CMS watch has released an update of its content technology vendor map. 

The Enterprise Content Line shows hubs for Open Text, IBM, Microsoft, EMC, Oracle and Autonomy/Interwoven.  There is also a smaller hub for Alfresco commonly thought to be the gruntiest of open source document management products.

A couple of the strong players in the NZ market are missing (CMS Watch comment that this is just a subset of the vendors that they monitor):

• Objective from Objective Corporation
• TRIM from Tower Software (bought by HP late last year).
• And DataWorks that was going strong in the NZ local government market in the early days of EDRMS but has not won much in recent years

What is increasingly apparent - and no surprise - is the convergence between enterprise content management, web content management, enterprise portals and social software and collaboration.

This throws up an interesting dilemma for the selectors and implementators of ECM solutions.  How much do we buy from the ‘get go’ and how much should we implement first up?   What do we use as part of a bundle of services from one vendor versus to what extent are we going to mix and match?

In NZ, I suspect that the PRA may be distorting these choices somewhat with a strong driver behind RFPs still being PRA compliance.  Note the number of tenders that are still being released asking for a PRA compliant solution - despite solutions not being compliant in and of themselves. 

If the PRA driver was removed I wonder what would be the top priorities for NZ organisations in the selection of ECM solutions and what would be the strongest business reasons for investment.  Is it finding documents, is it accountability/risk management, is it better ways of working together? 

What have been the drivers for your organisation?

The focus of this paper was federated search. Federated search works across multiple repositories – typically the extranet, EDRMS and intranet – and returns the results together.  The user interface presents the results either sliced by repository (top 3 intranet searches; top 3 EDRMS searches) or by relevance using tricky behind the scenes algorithms.

The key challenges faced by vendors developing search tools are:

·        De-duping (removing duplicate entries)

·        Developing algorithms that generate useful relevance rankings

·        Reflecting the security models present in each repository

When a tool meets these challenges then a vendor has a ‘viable’ federated search tool.  However, that doesn’t account for that nasty thing: human behaviour.  Letting humans at your repository can really stuff the accuracy of the search tool.  The nasty things that humans do include:

·        Changing content types

·        Adding and removing directories

·        Creating new workflows

·        Creating versions

·        Opting out of metadata

·        Changing taxonomies

All of these can conspire to seriously challenge your search tool.