The last decade saw a war between Portal and CMS frameworks, in which one had to choose between application integration and collaboration tools vs. information lifecycle management (from authoring to versioning) and Web publishing frameworks. With the advent of Web 2.0 technologies such as discussion forums, wikis, blogs, document spaces, microblogging and the increased use of mobile devices, boundaries among content, composites, contexts, and contributors are rapidly vanishing. This convergence where summarized in the previous blog post by the 4Cs Manifesto.

This trend is now pushing organizations to rapidly create all types of new portals, web sites and rich internet applications. Simple, static brochureware sites have become a thing of the past as each business lines need now to deal with a plethora of different public or private web initiatives such as document workspaces, social communities, interactive knowledge bases, customers and suppliers extranets or personalized information dashboards.

On their side, portal technologies are moving to what the Gartner calls User Experience Platforms. But portlet or mashup environments are still suffering from one big inconvenient: they are by default still not enough bound to any content middleware framework. Most portlet or mashup suites are simple presentation facades, which are clearly insufficient to develop real useful composite content applications.

The convergence of content stores, portal frameworks, combined with powerful context-aware publishing systems and social interactions, is pushing traditional ECM, WCM, Portal, and E2.0 vendors to rely upon a new generation of integrated “Composite Content Platforms” (also called “Content–enabled Enterprise Portals” or “Content Application Servers”).

The Content Application Services Decalogue

Rather than trying to structure such a platform according to a classical IT stack, going from persistence to presentation, I privileged a generic, service-oriented vision to demonstrate how all these pre-integrated services could finally benefit to any of your portals, sites and composite applications initiatives.

The 10 key axes of content and application services for the next generation of content-rich applications are illustrated in the diagram and described below.

1. Library Services
As the CMS industry has matured, library services have become a basic core requirement. They regroup all the services required to correctly manage the lifecycle of any content assets, from persistence to content structure, versioning, file plans, observations and relationships. Thanks to the ongoing standardization efforts and open source commoditization, (e.g. CMIS, JCR with some freely available open source Reference Implementations) such library services will rapidly spread to related industries, such as social software, knowledge management, or learning management. Distributing these services in a vendor-neutral manner in the cloud will be one of the next key challenges.

Standards: JCR, CMIS, WebDAV, NoSQL,
New challenges: Content library services as a standardized, scalable and omnipresent utility; Portable data; Distributed persistence in the cloud; Shared ontologies; Content ownership.

2. Identity Services
In an era of transparency, flatness and openness, privacy concerns risk to quickly come back to the fore. Widespread adoption of a single, simple authorization and authentication mechanism is still a dream. The situation is becoming worse with the spread of distributed content environments and aside-storage systems (search indexes, triple stores)which are often duplicating data without solving security issues. Multiplication of similar user properties across systems will rapidly become an obstacle for end-users. At a content object level, the industry still sticks to standard ACL and DRM-kind of feature is still in its infancy, mainly limited to the media and musical industry.

Standards: LDAP, Kerberos, Shibboleth, SAML, XACML, OpenID, OAuth, and many others
New Challenges: Truly transparent, federated and widely used identity management standards; Digital identity as a utility; Distributed user profiles and properties; Improved DRM on any content asset.

3. Process and Orchestration Services
From BPML to BPEL/BPMN, workflow and orchestration services were often considered as a separate piece of the enterprise IT puzzle. Misunderstandings among orchestration services and human workflows, often combined with overly complex business processes modelers and tougher than initially estimated web services integration issues, limited the widespread usage of such technologies. As standards and implementations matured along with simpler Web 2.0 interfaces, we should see the comeback of business process management services natively and heavily integrated into the next generation of composite content servers.

Standards: BPEL, BPMN, BPEL4People, etc.
New challenges: Native integration in next generation of composite content servers; Focus on simplicity; new generation of Visual BPM Modeler; Better integration with mashup services.

4. Content Interoperability Services
Improved content interoperability is bringing the content silo era to a close. As core content library services are becoming a commodity, and as customers are pressuring vendors to open up their silos, content interoperability services and protocols are gaining in importance. Associating and linking content objects existed from the beginning of the web, but semantic web gurus were perhaps too focused on modeling domains to reach the next level of computer intelligence, rather than integrating the core library services required for a common playground. In the coming years we should see a merger of semantic web concepts with other content interoperability services.

Standards: CMIS, RDF
New challenges: Migrate from a silo’ed to distributed content universe; Migration from proprietary binary files to open content types; Evolution from linked data to linked content objects; Widespread usage of common ontologies among content stores; Secured P2P-kind of services on content objects.

5. Semantic Services
Most of the time “Semantic” only refers to the “Linked Data” terms coined by Sir Tim Barnes Lee, which is mainly about better managing “content relationships” (cf. point 4 above). For the purpose of this post, I clearly distinguish “data and content interoperability services” from “semantic services” oriented toward the extraction and understanding of the meaning of content. The latter integrates all kind of techniques required to enhance and enrich any content assets, from simple text documents to images or videos. Such services rely on various algorithms, such as lexical and syntax analysis, natural language processing, object recognition.
Most existing content objects are still unstructured, with a poor set of available annotations and metadata. We are recently assisting to the rise of new semantic enrichment services – including OpenCalais API, Evri API, or Zemanta API – that dig into your content to automatically extract meaning, provide additional metadata and associate it to existing ontologies. Next-generation of content-enabled applications will rapidly embed such enrichment services to offer extra values to end-users.

Standards/Field of Computer Science: OWL, (P)LSA, NLP, etc.
New Challenges: Semantic lifting; Commoditization of semantic enrichment techniques; Standardization of semantic enhancement interoperability services; Adoption of very simple ontologies.

6. Information Access and Retrieval Services
Most content frameworks still rely on classical keyword searches. The Apache Lucene/Solr project is doing a fantastic job to commoditize access to core search services. But information access should not be limited to enter keywords in a search input form. The growth of content available in various stores, the lack of proper information filters, and the need to access to related information directly from your current content consumption context will foster the creation of new search-driven applications.

Standards: OpenSearch API; Need for a new search API standard?
New Challenges: Standardization of federated or unified search; Social search; Distributed LinkedData search; New information retrieval applications; Preemptive recommendations and suggestions; Genius-oriented kind of features;

7. Analytical Services
Web analytics services, leveraging audit trails, logs, and hits, have existed for years. They are now largely commoditized, mainly due to the apparition of the free Google Analytics service. Once considered simply as “nice to have” options, they now have to be at the heart of any application. These services are leading to the next level of “content intelligence”. Mixing public or private-facing audit trails, weblogs or social graphs will foster the development of more intelligent applications. However, finding the right mix among all possible factors, while leveraging such a mass-volume of data to turn them into relevant metrics and useful personalization services, remains a key challenge.

Standards and Techniques: OLAP, FB Open Gaph, ETL, etc.
New Challenges: Content mining; Interest graph; Usage patterns; Automatic audience segmentation;

8. Social and Collaboration Services
One of the recent goals of any composite content platforms is to let developers rapidly socialize their applications. Most so-called E2.0 software employ a top-down approach focused on the added value of adopting an enterprise social network that mimic Facebook rather than promoting the integration of social as a service.
Last year, socializing an application was mainly about enabling user generated content, such as comments, ratings, likes, and tags. We are assisting this year to the multiplication of all kind of activity and action streams. We should see tomorrow the rise of more standardized and distributed social profiles and collaboration protocols which will be natively integrated into the next generation of content application server.

Standards: ActivityStreams, OpenSocial, XMPP, Wave Federation Protocol, Salmon, SIOC/FOAF
New Challenges: Distributed user profiles; Unification of activity streams, Social archive management; Native integration of standardized collaboration protocols;

9. Mashup Services
Portal technologies have been decoupled from CMS for years, but as the web evolves, there is a growing need to develop content rich applications. The all-purpose MyYahoo-type of dashboards is reaching its limits. Users now want access to their back-end processes and information from within the context of their sites. Native support for portlets, gadgets, widgets, and other types of shareable micro-applications within a composite content platform is becoming a necessity and implies that your platform should natively support a good level of mashability.
Moreover, advanced end-users now want to create all the data, content, or process-driven mashups on their own. All these user-generated mashups will populate a new generation of enterprise app store. Composite Content Platform will also become in charge of offering all the discovery and governance services needed to efficiently manage such a repository.

Standards: JSR168, JSR286, OpenSocial, EMML, etc.
New Challenges: Mixing public-facing data with private-facing information; LinkedData composition; Comprehensive visual mashup builders; Governance of enterprise mashup stores;

10. Rendering Services
Users and developers should be able to rely on strong rendering and delivery services. The multiplication of sites (per audiences, language, topic, and so on), devices (including web, mobile, and social networks), personalization (such as user preferences, implicit personalization, or geolocalized settings), standards (including cross-browser compatibility, or new HTML 5 standard) and multi-scripting support (including JSP, velocity, groovy, or php) make rendering a complex beast. Combined with all the front-end delivery caching issues (CDN or similar natively embedded front-end caches), and the integration of highly dynamic UI components to create a rich user experience, content rendering and delivery has become a critical service for any content application server.

Standards: (X)HTML, WCAG, Javascript, AJAX, Multi-scripting, ESI/CDN
New challenges: Dynamic contextual and personalized content renderers; user experience platform; multi-device support; clear separation of form (context) from substance (content, data, metadata); easy content repurposing.

By leveraging at best such a collection of services, developers should be able to more rapidly assemble, reuse, and mashup existing content assets and composites into a new generation of content-rich applications. How many E2.0 solutions are today reinventing the wheel at a content platform level into what will rapidly transform into a new generation of Social Silo?

The rise of composite content servers signals the convergence among application servers, portal frameworks, social services, and content stores.

But in choosing a robust enterprise-grade composite content server, it is then critical to:

• Ensure that your data and content are clearly separated from your front-end applications from both a vendor-neutral and standardized manner.
• Understand how you can rapidly develop and assemble hundreds of contextualized sites and applications, employing all your content assets, social properties, or composites into such dedicated solutions.
• Make sure that your content application runtime can scale and adapt to your needs both on-premises or in the cloud.

Open Source Consequences

Today’s composite content servers are focused on trying to glue together a generic, unified content store and all the related services into a single consistent, robust, scalable and stable middleware platform.

But the IT industry’s commoditization is ramping. In 2005, we assisted to the commoditization of application servers with the rise of middleware such as JBoss, Apache Tomcat, and similar offerings. We should now look for accommodation at the content application layer, both from free proprietary solution (e.g. SharePoint Foundation 2010) or from open source alternatives (e.g. Apache Jackrabbit+Sling, Nuxeo EP, JBoss GateIn, Alfresco Content Application Server, etc).

However delivering such a complete stack requires skills and ongoing investments in so many different specialties that it will certainly and rapidly lead to some level of consolidation in the industry at least in the open source world. Open Source Software vendors will then focus on delivering and selling finished applications on top of the stack while working together at a platform level.

Where’s this all going?

Monolithic, ever growing, content application platforms, even if composed of hundreds of relatively independent sub-libraries, are dinosaurs on the way to extinction. Their lack of flexibility and their high integration and maintenance overheads will spur the turn to a more agile and distributed approach.

