I was reading this blog entry from the 451 group today. And I also answered in another previous blog entry which was stating:

"There were lots of heads nodding when I talked about a move to consolidate social tools for those orgs that have put up a WordPress blog over here and a wiki over there or maybe a discussion forum for customer support, and now wondering how to pull these together for better profile management, content re-use and overall consistency.  This could bode well for WCM vendors already running the main .com site for such a customer, but most WCM vendors still have a ways to go on the social software front.  Something for discussion at the next content management show, I m sure "

I am personally not so convinced that the core business of WCM vendors lies in the development of social applications even if they mainly deal with content. These are indeed two different business requiring different skillsets.

We could of course consider that (re)developing another web based shared calendaring system is quite similar to manage web content. So why not delegating such a task to the WCM folks? After all an "event" is only a web based content object which could be perfectly stored in a Content Repository as any other piece of structured content objects. But then you start to think about all the other features which will be missing. Either in term of UI, process or even in term of additional extensions (e.g: CalDAV support, RFC 2445; ...). And then I am not sure any more that this is a perfect fit any more with the core objective of a WCM platform.

However, yes, we really need to see more portable and reusable social oriented CEVA (Content Enabled Vertical Applications) kind of apps out there. I wrote some lines about it in my latest blog entry.

So why Social Software Vendors such as Jive, SocialText, ConnectBeam, ... are not more focused on content interoperability and more heavy supporters of existing standards (e.g.: support of JCR for a possible back-end content repository; support for OpenSocial, bridge with JSR168 portlets/gadgets or soon compliance with CMIS). This would then make them so easy to integrate with existing WCM/Portal front-end servers. And this would also let the customers be able to easily reuse the entered content, repurpose it in other content enabled applications or on the web site of the company.

WCM could then focus on their key strengths while being able to let each customer rapidly choose the best social applications he wants to embed on some of its web pages according ot his needs and budgets. Best of both worlds!

So a message to Enterprise Social Software Vendors for 2009: stop spending too much in marketing buzz, rather invest in content interoperability and start leveraging existing WCM&Portal environments. Generating money is key for 2009!