To be sure, Microsoft has created a very wide-ranging product here, but not every aspect of SharePoint is up-to-the-task of serving the enterprise. As such, a whole community of ISVs have surrounded the product with various bolt-on tools to either enhance either what SharePoint does natively or add missing functionality.

It is for this very reason that when we updated the latest SharePoint Report, we included critical reviews of more than twenty add-on tools.

So, if you're going to implement SharePoint, start planning for the inevitable 3rd party products that you will likely have to purchase as well. Whether it's a search add-on or a tool to assist in backups, you have quite a few choices.

And so we've changed with it. Today, we announce the release of a new evaluation service, The Search & Information Access Report, which represents a total analytical re-work and re-write of vendor reviews, versus what we used to call simply "Enterprise Search."

We take a fresh look at the vendors based on how well they help people get access to information, which is a rather broader, but still quite alluring (and elusive) challenge. Our latest research suggests that buyers are less likely to be looking for one "Enterprise Search" tool that solves all of their information access needs. Rather, many are looking for specific solutions to some very specific problems.

Part of this evolution has to do with you, the buyer. You are less likely to accept that search is somehow "magic." Vendors have responded by opening up (to varying degrees) their "black box" architectures to enable you to construct meaningful search applications.

As always, if you are a full subscriber, you'll receive your full copy shortly. If you're a previous customer, look for an e-mail offering you special pricing. New customers can download a free sample here.

Where there remains a disconnect between buyers and vendors - is in just how expensive and difficult good capture technology can be to acquire. For it seems that now OCR (optical character recognition) is commonplace, that buyers still imagine that dealing with the issues of distributed capture, multi-paged documents, multi-languages, in multi formats is somehow easy, and by default should also be cheap.

In fact the difference between the high end capture vendors (such as Abbyy, ReadSoft and Kofax) and low-end OCR is the difference between a bottle of wine vinegar and a bottle of vintage Krug. For at the high end, capture systems not only recognize multipage documents, but also relationships between pages and the context and content on them. They can recognize and capture a paragraph that is written in English, and just as accurately capture the native language Chinese footnotes related to that paragraph. They can capture at a staggeringly fast and accurate clip -- and once configured and running are typically far more accurate and faster than humans keying the same information in to a system manually.  And of course, they cost more. 

Key advice to buyers: don't underestimate the value of good clean captured data at the start of your process.  Remember the maxim, rubbish in = rubbish out. At the same time don't underestimate the capabilities of what are genuinely some of the most technically advanced products in the ECM stack -- as it is likely that just for once, the right vendor may be able to do more for you than you think.

Probably just because of that word "content," there has been some confusion as to what CMIS targets. CMIS is all about check in/out and the ability to create, read, update and delete a document anywhere. That in fact is the beauty of CMIS, it's simple and has obvious value in larger organizations with multiple legacy systems that are currently hard coded into an ECM central repository (or two).

JSR 170/283 is not only compatible with CMIS but is in fact complimentary

JSR 170/283's goal is to provide the potential for a virtual repository. It does this by providing an API at the application layer of the stack. CMIS on the other hand provides for interoperability primarily via Web Services at the transportation layer. Two quite different things when you think about it -- and with different use cases.

I happen to think CMIS will be a success, in part due to it's simplicity and focus. And we need to remember how success will be measured. True success will have nothing to do with the number of vendors who come out with CMIS implementations, rather it will be the number of onsite applications that use CMIS to integrate systems, that will determine success. It is also worth remembering that standards take many years before they really take hold, typically between 5 and 7, so even the most longsighted of us has no real idea as to what the future really holds for CMIS. All I know for sure is that ECM interoperability for buyers is a must have, CMIS (or something like it) is a necessity.

Hardly a week goes by without some discussion as to what ECM actually is, indeed today started off with just such a discussion -- but oddly enough we almost always ultimately agree that the AIIM definition is pretty damn good ".... the strategies, methods and tools used to capture, store, manage, preserve and deliver information in support of business processes".