So let’s try to foresee some trends and their possible consequences on the content application server market:

Trend #1: The cloud as your main distributed content and data store
Content assets need do become omnipresent. Open, standardized, interoperable, and distributed content stores should allow any content owner to securely store, access, and archive any kind of content asset from a transparent manner. Customers will buy disk quotas and value added services (such as replication, backup, caching, and secured data center) rather than applications. As mentioned by Lee Dallas: “Application archives need to be ultimately independent of the array of systems generating the data they store.”

Trend #2: Distributed RESTful Services
The ever-growing Internet bandwidth, improved security on cloud computing, together with the generalization of distributed RESTful APIs, should lead more and more software vendors to focus on specific niches and offer specialized services on the cloud which could be easily integrated back into your custom solutions.

Trend #3: Rapid assembly of content-rich applications
To best leverage trends #1 and #2, developers and power users should be able to rapidly compose the applications they need by federating content from several stores and by mashuping it together with all the required, local or distant, services they need.

This will lead to the creation of dynamically assembled composite content platforms relying upon widely distributed services which will connect to, reuse, and repurpose information available in various local or distant stores.

However, this vision of a truly distributed content application server seems unrealistic for the next 5 to 10 years, at least for enterprise-grade, mission-critical applications, even if it was already actively promoted by CORBA ten years ago, then by SOAP/UDDI, and now by OSGi. Too many standards are still missing. Cloud-based document storage (such as GDocs and DropBox) should transition into more granular content centers. Content interoperability and data portability should support more complex use cases. Content owners should be able to manage their distributed content in a transparent and secure manner, no matter what content centers they employ. Distributed SOA/WOA services should have the same level of performance and security as local, internally installed services. Identity and authorization mechanisms need to be standardized at an international level. Then the content industry will have entered a new era.

Meanwhile, we should expect to see an intermediate, bridging phase with the delivery of micro-kernels, pre-populated with different pluggable, hot-deployable services, hosted both locally and in the cloud with content openness and federation in mind.

Next Episodes: the saga continues

We can now see how composite content platforms will serve both as development foundations and as a production runtimes to develop your next generation of content-rich applications be (a web site, a portal or a 2.0 kind of applications).
Next time, I will go into more detail about:

• Development and integration tools needed to foster the rapid assembly of composite content applications.
• Illustrations of content-rich applications which can be developed on top of such content composite platforms.
• Products and Tools that let you manage all your content assets across all your sites and applications.

The long-awaited convergence among application servers, portal frameworks, social services, and content stores is becoming a technical reality, giving rise to such terms as “Content–enabled Enterprise Portals”, “Content Application Servers” and, finally the widespread use of “Composite Content Platform”.

As Lars Plougman from the Dachis Group recently noted, organizations are now looking for an integrated framework which best combine application and content integration. IT departments, digital agencies and system integrators need an enterprise-grade, service oriented, pre-assembled platform with which they can easily assemble web parts, foster content reuse, mashup processes, surface information, and better manage user interactions. Ideally speaking such a platform should even allow power users to create solutions on their own, without the need from any outside IT assistance.

But what is it really about?

The 4Cs Manifesto

From the sixties Marketers learn and use the 4Ps of the marketing mix. Information Management Professionals should now also be able to rely upon their 4Cs manifesto: Content, Composite, Context, and Contributors, as shown in the following diagram.

Content:

Content is the oldest of the 4Cs, and certainly the best mastered, even if it has suffered for years from a strong vendor lock-in situation and a lack of content interoperability standards. All sorts of Document Management Systems, Record-Management Systems, Digital Asset Management Systems, Case Management Systems have been developed and sold over the last years to manage the wealth of many types of digital assets.

Content is key. But content was captured and jailed like a robber rather than being fluid and omnipresent like the air. As mentioned by J. Brooke Aker, “when it comes to searching internally for information, we ask around the office and then run a search on the company network – fingers crossed and hoping for the best.”

We are assisting to a slow transition from Content Lifecycle Management to Information Management. We should then see the rise of a new generation of more intelligent and federated Content Platforms which will be able to better exploit the substance (aka the meaning) of every content item rather than only focusing on its type or persistence.

Composite:

The next of the 4Cs, Composite, refers to content and application mashability, a recurring industry topic. As noted by Chris Keyser, the lead architect for Microsoft's Global ISV team, “Composability is a paradigm shift in computing from brittle, monolithic, developer-centric applications solving one particular problem, to agile, contextual, user-driven applications.”

A decade ago we believed that federating and aggregating small applications at the presentation layer (Portlets/WebParts) would be enough to satisfy the needs of information workers. However, it was soon found that aggregated, side-by-side views, was no match when it came to developing the next generation of rich internet applications. With increased openness in content and data interoperability, easier to use web oriented architecture, and simple to use mashup tools, organizations want now to rapidly create their own custom composite applications.

Context:

Web Content Management and Publishing frameworks were long considered a marginal playground for script kiddies. But as the Web becomes the primary information vehicle, publishing, rendering, and personalization frameworks are playing a more and more crucial role within every organization. The evolution of content consumption practices and the multiplication of devices are pushing the industry from mono-channel site management toward context-aware publishing. Delivering the right information at the right person at the right time on the right device through the right application is becoming much more challenging than simply broadcasting information on static web pages. Context-aware information delivery and context management are among the hottest topic for the future.

Contributor:

With the advent of the 2.0 economy, every application is getting socialized. Every user, from active editor to passive reader, directly or indirectly contributes to a system. We currently best value user-generated feedback, but machines do not care – a system might attribute more value in knowing what your friends are currently reading, than in excessively promoting real-time trivialities exchanged in a discussion stream.

But managing all social interactions of individuals and groups are still in its infancy: user segmentation, crowd aggregation, targeted audience management are getting more important with the recent rise of social media. Social Network Analysis and Social Intelligence are rapidly gaining momentum. An incredible number of new applications can be derived from better exploiting all these passive or active user interactions – something that systems only start to exploit.

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This 4Cs manifesto needs to be converted now into a range of services, protocols, and storage interfaces to form the base architecture to more rapidly develop next generation of content-rich, social-enabled, process-driven, and contextualized web sites and applications.

This is what we will present in the upcoming blog post: “The rise of Composite Content Platforms”.

GilbaneSF 2010: Future of Open Source CMS Session

This blog post is a wrap-up of the GilbaneSF 2010 debate on the “Future of Open Source CMS” (#fosc on twitter) with Geoff Bock (Gilbane Group), Ian White (The Business Insider), and Jahia’s inputs from an Open Source Content Management vendor perspective.

You will find below the presented slides and a summary of the main topics we covered during the debate. This blog post will be followed by a couple of others over the coming months detailing the most important paradigms: the future of Open Source CMS. We will consolidate all these entries into a whitepaper available for download next fall.

Today, it is hard to define what an “Open Source CMS vendor” is, since virtually every CMS vendor uses open source in its products, contributes to open source, or provides services around open source. Additionally, most, if not all softwares are dealing with “Content” in one way or another.

To get a clearer picture of the future of Open Source CMS, we need to approach the topic from two different angles:

• The Future of CMS
• The Future of Open Source

1) Future of CMS: Composite Content Platforms vs Content-Enabled Applications

CMS is a strange beast whose definition is broad and uncertain. CMS mostly implies two different audiences: techies (CIOs; CTOs; and developers) and practitioners (marketers, information Workers, and lines of business). From this perspective, it is evident we are not dealing with a single “system,” but rather two.

CMS: Content Management Services or Content Management Solutions?

The former stakeholders are looking for a “content platform”, the latter, for finished products and solutions to solve some of their content issues.

As Wikipedia notes:

Application software is contrasted with system software and middleware, which manage and integrate a computer's capabilities, but typically do not directly apply them in the performance of tasks that benefit the user. A simple, if imperfect analogy in the world of hardware would be the relationship of an electric light bulb (an application) to an electric power generation plant (a system). The power plant merely generates electricity, not itself of any real use until harnessed to an application like the electric light that performs a service that benefits the user.

For a long time, CMS was a simple mixture of horizontal infrastructural libraries combined with vertical applications, without any clear segregation of duties. Most CMS solutions available today are still based on this monolithic approach.

Recently, the industry-led (think JCR or CMIS) massive standardization and interoperability effort was coupled with a push to quickly prototype and launch rich content-enabled applications. This combination led to a greater separation of content platforms and content-enabled applications.

Towards Composite Content Platforms and Content-Enabled Applications

Even though the term “composite” has existed for quite some time, only recently did it gain traction, due to its role as the cornerstone of SharePoint 2010, actively pushed by  Gartner as a replacement for the older and more limited CEVA term.

Content particles are becoming increasingly granular and structured. Moreover, there is an ever-increasing need to rapidly assemble, cross-link, enrich, and combine heterogeneous content objects. Therefore, the term “composite” sounds convenient and appropriate.

Composite Content Platforms are tomorrow's ECM 2.0

The nice thing about composite content platforms (call them content application servers or content management platforms if you prefer), is that they act as dynamic content containers or as content runtimes, which can run content composite applications. The next generation of composite content applications will be even more dynamic. They will not only glue cold content together, but also will natively inherit from the merge of application servers and content stores, and create hot actionable content-driven applications.

Of course, a simple website could be considered a composite content application (in which case your httpd server could be seen as a kind of first generation and lightweight composite content server). However, composite content applications can also scale to more complex content-enabled applications requiring advanced business processing schema, strong business integration, and heavy personalization requirements.

All these composite content applications can produce and publish massive amounts of content and data, which need to be correctly managed. And here come the usual content management product families (WCM, DMS, DAM, RM…) that will help manage this deluge of information for all the content-enabled applications.

This platform/product split is quite common, at least as part of the high-end enterprise spectrum of the CMS market niche.  It is rapidly moving down and impacting all other sub-segments.

Some recent examples:

• Day CRX vs Day CQ WCM or DAM
• SharePoint Foundation 2010 vs SharePoint Server 2010 Editions
• Alfresco Content Application Server vs Alfresco WCM, DMS, RM
• Nuxeo EP vs Nuxeo DAM, DMS, Case Management, …
• Exo/JBoss GateIn vs Exo Extended Services (DMS, WCM,…)

Due to their historical focus and inherited technologies, some of these frameworks or content foundations, are still driven by a portal-centric approach (e.g. Exo), a document-centric approach (e.g. Nuxeo, Alfresco), or a web-centric approach (e.g. Jahia, Day). However, we can assume that there will be a rapid consolidation towards a universal set of core value-added services able to nurture and enrich any content asset, be it a web page, a document, a record, an email or a scanned fax.

Content Lifecycle Services such as versioning, file plans, workspaces, content types, searching and querying services, interoperability services, mashability services, Social Services, persistence-independent storage services, etc. are becoming commodities.

As open source commoditization is actively ramping up and rapidly extending its borders, competitors must decide whether to horizontally extend the level of content services offered as part of their content middleware (e.g. archive more volume, support more load, add new value added content enrichment services), or to go up the value chain and provide new lines of content-enabled products and applications to solve the needs of various business lines. Usually, both expansion strategies are pursued in parallel.

Four main trends are emerging:

• A rapid growth of built-in content enrichment services available for any type of content assets
• Improved content interoperability services at the data level (OpenData; PortableData; CMIS; RDF…)
• The need to quickly assemble, reuse, mashup and reuse existing content assets within various content-enabled applications
• A tsunami of information, which needs to be correctly assessed and managed.

