Meet One-On-One With Forrester Analysts At Our Business & Technology Leadership Forum 2008

Consistently rated as one of the most popular features of Forrester Events, one-on-one meetings give you the opportunity to discuss the unique technology issues facing your organization with Forrester analysts. Business & Technology Leadership Forum attendees may schedule up to two 20-minute one-on-one meetings with the Forrester analysts of their choice, depending on availability. Registered attendees will be able to schedule one-on-one meetings starting on Monday September 15, 2008. Book early!

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William Band
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
Customer relationship management applications, customer experience management, stakeholder alignment, enterprise CRM
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Matthew Brown
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Marketing and advertising, enterprise portals, intranets and extranets, information and knowledge management
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Peter Burris
Research coverage for Technology Product Management & Marketing professionals
Enterprise marketing platforms, marketing automation, high-tech, application development
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Bobby Cameron
Research coverage for CIOs
IT governance, risk, and compliance; the marketing of IT; serving the business; security and risk
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Marc Cecere
Research coverage for CIOs
Designing IT organizations, changing the culture of an IT organization, IT strategic planning
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Patrick M. Connaughton
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
Supply chain management services, supply chain management applications, enterprise mobility, RFID
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Alex Cullen
Research coverage for CIOs
IT organization; IT strategy, planning, and governance; organizational design and change management, IT management
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Boris Evelson
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Information and knowledge management, business intelligence, OLAP, data warehousing
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Chip Gliedman
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
Customer relationship management, help desk/service desk, customer service and support, packaged applications
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Paul D. Hamerman
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
ERP, human capital management, financial management, business performance solutions
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Brian W. Hill
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
eDiscovery, archiving, records and retention management, enterprise content management (ECM)
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Bradford J. Holmes
Research coverage for Vendor Strategy professionals
Tech marketing tools and best practices; government, high-tech, tech marketing strategies
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Rob Karel
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Information and knowledge management, integration technologies, metadata management, extract
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Rob Koplowitz
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Information Workplace, collaboration strategy, collaborative platforms, SharePoint
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George Lawrie
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
Retail information technology; consumer goods supply chain; pricing, promotions, and revenue optimization; collaborative processes such as trade promotions management and sales; and operations planning
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Sharyn Leaver
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
Packaged applications, business process management, ERP, application strategy and selection
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Craig Le Clair
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
ECM, BPM, output management, document processing services
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Pete Marston
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
Customer relationship management, sales force management, software-as-a-service, outsourcing
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Kyle McNabb
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Information and knowledge management, document imaging, eForms and information capture, enterprise content management
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Thomas Mendel, Ph.D.
Research coverage for Vendor Strategy professionals
Product portfolio strategies, mobile services, business service management, data center management
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Connie Moore
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Information and knowledge management, business process optimization, IT organization, enterprise content management
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Leslie Owens
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Information and knowledge management, taxonomy and classification, enterprise search platforms, text mining and analytics
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Natalie L. Petouhoff, Ph.D.
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
Customer service and support, customer experience, customer experience management, business strategy for customer experience
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Lisa Pierce
Research coverage for IT Infrastructure & Operations professionals
Voice services, telecommunications services by region, remote access infrastructure, networking
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Tom Pohlmann
Research coverage for CIOs
Business models, high-tech, corporate strategy, tech sector economics, product and solutions strategies
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Stephen Powers
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Information and knowledge management, digital asset management, enterprise content management, Web content management
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Stefan Ried, Ph.D.
Research coverage for Vendor Strategy professionals
Enterprise architecture, Service-oriented architecture, application platforms and programming strategy; application development
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Ted Schadler
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Real-time collaboration tools (instant messaging, presence, document sharing, etc.), cloud-based collaboration and email, mobile collaboration tools and applications, virtual worlds for the enterprise
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Claire Schooley
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
eLearning, information and knowledge management, videoconferencing, Web conferencing, enterprise collaboration, new workforce, retiring workforce
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Scott Tiazkun
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
Financial management; governance, risk, and compliance; financial management applications; security and risk
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Zach Thomas
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
Human resources management applications, compensation, recruitment strategies, packaged applications
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Tim Walters, Ph.D.
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Web content management, enterprise content management, digital asset management, information and knowledge management
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R "Ray" Wang
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
Enterprise apps and ERP, software contract negotiations, software partnerships and ecosystems, customer data integration
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Doug Washburn
Research coverage for IT Infrastructure & Operations professionals
Green IT, IT organization, IT infrastructure and operations, IT management
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Gil Yehuda
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Enterprise Web 2.0 and Social Computing; collaboration strategy, tools, and culture; virtual communities of practice; virtual team collaboration
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Quark Making A Dynamic Comeback?

By Sheri McLeish

Quark, Inc. has been undergoing a major strategic overhaul in the past two years. With its acquisition this month of In.Vision, the leading add-in to Microsoft Word for XML authoring, it appears poised to be taken seriously for enterprises wanting to empower their business units and be able to reuse content dynamically through a variety of channels.

Once the leading desktop publishing solution, Quark's star fell hard and fast as Adobe shattered its dominance with InDesign and its leading Creative Suite of products. In 2000, Quark's founder Tim Gill sold off his stake in the private company, and in subsequent dark years Quark looked to gain its footing in a dramatically changing publishing world. Off the radar and nearly forgotten, in 2006 Raymond Schiavone was brought in to serve as president and CEO. Schiavone, the former president and CEO of Arbortext, Inc. (which was acquired by PTC), brought to Quark a wealth of experience in XML-based authoring and publishing products – and a vision for a reinvented Quark.  He also brought his former colleagues over. Today's Quark executive team includes a CIO, Sr. VP of Corporate Marketing, and two Sr. VPs of Sales that did stints at Arbortext.

Always taken to task for its poor support and spotty integration capabilities, Quark has been trying to pull its support act together and opened up its platform and partnership approach. One of these strategic partners was In.Vision, a Microsoft Office Solution Builder grand prize winner. In.Vision's Xpress Author for Microsoft Word provided Quark with an easy-to-use authoring tool with XML capabilities. But Quark wants to bulk up and was hungry for more than a partnership. By purchasing the assets of In.Vision, Quark not only gains a leading XML authoring tool and related technologies, but a growing client base and existing partnerships and alliances.