Though we can argue about the inclusion of the word Information and whether it should really just be documents etc, for in my book (literally...The ECM Suites Report 2009) Web Content is not a part of ECM nor is structured data.  It nonetheless remains a good definition. But now I have a new one that complements AIIM's perfectly "ECM is an ecosystem that facilitates change" .... Very nice, and thank you Mr Jay Vondran, I shall be quoting that regularly from now on.

"There are certain areas at the enterprise level, for example around backup and performance and archiving, where I would encourage bringing another vendor into the mix, despite the risks..."

In our new SharePoint Report 2009 we evaluate twenty SharePoint partner solutions, because so many customers were telling us they were going the 3rd-party route for add-on modules, and they weren't totally comfortable with it.

More and more, IT teams are finding themselves entangled in legal webs as legal actions spawn electronic discovery efforts. E-discovery can quickly become a costly and time-intensive activity -- and can put immense strain on an enterprise's business as usual. So much so, that many enterprises choose to simply settle cases in order to avoid the costly, and often painful, process altogether. Adding to the pain of an e-discovery process is the confusing marketplace of technologies that are classified as "e-discovery" tools. These can range from everything from search engines to full-blown case management tools.

Today we added our newest course, "The Fundamentals of E-Discovery" to our ever-expanding curriculum of online courses. Our hope is that this course will give you the basics that you should know before beginning an e-discovery project and help you minimize your risk by taking a pro-active approach to e-discovery. Armed with these fundamentals, you will be able to help your team see how e-discovery technology can be an essential part of the solution, but not the solution alone.

While handy in its own right, Overflight is not available as an RSS feed. It also doesn't seem to be searchable. So I decided to see if I could mash together my own version of Overflight (tailored to my own research needs), using Yahoo Pipes, the visual Web-app builder.

As it turns out, I was able to cobble together an Overflight workalike in a matter of 90 minutes or so (give or take a bag of microwave popcorn). I didn't have time to aggregate all 70-something Google blogs, so I concentrated just on the twelve developer blogs that are of particular interest to me. My app is on the Pipes site as Google Developer Blogs Super-Feed, which you can subscribe to here.

With my super-feed, you can see the title, description, and content for the most recent 8 blog entries in all twelve Google developer blogs that I chose to aggregate (AJAX Search API, Gears, Gadgets, OpenSocial, Open Source, Mashup Editor, Web Toolkit, App Engine, Google Code, iGoogle, Desktop, and Data API blogs). That's 96 entries total. Actually, it can be less than that if a blog is cross-categorized, since I included logic that removes duplicates.

A tool of this kind is obviously more useful if it allows searching. The keyword-search version is here. (It supports single words or exact phrases.) You'll notice that after you perform a search, a header bar will appear above the results-list containing various links and buttons you can use to subscribe to (and/or syndicate) that particular search. In other words, you can search on "AJAX" and then subscribe to the query as a feed; then you could search on "Google Docs" and subscribe to that query as a feed. And so on.

Is Pipes the ideal way to build Web apps? Not necessarily. The list of things you can't accomplish with Pipes is quite long, and the learning curve (for what you get) is somewhat steep. But it offers a glimpse (arguably) of how some Web apps will be built in the future.

What this exercise really shows, however, is the power of standards like RSS. This is a point worth emphasizing. As Web content becomes more granular, compositional, and personalizable (not to mention more perishable), subscribability becomes a design consideration. Users want to be able to opt into dynamic content. This is a theme I've seen emerge over the past year in the Web CMS world as well as in Enterprise Search, where it's no longer enough just to let users save queries; they now need to be able to subscribe to their queries (or the content generated by them).

Bottom line? Feed-based delivery of content isn't just about aggregation; it's about empowering users -- giving them the power to choose how they want to consume content. That's a subtle distinction that's driving a good deal of change in the content management industry right now, and it's something we continue to watch carefully.

GCN: What do agency systems developers sometimes forget when purchasing an ECM system?

BYRNE: ... The third thing is a tendency not to test the tools properly before they sign a contract. The federal government is way behind the commercial space here and doesn't need to be. There is a misperception among contracting officers that the Federal Acquisition Regulation doesn't allow this, but the FAR actually does. Some of the smarter agencies do these [competitive bake-offs], but too few of them do.