With the rise of composite content platforms and content-enabled applications, we should see a shift from monolithic CMS towards better fractioning ones:

• Composite content platforms which will serve both as a development foundation and as a production runtime for content-enabled applications
• Content applications, which could be rapidly developed and run on top of a composite content platform
• Content management products, which will let users best manage their content assets across all their content applications.

Ideally, the next generation of composite content platforms should ensure a level of data openness and interoperability, aligned with the current CMIS, OpenData and other DataPortability trends.

The goal of this new generation of Composite Content Platforms will be to offer a wide range of content enrichment services, while ensuring proper data interoperability and freedom. Ideally, composite content applications will become more standardized and portable, much as web applications became more standardized during the last decade. However, such a standardization process would take at least 5-10 years. Data Portability will therefore become one of the key purchase criteria.

2) The Future of Open Source: Properly defining the limits of Open Core

The line between proprietary and open source software has become increasingly blurred, as open source software is embedded in proprietary products and extensions. There is also plenty of confusion about the term “community”: community builds, originally based on the unstable development branch, are now promoted as “Freemium” editions for viral marketing purposes. Besides, the scope of  “core” features tends to be slowly but surely pared back to boost sales of newly created commercial extensions.

So what can we expect of “Open Core” software vendors? How can we better define ethical and fair boundaries both for open source communities and vendors, while ensuring a reasonable level of open source “purity”?

Simply put, more than 70% of open source contributors are now paid professionals while all open source commercial vendors look for ways to monetize their initial investments. This makes perfect sense, as any commercial entity needs to generate revenues, to pay employees and reward their shareholders.

The Open Core business model is only the latest in a long series of commercial open source business models. Over the past two years, it has rapidly gained momentum. But it is also facing heavy criticisms (cf Gartner or InfoWorld). The model is more and more considered just another type of “Shareware 2.0” or, at best, a lightweight, limited and free SMB edition of the vendor’s main product offering.

Essentially, there is nothing wrong with the Open Core approach and it has existed for years, even if it was not marketed under these terms. It comes down to how the vendor or the community defines the notion, including the scope and the “raison d’être” of the core vs the vendor’s product derivatives.

In today's landscape, we can discern several common pitfalls:

• Unclear core boundaries: there is no clear delineation between features that should remain in the open source core vs those reserved for commercial product derivatives.
• Community Development editions vs Freemium marketing editions. Builds for developers and early adopters are often mixed up with "Gratis" editions to promote and evangelize a product line.
• Community Open Source vs Vendor Controlled Commercial Open Source. Often the underlying intentions of the original contributor regarding its core are unclear. Is it to keep control over the project, or let the community drive development?

In practice, an Open Core strategy often leads to the following consequences:

• Endless debates: Defining the scope of the core vs the one of the proprietary product derivatives is a frequent source of contention both for the vendor's employees or between the vendor and the community.
• Cannibalization of offers: Often there is little marketing distinction between the Core and Commercial Editions, in which case cannibalization normally occurs, to the detriment of the Core.
• Community Exclusion: Vendors tend to favor their proprietary derivatives of community contributions, and shift their focus to value added enhancements rather than the enhancements to the Core.
• Customer FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt): Customers often desire to buy software based on a free open source community project, but in the end revert to a classical vendor lock-in proprietary scenario. They are uncertain about the future of the Core, its maintenance, its migration path, its upgrades, and finally about its product roadmap  driven by the product strategy of the commercial derivatives.

Open Core Main Success Criteria

We can try to solve some of the classical Open Core issues with a series of best practices:

• The Open Core should be of a real utility to the target market audience, and shouldn’t lock further usage or initiatives to the other vendor’s product lines. Open Core is not about confining customers in a closed shell --it's about promoting an open kernel that will help seed other initiatives and attract a long term community.
• It should be evolutionary, despite the initial wishes of the main contributor to follow its own independent product roadmap.
• It should not intentionally degrade stability, scalability or enterprise-grade features to boost conversion rates to commercial offerings.
•  Last but not least, there should not be an overt conflict of interest with the vendor's other product lines lest the value proposition fall back into the Freemium/Shareware2.0 camp, despite the presence of the source code.

The value proposition and scope of the Open Core product offering should be clear to all stakeholders. Most importantly, users should be able to foresee a future for this Open Core product beside the extensions, derivatives, or additional lines promoted by the original vendor.

This leads us to the following suggestions:

Suggestion #1: Better distinguish your product branches

First, let’s not confuse Freemium offerings aimed at practitioners with development builds for code contributors or early adopters. The term “community” normally relates to the crowd source collaborative aspects of an Open Source project (free speech), not that it is gratis (free beer). Releasing some community builds does not prevent a vendor from simultaneously offering Freemium editions of its various product families.

So why are so many Open Core software vendors trying to redistribute an unstable version of their product as a promotional resource, in the hopes of converting users to stable and enhanced commercial editions?

Second, most vendors need to improve the transparency of their Open Core strategies. The vendor should clearly state which of its products aim to become a community-driven open source Core, and which it will more strictly control with dual GPL/Commercial licenses, or even more proprietary licensing schema. There is no shame in being a Commercial Open Source vendor in 2010, so vendors should be candid about their position.

Suggestion #2: Keep your Core away from possible conflicts of interest

The second suggestion is to clearly delineate the scope of various product lines, to avoid any long-term product cannibalization. This not only helps to clarify the audience and the scope of features, but also the entire roadmap for each sub-product. The only sure way to do this is avoid all direct conflicts of interest between your core kernel and your product derivatives. Ideally, the Core should have a long-term perspective which encompasses the vendor's commercial derivatives. Organizations, or competitors, should be able to reuse, leverage and extend your core. Co-optition should be made possible.

Common bad practices are the following:

• Enterprise-grade features or scalability limitations. This classical marketing tactic associated with vendor lock-in is not viable in the long run, as it creates conflicts with the community and can finally force the vendor to fork the core and maintain two distinct branches.
• Features required by the community (or even contributed by the community) that are deliberately placed in proprietary extensions (or not committed back into the Core by the vendor).
• Refusal to loosen control of the Core: The vendor keeps full control of the Core and does not grant committer access to any third party.

A frequent underlying cause of these bad practices is the lack of clear product boundaries vis-a-vis the Core, leading to severe conflicts of interest.

Suggestion #3: One size does not fit all

Now that Open Source business models are better understood by developers and customers, more vendors are using various open source strategies as part of their product families.

For example, one could combine a community-based Open Core released under a business-friendly license, associated with some hybrid GPL/Commercial derivatives, combined with some other proprietary extensions.

The “purity” of an open source vendor no longer has much meaning in 2010. Rather, we should speak of the purity of a given open source project, be it a Core, a library, or an entire product line. As vendors continue to adopt more hybrid strategies, the various levels of “purity” should be assessed for its particular product offerings. 100% pure Open Source vendors should start exploring various licensing models and apply them distinctly to each of their sub-products. As a result, these vendors will develop a more global and valuable Open Source business model. Customers will have to understand a vendor’s entire open source strategy before rushing to deploy the core or on another sub-product.

This trend underscores the need for vendors to avoid Open Source FUD to their customers. The company's open source business model should be rather simple to explain, and clearly state the value proposition for all the stakeholders.

We can summarize this chapter by listing the following key points:

1. Open Core vendors tend to create confusion by mixing their Community with their Freemium editions, and their stable with their development branches.
2. Most Open Core vendors do not clearly delimitate the kernel from their product derivatives. This usually creates severe conflicts of interest.
3. Open Source vendor purity has largely lost meaning in 2010. Purity should be assessed on a project-by-project basis, and the vendor's entire open source business model should be clearly communicated to customers.

3) Applying the Open Platform paradigm to the CMS industry

Let’s now try to combine the first chapter, Future of CMS, with the second one, Future of Open Source, to envision how Open Source CMS could evolve over the next few years:

• Composite Content Servers, Content-Enabled Applications and Content Management Products will be better differentiated, and split into distinct product lines.
• An Open Core CMS strategy makes sense, especially if the Core becomes the Composite Content Platform. Such an Open Core strategy will avoid long-term conflicts of interest with the Content-Enabled Applications or the Content Management Products delivered on top.
• The community of Open Source developers always tends to favor infrastructure and middleware initiatives on finished and ready-to-use software products. We should therefore assist the fast rise of new hybrid business models with some open-sourced Composite Content Servers for techies, released under a business-friendly license, combined with dual-licensed or even proprietary content applications and content management products for practitioners. It is wise to separate communities of techies and practitioners.

Applying our conclusion to the Open Source CMS industry, we can now try to draw a general picture of future business models:

Of course, each CM product and vendor is different, so there will certainly be hundreds of heterogeneous variations of this business model over the next few years. But the underlying paradigms should be pretty similar.

I will further detail each of these major paradigms in future blog posts. Meanwhile, please do not hesitate to add your thoughts and comments below.

Future of Open Source CMS

(Twitter hashtag: #fosc)

Last December at the Janus Boye Geneva Intranet Group Xmas Party, Janus Boye challenged me regarding the real added value of an Open Source CMS in 2010 compared to proprietary or hybrid products offers. He wrote a blog post in January about it:

J.Boye – Janus Boye: http://www.jboye.com/blog/

• http://www.jboye.com/blogpost/open-source-what-does-it-mean-in-2010/ (January 10^th, 2010)

While not directly related to the CMS industry, criticism of the Open Source business model came to the fore at OSBC 2009, in a session between Canonical's Matt Asay and Brian Prentice of Gartner.

This discussion resulted in a series of very interesting blog posts:

Gartner – Brian Prentice :

• Open Source’s Reality Distortion Field (March 23^rd, 2010)
• Open-Core: The Emperor’s New Clothes  (March 31^st, 2010)
• Defining & Defending The Meaning Of “Community” – An Open Source Imperative (April 20^th, 2010)

451 Group - Matthew Aslett Caos Theory:

• Winning and losing with open core (March 25^th, 2010)
• Please break our open source business strategy model (March 25^th, 2010)
• Sales and marketing for open source – same difference (April 1^st, 2010)
• Let he who is without proprietary features cast the first stone (April 8^th, 2010)

CMS Vendors’ first feedbacks:

• Business of open source: my take on "open core" - Nuxeo – Eric Barroca  (1^st of April 2010)
• Open source business model - Hippo – Jeroen Verberg (11^th of April 2010)

We can assume that something is broken, or at least unclear, in the Open Source CMS world. This debate is clearly not over as we will have to defend the “Future of Open Source CMS” at the next GilbaneSF 2010 conference.

GilbaneSF 2010: Future of Open Source CMS

The future of CMS is already a hot topic of debate with various CMS experts presenting alternate visions of this burgeoning market niche. Nowadays content is omnipresent, produced by everyone employing a variety of devices. As a result, content management practices are rapidly evolving from traditional, that still many consider complex and elitist, ECM platforms to new generation of Web2.0-E2.0 tools aimed for “Milleniums” born with the web. Content consumption practices are also rapidly changing. Users are flooded by a deluge of information and the attention deficit does not stop to increase. This presents a growing challenge for the content management industry.

The future of Open Source is another hot topic. Everyone, including Microsoft, agrees that Open Source is here to stay. However,  like the notion of "green", the Open Source concepts have been muddled by marketers, VCs, and myriad of software providers who have latched on to the label. Dual Licensing, Open Core and Patron Models make analysts heads spin as they try to figure out what Open Source really is, let along measure its value against more traditional proprietary offerings. To add to the confusion, we are assisting to a convergence of prices among competing proprietary, hybrid, or fully open source solutions especially in the CMS industry that finally are all relying on the same Open Source bricks? So, above all, what added value does Open Source still bring to the table? How does Open Source business models will evolve and stand the best chance for future success?