While Quark's move won't send the competition scrambling (some may even be surprised it is still around), it is another step on the path toward providing a true solution for professional design and simplified XML authoring capabilities in a single integrated system. Quark's Dynamic Publishing Solution, combined with XML authoring and design, provide a system that will be of interest to content-heavy business units like marketing and sales. Of course, the catch here is that the integration isn't entirely seamless – yet. But given its recent measures to reinvent itself, Quark's pulse is quickening, and there is more than a glimmer of hope for a dynamic comeback.

To learn more about Forrester's take on dynamic publishing, please read "Drive Forward With Dynamic Publishing."

Open Text Makes A DAM SaaS-y Move

By Stephen Powers

I'll give you five seconds to recover from your pun-induced groaning [5...4...3...2...1] Now, on to the news: Open Text announced late last week that it has acquired eMotion, a software-as-a-service digital asset management (DAM) product, from Corbis. Open Text plans to rebrand eMotion as Artesia on Demand for Marketing, complementing its full-featured, installed Artesia DAM product.

This move into SaaS DAM is a smart move by Open Text. The installed version of Artesia has a reputation as one of the top DAM solutions out there, but its functionality and price tag may be daunting for those organizations just starting to dip their toes into the DAM waters. Some enterprises don't have the need for some of the high-end functionality - management of broadcast-quality video, for example - that "Classic Artesia" offers. Instead, many enterprises exploring DAM want to use it to manage rich media assets for use in the online channel.

In addition, marketers are now driving some of the demand for DAM, and they're not excited about waiting in the IT queue for another installed content management implementation. While other components of ECM (like Web content management) may need customizations that don't lend always themselves to the SaaS model, marketing requirements for DAM tend to be more a bit more straightforward: repository, workflow, search, metadata, permissions, and hooks into delivery mechanisms.

Now, Open Text has a DAM solution that can meet mid-level needs, and customers who want SaaS - without worrying about the stability of some of the niche DAM vendors - get the benefit of the relative stability of Open Text. Plus, this acquisition has the possibility of being an effective answer to North Plains' recent release of a SaaS version of its TeleScope product. Time will tell how much tinkering Open Text needs to do with its new acquisition, but this is a good first step into the SaaS world.

Oracle To Purchase Skywire Software – DOM And ECM Continue Pattern Of Convergence

By Craig LeClair

On June 24, 2008, Oracle announced its intent to purchase Skywire Software. This potential acquisition has three very strong positives:

Skywire enhances Oracle's ECM offering. Skywire Software has a document output management arsenal that includes Whitehill Technologies (InSystems) and Docucorp International, both of which the company acquired in 2007. Skywire's customer communication solution fills gaps and creates opportunities in Oracle's overall ECM suite. Universal Content Manager and Imaging and Process Manager can now provide complete structured solutions -- built for statements and bills for the print channel, and interactive output management -- creating direct marketing material, or collaboration and workflow for creating enrollment kits. In addition, pain points in customer communication can be addressed more broadly when Skywire's DOM solution is combined with Oracle's web content management products to provide a more complete multi-channel solution.

The acquisition enhances Oracle's reach into the insurance vertical. Oracle continues to expand its insurance industry assets. Insurance has always been a bit IBM-heavy on the software side -- perhaps reflecting thier conservative disposition -- so Oracle's collection of insurance assets makes perfect sense. Most of Skywire Software's DOM customers (1,400 of 2,000) are in insurance, and most others are in financial services. So even before any synergy with Oracle's Global Insurance business unit, Skywire provides document automation for more than 60 policy and administrative systems. The Whitehill product provides strength in Group Health and Life insurance, while the products acquired from Docucorp offer strong Property and Casualty solutions.

When Skywire is viewed in the context of Oracle's Global Insurance assets -- incuding AdminServer, a licensed software suite for policy and administration -- the combination will be a formidable competitor to other DOM solutions in one of the strongest verticals. Over time, we expect Oracle to provide process integration packs within their Application Integration Architecture, leveraging Fusion Middleware and BPEL Process Manager -- a compelling solution for the insurance industry.

This makes sense for Oracle as a good defensive move. We have seen HP purchase Exstream Software and EMC purchase Document Sciences, so I will go out on the analyst limb and declare the ECM/DOM consolidation trend valid. Oracle picked up the strongest remaining DOM provider. Good move.

Other nice things include Skywire's Tracker insurance-compliance product that merges rating data with underwriting document production. The DOM products provide good coverage in insurance.

The acquisition is a real boost to Skywire as well. Oracle's R&D budget and experience in unifying software application will be a plus, as their diverse platforms will create road map and unification challenges. And any worries of having needed ECM support are now gone, as the suite can leverage UCM. This acquisition is all good news for Oracle and Skywire.

Microsoft Crashing The Party: Announces Intent To Support ODF And Join Standards Boards

By Sheri McLeish

Wow. Microsoft opened up today, taking a nearly 180-degree turn to announce its intent to support ODF, PDF, and XPS. Overall, this is a great, positive move. While unexpected, it's not surprising. Microsoft has been moving towards more open standards, like with its recent DAISY XML initiative. But it's also a no-brainer. Sticking exclusively with its competing Open XML was divisive, complicating IT's efforts to leverage the benefits that open source XML provides.

But before we get too warm and fuzzy about this change of heart, remember: It's only an announcement of intent. The relationships with the OASIS Technical Committee and the ISO/IEC are not official and confirmed. The success of this strategy will only be realized if there are no hard feelings, and Microsoft doesn't try to bully into the committees' efforts. I suspect that Microsoft will be welcomed aboard, however. Certainly because the resources will be welcomed, but also because these organizations would be hard-pressed to deny Microsoft a seat at the table without looking divisive themselves.

There are three major components to today's announcement:

1. 2007 Microsoft Office Service Pack 2 will add support for Open Document Format (ODF) 1.1, Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) and XML Paper Specification (XPS) within Word 2007, Excel 2007 and PowerPoint 2007. Support for these standards will be enhanced by the inclusion of ODF 1.0 and 1.1 under the Open Specification Promise.

2. Microsoft has previously expressed its commitment to supporting the Open XML specification that was recently approved by ISO/IEC members (IS 29500). In the next version of Office, codenamed O14, Microsoft will update the support it provides for IS29500, the Open XML specification that was recently approved by ISO/IEC members.

