ECM Bulletin
Enterprise Search: where do we go from here?
About five years ago, Enterprise Search was really hot. It was on almost every CIO’s radar, and leading vendors like Autonomy, Endeca, FAST and Verity were in high demand. Everybody agreed that organizations were drowning in massive amounts of digital content - from within and outside the enterprise. Different studies even showed that knowledge workers were losing up to 8 hours a week by searching for information to do their daily job. This definitely was a problem that needed solving, and out went numerous Requests for Proposals to the Enterprise Search vendors. Five years on, findability still is a major issue: Enterprise Search projects have caused a lot of headaches and frustrations within many organisations.
So what could we have learned from all this?
Mobile Document Management & Collaboration
The overwhelming success of the Apple iPhone has certainly caused a massive wave of innovation in the area of mobile applications and content. Add to that the explosive growth of Google Android based smartphones and the arrival of Microsoft Windows Mobile 7, and you’ll realize that there will be a significant shift in the way we interact with content and applications in the years to come.
So what about mobile document management? While it’s not exactly comfortable to read an MS Word file or review an Excel spreadsheet on your smartphone, it might come in handy to be able to do so.
The Web Content Management vendor market anno 2010
The Web Content Management software market has been quite stable in 2009. Which actually is a good result considering the economic downturn of the last 18 months. As a matter of fact, many people expected some kind of shake-out in the WCM market; with over a thousand WCM software solutions to choose from, the WCM-business is still a crowded, scattered environment and the vast majority of the players are relatively small companies with less than 50 employees.
Your next WCM Project: Basic Questions
Autumn time is budget time. And as the web is becoming an increasingly strategic channel for most organizations, they are planning important investments in their web presence.
Web teams are currently figuring out which budgets to submit in order to realize their web initiatives for the years to come. Major elements in these budgets are typically the cost of state-of-the-art web content management software, the actual implementation cost by an integrator/consultancy firm and internal costs.
Enterprise portals are back
Portals and portal software go a long way back: they were one of the hypes in the dot.com era, almost a decade ago. The term has many definitions (e.g. ‘a secure and personalized web-based access to content and applications’) and portals come in many different flavors: horizontal vs.
Microsoft SharePoint - Dealing with the Abundance of SharePoint Sites
Amplexor has developed a solution – ‘Ceylon’ - that allows “helicopter views” on your collections of SharePoint sites. Ceylon consolidates sites throughout the SharePoint farm in a structured way, thus offering an overview and single point of access to hundreds of sites.
Microsoft SharePoint has been widely adopted on the market. Companies using the SharePoint platform within their organization have seen a major take-up.
Drupal - From student's tool to enterprise CMS
In the year 2000, some Belgian university students started sharing a broadband internet connection. One of them, Dries Buytaert, developed a web based message board on which he and his fellow students could exchange information regarding the status of their internet connection. The software was under continuous development which stimulated them to put their internal website online as a place where they could exchange ideas, keep in touch and leave messages about their personal lifes.
Enterprise Content Management: User Interfaces
When deploying an enterprise content management system in an organization, much effort goes into requirement studies, technical analysis and implementation and customization. However, the most challenging aspect of a new content management solution is probably the acceptance by the end-users. These are the people who will have to work with the system on a daily basis - and if a tool is hard to use, then no one will.