When we combine both topics, we end up with an explosive mixture. Open Source CMS have the potential to significantly disrupt the market, but lots of new challenges lie ahead :

• Balancing the role of Open Source CMS communities in a world of paid professionals.
• Differentiating techies' needs for a flexible content platform from those of practitioners looking after content-enabled solutions.
• Determining the limits of code co-optition in an already overcrowded market.
  
• Dealing with the fast and disruptive rise of new Content Composites, Mashups or Social/E2.0 technologies.
• Finding the right Open Source Business Models and value propositions that will please all partie.

So, according to you, what is the Future of Open Source CMS? Is it just a late and low-cost follower, or can it significantly disrupt the CMS market, from both, the technological and market share points of view? Will the existing split between Community and Commercial Open Source wither away?

I already mentioned this topic last summer (in What is the future of Content Management? #6 Your Personal Digital Filing Cabinet for your entire Lifecycle) and in my 2010 predictions (#8: Personal Web Filing Cabinet is the next Content Shadow IT), but I have not really taken the time to detail it much more yet.

PCM/PKM: The Next Shadow IT?

 Everyone knows about Personal File Management. Everybody manages its own collection of documents either stored in your local hard drives or in a private directory available as part of a shared network drive. We are now assisting to the rise of a new generation of “Cloud Content Management” with the fast growth of DropBox and similar offerings (the so long waited GDrive for example). If you combine these document oriented applications with other notes taking, web scrapping utilities (e.g: Evernote, ReadItLater or Webnotes kind of tools) or personal social decks (Seesmic, TweetDeck and similar), we are assisting to an explosion of personal productivity tools.

These tools are being downloaded and used by millions of individuals and the spectrum of features is quite large and goes from:

-         Personal Storage and Backup services on the Cloud

-         Web-based groupware, email, mailing lists, word processor, spreadsheets or presentation applications.

-         Social Bookmarking

-         Page Ripping / Web Scraping

-         Personal Notetaking Software

-         Personal Wiki

-         Personal Blog

-         Feed Reader and Aggregator

-         PIM

-         Personal Social Decks

-         Instant Messaging

to many others…

Clearly speaking the usage of these tools is not limited to your personal usage or to the sharing of personal data with your friends or your family members any more. More and more people are today using them as part of their daily business life.

We can then reasonably ask if those tools are not rapidly becoming the next shadow IT? Are they a danger for your business organization? Should they simply be forbidden (knowing the fact that this is becoming today quite hard to forbid the use of an iPhone in your offices)? Or should your rather consider that your IT department was slow or unable to foresee the needs of a certain category of your employees to use such personal applications as a business productivity and efficiency booster? Or perhaps your favorite ECM is guilty of having spent a bit too much time in the last 10 years to try to unify all your company content assets while completely stopping taking care of the individual employee needs?

But finally who cares? What is sure is that there is a strong market need for these personal applications and they already proved to be useful in many business oriented use cases. The ECM/CMS industry has then no other choice than to deal with it.

From a more general perspective, all these applications are related to Personal Content Management (PCM) and to Personal Knowledge Management (PKM). According to Wikipedia, the PKM definition is the following: “Personal knowledge management (PKM) refers to a collection of processes that an individual carries out to gather, classify, store, search, retrieve, and share knowledge in his/her daily activities and how these processes support work activities. It is a response to the idea that knowledge workers increasingly need to be responsible for their own growth and learning and represents a bottom-up approach to knowledge management, as opposed to more traditional, top-down KM”

 In his latest book (only available in French: Le nouveau management de l’information) Christophe Deschamps demonstrated that Individual Intelligence should take precedence over Collective Intelligence. This is based on the simple following paradigm: You can not share what you still do not know.

“If the 2.0 technologies are a recipe for increased collective efficiency, there are needs of knowledge workers they do not address directly. For example while wikis allow the collaborative drafting of a document, this way of working is still rare in the business. Most of the time the employee finds himself alone with his work, forced to move at any cost. 2.0 technologies certainly will help locate the "material" required to complete his task, as they will allow him to remain in contact with other experts in the organization. Yet the drafting stage and the skills it requires in terms of time management, use of gathered information and writing often remain the sole responsibility of the knowledge worker finally considered as an isolated individual who must self-learn to organize himself to deliver on time his best job. In summary, the 2.0 technologies can take advantage of the network but don’t do the work for us ...” (in French in the original text)

Traditional KM was mainly a monolithic approach about documenting processes or pushing employees to formalize knowledge on their extra-time. KM2.0 and E2.0 solutions were mainly “social” and people-centric. They are helping you build more rapidly your social business ecosystem. KM3.0 should reintroduce personal efficiency and productivity at the heart of the system.

This graph summarizes pretty well the situation:

Graph source: KM3.0: This time it’s personal

Some of the problems raised by PCM/PKM

The fast growth of this new generation of PCM/PKM tools may however cause several problems within a business organization including (non exhaustive list):

a)      Privacy concerns

I recently read a blog post called: “Evernote for Doctors Revisited: Privacy Issues and Yet More Uses”. The key question which directly came to my mind was about: “Is it really the goal of applications like Evernote to store protected health information?” Or is Evernote only a convenient workaround for some Doctors to store business data and use a pretty nice productivity tool by bypassing their IT department and the other internal policies already in place?

With the fast raise of mobile and other free hosted services available on the cloud and often combined with the lack of proactivity, budget or risk awareness programs from the internal IT department, employees tend to easily forget the reasons why certain internal procedures have initially been put in place. Nowadays this is just so easy and convenient to install DropBox-like services to store patient-related information and to have the opportunity to check them out later on at home rather than having to ask for similar services to the IT department and having to initiate an often long, costly and time-consuming internal project.

But in many business use cases, such PCM/PKM tools are raising some severe content privacy flaws. I would not be surprised to see some big law suites in the next couple of months after some lawyers, consultants or doctors who were unofficially using such hosted services to store sensible data with poor password schema and no other privacy policies in place.

Briefly speaking ease of use of such tools should not take precedence on content privacy especially for business related information.

b) Lack of Control on Data

Another concern with all these personal services is about the lack of control your company can get on remotely hosted data. Most of the time those PCM/PKM solutions are still young and immature and mainly focus themselves on the front-end user experience rather than on a back-end enterprise-grade content platform.

This is for example quite hard to know how data is backuped or if any contingency plan was put in place (do you remember what happened to the Magnolia social bookmarking system last year?). Most of the time you can not control the life cycle of content hosted in such systems (File Plan oriented kind of features). You also do not have any guarantee if such or such new and still heavily VC-funded SaaS providers will still be here in 5 years or will go bankrupt with all your data? Classical source code escrow or other kinds of “automatic conversion to Open Source in case of bankruptcy” clauses are most of the time absent from the contract.

Clearly the question is not to debate here about the pros and cons of hosting data on the cloud and if this level is not finally better than the one of your company. This is just about ensuring that your company knows precisely which applications are being in use, where precisely data is stored and if such hosting services fit with your current IT policies. Lots of SaaS services are today enterprise-grade and are really providing a nice alternative to on site applications. But in the field of PCM/PKM I must say that most services still lack a proper level of enterprise-readiness. And these are typically the applications that your employees will start installing on their own and which will rapidly become the next shadow IT.

c) DataPortability and integration of PCM/PKM tools in your enterprise ecosystem

Even if the main goal of personal productivity tools is to foster Individual Intelligence, the final goal of your company is to boost Collective Intelligence. Otherwise speaking PCM/PKM tools are necessary but not sufficient. These tools need to be integrated with your traditional knowledge bases or with your newly acquired E2.0 social networks. Else your information workers, taken one by one individually, will of course become more productive but this will finally not benefit to the overall organization.

If your company doesn’t have any problem to use hosted PCM/PKM services such as Evernote or Dropbox, do not hesitate and go for it. These are great solutions that I am personally using on a daily basis. But perhaps your company will also have to investigate how it wants to manage all this corporate knowledge which is bit by bit going away, to find perhaps on site alternatives or to figure out how to integrate such solutions with your existing information system.

Data Portability should then become one of your top concern (e.g: the DataPortability Project). Very few PCM/PKM vendors are now also embracing content interoperability standards such as CMIS. There is a light in the night as most SaaS PCM/PKM tools are now bit by bit opening access to their underlying platform API. But most of the time there are no connectors available within your other enterprise systems yet and each of these Platform API remains very specific to each SaaS vendors. So do not underestimate the costs of connecting to these remote services and maintaining them afterwards. Finally once connected, you risk to face another serie of feature-oriented problems. For example how will you map all the personal tags used by every of your employees on these PCM/PKM services with your corporate taxonomies? How will you observe events performed by your employee on the remotely hosted PCM/PKM systems and map this on your internal activity streams? How will you manage the duplication of your employees‘profiles? Etc.

Note that these issues are not only related to content hosted on the cloud but to any kind of PCM/PKM-oriented content silos. The problem is that PCM/PKM applications used in a business-context are mainly a sub-system which should be part of a larger E2.0 initiative. This is not the case for all enterprise software. For example this is better to have a CMR integrated with your ERP or a WCM connected to your ECM but most of the time you can perfectly live without such a level integration. This is however harder to separate PCM/PKM tools from your overall Intranet initiative. Before providing such 2.0 personal productivity tools to all your employees, check how you will be able to integrate them, or at least synchronize data, with your other enterprise applications.

d)      Legal Issues on Content Reuse

Most of these PCM/PKM utilities and especially the ones offering some levels of web scraping (bookmarking with offline copy of the clipped information; read it later kind of tools,…) offer easy ways to collect information over the web and to share results with colleagues.

Even if those tools could also perfectly be only applied on large intranets, they are better exploited when mixing data coming from the public web and from your private information spaces. This trend is confirmed by a recent post from IBf Intranet Life: “The borders between internal and external are coming down: Employees will be able to aggregate external content such as Facebook alongside internal content such as corporate news”

One could then question the legality of this clipped information. Most of the time, harvested information is neither copyable nor redistributable without the prior consent (or sale) of the original author. Personal bookmarking systems look like being today an accepted practice. Perhaps because of the American Fair Use doctrine. Or simply because this is still mainly used today as a personal backup system and this does not really impact advertisement revenues from the original content producer.

But this legal problem may rapidly become much more complex when such personal backups suddenly become more “social” and will let your share all your personal archives with your whole organization. One of the main goal of social bookmarking program is to let you look for information within the bookmarklets of your friends before having to make a standard search query based on the assumption that content harvested by your business network is more relevant than a classical keyword search. But if those articles are archived there will be suddenly a propagation of “stolen” articles within your company without the proper payment of the syndication fees.

WCM/E2.0 tools associated with content syndicators (Yellowbrix, Newscred,…) could then act as a your new internal infomediary which will help your webmasters ensure that non-legal content is stored or exchanged within your company. With the growing number of external content sources, integrated copyright infringement auditing tools could rapidly become a nice to have option.

e) Ownership of personal data

Evernote CEO mentioned: “We want to be the permanent, trusted and ubiquitous place for all of your memories”. As an extension of this sentence we can then ask ourselves: Should an employee keep his personal data all-along his life? Can he leave a company with his “personal space”? What is a “business memory” and does he belong to the employer or the employee?