3. To ensure its products support the ongoing evolution of Open XML and ODF, Microsoft said it will take an active role in the development of both Open XML and ODF formats and in the SC34 working group designed to improve interoperability between the two. Microsoft said it also intends to join the OASIS Technical Committee for ODF that is currently developing ODF 1.2.

The impact of these initiatives will take years to be realized, and it remains to be seen if Microsoft can play nice and not try to overextend its influence. If it works, however, the open source XML party will be in full swing.

Alterian Goes Into The WCM Business

By Stephen Powers

A UK-based marketing software company, Alterian, has moved to acquire Mediasurface, maker of both installed and hosted Web content management (WCM) products. Given the state of the WCM market, an acquisition like this is not completely unexpected, since marketers increasingly have a say (if not the final say) in WCM purchasing decisions and strategies. And enterprise content management (ECM) remains disconnected from the other technologies that those marketers need to use in order to manage multichannel campaigns. My colleague, Craig Le Clair, and I are planning to publish some research that tackles this issue - how enterprises need to support their marketing teams through a combination of integrated ECM and marketing processes. We'll also be speaking on that topic at Forrester's IT Forum this week (OK - that was a blatant plug, but you have to admit the timing worked out pretty well).

Alterian's move is an interesting one, and helps move them towards an overall product suite that can better serve marketers. It certainly will make Alterian's competition think about the advantages of having some content management capabilities, and there are several pure play WCM vendors out there that are ripe for the picking. Stay tuned.

WCM: The Real Differentiator

By Stephen Powers

I recently attended Vignette’s annual analyst day, which turned out to be pretty enlightening, although perhaps not for the reasons I would have originally thought. For those of you who are unfamiliar with analyst days: vendors regularly hold what - to put it inelegantly - are essentially dog-and-pony shows that give their executives the opportunity to communicate their vision, their strategy, and their roadmaps to the analyst community. The buzzword du jour for WCM vendors is "customer experience," and Vignette's management team dutifully spoke about how their products can help companies create rich, contextual online experiences using Vignette's new recommendation engine, video offering, and community products. Vignette also included as part of its analyst day schedule two customer panels, where customers spoke about their experiences with Vignette and participated in Q&A with the audience. In analyst-speak, these customer panels were the real differentiators for Vignette's analyst day.

While WCM vendors are busy announcing all kinds of bells and whistles, the fact is that the true functionality differentiators among the top WCM vendors are few and far between. These days, most of the WCM vendors are hopping on the customer experience bandwagon, and they are adjusting functionality and messaging accordingly. And they truly need to.

But functionality aside, what is really compelling is when a high-visibility, high-volume content provider like Fox News participates in a customer panel, and stands up and praises a vendor (Vignette, in this case), talking about how valuable their products are in creating those customer experiences and how those products have helped them become more competitive in the marketplace. Others on the panel had similar success stories. Another customer, when asked about what made his company stay with Vignette, didn't answer functionality, but simply stated, "It's the people." Vignette has had its well-publicized share of issues with customers who moved from V6 to V7, but I recently spoke with another customer who went through that upgrade, and she stated that she never considered bringing in another vendor, because she was happy with the customer service and support people she had regular contact with.

There is no subsistute for positive word-of-mouth generated by customers speaking publicly about their success stories and about their satisfaction with the vendor's employees; that's more effective than anything marketing can come up with. It seems like Vignette may be starting to make some progress in this area. It's certainly worth keeping your ear to the ground for stories like this about the WCM vendors you may be considering.

Microsoft Unchains Content For The Blind With DAISY XML Word Add-In

By Sheri McLeish

Microsoft's release this week of the free Word add-in for DAISY XML is great news for blind consumers, as it opens the door for easy conversion of Word documents to digital "talking books." Forget about the criticism that was leveled at Microsoft that its foray into disability-related technology was in part fueled by self-interest to gain ISO approval for its Office Open XML standard (which it finally did receive April 1). Today, only a fraction of published works have been made available for the 180 million blind or visually impaired people worldwide. Microsoft's efforts will help not only writers and publishers make their work more accessible, but be a boon for businesses, schools, governments, and other agencies that can now convert their Word docs to talking books.

The "Save as DAISY XML" add-in was created through an open source project with Microsoft, Sonata Software Ltd., and the Digital Accessible Information SYstem (DAISY) Consortium. DAISY provides a framework to create a talking book format. With increased regulations to make content accessible — it's a requirement in the US for school textbook publishers to provide copies of books in DAISY format, for example — the Word add-in is a welcome complement other text-to-speech technologies. The challenge for earlier technologies to convert text-to-voice was providing a navigation capability similar to how a sighted person might scan a document, by title, chapter, or skipping around to points of interest. DAISY-formatted content provides a reading experience that most closely approximates how sighted people read print. The free tool creates a "Save as Daisy" option within Word 2007 and 2003. The files can then be "read" aloud by speech synthesizers, paired with audio narration, and used to create electronic Braille.

Microsoft isn't alone in trying to make the printed word more accessible to the blind. Adobe has a Read Out Loud feature for PDF. Both approaches use the hierarchical organization of structured documents to deliver voice translated content. But Microsoft's approach takes advantage its new Office Open XML format, and through this add-in is aggressively embracing accessibility. The competing Open Document Format (ODF) doesn't support the same accessibility demands, and these are the things that matter to a business when evaluating standards and file formats.

And for those at Microsoft involved with the DAISY XML add-in for Word, it really isn't just about standards: Microsoft Word's product manager Reed Shaffner has said, "Working in this area is by far the most rewarding part of my job — It's not like service packs and Word aren't fun .... it's just that thought of making technology usable for more people really makes me happy." Now, thanks to Microsoft's efforts to make the DAISY XML add-in widely available, a whole lot of other folks are going to be made happy too.

SharePoint For The Enterprise

By Craig Le Clair

Forrester recently surveyed 233 IT decision-makers who have plans to implement or upgrade to at least some part of MOSS 2007 and asked: "Which of the following best describes your organization's time line for implementing or upgrading to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server?". The results? 21% will upgrade immediately and 41% will do so within 6 months.

