At the Gilbane conference in Boston last week, I chatted for a few minutes with new FatWire CEO Yogesh Gupta, who made what I thought was an interesting observation. Commenting on architectural trends in the IT world generally (not just with regard to content management systems), he suggested that hub-and-spoke systems have not served enterprises well, in many cases. Connecting users, client apps, and target systems via a centralized control point (whether it's a database server, a metadirectory, or whatever), and forcing all clients to "phone home" through the hub's service layer, is (or can be) a difficult and inefficient way to solve certain problems; problems that are sometimes better solved just-in-time at the edges of the network, using edge resources.

Gupta's comments weren't aimed specifically at JCR (the Java Content Repository initiative, also known as JSR 170 and now JSR 283), but he speculated that JCR, which effectively hides repositories behind one unified API, could be understood in the context of yet-another-hub-and-spoke-system. His point wasn't that JCR is evil or that abstraction layers aren't good, but that we know content exists in mini-silos all over the network, in heterogeneous systems, under non-centralized control. (And usually for good reasons.) Like it or not, the edges of the network tend to build out organically, resulting in what might be called "accidental architecture." Whatever you want to call it, content management systems need to take it into account, because Web 2.0 is driving things in that direction, fast. Of course, as a pure-play Web CMS vendor, FatWire has a vested interest in this approach.

Still, the "Web 2.0" way of working is about user empowerment, peer-to-peer data-sharing, collaborative authoring, ad-hoc formation (and dissolution) of groups, delegated administration, "just enough" access control, and (in general) decentralized management of things that were traditionally thought best to be under central control and administration. Going forward, the challenge of Enterprise 2.0 is to make these sorts of social-web architectural motifs, which involve ad-hoc teams and shared content with short shelf life, coexist within the greater Enterprise 1.0 machine.

This is also the challenge of "CMS 2.0." Right now, the industry is at CMS 1.1 or 1.2. Expect to see rapid-fire point-releases in 2008.