I already mentioned the typical use case of a student leaving the university and usually loosing his personal account with most of his data. This problem will become more important as students are using more and more different content-enabled web applications (LMS; Collaborative Wikis, Personal blogs,…). Students can not simply backup a UNIX directory onto a CD-Rom archive any more. Most of the data they learned or created over the years, even if they belong to them, are now locked into some Web2.0 applications.

Clearly speaking the situation could be easily extended to all information workers. The rise of personal spaces on intranets, the installation of improved E2.0 tools and a trend towards a more digital and paperless world (digital post-its and comments, digital quote highlighting,…) will impact our old personal knowledge practices. Could you imagine a lawyer taking another job in another consulting firm and leaving behind him all his personally annotated law books?

This situation rises important and often under debated questions such as: which personal data an employee could take with him by leaving a company? Or what is a personal data and how interoperable it is? Most of the time employee can not take any corporate data by leaving the company they work for. That is for the official policies in place. In real-life scenario most of the employees are keeping some backups of their previous jobs. And I do not include other legal constraints which are local to each country such as the ones specifying the level of privacy of your personal mailbox for instance.

So wouldn’t be a saner approach to more precisely define which data are the exclusive property of the company, which ones belongs only to the information worker and which one belongs to both along with how an employee could export his personal data (cf: the PortableData initiative mentioned above)? But by not taking into consideration the human factor (e.g: Why should I bookmark all my knowledge on the company intranet when I know that I will certainly leave this company in the next couple of years?) rapidly risks to become a counter-productivity problem: employees will simply install Evernote-like services in parallel of your company internal bookmarking system and duplicate all their bookmarking efforts. Or perhaps they will use their own personal wiki and not share their content with other employees which is exactly the opposite goal than the one originally planned.

In a knowledge economy the definition and ownership of personal data will rapidly become a hot topic which will need to be better clarified.

Conclusion:

Most Intranet initiatives are still following a classical top-down approach. We are still asking employees to “put on paper” (today “to put on the intranet”) their knowledge from a classical Command and Control manner. Enterprise Social Networks and generally-speaking E20-driven initiatives tend to add a new social dimension. But there are high risks that all these enterprise social networks fail if they do not first better manage “Individual Intelligence” before trying to address the “Collective Intelligence” one.

So the question you should ask yourself is: Will your next E2.0 initiative succeed without a proper PCM/PKM approach? The answer is probably no.

This globally means that:

a) PCM/PKM tools should be taken into consideration in your next E2.0 / Intranet 2.0 project

This illustration comes from the CSC Next Generation KM white paper and perfectly summarizes the Personal vs Communities focus for the next generation of intranets.

Personal content management solutions (either hosted on the cloud or on site) will have to rapidly become part of your next Intranet strategy. You will have to envision how they will impact your intranet and your workspaces. Most of these tools are also supporting mobile devices and this will automatically raise question about if and how your employees could access to all or part of your intranet from their mobile. Finally all these PCM/PKM utilities are suffering from non standard API. Personal content interoperability could rapidly become a show-stopper you will have to assess carefully.

b) PCM will become an important part of Enterprise Information Portal.

Enterprise Portals have always been considered as a unified layer on top of all your enterprise applications.

But most of the time Portals do not include personal content management (cf: graph above). If we consider Portals has an aggregated information dashboard mixing all your data sources, it makes then a lot of sense to also federate your PCM/PKM content and tools in there.

What is sure is that PCM/PKM is currently a complex and often neglected enterprise paradigm. Before investing too much time and money in collaborative workspaces, enterprise microblogging systems or other shared wikis, be sure to correctly assess the personal dimension of your intranet. Do not forget that employees can not share knowledge that they do not have.

Finally you could be surprised to know how the introduction of PCM/PKM-oriented productivity tools could offer much more added values to your employees than many other and often much more expensive knowledge systems.

P.S: For additional information, please refer to:

• In French only : 28 fiches pratiques pour mettre en place votre système de PKM
• An interesting chat retranscript from KMers.org : http://www.jarche.com/2010/02/talking-about-pkm/
• Semantic PCM article
• PersonalKnowledge.org

Part 2/2: Please check the beginning of this article on the previous previous blog post

5) Information Overload: How to let the best content items magically surface out?

Finally the largest problem is not about dealing with all these issues of standardization, federation, metadata or tools overlaps but more about the proper prioritization and content curation of the tons of information you have to digest daily.

All the twitter fanatics following hundreds of people know how time consuming but addictive it is to permanently keep up with this permanent flow of data. So if such information streams want to be widely adopted by regular knowledge workers and not only by early adopters and tech savvies your company may want to be first sure that this will not be in disfavor of any white-collars efficiency.

Fig. 9: Reduce the Signal-to-noise ratio and help the best automatically surface out

Pete Cashmore from CNN mentioned “content curation as one of the 10 Web Trends to watch in 2010: The Web's biggest challenge of recent years is that content creation is outpacing our ability to consume it: "Information overload" has become an increasingly common complaint. In the attention economy, with its millions of daily status updates and billions of Web pages vying for our time, how do we best allocate that scarce resource? One solution has been algorithmic: Sites like Google News source the best stuff by technical means, but fall short when it comes to personalization.”

How many employees are suffering today from poor corporate email practices (“Reply to all” syndrome; Ping-pong of different document version s in attachments; Trivialities exchanged with half the company,…). But will this situation change with the addition of a new private microblogging system in your company? No, certainly not.

Catching the scarce attention of your microblogging audience is already becoming the next national contest. Implicit coding conventions already start to emerge and look like very similar to the one used previously as part of your old email labeling strategy: “[Urgent]”, “[Must read]” or other form of “>> +++“ is rapidly becoming a common practice.

User generated ratings should allow your communities of practice to rapidly tag and extract important news away from trivialities. Others systems are now working on enhancing new scoring algorithms by mixing other criteria such as the source of the information (e.g: your boss vs the new internship), your preferences and skills, the articles you recently read, the articles your colleagues recently read (based on the fact that an article read by one of your subject matter experts is certainly better than another article all things being equal) and many others. All these practices are related to finding ways to assess the importance and relevancy of an information update in regards of another one and to help you more rapidly extract the key information you were looking for.

Danah Boyd wrote: “We need technological innovations. For example, tools that allow people to more easily contextualize relevant content regardless of where they are and what they are doing and tools that allow people to slice and dice content so as to not reach information overload. This is not simply about aggregating or curating content to create personalized destination sites. Frankly, I don't think this will work. Instead, the tools that consumers need are those that allow them to get into flow, that allow them to live inside information structures wherever they are, whatever they're doing. The tools that allow them to easily grab what they need and stay peripherally aware without feeling overwhelmed.”

Starting from next year we should then see a clearer emphasize being put on how we could more intelligently consume data and no more on how we could still ease content creation.

But is there any other best way to rapidly consume content than your old good newspaper? Make a simple exercise next time your read a traditional paper based newspaper: compare how fast your brain can automatically surface out the best relevant articles compared to what similar time it would have taken with your email client or your social deck? Note how your brain is used to speed reading techniques with such a content consumption model rather than through digesting email, web pages or columns of tweets.

There are indeed hundreds of years of best practices as part of traditional newspapers on how end-users want and can more rapidly consume their daily content without greatly reducing comprehension or retention. This is probably why a new generation of applications such as Feedly, Lazyfeed, NewsCred and similar are today investigating such a path and are trying to emulate the creation of a personalized a digital newspaper by dynamically aggregating all your favorite content sources.

Fig. 10 : Screenshot of a personalized and dynamically aggregated digital magazine on NewsCred

The fast apparition of colored digital tablets will also certainly help change our content consumption behaviors. Who will still be interested to consume his emails, tweets or RSS feeds from a traditional manner when you could do it from a similar manner than the one proposed by the latest proof of concept done by Sport Illustrated.

Fig. 11:Imagine if this digital prototype for Sport Illustrated could be automatically and dynamically generated from all your various E2.0 information streams.

There will then be a convergence between traditional media and content syndicators (e.g: your Social decks or your RSS aggregators) towards the development and delivery of a new form of dynamic and personalized digital eZine.

Clearly speaking this is not about being able to subscribe and consume online such or such traditional newspapers. This is about being able to dynamically recreate your daily personalized digital magazine from all your heterogeneous sources of content whatever the sources (including your emails, your RSS feeds, your private or public-facing status updates and all other form of commercial content you subscribe to) and to be able to automatically generate the table of content and teasers which are the most relevant to you.

Wouldn’t you find more convenient to consume your daily content from this manner?

Synthesis:

In order to summarize this long blog post, we could highlight the following points:

1)      Avoid the “build and they will come” web-based only approach. This is not the way end-users want to consume today their information streams

2)      Every piece of software available in your company is getting social. Think of the consequences in term of unification and federation both from an IT and an end-user perspectives

3)      Do not try to find substitutes to email, IM or any other existing communication channels already available in your company with new emerging E2.0 tools. Rather try to integrate them altogether and to exploit each of them at best in the right context

4)      Try to think how you could best manage and leverage all the “mosaic identities” of your various end-users and communities of practices.

5)      Last but not least think on the best ways your end-users wants to consume their information today.

Focus for next years will certainly switch from content creation to improved content delivery. All E20 tools are still mainly focus on easing content updates (wiki, blog, microblogging,…) while traditional corporate Portals failed to ease content consumption. eZine as a new form of personalized, dynamic and multi-source Information Hub looks like being one of the key missing content feature in all the E2.0 initiatives.

Technically speaking, multi-channeling, improved content reuse and repurposing, better social lifecycle capabilities, user personalization and on the fly semantic analysis will rapidly become key required features to solve certain of the aforementioned problems. These features really look like being the one already available as part of more traditional CMS. It would not be a surprise then to see some levels of consolidation between Social software and Content Management offerings.

Lots more to say on this topic but this blog post is already much too long. I will keep them for some next posts.

Cheers,
Stéphane

Disclaimer: I maintain some personal relationships with Hyperweek as being part of their steering committee.

Everyone knows about the growing importance of status updates (microblogging) and other types of activity streams at least on public-facing social networks such as Twitter and FaceBook. Information streams are now also rapidly gaining some momentum in the Enterprise world and aim to become one the next communication pillar companies will have to rapidly integrate as part of their IT strategy. Indeed with Gartner predicting that 80% of social software platforms will include enterprise microblogging as a standard feature by 2011, there no doubt about the future durability of such a tool.

As a consequence there is nearly no one single week where a new “Twitter/Facebook for Enterprise” is not launched on the market or that a traditional business application is not getting “socialized”.

But enterprise-based information streams are also bringing their plethora of direct and indirect problems:

1)      Web-based only user experience

Most of the E20 offerings are currently only web based. They still rely on the old portal paradigm: “build and they will come”. However all professional users of some public-facing networks are using today a Rich Internet Application not the web-based channel any more. Does it mean that every enterprise application will soon have to offer its own social client? Let’s hope this won’t be the case.

2)      Lack of enterprise-grade content infrastructure for E2.0 tools

The current ultra-fast peace of innovation in the E20 world and the focus on the end-user experience rather than on the back-end content infrastructure could cause some problems in the future. Shadow IT is sometimes necessary but not everything is crappy in the traditional Enterprise Content Management world. Strangely one of the key essential pieces of the E2.0 infrastructure puzzle is vaguely defined and often under-considered in RFP: the underlying Social Graph Server. It will be interesting to guess how this one will evolve in the future years.