With this level of adoption the issue of scalability comes up more and more. In one sense you have architectural concerns with any solution that scales horizontally, uses banks of load-balanced Web servers, application servers, and clusters of SQL servers on the back end. Add high availability and you quickly get a complex environment. To Microsoft's credit there is quite a bit available on performance guidelines. But looking through these, and coping with notions of site collections, lists, file arrangements, performance of folder hierarchies versus flat files, and automatic versus manual partitioning, the bottom line seems to be that even on the new 64 bit architecture with 4 screaming Intel processors, and SQL 5 -- the upper limit of the content repository is 500GB.

Assuming allocation for index data and other overhead this really allows less then 20 million objects to be reasonably managed. For enterprise solutions that may ingest 50,000 document a day, this would last about a year. Basically these are not huge numbers. Contrast this –- just for kicks -– with the DocHarbor repository, which was originally built for indexing computer output like customer statements. For statement archiving, ingestion runs done at month-end can be 10 million. Meeting the index management requirement meant building configurable hashing algorithms that can create up to 64K database tables. Anacomp, owner of the DocHarbor platform, claims 1 billion objects managed in their high-end IBM Unix environment.

The clear message from Microsoft is that MOSS 2007 can be an enterprise solution but firms contemplating this should plan carefully. The point for companies adopting SharePoint to consider is the degree of complexity and attendant soft costs required to manage this environment as it grows. I fear that firms will be seduced by the ease of rolling out SharePoint and at the end of the day may prematurely push this platform too far. But let's be fair. All platforms at the "enterprise" level of performance are complex and require strong engineering to maintain, whether it be EMC, IBM, OpenText, Hyland Software, or others. Yet, these products have had years dealing with approaches to keep table sizes manageable, optimize database schemas, index documents at high rates, and maintain business continuity.

Companies that have these mature environments in place must compare the complexity of scaling with SharePoint to leveraging that back end investment and skilled people they have. Many will chose to link that back-end to elements of SharePoint that makes sense.

I'm doing an AIIM Webinar on April 9 that will discuss this. I'd be very interested in any comments from enterprises -- or suppliers -- with experience wrestling with this decision or that have had success or issues with trying to scale SharePoint. Our recent adoption data makes this a very topical issue for many firms.

Competitive Business Intelligence, Harnessed Through Collaboration And CEP, Harvested Across The Cloud

By James Kobielus

Sometimes ideas for blog posts flow out of everyday conversations with colleagues. I want to thank Leslie Owens and Matt Brown for stimulating the following thought train.

The external competitive environment is the cloud where opportunities and threats hang, sometimes latent, sometimes looming. So it only makes sense that enterprises will outsource more of the competitive surveillance to the cloud of external resources, such as analyst firms, third-party market intelligence subscription feeds, social networking, Web 2.0, etc.

Of course, enterprises realize they don't dare outsource the competitive intelligence function entirely. That explains why they maintain research staff, tools, portals, and informational resources in-house. Mostly, these competitive intelligence teams monitor the prevailing market conditions that impact on their companies' core businesses. But, to a great degree, they also serve as an early-warning system helping their organization respond to specific breaking events -- i.e., the "disrupters" -- that threaten to capsize the corporate boat.

Recognizing this perennial "disrupter pre-emption" requirement, enterprises are concerned with best practices for setting up event-driven competitive intelligence operations. These best practices should help them survey the external horizon more comprehensively and proactively. Best practices should also help them foster, harness, and harvest internal collaboration among competitive-intelligence subject matter experts.

Essentially, competitive intelligence operations of this sort practice CEP in the following senses that I described in a previous post:

• Each event may be quite complex in its own right, standing for a linked set of data updates, application state transitions, and process status changes (NEW NOTE: a "disrupter" is any extremely complex, perhaps way too vague, but still undeniably important "event" -- disrupters aren't "tagged" as such -- and they may not be easily identified before, during, or after the fact -- maybe, hey Leslie, on-the-fly social tagging is the best way to approach this squishiness).
• Each event-reliant decision agent (e.g., end user) may access, interact with, and/or consume events through a complex interface (dashboards, analytics, semantic layer, etc.), across multiple devices (desktop, laptop, Blackberry, etc.) and have a complex event-enriched streaming  "experience" (NEW NOTE: competitive intelligence groups make use of the full range of portals, e-mail, IM, search engines, social networking, wikis, blogs, podcasts, workflow, alerts/notifications, etc.).
• Each event-reliant decision agent may be a complex creature in its own right with its own complex, convoluted, squishy decision-making methodology -- i.e., an individual human being with their own habits and cognitive/psychological dispositions; or a group making decisions collectively and collaboratively through workflow, or social networking; or a half-human/half-automated workflow behaving in the herky-jerky manner one would expect from a split-personality decision agent; or a completely automated orchestration of applications triggered by rules engines, etc.) (NEW NOTE: competitive intelligence teams are very human teaming environments, at heart -- everybody is a "sentinel" on the "lookout" for critical events while others are "sleeping" or attending to something else).

Tying in another observation from that earlier post, I expect that CEP for I&KM (i.e., real-time, event-triggered, under-deadline, continuously-refreshing dashboard-sharing collaboration applications) will play a key role in event-driven competitive intelligence everywhere. CEP, hence BI, will be used to beef up organizations' in-house competitive intelligence/surveillance function, supplementing (hopefully not replacing) the outsourced competitive intelligence/surveillance they get from analyst firms such as Forrester.

In such an environment, the self-service, in-house research portal's the chief presentation layer, and BI operates as an intelligence source and/or target accessible via the portal, with real-time/near-real-time data integration approaches (e.g., ESP, CDC, MOM, trickle-feed ETL, etc.) providing the low-latency plumbing to deliver those feeds to the DW/BI/portal/preso front-end.

The BI vendors are laying the foundation for this emerging best practice. If you look at what vendors such as Business Objects are doing, they're making more external, commercial, competitive intelligence feeds accessible, via partnerships with content aggregators/publishers, from their platforms (e.g., http://www.businessobjects.com/news/press_release.asp?id=20070521_006524). They're also providing text mining/analytics-integrated tools (e.g., http://www.businessobjects.com/news/press_release.asp?id=20070924_006494) for searching across internal and external, unstructured/semi-structured data sources. And they're expanding the social networking and other collaborative features, and mashup offerings, for bringing together real-time feeds of internal/external data/events (e.g., http://www.businessobjects.com/news/press_release.asp?id=20080313_00001).

