age of pay-per-click advertising, we might as well say that a fifth to a quarter of online ad dollars are wasted due to click-fraud (based on estimates by Adometry, which tracks these things). It remains a cat-and-mouse game with the good guys and bad guys trying to outwit each other. Marketers need to stay alert and keep a close eye on their analytics for any suspicious behavior and patterns.

“TV is not the idiot box in India”: In India, where only less than 10% of the population regularly accesses the Internet, TV remains the influential medium and unmatched in its reach.  Flipkart (the “Amazon of India”) says that they were taken much more seriously once they started beaming commercials on TV. The larger message here is that depending on your situation, online may not necessarily be the cheapest or the most efficient channel.  

“Comment is Content”: Particularly for news and other community oriented sites, high-quality user comments are becoming as important as editorial content. We can second that based on our experience with clients who place great emphasis on the functionality like management of user generated content and community moderation in their social technology selection processes.

“Crisis Response Use Case” We’ve heard excellent examples of the general public and NGO volunteers rallying in the aftermath for the disasters in Haiti and Fukushima. They’ve created “people finder” apps and used social media tools to coordinate the relief efforts. There’s a lesson here for enterprises on having a plan for when things go wrong and be not caught flat footed. Have your public relations crisis plan ready before it happens.

“Greedy Brands” Earlier, companies just wanted a consumer to buy their products. But now they want them to not only buy their products, but be an advocate for them and also help with co-creating the products. From a software products perspective this has seen the emergence of co-creation and open innovation software tools. However, it is not yet clear why the consumers should participate and / or what’s in it for them.

“Did you know?” Finally, we promised trivia and tidbits as well. Here they are:

• Organized Crime is shifting from their traditional vices to cybercrimes -- equally lucrative but less physically risky.  
• The largest social media monitoring enterprise in the world? It could well be the Government of China, whose 40,000 officers analyze citizen postings on the Net  
• The average tenure of a Chief Marketing Officer is only two years, according to Ogilvy; digital / social marketing projects need to deliver results fast, then

That last one must make CIOs -- whose average tenure is a bit more than four years -- feel pretty good by comparison...

- Apoorv Durga and Kashyap Kompella

Having done so many, I tend to approach marketplace overviews with real skepticism, for I can no better predict the next 10 years of the ECM industry than my 12 year-old daughter could. What I can do though is look closely at the events of 2011 and detail where these could lead us in 2012. And that is just what I have done in this report: keeping it real.

So what are our conclusions? Well, some of them should come as no surprise.

• The Document Management market continues to grow strongly despite some fragmentation
• Cloud-based file sharing providers will make an impact in 2012, particularly as an alternative to SharePoint
• The skills shortage we have noted in past years is reaching a critical point

There is much more of course in the actual report, including an updated "Cross Check" chart detailing the relative risk and evolution of ECM vendors.

Each year I write these, I wonder what will be different from the previous years, since this is in some respects a very mature market. Yet there always is change, and 2012 looks set to be one of the most turbulent in a long time.

The reality is that search remains an important element within the information management spectrum, yet big enterprise search projects are thin on the ground.  Most buyers default to whatever search engine is bundled with their enterprise licensing deals (IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, et. al.) and few RFP/Tender documents are issued for specialist search vendors to bid upon.

Nevertheless enterprise search in its broadest sense is a multi-billion dollar industry, and pretty much every enterprise globally makes some use of search technology. So why the lack of visibility and so few major search projects?  Simply put, much of the money in enterprise search is in basic document filters.

Document filters are a core components of search systems. They parse the many different electronic document types (Word/Excel/Pages/Keynote, etc.) used within a typical organization, thus making them indexable, searchable, and more broadly viewable. It is a crucial if basic job, and one that runs in the background -- as technology embedded within other technology. 

Almost every major business software supplier makes use of such filters, and when you stop to consider the vast number of document types and how often they change, you can understand why most software suppliers don't try to built their own.  Rather they license well-maintained filters from Oracle, HP (Autonomy), or ISYS.

Indeed the licensing of filters is so pervasive and lucrative that some argued at the time of HP's $11B acquisition of Autonomy that much if not most of Autonomy's "IDOL" revenue actually came from their Keyview document filters -- rather than their flagship IDOL enterprise search systems. Oracle also retained and grew a very healthy license revenue stream when they acquired Stellent's INSO filters, and independent search specialist ISYS does a healthy trade in filters too. Taken together it is fair to say that filters make up the lion's share of enterprise search related spend. Yet frankly as a technology sector to watch and comment on there is little that is less interesting. What would you rather study and write about, the new Ferrari or the oil filters it uses?

So what ever happened to real enterprise search, those mega projects involving federated search across multiple silos of information, that normalize search sets from many different sources and types into a cohesive singularity?  Well those projects still do exist.  But they are rare, expensive, complex, and have a high failure rate.

Enterprise search will always be with us, as a critical component of any information management strategy. But there's the rub: it's just a component, typically dwarfed by other elements and playing a supporting role at best.

The danger here of course is that buyers can underestimate the importance of getting the right search technology, and the burden of maintaining and managing the search environment. When technology is simply bundled into a deal, there's a temptation to ignore it.