3)      Lack of unification among all your heterogeneous information streams

Social desktops (e.g., Tweetdeck, Seesmic,…) are now acting as your new federated information broker. They connect to all your various accounts on all your various social networks and consolidate everything into one single information dashboard. However federating several connectors and dispatching the information into different “columns” does not mean unification of all your information streams into one single chronological river of information. Beside most if not all social decks are currently not E2.0 ready. This means that a typical business worker has to multiply the number of social clients by the number of E20 tools his company plans to implement. Not an ideal situation.

4)      Multiplication of logins, social networks and other workarounds on the social Web which won’t be possible in a E2.0 context

There are lots of “workarounds” going on on the social web which are just impossible to exploit on an as-is basis within the context of a company. For example you can usually easily create on the Web as many logins as you want to either better split your audiences (e.g.: family vs business), or to manage your verbosity-level (e.g.: one account for regular followers and one account for special events) or to better manage multiple languages (e.g.: one login for English and one for French followers). Most of us are also using different social networks according to the manner we want to privately or publically broadcast our content updates. Managing multiple accounts on multiple public-facing social networks is today a common practice… which will most of the time be impossible to redo within the boundaries of your company: an employee usually has one single LDAP/AD credential.

5)      Information Overload and other Signal-to-Noise Filtering Issues

Lots of people are mentioning that email is an old crappy system full of spammers and of useless time-consuming emails they should digest for nothing. As far I am concerned I could exactly say the same from any social networks. Moving information overload from one system to another will simply not help employees improve their signal-to-noise ratio. Other improved ways of consuming content should be envisioned.

So let’s now investigate these five points in more details and bring in my personal thoughts.

1) Push your information streams on all possible channels

Forget the web as being the only exclusive content consumption tool. But rather think of it as an excellent transport protocol.

Social networks clearly simplified the creation and subscriptions to information channels compared to old-styled mailing lists. But as Danah Boyd mentioned it during the last Web2.0 conference: “with the barriers to distribution collapsing, what matters is not the act of distribution, but the act of consumption”. And I am personally not sure the traditional web browser is the best media to consume all your information streams from an efficient manner.

Mark Fidelman also highlighted this point:

Luis Suarez also wrote a blog post few days ago about it: “[Posterous] still allows you to share your knowledge and collaborate with other knowledge workers in an open, public and social space by bypassing the main issue that is stopping us all from adopting these social tools in the first place even more: The Web Browsers.”

As soon as you start to leverage any public or private social networks and to target “professional business users” you generally rapidly need to plan the adoption of some RIA or mobile based tools.

These new content consumption trends could generate quite a lot of problems for all traditional enterprise applications which are trying to get social. Getting social is not as easy and as simple as only being able to support such or such activity streams standards (e.g: OpenSocial or Activitystrea.ms) and to render such streams on some web pages. It is mainly about being sure that end-users will be able to rapidly consume, digest and interact with them as part of their daily life throughout the devices they prefer (RIA; Mobile; Email digests; RSS Readers, Tablets;…).

New generation of social desktops (Tweetdeck, Seesmic and similar) are doing an amazing and incredible jobs to help public-facing communities get the best from their social networks (including now with their mobile editions). But they failed to get hooks into companies and to best leverage existing E20 platforms. This is now becoming urgent that such social desktops also start offering some enterprise connectors or at least support the most basic activity streams standards.

The knowledge worker currently needs at least one social deck to manage his public-facing social networks and another one to deal with his private social networks. The situation is even worse if the company is using different E2.0 products each of them provided with its own “social deck”. I do not include all the other E2.0 applications which are also generating some kind of activity streams but without leveraging any RIA clients at all.

Your employee might then certainly want to avoid having to manage this fast proliferation of all these different social decks which are all globally providing exactly the same sets of features. I am personally not convinced that the main mission statement of server-side applications is to develop and distribute such social decks. So it would be great to see such public-facing social desktops also starting investigating the E2.0 space. Money is there and we need some vendor-neutral RIA clients which could aggregate and consolidate all the activity streams generated by all the newly socialized WCM/ERP/CRM/SoCo servers.

2) The social graph server war is just beginning

I already wrote a blog post about the risk to rapidly see emerge a large number of heterogeneous neither federated nor unified activity streams within your company private environment a few months ago.

On the public web, this federation problem was initially solved by FriendFeed. More recently Cliqset released its new FeedProxy initiative. Each Social Desktop also started to support such or such connectors towards such or such social networks and to centralize the management of all your various accounts.

But do we really want to manage this plethora of connectors and of non-compliant activity streams in the enterprise world? Not necessarily. So we could then question if a company needs not first to envision and consider how to standardize and federate all its present and future information streams before reaching the current web chaos. This includes of course all the user profiles and their social relationships which you do not want to redo on every E2.0 sub-application your company will acquire.

Currently most customers are still selecting an E2.0 solution solely based on users-oriented grid of features. They should however not forget that the adoption of a new microblogging feature, even if it sounds like a pretty basic feature at first glance, is often synonymous with the introduction of a whole new underlying social graph server which will control all your different profiles and relationships within your company for the next years. The control and the ownership of this underlying social graph server is one of the next major battles that every IT software company currently tries to control. This Social Graph Server will rapidly become the centerpiece and heartbeat of your company social ecosystem: the IT company which will control your social graph will be able to gain some significant competitive advantages in all your future IT decisions.

So make sure to not only evaluate your new E20 software tool only from an end-user perspective. You either rapidly risk to see emerge a multiplication of user profiles and sub-social graphs within your company which you won’t be able to consolidated any more or at least to have to deal with a new generation of vendor lock-in scenario: migrating all your company social relationships from one platform to another risk to be tricky.

Today nearly every E2.0 solution is embedding its own social graph server with its own user profile management features. One could then question which IT server should be in charge of managing such data within your company. Is it the mission of the new generation of E2.0 players to provide such a piece of infrastructure à la FaceBook Connect? Will we see the commoditization of a new type of “Extended Virtual Directory and Social Graph Servers” either promoted by existing back-end systems such as Active Directory+Sharepoint or by actors such as Radiant Logic? Or will we see the emergence of a new open source driven de facto standard alternative?

What is sure is that the Social Graph war is just beginning. From an IT perspective, do not forget to take a look at the big picture and to question yourself about how you want to manage and evolve your social graph in the future and which sub-system(s) will be in charge of it.

3) One Unified Information Hub but associated with Contextual Content Reuse

Proliferation of communication channels and of various social hubs is probably not so critical for public-facing social networks because most of them tend to target different audiences or simply because Facebook and Twitter are now prevailing over all other social networks. This situation might however rapidly evolve with the rapid socialization of multiple verticals (e.g: a soccer social hub directly powered by the FIFA) or more local (e.g: your local TV or radio web site) social initiatives.

In all the cases, on the enterprise side, the situation risks to rapidly evolve from a different if not negative manner. As an employee you now generally have to deal with more and more information streams. You usually have to catch up with all your public-facing activities. You also certainly have to follow your official enterprise twitter. Recent upgrades of your more traditional business application (be it your new social ECM, WCM, ERP,…) is now also bringing additional information streams to monitor. And meanwhile you still have to check your good old-fashioned email and perhaps also your Instant Messaging system. So does it still really make sense to have one distinct public social deck (or two if we include the mobile version), another one for your private network (and yet another one per Social XYZ Server) and finally one for your email client? Certainly not.

Monitoring all these different sub-systems could rapidly become painful and inefficient. This does not include the fact that it also becomes quite probable that a conversation will start on a channel and will rapidly spread out on your WCM Intranet blog and on your CRM chatter. will be perhaps commented via traditional emails or will be cross-referenced in some instant chat transcripts. This is then quite clear that, as a business user, you do not want to recompose such a distributed discussion thread manually.

So there is clearly today a need to merge and federate all communication channels into one single universal information hub. All this “(near) real-time web” hype is a distraction from the reality of our life: Nobody (excepted perhaps a financial broker) has the time nor interests to stay connected in real time to all his subject matter experts.

However everybody has to deal with more and more sources and different types of information.

Danah Boyd mentioned: “When consuming information through social media tools, people consume social gossip alongside productive content, news alongside status updates. Right now, it's one big mess. But the key is not going to be to create distinct destinations organized around topics, but to find ways in which content can be surfaced in context, regardless of where it resides”.

Two different important points to address here:

1)      No distinct destination but one single information hub mixing all your information streams

2)      Contextual-driven content reuse and consumption trend

Let’s start with the first point:

A) Your Next Unified Information Hub

You currently do not only want some level of content federation either by type of social networks or by type of content, but you also want some level of information aggregation. Generally speaking you only want to monitor one single river of information not plethora of different activity streams.

I know that I will certainly upset more than one who are already betting on the future death of the email, but I personally do not find that there are so much differences between an email client and a microblogging desktop or between an email and a status update.

Both are bringing some unique advantages and could be mutually leveraged upon in order to converge towards what could become your unique unified and federated information hub.

Are you for example seeing a lot of difference between such a “social dashboard”:

Fig 1: A Social Deck by Sobees

Versus such an old mailing lists-driven one?

Fig. 2: MarkMail Mailing Lists-focused Information Dashboard

Email clients became such a common communication system that they had to slow down their peace of innovation. Large enterprises could not afford to upgrade all their systems on a monthly basis as it is still currently the case for all free social decks. So recently email clients are looking like “laggards” or “dusty” while social desktops are suddenly looking like “innovators” and “cool”.

But finally are they not the same beast? Fundamentally speaking what is the difference between a tweet including a shortened url pointing to a blog post and an email with a meaningful title and a body you can access when clicking on it? One might even say that the situation is even worst than before in term of ease of use as you now first have to post a blog entry before being able to send your teaser (vs your email’s title) to your targeted audience.

Of course email is suffering from a lot of issues including:

1)      The content silo effect: once your email was sent to your audience it could hardly be reuse as part of your company collective intelligence. But could we really attribute this problem to the email servers? Are you sure your newly acquired “Twitter for Enterprise” is more open and standardized than your existing SMTP server? Could we impute the lack of a email archiving system to turn your email server into a shareable knowledge base only to your email server?

2)      Meaningless titles: Activity streams are bringing one key substantial advantages (among many others of course): they forced the adoption of meaningful and concise teasers which could drastically ease a more rapid way of consuming information. But here again it would be quite interesting to see results from a company which could have enforced the twitter-kind of 140 character taxonomy to its internal email+mailing lists policy?

Fig 3: No Meaningless titles any more. Ever!

On the other hand activity streams are also suffering from different problems including among others:

1)      No threaded discussion view: the first criticism you get from social networks newbies is usually: “How hard it is to follow a discussion”. But here again this is more a problem of poorly designed user interfaces rather than some technical constraints. Most of the Social Platform API allows you to get the ID of the parent status update. So it should be possible to rapidly regenerate a hierarchal or nested view of all this data.

2)      The second issue you get from end-users is generally: “If I take one week holidays, how can I catch up with my activity streams?” This is of course related to the lack of built-in archiving system and poor local indexing feature which are still making the strength of your email system. But how much time do you give to the IT industry before seeing some built-in archiving and indexing features appearing in your social deck?