Business Objects is a bit ahead of the industry curve on all these things. But it's clear that, as market leader, they've laid down the chief challenge for all BI vendors, to make their offerings more pervasive in competitive intelligence use cases, and also to harvest the informational resources of the Web 2.0 cloud to the max.

AIIM Show: Still Serving Core Imaging Needs

By Craig Le Clair

I went to the AIIM conference in Boston last week. My first AIIM show was in 1993 — where the ratio of demos to production systems was about a billion to one. For the historians out there, the 1993 show in Chicago had over 33,000 attendees. New optical disk jukeboxes and digital scanners were the rage. So it was good to see how far the industry has come in providing mature and productive solutions. Yet  — AIIM is still something of a chaotic, disorganized, vendor-feeding frenzy that seems to somehow work for most attendees.

It's probably the Boston convention center and not AIIMs fault, but is it really so hard to have something available to eat before 11AM in the morning? I gave a talk on ECM Strategy Tuesday morning and wrongly assumed some protein would be available. I was not looking for something as complicated as an egg sandwich, just perhaps a donut. The Dunkin Donut cart seemed to have more interest then any booth — an impossible line and very poor inventory.

The AIIM show has many moving parts but looking around it was easy to see some differences from last year. There were more search vendors, focus on content analytics, stronger records management presence, and amazingly — a host of new or repositioned imaging and workflow solutions from small companies. It's clear not everyone got the memo on consolidation in the industry.

There was a better overall balance and synergy between the On-demand and the AIIM side then previous years. Perhaps it was just being the same room — perhaps fewer overall exhibitors. Whatever the reason, the big iron was drawing a crowd, with the noise keeping anyone from a having a civil conversation nearby. DOM software suppliers seemed to have good traffic. Overall the DOM crowd had a lift to their step.

It also seemed that the focus for many ECM software providers was as much on VARs and integrators then end users — perhaps reflecting the importance or providing more complete ECM solutions. For the ECM mid market — the show was more an opportunity to retain and recruit resellers then to lure end users into the booth. The Microsoft partnership pavilion looked pretty quiet whenever I looked. Perhaps partners or users were at the SharePoint conference awkwardly run at the same time.

I also noticed a lot of new providers for the little things —such as document conversions — new twists on OCR, smallish ECM providers and a stronger emphasis on ECM outsourcng SaaS providers and even outsourcers like SourceCorp. Apps like invoice processing were more prominent. ReadSoft had a large presence and now has 2500 invoice processing customers. Kofax and othersa are ramping up on a winning application.

All in all, a pretty typical AIIM show which refreshingly lacked the normal technical buzz. This is — at the end of the day — the AIIM crowd where BPM is still a bit abstract. These are mostly real folks solving real problems created by paper. The printers on one side of the show crank it out faster every year while folks on the other side try to keep up with it — running scan centers, getting productivity from OCR, managing records and wondering why the pay scales are so much higher in IT.

The AIIM show always brings out hundreds of people knowing very little about the industry. They wander around — looking like George Bush at a press conference — and wonder what all the fuss is about and why does everything seem to work so well on the show floor.  I'll give AIIM credit for not losing sight of these roots. Despite content analytics, enterprise search, social networks, Web 2.0 influences, and other things that will make ECM a lot better in the next decade, most AIIM attendees get up every morning to fight paper-based processes that seem to defy automation. And for these heroes, AIIM is still a relevant experience.

Thoughts On Recession...And ECM Adoption

By Kyle McNabb

While we all wait and watch numerous economic indicators (my favorites are easily found in the WSJ) to see if the US economy, and possibly others, will head into recession, here's a thought - just a simple thought - on what you can do if/when you get the call to pull back on your ECM spending. Turn you attention now to understanding your organization's business context. I'm not referring to business requirements - most of you have business requirements related to your ECM endeavors. Instead, I'm referring to discovering how your business people and business processes work with and use content, not simply how they manage it.

Lack of adoption plagues many ECM initiatives - many of you live with this issue. And our ECM research over the past 18 months reveals a good reason why adoption's such an issue - most implementations fail to take into consideration business context. To put it bluntly, implementation teams know who their users are, but they know very little about the people that will use the technology. And focusing on users often leads to implementing technology in a way that materially changes the way people work...a big cause of poor document management adoption in particular.

We've learned from many enterprises with successful ECM initiatives that focusing on business context helps. How? It allows them to build up profiles on their people, not as users, but as people that just happen to use ECM technology to get their daily work. They've basically adopted, to a degree, the marketing practice of customer segmentation and persona design and applied it to their employees (more to come in the next few weeks on this topic...what information & knowledge managers can learn from marketing). As a result, they've been able to fit ECM technologies into how their people work, complementing they way their people work instead of materially changing what they do.

You may get asked the question "What can we cut?" Well, maybe, just maybe, focusing on business context will allow you to tell your management you may not have to replace that "unusable" ECM system with something new. You may find better ways to put what you already have to better use. Business context matters.

What do you think?

IBM Expands IOD Portfolio, Perhaps To The Bursting Point

By James Kobielus, Boris Evelson, Paul Hamerman, Rob Karel, Kyle McNabb, Craig Le Clair, Colin Teubner, Merv Adrian, and Connie Moore

Simplicity is bliss, but complexity has the upper hand in many enterprise information and knowledge management (I&KM) environments.

To keep a lid on runaway complexity, enterprise I&KM professionals often limit their strategic solution vendors and professional services partners to a chosen few. Typically, strategic vendors are those that can offer the widest range of best-of-breed I&KM solutions. Sourcing from a core group of solution providers also allows enterprise IT staff to obtain better licensing terms, reduce maintenance costs, and tighten cross-product and platform integration across diverse solution components.

IBM, like other all-in-one solution vendors, benefits from this enterprise sourcing best practice. Over the past few years, IBM has sought to deepen its best-of-breed status in the I&KM market by adding a growing range of offerings to its already substantial portfolio. Under the Information On Demand (IOD) banner, it has assimilated a wide range of solutions: some of which were developed in-house, while others were picked up through strategic acquisitions. Few vendors now offer as comprehensive an assortment of I&KM products as IBM. The vendor’s offerings range across such I&KM segments as business intelligence (BI), business performance solutions (BPS), database management systems (DBMSs), data warehousing (DW), data integration (DI), data quality (DQ), master data management (MDM), and enterprise content management (ECM).

