Over the last few years, ECM vendors have expanded their functionality and capabilities by partnering with niche players in the market, developing the features themselves, or acquiring and integrating the capabilities of niche vendors.
When we look into the future and see what things the market is asking for and what vendors are focusing on, several subjects that come to mind. We will touch on a few topics that we see as being market scopes. A market scope is a view of the market and where vendors are currently focused. We'll use this Donald Norman's categorization, to identify the phase each topic is in, in the market life cycle.
(Norman, Donald A. The Invisible Computer. The MIT Press: 1998)
* Web services are increasingly being used. They consist of components and resources that are used by ECM suites to communicate and integrate with other content rich applications. Often Web services, which are becoming the standard in the market, are used in third-party portals and portlets and can enable businesses to integrate more easily with third-parties. Web services are in a late majority stage within the ECM life cycle.
iECM, which stands for interoperable enterprise content management was started by The Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM), the international authority on ECM. AIIM started a collaborative work space to create an international standard composed of service oriented architecture (SOA) and Web services, with the cooperation of organizations such as EMC, Adobe, and the US Federal Aviation Authority (US FAA). AIIM's objective is to produce a single set of functional requirements for process-oriented, Web services that enable disparate enterprise content management functions and systems, portals, and enterprise applications to interoperate. It enables content (unstructured and semi-structured data) to be exchanged, integrated, and managed securely between systems. This standardization is still in the innovators cycle.
* Information extraction is the process of retrieving elements of data from unstructured data, often text. Vendors will focus on this feature in the future to enable the end user to map and consolidate data, give easier access to information, and even provide competitive intelligence. Verity, one of the market leaders in search software, has already integrated this capability in its technology. This feature is still in the early adapters' cycle.
* Advanced search and information retrieval is becoming a greater necessity for organizations because large amounts of content is divided among different applications and repositories, making it harder to find the right information on time. Vendors, such as Verity and Autonomy, are addressing this by offering the capability to search multiple repositories using keywords, and semantic and syntactic queries. A sophisticated taxonomy, which is a hierarchical classification of information components, plays a big part in making this functionality work. Advanced search and information retrieval is also still in the early adapters' cycle.
* Content integrattion is the capability to combine (part of) the content of several repositories spread out through the organization, to provide content in one repository used by ECM suites. It offers better interoperability between organizations, departments, and processes. This concept is mostly used by vendors that have integration architectures such as IBM and Day. This is in a late stage of early majority, probably moving soon to late majority.
* JSR 168 and 170 are specifications defined by the Java Community. Java Specification Requests (JSR) 168 and 170 specifically focus on the ECM market. JSR 168 enables interoperability among portlets and portals. This specification defines a set of APIs for portlets and addresses standardization for preferences, user information, portlet requests and responses, deployment packaging, and security. JSR 170 specifies a standard API to access content repositories in Java independent of implementation.
These standards being adapted by the majority of the ECM vendors, which will increase the functionality to integrate between applications. Even though JSR 168 has been adapted by more users than JSR 170, both can be classified as being in the early majority phase.
* Rich site summary, or really simple syndication (RSS) is a method of providing news or other content through RSS feeders that bypass the Web browser. RSS is an application that uses XML technology and is often used in web blogs and for less important, but nice-to-know content. It is highly adaptability and is easy to use in environments where content changes rapidly. The media market, in particular, will be interested in using this technology to spread news to its readership.
* Personalization, through portal software provides tailored content based on the role of the user, the user's previous visits, or other statistics. Through this technology, organizations are capable of targeting content more precisely on the needs and interests of their employees or their visitors. Vendors such as BEA, Plumtree, BroadVision, and Hummingbird have already included this with their solutions. Personalization is already the majority stage, but most ECM vendors are still in early majority stages of including it in their solutions.
* Integrated document archive and retrieval systems (IDARS) is a combination of document management systems and records management systems. It provides a system for storage, managing, retrieving, and distributing content in any form, from documents to digital images. This technology has been around for a decade, and in the beginning, databases were put on laser discs. Currently, the Web is often used as a common source to access databases. This provides organizations with the ability to retrieve information, and store high volumes of content in a more efficiently and in a fashionable order., which is often critical to meet regulatory requirements for legislations like the US Sarbanes-Oxley Act. IDARS is currently in a late majority phase, but still very demanding in the market.
* Knowledge management is not really a module of ECM, but it uses the information that is provided by ECM suites. Knowledge management is a separate solution, used at the business level to provide an overview of an organization's information. It is more than just content; it is actually information that is useful to the company. This technology has been around for several years, and is becoming an important part of integration with ECM suites. It will become an additional module for ECM suites, made available by the vendor or by integrating with a third-party solution.