So are we not finally assisting to the convergence of emails, status updates, RSS feeds and any other forms of information streams trough a new more optimal manner of rapidly consuming data through “teasers”?

Fig 4: Towards an ideal unified multi-source information teaser?

Title fields are indeed omnipresent. We could then perfectly imagine that the new universal 140 char constant could be adjusted to all kind of “title” fields (or added as a new alternative title field) as part of your email server, your bug reporting ticketing system, your articles in your enterprise blog, etc…as a new generic universal teasing mechanism which could become “tweetable”.

But the convergence will not stop here: how much time until we see all social deck being integrated with your IM status (which is by the way already the case in Gmail so why is it still not the case in my social deck?)? How much time before assisting to a merge between your RSS reader and your activity streams (the PubSubHubbub was developed for this reason, isn’t it?)? Do you really want to consume your next Google Wave blips only from within the poorly designed Google web interface?

So bit by bit your social deck is adding additional federated connectors to help you better digest all your various information streams. Or the opposite will happen and your email client will become your next social decks? For example check this blog post on some propositions to enhance Firefox Thunderbird or check some social integration as part of the new MS Outlook 2010 Social Connector. But finally who really cares which system will prevail!

Fig 5: New MS Outlook 2010 connector

I then think that we are assisting to the beginnings of the next generation of federated, socialized and multi-source information hub.

But what about the second topic:

B) Contextual Content Reuse

The context of a status update, an email or any other chunk of information is becoming more and more important.

Firstly not all information updates are mainly or only related to a time-based context which is still usually the main navigation and classification criteria in all the aforementioned information proxies. As an end-user you perhaps do not want to consume such data elsewhere than within a given context. This context could obviously be a topical group but it could also be a more innovative context such as a geolocalized area (such or such information updates will only be available in a certain geographical area).

Secondly it is also about content discovery. You do not want to come back and forth to your main information hub each time you want to consume your next content item. You also want to navigate within all your content sources from an horizontal manner based on the extracted “meanings” associated to the current context. These cross-references could of course be managed from a traditional and manual manner (manual cross-references, static menus or constant tags) but we are also assisting to the rise of new semantic algorithms which can dynamically recommend to you some context-aware reading suggestions.

The new Feedly suggestion box is a good example of such a context-aware content consumption model which can automatically extract the current “meanings” of your current article and suggest to you other related items which belong to the various sources of information you have access to.

Fig. 6: Some dynamically generated context-aware suggested readings by Feedly.

This combination of a chronological and unified information hub associated with some dynamically generated context-aware related items should make a pretty ideal, easy to use and convenient manner of consuming information from a more efficient manner for the next years.

4) Management of Your Mosaic Identity and other Facetted Information Streams

In a recent interview Ray Ozzie was correctly pointing one of the biggest problems of social networks today: the correct management of your mosaic identity.

“STEVE GILLMOR: But isn’t the use case for each individual person more around figuring out what the people that you communicate with and are interested in, what they think is important rather than trying to analyze a volume of information which guaranteed is going to be irrelevant?

RAY OZZIE: I think they’re both important to different people in different mixes. How I’m interested in things that happen in my family or my close knit family is going to be a certain priority. My colleagues will be a certain priority. The larger Microsoft will still be a higher priority than what’s going on in some of the feeds that I might subscribe to or individuals that I might follow in Twitter, and it’s not an absolute of one being more important than the others for every individual.

J Allard describes it as mosaic identity; we each have different facets, and it’s hard to make generalizations about what’s important to one person or another. My son is really into gaming, and so he follows a certain community very, very well. Even though it’s a public thing, he doesn’t want to miss anything. Whereas my public stuff, I’ve just got such overload, I can’t pay attention to what’s going on out there as much as in the circles that I just have to do. “

Similar to dynamic facetted search, facetted information streams will also become more and more important in the future. But what is finally a facet on a status update?

According to the activity stream definition “An activity is a description of an action that was performed (the verb) at some instant in time by some actor (the subject), usually on some social object (the object). An activity feed is a feed of such activities.

In the current draft spec, you can perform such actions as Post, Share, Save, Mark as Favorite, Play, Start Following, Make Friend, Join and Tag Object. An Object could be an Article, Blog Entry, Note, File, Photo, Photo Album, Playlist, Video, Audio, Bookmark, Person, Group, Place or Comment. These actions can have such contexts as Location, Mood and Annotation.”

Let’s now try to see concretely how we could apply it:

a) Topical social filtering and dynamic groups

One of the currently most well known facets is certainly the “Hashtag” which is available on Twitter and let end-users subscribe to one single topical facet without having to subscribe to all the “posters”.

The trend in the E2.0 world is currently to instantly and dynamically create sub-topical groups (it was called spaces a few months ago) based on such user generated hashtags. You can get a good idea of it by watching the latest demonstration of the future incoming Salesforce Chatter application.

However in an enterprise context these UGC tags and their associated dynamic groups could rapidly raise questions about the uniqueness and the whole lifecycle of such topical tags and groups which could be instantly created by any knowledge worker.

Are their scopes similar to some Google Wave blips (mainly around a discussion)? Or are they related to one of your company longer mid-term event or project? Should they become permanent? What if someone now wants to re-launch a second group with the same name in one year or so? Should such informal discussion groups be archive? What are their associated “file plans”? Who will be in charge of deleting such topical groups? Or merging two of them if they are too closely related? How are they linked to your current company ontology?

Such questions are certainly less critical on the public-facing social web which can pretend to be more “flexible” but this could generate quite a lot of questions in an enterprise-grade environment. And most E20 tools are still today only partially answering to all these questions.

b) Metadata-driven social filtering

You do not only have now UGC topical filters, you also have more and more associated metadata provided along each status update.

We are of course used to the basic standard metadata (e.g: date and time of your status updates, client being in use to post your status update; relations with the parent item in case of a reply;…). But we are also assisting to the apparition of more and more new automatically or manually added metadata such as geolocalized information, social ratings, relevancy or prioritization factors or other various kinds of annotations.

This extra-information will let integrators generate some new facetted oriented activity streams which could not only be filtered according to the classical chronological order but which could also be displayed and drilled down according to different axis.

Fig.7: Example of a facetted activity stream on Notrehistoire.ch developed with the Hyperweek social platform.

Similar to more traditional Business Intelligence hypercubes, facetted activity streams should allow us to enter a new age of Information Intelligence at least on real-time web updates.

c) Permissions based Social Filtering

In an enterprise context we usually have to deal with some more complex authorizations schemas: not everybody is entitled to access to all status updates on all topics even if they are considered as being one of your “friend”. This obviously also applied to the notion of groups.

As mentioned in the introduction most companies will not have the opportunity to install different social networks with only slight differences on the manner they dispatch information to their audiences. Different models exist on the open web (e.g: the Public Twitter; the (not so) private (any more) FaceBook; LinkedIn Groups;…) with different 1:1; 1:many; Many:many subscription and delivery schemas. You usually want all of them as part of your next E2.0 strategy.

Such privacy schemas are perfectly understood from social media early adopters but I personally doubt this is the case for most of the existing workforce. Usually the introduction of an E2.0 strategy aims to empower the productivity of your business workers and not to slow them down. So make sure you will not have to spend hours of training to explain to them the differences between sending an internal “public tweet” or how to restrict it to a certain audience. Such privacy settings could rapidly become counter-intuitive. Make sure to clearly understand how they work and how you can apply and customize them in your next E2.0 system.

d) From a cold information push to a hot actionable item

Finally one of the most recent trends is to not only consider an activity stream as a cold way to push data to certain followers but to let them take actions on it.

In an enterprise context this often comes back to new integration challenges. For example you may want to associate a status update with your Calendaring server in order to ease the scheduling of a meeting or with your ERP system in order to ease an order.

Fig. 8: Merge of Shared Calendaring/ToDo features through an activity streams by mixin.

We should also see the emergence of better mashup integration throughout your microblogging mechanism letting you not only consume data but also rapidly interact with other third party systems. Such a trend already started with Google Wave and the capability to attach gadgets to any one of your blips. It should rapidly come in the enterprise world as companies will try to couple the new generation of their enterprise mashup servers to their E20 initiatives.

As usual the initial microblogging idea was really easy to learn and user. This is one of the main reasons of its fast adoption rate. But as the technology matures, needs evolve and complexity increases. Imagine if you now had to enter some ACL, contexts, tags and categories, mashups and all other kind of additional metadata on every status update you generate: your usage of such a tool risks to rapidly vanish. So one of the main challenges for the future will be to try to keep this simple Web2.0 kind of user experience while still being able to provide enough data to the underlying systems to help it better exploit all the different facets of your mosaic identity.

Check the second post for the end of this article (max Posterous post limit reached!)

We are now rapidly getting closer to the end of the year. This is then time to make the usual predictions for 2010 and to launch a new meme to all the CMS gurus about the Top Trends for the CMS/WCM industry.

After the #fixwcm session at the last JBoye09, let’s try to merge this effort with the discussion launched by Scott Liewehr on Twitter (please follow the #futurewcm hashtag) and if you can go to the related Gilbane session for a live discussion… Perhaps some kind of best-of consolidated results (still crystal-ball however) will be presented.

David Nuescheler already started a few days ago at JBoye09 with this presentation (slides available here).

The Gartner also listed:

1. From System to Solution
2. From Visitors to Users
3. From Technical to Business
4. From Tactical to Strategic
5. From Global to Local
6. From Point Solution to "Environmentally Aware"

As far as I am concerned, my predictions for 2010 are the followings:

1. XCMS - eXtended CMS
   CMS/WCM will have to find ways to deliver content to the “eXtended Web” which will include mobiles, RIA or even now game consoles (e.g: Ping.fm now delivered on the Xbox) or new generation of Tablet PCs. The Web is omnipresent and not only available through the classical browsers interfaces only.
   
2. LATCH time
   Any CMS will have to better support LATCH. This is inline with the needs to better support geo-localized data which is rapidly becoming a commodity as part of the new generation of mobile devices. This is also the entry point in order to start better leveraging the “Web Squared”.
3. Rise of cloud-based sub-content services
   Think SOA/WOA on the Cloud; All CMS will better connect to and interact with value added content services available on the cloud (e.g: OpenCalais, Facebook Connect; Zemanta API;…) despite some security concerns.
4. The Semantic Web is NOT for 2010 but Semantic Lifting will become hot
   The world is composed of unstructured data. That’s for sure. The situation is getting even worse with the fast rise of social media. Asking the end-users to manually fulfill some metadata was a complete failure. The promised world of Linked Data is then certainly not for 2010. However Semantic Lifting technology (art of automatically finding structures and relations in unstructured content items) and ontology-free semantic indexing will certainly be in the product backlog of all CMS vendors.
5. From cold passive content to hot actionable content triggers
   Information, Sites, Content-enabled Applications,… are all around. I will then agree with BJ Fogg: CMS will have to get more inspiration from Facebook & co and focus on “putting hot triggers in the path of their users”. Ease of use, fun to use, no learning time and instantly actionable content items are the successful content platforms for tomorrow.
6. Standardized CM infrastructure, Content Composites Applications and Content Solutions are the three layers of next generation of CMS
   The Content Infrastructure and Middleware offerings is rapidly becoming a standardized commodity. CMS will have to focus on the development of value added content composites correctly assembles into content solutions targeted to a specific audience.
7. Social E.20<->KM/CM reconciliation
   Shift between new generation of E2.0 vendors and traditional KM/CMS vendors will vanish: War is over. Social is all around.
8. Personal Web Filing Cabinet is the next Content Shadow IT
   Everything started with USB keys. But with the fast rise of iPhone, netbooks and other affordable Wifi/DSL connections, it looks like IT departments could not follow the requests from employees. Everybody is now using tools such as Evernote; DropBox; iDisk… without any content policy. Traditional WCM/CMS failed to deliver integrated enterprise-grade solutions to deal with PKM. Time for the CMS industry to catch-up?
9. Tablet Readers and digital eZine will rapidly become a new content consumption best practice
   Paying Digital Newspapers are back. And the industry will heavily push every customer to acquire a new Tablet Reader(or give it for free if we compare this market to what happened to the mobile phone industry). This probably mean that any knowledge workers will probably soon get one… and will probably not see why he could not consume his internal or web-based content (RSS feeds, status updates, internal PDF,….) with his new toy. Think about it as your personalized and intelligent Information Dashboards for your Tablet Readers mixing internal content, paying newspapers and free web based posts.
10. NO CMS market consolidation but even more content solutions providers
    I do not think there will be any market consolidation in 2010. Web is Business today so this means that we will certainly see even much more actors popping up next year. This emphasizes the importance for customers to rapidly adopt content interoperability standards (e.g: CMIS/JCR) to avoid any vendor lock-in scenario in the future.