However, comprehensive is not the same as comprehensible. For all its functional breadth and platform integration, IBM’s IOD solution set has grown so large that users may be hard-pressed to weave it all into a unified, enterprise-wide I&KM environment. Every new strategic acquisition by IBM adds more complexity that the vendor, its partners, and its customers must absorb into their strategic plans.

To IBM’s credit, it has steadily knit together its recent acquisitions over successive enhancement cycles. Slowly but surely, it has begun to assimilate Ascential, Trigo, DWL, Venetica, SRD, Unicorn, FileNet, DataMirror, and other acquisitions. It has done this through a multi-pronged approach that includes unified messaging, tighter cross-product and platform integration, and more cross-solution professional services engagements. The initial rollout of IBM Information Server as a common integration backplane in 2006 was a major step along that road.

This week’s announcements demonstrate how IBM is both adding to its IOD portfolio and focusing its go-to-market message. With these most recent moves, most of which were pre-announced in late 2007, IBM has taken its already substantial IOD value proposition and strengthened it further. Most important, it has finalized the Cognos acquisition, rolled out its converged MDM server solution, and rebranded its IOD offerings around the new InfoSphere moniker. Through these and other, related moves, IBM now offers I&KM professionals a robust range of best-of-breed IOD solutions that leverage its dynamic warehousing, middleware, metadata, and modeling tools.

Clearly, completion of the Cognos acquisition is the most significant of these announcements, both for IBM and for enterprise customers. IBM has presented a solid go-to-market message on the acquisition, illustrating how little ongoing product rationalization will be needed to fit Cognos into IBM’s multi-brand IOD solution portfolio. As we’ve stated previously, rivals such as Oracle/Hyperion and SAP/Business Objects have more product overlap in the core BI and BPS of the converging vendors than do IBM (which was not a major player in these niches before the acquisition) and Cognos (which was one of the recognized leaders).

This is not to deny that IBM and Cognos have functional overlaps in areas critical to a full-fledged BI/BPS portfolio. The vendors offer comparable solutions in enterprise information integration (i.e., IBM WebSphere Data Federator and Cognos’ OEMd version of Composite), extract transform load (i.e., IBM WebSphere DataStage and Cognos 8 Data Manager), and online analytical processing (OLAP) engines (i.e., IBM DB2 9.5 Cubing Services, Cognos PowerCube, Applix TM1). But with the formal close of the acquisition, IBM has clearly positioned these offerings for distinct customer requirements. Yes, it’s a complex convergence message, but IBM has done a good job of minimizing the inevitable marketplace confusion that stems from an acquisition of this magnitude. Indeed, IBM has a strong track record of integrating acquisitions such as Ascential, which gives us confidence that it will waste no time bringing Cognos’ solutions fully into its IOD stack.

Just as significant as the complementary aspects of the Cognos acquisition are the new solutions that the combined vendors have now made available to their customers. IBM has identified several new industry solutions, product bundles, and service offerings that are immediately available and leverage both its and Cognos’ technology. Furthermore, IBM has presented a roadmap that spells out its long-range priorities for product integration, convergence, and bundling across its existing IOD and service-oriented architecture (SOA) portfolios and Cognos’ established BI and BPS offerings. Of course, the roadmap is still sketchy in many places, and it’s not yet clear whether or how far IBM will evolve its Cognos solutions into a more comprehensive business application portfolio.

One of the most promising convergence themes that IBM has identified for Cognos going forward is expanded support for unstructured and semi-structured content in BI and BPS applications. Even in advance of taking that step with its Cognos brand, IBM has rolled out its Compliance Warehouse for Legal Control, an important new version of its DW appliance solutions family offering in the market that is geared to handling unstructured and semi-structured data for ECM all compliance-related content and process information. However, it remains to be seen whether IBM will now be able to catalyze its diverse brands--BI/BPS (Cognos), ECM (FileNet and WebSphere Content Manager), application data management (Optim), and text analytics (OmniFind)--into a unified solution portfolio for handling complex data types.

We’re also encouraged by the extent of IBM’s commitment to maintaining Cognos’ operating autonomy as a product group, as well as allowing Cognos to expand its partner ecosystem and execute on its established solution roadmap. Cognos customers should have confidence that IBM will continue to preserve and enhance their investments through growing integration into the InfoSphere and WebSphere portfolios. Cognos now takes its place alongside other solid enterprise-grade brands — including FileNet, Lotus, Rational, and Tivoli — within IBM's comprehensive solution portfolio.

IBM’s rebranding of its MDM, DW, and other (but not all) IOD offerings around the InfoSphere moniker should help clarify its value proposition for enterprises. The vendor’s new InfoSphere brand distinguishes those established solutions from its core DBMS (DB2 9) and from its platform/tool offerings (WebSphere). It should also help IBM to more clearly present its message that InfoSphere’s data integration, data quality, MDM, and DW solutions are heterogeneous and SOA-focused and can also be sold into non-IBM accounts. Of course re-branding aside, IBM will still likely meet resistance from non-IBM footprint customers targeting specific technology investments like ETL or MDM that want to avoid a sales pitch for a comprehensive IOD stack.

One of IBM’s most exciting strategic opportunities from the Cognos acquisition centers on business optimization—Forrester’s term for BI’s next generation. Business optimization combines operational BI with business process management (BPM) and business rules engines (BRE) to enable better decision making. By focusing on business optimization, the combined IBM/Cognos is in a position to shift BI’s traditional focus from historical reporting and analytics to predictive analytics and business transformation.

Though we’re positive on IBM’s recent announcements, we must acknowledge that the vendor confronts vulnerabilities of its own making. For starters, it appears to be ramping up its Global Services push for IOD, stirring up concern among some I&KM professionals who suspect that IBM wishes to sell them heterogeneous wares with “some assembly required” (i.e., assembly for the price of an IBM Global Services engagement). Also, adding Cognos to the IOD equation complicates IBM’s partnerships with Business Objects (now a SAP subsidiary) and with other BI and BPS vendors. In that regard, customers of rival BI/BPS vendors should hold IBM to its pledge to maintain SOA-based heterogeneous interoperability on a par with what it provides to its Cognos offerings.

IBM is without a doubt a best-of-breed solution provider in data management, but it still struggles to simplify its busy IOD go-to-market message. Now, as we move further into 2008, IBM will have to show how its comprehensive IOD family of brands can compose into a unified solution set that enterprises may deploy swiftly and with minimal handholding.