Don't ignore search.  Search can be labor intensive, and with a lack of skilled resources can degrade to the point of uselessness over time. Search needs to be taken seriously, and it would be good if it got more of the limelight. But the reality in 2012 is that specialized search technology options such as dtSearch, Solr, Recommind, ISYS, or Funnelback can't and shouldn't occupy the limelight.  The limelight should be on the proper practices and resources needed to manage a search environment and the difficulty most organizations face in obtaining them. Most organizations today already have search technology, it was typically thrown into a deal without any further discussion. It is the ability to fully exploit the technology that they lack.

Not surprisingly, most architects have taken an intense interest in cloud-based computing, across both its public and private (and hybrid) incarnations. These same architects typically also participate in software selection decisions. Then here's what happens: architects immersed in planning cloud-based futures often get surprised to discover how poorly traditional software vendors fit into that world.

Among the unpleasant surprises that can emerge:

• Most off-the-shelf ("COTS") tools are not readily cloudable, or claim cloud-readiness but must be installed in a specific cloud environment (like Azure) and often cannot take advantage of some key cloud benefits, like elasticity and rapid provisioning of new instances
• Many SaaS-based offerings (increasingly favored by business units) do not actually employ cloud infrastructures -- not the end of the world, but requires probing the attendant consequences
• Some self-described "cloud-based" solutions are really just managed hosting services for traditional COTS packages -- in short, outsourcing your datacenter, and not much more (sometimes much less)

Architects looking to engage business stakeholders on the benefits of cloud need to understand that...

1. Non-technical people may have a very different idea about what "cloud" means
2. Vendors coming in to solve business problems may have similarly fuzzy (often conveniently fuzzy) notions

So it becomes all the more important for architects to remove any rose-colored glasses when looking at packaged software. There's a reason why software that's purpose-built for cloud deployments works better in that environment than toolsets struggling through a cloud retrofit. Let us know if we can help you sort it all out.

Social Media Monitoring and Intelligence is an important tool in a digital marketer's arsenal. Of course, digital marketers also require tools for Lead Management, Campaigns (using email, social media, and mobiles), Landing Page Management, and so forth. We club all such capabilities under the umbrella of "Digital Marketing."

If you are a web or a digital marketer, you can source these capabilities in many ways. For example:

• You can consider a standalone Lead Management or Social Media Monitoring tool. There are a huge number of such tools - mostly SaaS based - in the market and this marketplace is seeing a rapid evolution
• Your existing Collaboration, Portal or Web Content Management product provides these. Jive is an example of this (we review Jive in our Enterprise Collaboration and Social Software Report)
• You already use a CRM platform that also provides some such capabilities. Salesforce.com, for example, has started offering Social Media Monitoring capabilities via its acquisition of Radian6

There are many other ways too and whether you  use an existing platform or a standalone tool depends on many factors. This is an emerging marketplace and there are not too many best practices out there. We will provide detailed guidance in a subsequent advisory for subscribers but in the mean time, remember to evaluate such tools with the same rigor as you would any other enterprise tool selection.  Most of these sevices promise quick setup and time-to-market, but you should still take the time to follow vendor selection best practices.

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...

I know however that I am in the minority -- in previous jobs I have argued with fellow managers about the educational qualifications of the people we hired. ("I don't care if she's a certified PMP, has a PhD, and 5 other professional certificates. Has she ever actually managed a large, successful project? Can she inspire a team? Is she an effective communicator?") Education only gets you so far: what matters in my book is real experience and results. (Note, I have 3 PhDs in my immediate family, so I may now be uninvited to the holiday events.)

Recently I had an advisory session about web content quality control with a large, global Real Story Group research customer who adopted a new web content management system a year ago. They wanted to establish a culture of quality among their web content managers, and champion those who not only understood the system designed to manage dozens of global websites, but also possessed a certain level of experience and inherent attitude towards quality.

I suggested adopting a six-sigma-like / karate-oriented "belt" system that, after a base level of system training, was focused on levels of experience-based knowledge and, equally important, positive attitude and focus on content quality. 

Here's a short summary of a longer deliverable:

WCMS yellow belt:

• Has taken 3 days initial WCMS training, is willing to ask for advice, proactive curiosity about WCM and how it works

WCMS blue belt:

• Minimum of 3 months using the system, showing inherent interest in the "health" of the system, proactive constructive attitude about content quality
• Understands the ramifications of content type changes, tagging, and other content editing tasks
• Takes responsibility at at a local level and derives improvement ideas for both the site(s) and the WCMS from experience

WCMS black belt:

• At least 6 months using the system, daily exposure to the WCMS, experienced as an admin
• Omniscience of the "big picture" of how the WCMS effects sites, knows and understands why it's important to do things correctly, encourages others to maintain quality 
• Leads, delegates, and maintains content quality at a global level

One key question came up during the planning: "should we hire or promote someone into the black belt role?" Promote, promote, promote. Again, since this is about real-world experience in a particular environment and a particular company, it's like learning a language. Even if you learn to speak Spanish in Madrid, that doesn't cut it in Mexico City or the Andes. Black belts vary from dojo to dojo; the same should be true for WCMS black belts.

As such, there were many more criteria specific to the organization that defined these different levels, which I won't share here. Creating an operational framework that rewards system users based on their real-world experience, dedication to web content quality, and proactive attitudes towards system and content improvement is one way to make WCM a core part of how your team is evaluated. This approach can be adopted regardless of what platform you use, and also adapted for other types of technology.

As always, let us know if you need help.