As someone committed to the value of proper research, I'll always suggest doing your homework before you start to procure technology, but then -- after getting as smart as you can -- be sure to test....test....test...before you buy.

As always, CMS Watch will be leading a track. I'd like to point you in particular to the now-famous "Stump the Consultant" session, where you'll have a chance to win a free iPhone if you pose the toughest question to our panel of expert consultants.

We organize the "stump" session because we believe that when you go to conferences you should get your specific questions answered. This year the Expo program offers a slew of answers in a very broad curriculum. And if you don't find all the information you need, feel free to drop by our couch on the exhibit floor for a "content management therapy session."

Finally, please consider our post-conference tutorial, "SharePoint for the Enterprise: The Real Story on Strengths & Weaknesses." I'll be teaching the workshop, and guarantee you'll come away significantly smarter about where and how and why to use (or not use) SharePoint in your enterprise. Tutorial space is limited, so register early...

Yesterday I attended the Interwoven annual Analyst Day in New York.  It was an interesting day in many respects, and one which showed a very different Interwoven than the one of circa 2006.  For just a few short years back such events for the firm were painful experiences, as they were forced to trot out a series of lame excuses for missing targets and falling short of expectations.  To their credit they have been working hard to turn things around, and with new leadership at the top, financially at least, 2008 has been a year of success. Despite a slowing economy Interwoven has become the comeback kid.

In New York they were not just in a confident mood, they were overtly bullish, bordering at times on the arrogant. And they laid out a simple, but potentially  effective strategy to continue their upward path.

This strategy hangs on three things.

First, the recognition that Interwoven is in fact two separate companies, with two very different sets of customers - Web (read TeamSite) and Document (read WorkSite).  This basic recognition that there are and always have been two quite separate worlds (that's why we have separate CMS and ECM services) is a breakthrough, and one that some of its competitors might want to follow.  

Second, a continued focus on customer satisfaction.  As readers of our CMS and ECM services will know this has not always been a strong point for Interwoven, but to give credit where it is due, I have observed and had further confirmation this week that they have worked hard to improve on this - and partners at least (who account for nearly 3/4 of Interwovens revenue now) have come to both like and rely on Interwoven - whilst souring on other relationships.

Third, is to target in on, and to take market share away from, vulnerable competitors.  In this regard Interwoven execs were clear cut about exactly who they are gunning for.  Vignette customers on the Web side of things, and disaffected Hummingbird (now Open Text ) customers on the Document side of the business, and as of today that approach appears to be working for them.

Overall this appears to be an effective if simple strategy - but it does not tell the whole story of Interwoven. For example, I have long thought that the WorkSite side of Interwoven was the stronger of the two, despite the fact that Interwoven's roots are in the web - and I saw little this week to change that opinion. For like it or not TeamSite is due a major overhaul, some might say long overdue - as the core system is over ten years old. And knowing what we know in 2008, nobody would build a CMS system the same way they did in 1998. How the newly invigorated Interwoven handles this overhaul will be key.  They do have the luxury of being able to learn from and avoid many of the mistakes from Vignettes truly disastrous move to V7 that left many customers both stranded and angry. Then again change is always painful, and surely the best they can hope for is to manage the transition in as humane a way as possible.  One thing they could (and arguably should) do, would be to lay out a very visible road map for TeamSite change - but they didn't do that in New York. There was tacit recognition from the executive team that change was due and would be coming, but specifics were non-existent. 

This has been a constant theme over recent years, and just as Interwoven is gunning for Vignette, they are also losing Web CMS  deals to smaller competitors with more contemporary architectures.

With a new VP of Engineering in place Interwoven needs to get public quickly regarding what is on the horizon, again to be clear, we all know that nobody would design a CMS product today the same as they would have in 1998 - hence tinkering with the system will not do the trick, it will need much more than that.

Yet it's not our job at CMS Watch to advise vendors - and my cautionary here is not for the benefit of Interwoven - but for you the buyer to be aware and to start asking tough questions of Interwoven. Where exactly is TeamSite going?  How will future changes impact my existing deployment? When and how can I expect these changes to occur?  If you don't there is a real danger that the next 18 months could good  for Interwoven, but might leave you the buyer with a headache once the party is over.

