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.

----------------------

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”.