Just as important, if IBM continues to acquire niche vendors in BI, BPS, and other key IOD niches — and there are still many exciting startups on the market — it will have to figure out how to integrate it all without bursting its bulging portfolio at the seams.

Oracle To Purchase Captovation

By Craig Le Clair

On January 16, 2008, Oracle announced it has entered into an agreement to acquire Captovation, a provider of document capture solutions. With Captovation, Oracle extends its solution for ECM for transactional content by adding a strong capture solution. The acquisition is expected to close by February 2008. Captovation already has joint customers with Oracle/Stellent and had actually partnered with Optica even prior to Stellent's acquisition. In this sense the acquisition is not surprising. "Oracle Capture" will be the new product brand.

For Oracle customers, it makes a more complete ECM solution, one that can address paper capture for invoice processing for ERP applications or more convincingly incorporate unstructured content for Siebel. For Captovation customers it means increased R&D, investment protection, and access to Oracle's global support and services.

A win for both companies and the customers.

DOM Market Heats Up: EMC And HP Make Strong Moves - But For Different Reasons

By Craig Le Clair

HP’s plans to acquire Exstream combined with EMC’s intent to buy Document Sciences demonstrates that output management for transactional content is becoming critical to many large organizations. But how do you rationalize these two acquisitions? First let’s look at EMC. They add to their consistently improving transactional content assets. Whether it involves invoice processing, account notices and policies for insurance, or new account opening, DOM gives EMC more complete support of the document lifecycle. More to the point, Forrester’s predicted growth in Interactive DOM is very important for the major ECM players. Interactive DOM makes more use of ECM then Structured applications that are essentially batch processes with little human involvement. Interactive applications need human-centric business process management to help author, store, version, and manage content dynamically. EMC can now link their broad ECM platform to Document Sciences for this emerging area.

The HP acquisition is harder to see at first but is clearly aimed at the structured print channel and less at the interactive content and multichannel segment. From a hardware and document outsourcing standpoint for structured DOM, HP has not had as strong a footprint as OCE, Xerox, or IBM. Their printers – think PCL - have always been mid-range and not used for significant statement and transaction reporting volume. So why buy Exstream Dialogue, the market leader in that high-volume segment? With the acquisition, HP now gains a significant software position for this segment. With Exstream, HP can, as the balance between print and electronic delivery equalizes, direct output away from the major print centers to more distributed environments where they play well. They can help customers more strategically optimize their DOM environment, and for HP that makes money when bits are set to paper. This is important. Those readers that like grand strategies will respond to this theory. But anyone with a bit of “toner” under the fingernails knows that changing these high-volume environments is not for the faint of heart and needs a very strong ROI. There is a reason they are centralized. All this being said, DOM is important from any angle one takes, and HP and EMC are showing vision by launching into this market.

Hewlett Packard To Buy Exstream Software: DOM Is Getting Its Due

By Craig Le Clair

In October of last year, I published "Give DOM its Due" and argued that for years, document output management (DOM) had been pegged as a back-office operation that produces customer statements and bills. And that now, customer experience demands will thrust DOM into a major software category supporting the growing and diverse content that enterprises must assemble and deliver to customers. A few weeks ago EMC purchased Document Sciences. And now on January 22, HP has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Exstream Software, a privately-held provider of document creation and publishing software for print, mail and online channels. HP expects to close on this transaction in the second quarter of HP's 2008 fiscal year.

Exstream continues to be a leading choice for the high-volume segment of the DOM structured market and will greatly strengthen HPs document automation capability. Initially targeting service providers — a tough crowd — Exstream followed an object-oriented development model to allow re-use of document components, which was quickly adopted by service providers to provide similar applications to many customers. Today's focus is heavily in the interactive and on-demand DOM segments with strong direct sales. While revenue numbers were not available, Exstream has 300plus employees.

In an analyst briefing on the acquisition today, HP was clear that Variable Data Publishing (VDP), referring to the combination of specific customer data to a structured output format,  is not just printing but a complete publishing infrastructure for capture, retaining, securing and extending digital content creation for the on line, mobile and the interactive environment - although there was little mention of the acquisition in the context of HP's well-publicized Print 2.0 initiative. HP intends to incorporate not only structured and unstructured information into future output applications, but also rich media such as audio and video.

Exstream fills a gap in HP's document automation capability which largely consisted of HP Output Server with roots in print infrastructure output management, and derived from the Dazel product. Exstream moves well up the value chain providing complete output creation and management with the ability to add value to the customer through TransPromo and highly personalized communications. As part of the Web Services and Software business unit within the Imaging and Printing Group, it will become an integral part of the overall IPG SW strategy and help link capabilities across HP's Technical Solutions Group and the office solutions area.

Yet, HP will have challenges and opportunities with this acquisition. They must carefully navigate very productive hardware channels, providing a more complete solution, but not directly competing with service bureau HW customers. They are also wading into the high-volume AFP and transaction printing market, traditionally not a sweet spot. And they must continue Exstream's support for non-HP hardware platforms, and to fully leverage the combination, they must train a sales force more accustomed to hardware then complex document automation sales like correspondence management.

Yet the pros far outweigh the cons for this combination. HP has greatly extended its capabilites at a time when DOM — particulalry for interactive applications — is heating up. Exstream customers get stronger worldwide sales and support and deeper R&D pockets. HP is to be commended for showing vision in the document output space and yes — helping give DOM its Due.

Laserfiche At The Aquarium

By Craig Le Clair

The Laserfiche user conference held its main event at the Long Beach, California aquarium. I will try to refrain from making obvious jokes about this. I did make every effort to avoid walking past the fish tanks and lagoons with my Halibut dinner (the shark lagoon is pretty good). The Mayor of Long Beach gave Nien-Ling an award celebrating 20 years in business. Nien-Ling Wacker is the founder and chief inspiration for the company. I will credit her with defining the SMB market for ECM. The governor also gave an award, although the Terminator could not make the event.

Despite a name that combines two obsolete technologies, Laserfiche continues to grow. This year 600 customers, 200 VARs and 200 employees pushed this event to the 1000 people milestone. 