But let's try and end on a positive note.  I really don't want to rain on Interwovens party, they have a strong story, strong management (which they haven't always had), cash in the bank, a supportive channel and are experiencing sustained and profitable growth.  And for what it is worth I have some faith that Interwoven will manage future change well, whether it involves acquisitions, mergers or just some new products. Nevertheless for buyers (and the channel) a bit more openesss around where things are going would help to put a lot of minds at rest.

In the interest of full disclosure - CMS Watch paid for all our own travel and accomodation to the event, along with my delicious veggie burger from Big Daddy's Diner on Wednesday evening. We do not accept travel and expenses from vendors, just as we do not consult to or work for vendors, period.
  

With this latest edition, we recognize that SharePoint has moved beyond a simple product, and beyond even a platform, to become a vibrant but often beguiling ecosystem of 3rd-party suppliers, consultancies, and integrators. In the report, we evaluate twenty-two SharePoint software partners. The latest edition also identifies best practices for enterprise architectures and governance.

You can download a free sample here.

Full subscribers will receive their copy shortly.

Day Software's David Nuescheler (CTO) and Kevin Cochrane (the company's new CMO) were in town last week, and we had an interesting lunchtime conversation, much of it centered on the long-awaited Version 5 of Day Communiqué, the planned release date for which is ... November 14. 

Without spoiling the suspense, let me just say that CQ 5 (not unexpectedly) demos well and is replete with enhancements that are certain to wow many a new customer while also mollifying many an existing customer (including some who've waited years for these functionalities).

But for me, the most impressive features of CQ 5 are in areas other people might not think are sexy. Admittedly, I'm a bit of an alpha-geek; I like to know what's going on under the covers, and I get jazzed about architectural minutiae that would bore the average system administrator to tears. But I've also spent enough time (in prior lives at SilverStream and Novell) installing, troubleshooting, upgrading, configuring, using, and documenting Java-based systems to know how important the seemingly small things can be for achieving acceptable quality-of-life.

Installation pain is a prime example of what I'm talking about.  I can name popular products (you probably can, too) that require two full days of hair-pulling and hoop-jumping before you can light up localhost and get "Hello World" to stop throwing exceptions. The excuse is often given: "You only have to go through this pain once, therefore it's not really a cost-of-ownership issue in the broader scheme of things..." Which of course is not a good excuse for having to endure a time-wasteful, ibuprofen-intensive installation process. With Communiqué 5, Day has made installation about as painless as it can be. With just a couple of mouse-clicks to kick off the installer, you can lay down a sandbox-worthy system in less time than it takes to microwave a bag of popcorn.

"Upgrade pain" is another qualty-of-life issue for ECM and WCM system admins. Day Software has done some exemplary work here. With CQ 5 comes a hot-upgrade utility that allows you to migrate from CQ 3 or 4 straight to CQ 5 while editors, content creators, and administrators are still using the old system. You don't have to take the system down in order to upgrade, nor do you have to go through a two-phase process of migrating content, then migrating changes that occurred while the original migration was underway. During the hot-migration process, Day activates change-listeners on your old system, ensuring continuous synchronization of content even as users continue to author and approve material in the old environment.

System backup and "point in time" snapshots with rollback capability are yet another area where most WCM vendors leave customers in the House of Pain. Again, Day has done some good work here. Unlike other products that merely back up your content and templates (and maybe a few artifacts here and there), CQ 5 actually backs up your entire system, including all configuration settings, all logs, license keys, credentials, state information, dependencies, everything necessary to fully recreate the running system. When you later unpack the snapshot (a .zip file), it "installs" itself and recreates the previous environment bit-for-bit. "This is a boon for customer service scenarios," David Nuescheler explains, "because now you can just send me your entire system as a snapshot, and I can reproduce your problem on my machine exactly."