When we look into the future and see what things the market is asking for and what vendors are focusing on, several subjects that come to mind. We will touch on a few topics that we see as being market scopes. A market scope is a view of the market and where vendors are currently focused. We'll use this Donald Norman's categorization, to identify the phase each topic is in, in the market life cycle.
(Norman, Donald A. The Invisible Computer. The MIT Press: 1998)
* Web services are increasingly being used. They consist of components and resources that are used by ECM suites to communicate and integrate with other content rich applications. Often Web services, which are becoming the standard in the market, are used in third-party portals and portlets and can enable businesses to integrate more easily with third-parties. Web services are in a late majority stage within the ECM life cycle.
iECM, which stands for interoperable enterprise content management was started by The Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM), the international authority on ECM. AIIM started a collaborative work space to create an international standard composed of service oriented architecture (SOA) and Web services, with the cooperation of organizations such as EMC, Adobe, and the US Federal Aviation Authority (US FAA). AIIM's objective is to produce a single set of functional requirements for process-oriented, Web services that enable disparate enterprise content management functions and systems, portals, and enterprise applications to interoperate. It enables content (unstructured and semi-structured data) to be exchanged, integrated, and managed securely between systems. This standardization is still in the innovators cycle.
* Information extraction is the process of retrieving elements of data from unstructured data, often text. Vendors will focus on this feature in the future to enable the end user to map and consolidate data, give easier access to information, and even provide competitive intelligence. Verity, one of the market leaders in search software, has already integrated this capability in its technology. This feature is still in the early adapters' cycle.
* Advanced search and information retrieval is becoming a greater necessity for organizations because large amounts of content is divided among different applications and repositories, making it harder to find the right information on time. Vendors, such as Verity and Autonomy, are addressing this by offering the capability to search multiple repositories using keywords, and semantic and syntactic queries. A sophisticated taxonomy, which is a hierarchical classification of information components, plays a big part in making this functionality work. Advanced search and information retrieval is also still in the early adapters' cycle.
* Content integrattion is the capability to combine (part of) the content of several repositories spread out through the organization, to provide content in one repository used by ECM suites. It offers better interoperability between organizations, departments, and processes. This concept is mostly used by vendors that have integration architectures such as IBM and Day. This is in a late stage of early majority, probably moving soon to late majority.
* JSR 168 and 170 are specifications defined by the Java Community. Java Specification Requests (JSR) 168 and 170 specifically focus on the ECM market. JSR 168 enables interoperability among portlets and portals. This specification defines a set of APIs for portlets and addresses standardization for preferences, user information, portlet requests and responses, deployment packaging, and security. JSR 170 specifies a standard API to access content repositories in Java independent of implementation.
These standards being adapted by the majority of the ECM vendors, which will increase the functionality to integrate between applications. Even though JSR 168 has been adapted by more users than JSR 170, both can be classified as being in the early majority phase.
* Rich site summary, or really simple syndication (RSS) is a method of providing news or other content through RSS feeders that bypass the Web browser. RSS is an application that uses XML technology and is often used in web blogs and for less important, but nice-to-know content. It is highly adaptability and is easy to use in environments where content changes rapidly. The media market, in particular, will be interested in using this technology to spread news to its readership.
* Personalization, through portal software provides tailored content based on the role of the user, the user's previous visits, or other statistics. Through this technology, organizations are capable of targeting content more precisely on the needs and interests of their employees or their visitors. Vendors such as BEA, Plumtree, BroadVision, and Hummingbird have already included this with their solutions. Personalization is already the majority stage, but most ECM vendors are still in early majority stages of including it in their solutions.
* Integrated document archive and retrieval systems (IDARS) is a combination of document management systems and records management systems. It provides a system for storage, managing, retrieving, and distributing content in any form, from documents to digital images. This technology has been around for a decade, and in the beginning, databases were put on laser discs. Currently, the Web is often used as a common source to access databases. This provides organizations with the ability to retrieve information, and store high volumes of content in a more efficiently and in a fashionable order., which is often critical to meet regulatory requirements for legislations like the US Sarbanes-Oxley Act. IDARS is currently in a late majority phase, but still very demanding in the market.
* Knowledge management is not really a module of ECM, but it uses the information that is provided by ECM suites. Knowledge management is a separate solution, used at the business level to provide an overview of an organization's information. It is more than just content; it is actually information that is useful to the company. This technology has been around for several years, and is becoming an important part of integration with ECM suites. It will become an additional module for ECM suites, made available by the vendor or by integrating with a third-party solution.
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