Laserfiche takes a "less is more" philosophy and still focuses on eliminating file cabinets, being easy to use, and most importantly — affordable. This year version 8 is out and emphasizes a records management module and stronger workflow as well as embraces a more open approach. The key to their success seems to be responsive support and taking care of the little things that help ECM adoption, such as synchronizing CD volumes or a simple integration with the Goldmine contact management system. Their "code library" has hundreds of these utilities that handle often overlooked but critical tasks.

Nien-Ling Wacker referred to the big players coming into the market as "boys" with LaserFiche being "adults."  Several case studies were presented where some of those "boys" implemented overly complex systems at great expense only to be thrown out for a system that did not require teams of consultants.

Laserfiche has grown revenues consistently and has been profitable now for years. I spoke with many of their customers and one thing is constant: They are trying to buy solutions that solve basic records management and paper-related problems. And most care little about who is buying who — and even less about whether an ECM provider is part of a big company positioning for infrastructure or a medium size pure play emphasizing applications and vertical markets. These buyers are focused on the thousands of business processes that need help managing content, migrating from paper to electronic, and applying higher levels of automation. There is plenty to do for everyone and firms that focus on what customers need will continue to prosper.

RM Market Poised To Grow, But There Are Short-Term Inhibitors

by Barry Murphy.

While market drivers like compliance, eDiscovery, and risk management get a lot of press (and point to great opportunity for records management), the fact is that many organizations are not ready for full-blown RM programs. Why? Mostly due to organizational immaturity — not correctly aligning roles, responsibilities, and budget ownership (for more on this, click here). But there is also the problem of mutliple repositories containing records; organizations struggle with the question of moving records to a central repository or investigating federated RM.

Today, most organizations approach retention by content repository – in most cases, email is addressed first, along with other important systems of record, like imaging. Because it’s easier to start with the simple retention capabilities of an email archive, organizations can put off larger RM decisions until their email implementation is complete and they have digested the learnings involved. So, that has been something of a growth inhibitor for RM in the short-term. It won’t be long, however, until RM moves into the infrastructure level and gets deployed at that level – policy management across the ECM infrastructure instead of RM being an app on top of infrastructure. So, in the longer term, expect to see a greater uptake in RM.

We're interested in hearing from you about RM efforts. Is federated RM working?  Are you drowning in too much retained information? Are eDiscovery costs growing out of control?  Send me an email at bmurphy@forrester.com and we can talk through the issues.

Facebook & Alfresco Help Signal The End Of Today's Definition Of ECM

by Kyle McNabb.

Alfresco recently announced integration with Facebook. The news works well for Alfresco, which continues to demonstrate a bit more edge thinking in the world of ECM than their commercial counterparts IBM, EMC, Oracle, and Open Text. Facebook's not making a big deal out of it, which should be expected considering their exploring what it means to deliver applications to businesses at this point.

Last October we published research entitled 'The Top Five Technology Trends That Affect Your Enterprise Content Management Strategy.' One of the most important trends we singled out was a trend we refer to as Tech Populism — or how the technology we use at work continues to find its way into the home (Outlook calendars and Microsoft Office for example), and, more interestingly, the technology we use at home — or our own personal technology — continues to find its way into work (Facebook, LinkedIn, and iPods for example). Many of us will increasingly use online social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn to help us get our jobs done. And sometimes getting our jobs done will require we work with, collaborate on, and access content (e.g. documents, presentations, spreadsheets, and rich media assets). Alfresco's tapping into this trend, hoping to beat some of their commercial ECM peers to the punch, and be in front of the early enterprise adopters of Facebook that need a little ECM help.

But Facebook isn't going to be your answer for all things ECM. Instead, you should look at this as a sign of things to come. Content, and content repositories for that matter, will be wherever people work. And your organization's not going to be able to stop every employee from using online social networks like Facebook if it helps the employee get their job done. But how should you think about this trend?

ECM's still valid...

Look, you still have a ton of unmanaged and underutilized content in your organization. Transactional business processes need content to be more efficient — e.g. accounts payable, new account opening in Financial Services, claims processing, and license renewals in local governments. And we're just starting to tap into the persuasive power of content as organizations try to use content, across multiple channels (not just the Web site) to improve the customer experience. And there's a mountain of content stuck on network file shares that need to be put to use to help improve how information workers get their jobs done more effectively. My contention: You can't put this content to use if you don't manage it. You need to manage this content to ensure you've got a single source of the truth, that you have the right content ready for use, and that you know where to get it. And from there you can use metadata to help drive it into the way a transactional business processes (supported by business process management technology), business people (supported by collaboration technology, including Web 2.0), and your customers (supported by marketing platforms, CRM, and ecommerce technology) work with your organization. That's why we asked ECM suite vendors what BPM, collaboration, integration, and document output management technology they have to offer in addition to their core ECM suite in our recent ECM Wave evaluation — it's about helping put managed content to use.

...but ECM's definition is changing quickly thanks to more pervasive content usage

The usage of online social networks plus the pervasive use of Microsoft SharePoint document libraries and Lotus Quickr document repositories will soon put an end to the notion that content has to be in a repository to be managed and secure. Face it, without an ability to dictate what technology their employees use to get their jobs done, organizations have to shift their ECM focus from repositories to figuring out how to extend the security and management of content beyond the repository, and onto the content asset. You'll soon have to work on answering questions of 'How do we make sure our people can work in Facebook, but not take contracts in there that may put us at risk?' Or what about 'How can we let our engineers work in Second Life, but make sure they don't bring in sensitive designs that may get lost or stolen in this unsecured environment?' ECM has to do more than just provide the repository, it has to provide some of the answers for how do you effectively manage the asset, regardless of where it lives.

The future's about policy management, just not today's policy management

Tomorrow, in order to facilitate the way people and business processes work with content, repositories will still be in existence — hey, not all content's going to be useful or needed in a social network. But organizations, and information & knowledge management professionals, will want a way to define and enforce how this information gets managed, how it gets retained, and MOST IMPORTANTLY, how it will be used, regardless of where it physically lives — Facebook, Microsoft SharePoint, or on my dreaded C: drive (I can never find anything on it). We asked ECM vendors what rights management technology they have in our ECM Suites Wave to help understand what they're doing to help you answer these important questions. Frankly, I don't think today's rights management really addresses the concerns highlighted above, but it is a start. And maybe thanks to Alfresco working with Facebook, we'll see rights management evolve into what it needs to be. Stay tuned...