Probably the most impressive thing I saw in CQ 5 when David demonstrated it to me on his PowerBook was the hot-scale-out capability of the newly updated CRX repository. Every copy of CRX comes clusterable by default (i.e., cluster capability is not "added on" or sold as an extra-cost upgrade). In essence, a single-repository install of CQ 5 is just a cluster of one. To add more nodes, you simply install more CRX instances (on as many different boxes or blades as you want), run a wizard that asks you for the URL of the primary node, click OK, and wait for the new nodes to connect themselves together automatically. In demos, David and Kevin routinely do the grid-expansion trick between their two laptops (one of which is a Windows machine, the other of which runs MacOS), wirelessly, in real time -- and I must say, it's a jawdropper. I've never seen clustering done this easily.

These are just a few of the seemingly less important, easy-to-overllook features of CQ 5 that may not make for sexy screen shots or wow the typical business user, but are bound to have a big impact on people who administer, maintain, troubleshoot, and/or implement solutions built on Day Communiqué. In today's market, most WCM vendors are struggling mightily to come up with differentiators for their products. Day, it seems, has found a few -- in the unlikeliest of places.

If there is a fly in this nice ointment, it is that (as Web CMS Report readers know), Day has a history of demonstrating impressive engineering feats that don't always work as well as intended in real enterprise environments. So, as always, test first, before you buy.

According to the 10.3 release notes, Oracle WebLogic Portal 10.3 is really a very minor release. Support for WebLogic Server 10.3 and Java version 6 has been added. Oracle product naming and branding has been implemented and developers can now work with a new version of the Workshop IDE.

This may not sound like much and I doubt that it is enough evidence to comfort those worried buyers that have invested deeply in WebLogic Portal. To be fair, some other large vendors -- e.g., Microsoft and SAP -- have also done very little to their portal products during 2008.

While Oracle may have its own reasons for slowing down the pace on product improvements to WebLogic Portal, change is certainly still happening in the marketplace. Both from the open source vendors in the space, but also from vendors that don't call themselves portal vendors, e.g., Google with iGoogle and gadgets, Netvibes with widgets, Facebook and LinkedIn apps, and those hyped enterprise social software vendors. 2009 promises to be another interesting year in the portal market!

Today we learn of the departure of Sarah A. Reed from Vignette. As Director of Global Analyst Relations, Sarah was our main point of contact with the company and she did a great job of making our job easier (which is saying a lot). We wish Sarah well in whatever life-after-Vignette holds in store for her.

This week is also the final week at Vignette for Alex Shootman, the company's SVP of Worldwide Sales and Service. His last day is November 14.

It's a bit too soon to tell if these departures mark the beginning of a trend -- after all, software companies typically have high turnover for sales and marketing staff.

But we note with interest that other restructuring is going on. For example, Vignette has lately been accelerating its transition to an Asian-outsourcing model for R&D. In the company's SEC 10Q filing of September 30, 2008, we learn that Vignette (which currently gets half of its R&D done overseas) has "decided to establish a development center in India" and will "phase out our primary third-party service provider over a twelve month period." The third-party provider is Virtusa Corporation, which Vignette has been paying $7 million per year (approximately) for offshore services. The phase-out (which began last August) calls for the payment to Virtusa of a $1 million termination fee, because there is still a year to go on the Virtusa contract. In an August 2008 SEC filing, Vignette notes that it is entitled, over the next twelve months, to "solicit for hire as full time employees of the Company [Vignette], the Virtusa personnel who are currently performing services as part of Virtusa's center dedicated to the Company."

We also know from a 2006 slide show put together by Leo Brunnick, Vignette's then-SVP of Engineering and IT, that "full lifecycle product development in the Offshore Center is a prerequisite to attract the real talent," meaning Vignette has tried (and abandoned) the typical "do your best R&D in the U.S. and ship QA-and-maintenance grunt-work to India" model. The company will seemingly ship the real R&D jobs to India.

This is also a fortuitous time for Vignette (and other companies) to send jobs to Asia, because in just a couple of months, when Mr. Obama takes office, Congress will likely enact legislation that will penalize (or at least not reward) companies who ship jobs overseas. For companies like Vignette, it's now or never.

Meanwhile, Vignette continues to be severely punished by Wall Street. For the year, VIGN common stock is down 50 percent, and in today's trading action, it made a new 52-week low of $7.24 a share on the Nasdaq. You shouldn't acquire software (or not) based on stock prices, but Vignette's transition is worth following. We'll keep watching....