And you, what are your WCM/CMS predictions for 2010?

The IKS project will organize in two weeks (12^nd and 13^th of November) its second workshop focused on the semantic search topic. IKS is a EU funded initiative which aims to semantically enhance next generation of European CMS/KMS.

The IKS team asked to me a few weeks ago to moderate the Demonstration Session which will occur during the second day of the event. Even if I am far from being a “semantic expert” and to pretend to have any legitimacy to play such a role in regards of the quality and in-depth knowledge of the speakers, I accepted it with enthusiasm: the semantic world evolved in a parallel track from the one followed by most “traditional CMS” for the last ten years. I then really think it now makes more and more sense to reconcile both worlds. Bringing CMS and Semantic folks in the same room is already a good start to help foster communication and collaboration.

The Future of the Information Access Industry

As far as I am concerned the “Semantic Search” topic is a bit too narrow in regards of the importance of the subject. Perhaps the use of a more general “Information Access Technologies” term similar to the one used by the Gartner but only applied to the next generation of semantically driven tools would be more adequate.

The Tectonic of the Web Evolution Plates

At first glance the semantic world looks like being quite simple: After the Web 2.0 which was all about harnessing collective intelligence (social media, social networks,…), the next step in the Web evolution should be the Web 3.0 and the apogee of a semantic world of things.

However even if this vision is already 10+ years old it will still probably require another 10 years in order to let the dream become true. So some “gurus” are already suggesting an intermediate minor “web release”: the “Web Squared” to help transition to this new intelligent internet era.

Meanwhile we are also hearing more and more discussions about how to best apply the results of the Web 2.0 era into the search industry. New trends such as social search helps determine the relevance of search results by considering the interactions or contributions of users and real-time search offers new capabilities in order to find information as it is produced.

Finally users behaviours are also changing. Classical "search input forms" and other "advanced search forms" are now challenged by new mobile devices, mashups and other types of social networks. Search behaviours will then also need to be adjusted accordingly and to find new ways to ease ubiquitous and instant access to information.

(from: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Hinchcliffe/?p=1007)

Various underlying semantic search technologies

In order to complicate things a bit further there is not only one single technology to improve the next generation of semantic search platforms but many.

Improved querying methods on structured data (e.g SPARQL) sits beside other new probabilistic model (e.g LSA / PLSA ). Human driven classification and taxonomies should be taken in account by automatic meaning-based categorization. Traditional keywords based searches needs to leverage social ratings, sentiment analysis, folksonomies and other crowdsourcing algorithms. This does not include other natural language processing and other kind of technological improvements.

Some existing User Stories

All these technologies are basically trying to solve certain user needs. The IKS community is trying to list all of them in a collection of User Stories which could be found on the IKS wiki site: http://wiki.iks-project.eu/index.php/User-stories

This is a collaborative project so please feel free to add new ones if you think that some topics are missing.

Eleven semantic search demos

We will have the opportunity to assist in two weeks to eleven demonstrations from various established or emerging projects evolving from proprietary to open source solutions. They are quite representatives of all the different underlying semantic trends which result in different manners of embracing and improving access to information.

Each project presented itself to the IKS community over the last months. You can find all the details on the archive of the IKS public mailing list (http://lists.iks-project.eu/pipermail/iks-community/). For convenience reason I tried to make a short summary below.

Semantic Search Demonstrations

• Trialox (Reto Bachmann-Gmür – New Generation of Semantic RDF-driven WCM)

“I'm working with trialox (http://trialox.org/) a startup founded last year at the University of Zurich. We're working on open source software that makes it easy to develop semantic web enabled applications. Our system is based on OSGi technologies and support various RDF stores as backend.”

• Yahoo! Research (Peter Mika - Researcher and data architect at Yahoo!)

“I work as a researcher and data architect at Yahoo!, based in Barcelona, Spain. Our research lab is part of Yahoo! Research (http://research.yahoo.com). I'm working as a data architect on KR questions related to how we consume and use metadata inside Yahoo. As an example, many of you might have heard of SearchMonkey, which allows site owners and developers to create applications that change the way search results are presented, by using metadata associated with those pages

• Salsadev (Stéphane Gamard - Founder and CTO of salsaDev)

“salsaDev uses a technology emerged from language acquisition research at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to index textual information at a conceptual level. Our approach to information access is not a replacement solution, but a high-value added feature: knowledge workers are provided with a sense-centric/meaning-aware access to their relevant content.”

• Scribo / Nuxeo (Olivier Grisel - R&D Engineer and Stefane Fermigier – Chairman at Nuxeo)

“As part of the Scribo project (http://www.scribo.ws/), we are working on integrating semantic knowledge extractors to semi-automatically enrich the knowledge base with named entities and semantic relationship found in unstructured text content using UIMA components. We plan to integrate a CRFs-based Named Entities extractor trained on multilingual corpora such as wikipedia. CRFs are a machine learning algorithms to perform Natural Language Processing of token sequences.”

• Deri (Dr Axel Polleres - Digital Enterprise Research Institute, National University of Ireland,Galway)

“...This (http://srvgal65.deri.ie/files/iks_search_engine_cloud.pdf) is the architecture that DERI would like to suggest for the IKS Semantic Search Engine. The figure contains a set of CMS sites complying to the best practises of RDF data publishing, which include RDFa, a local schema export (site vocabulary), a SPARQL endpoint. We have worked on a set of modules for Drupal detailed in a technical report at [2], but their features could be generalized to other CMSs.”

• Kiwi (Rolf Sint - Researcher and developer at Salzburg Research)

“The KiWi-System aims to break system boundaries in that it serves as a platform for implementing and integrating many different kinds of social software services.[…] In KiWi the navigation and search of content is a key issue and is realized in several ways.  One possibility to navigate within KiWi is a very flexible facetted search, which allows a dynamic configuration of the search facets.”

• Zemanta (Tomaž Šolc - Head of research at Zemanta)

“Zemanta's content suggestion system is the main product of our company - it takes a fragment of plain text as its input and provides images and articles related to the topic of the text as well as relevant tags and automatic explanatory in-text links.[…] From the perspective of semantic search, Zemanta is an interesting example of automatic semantic query construction by extracting key concepts from a longer piece of text. Since to some degree we use external third-party search APIs we also had to address the problem of how to construct traditional keyword queries from semantically annotated text.”

• Trezorix (Sander van der Meulen)

"Our main software product is the RNA Toolset, a semantic web based innovative tools for working with content, metadata and reference structures. The goal of the RNA Toolset is to create an open environment for knowledge workers to create and edit their content, and to enable the knowledge workers to publish the content to a semantically rich search environment.

The roadmap for the development of the RNA Toolset points to implementing a federated Sesame/OWLim RDF layer with RDFS and OWL support as the search platform. Currently we only have RDF configurations in our test environments. In our production environments we've successfully implemented Solr as the search platform, providing superb free text and facet searching. But the lack of relational constructs and inferencing capabilities in Solr force us to move to the richer RDF environment for more complex knowledge systems."

• Sourcesense (Tommaso Teofili - Software engineer)

“I started studying, using and then contributing to Apache UIMA [3] for my graduation thesis (since November 2008), then on August 2009 I gained the committership. At the moment the project is on his way towards the 2.3.0 release and possibly become an Apache TLP. During this period I realized some prototypes of applications using UIMA for semantic search, one of which I am going to show during the workshop.”

• Semantic Technology LAB (Alfio Massimiliano Gliozzo - Researcher)

"My main research topic is hybridizing Information Retrieval, Natural Language Processing and Machine learning approaches with knowledge management tools at scale. One of the applications I'm interested in is Knowledge Retrieval, which is about retrieving structured knowledge relevant for natural language queries. This task can be performed on large RDF/OWL knowledge base. I will present an application of knowledge retrieval. This is a semantic search engine working on an RDF/OWL ontology."

• Semantic MediaWiki (Tran Duc Thanh, Markus Kroetsch - Karlsruher Instiut für Technologie)

"At AIFB (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology) I work on storage, query processing, query interface and ranking on integrated collections of structured (RDF) data and text (DB & IR). I will demonstrate the search solutions we have developed. One is a semantic search extension to SMW (http://semanticweb.org/wiki/Special:ATWSpecialSearch) that computes completions and translations of keywords.  This results in expressive structured queries that can used to retrieve precise answers from semantic wiki. The other called the Information Workbench (http://iwb.fluidops.com/) supports the lifecycle of “interacting with data”, i.e. from data integration, to semantic search, data manipulation, presentation, visualization up to data publishing”.

Synthesis

It makes no doubt that the future of information access will be driven by innovation. As usual the future will certainly not be white or black but will consist of a mixture of Web 1.0 (keywords), Web 2.0 (social), Web Squared (Environment / Information shadows / Real-time) and Web 3.0 (semantic) driven search technologies.

There will be lots of opportunity for specialized niche players to best leverage such or such a technology in order to improve the resolution of certain custom use cases (best of breed approach) versus a all-in-one universal search platform.

For the CMS industry and its customers this will then be a challenging period which will require quite a lot of change management. For the moment the “information access” industry is characterized by its lack of focus on standardization and rather a focus on some vendor lock-in strategy. I already wrote a blog post about it a few months ago. It won’t be possible for a CMS to integrate the plethora of traditional keyword driven search engines combined with the  new semantic-driven search platforms. There will be a need to have better defined standards to help CMS access to some abstracted interfaces which will allow them to more easily (un)plug various open source or proprietary search engines according to each of their customers needs and without having to hardcode everything and stick to one single search engine.

Of course there are already different attempts to abstract and unify access to various search engines out there (e.g: the JSR283 Abstract Query Model, the most recent CMIS API, not counting probable future evolution of OpenSearch, WebDAV Search, OASIS Search WS and probably a few others that I forgot to mention).

Let’s see now how all these information access technologies, their evolutions or revolutions and the existing or new standards will now adapt to the semantic world and all these pieces will fit together in order to help next generation of CMS propose better solutions to their millions of end users.

Disclaimer: I maintain some personal relationship with salsaDev as a board member.