A Look at How Enterprise CMS Vendors Support Collaboration

By David Roe (@druadh20) Mar 29, 2011

As our month's focus on enterprise collaboration draws to a close, we know now that collaboration is the act of working together towards a common goal and enterprise collaboration is a group of people working to achieve the goals agreed upon by those in an enterprise. Over the past couple of years, we have seen a large number of Enterprise CMS vendors develop software products to help people in the enterprise do just that.

The goal is to facilitate collaboration between individuals working in geographically disparate locations using features from a wide list of software possibilities.

While most large enterprise content management systems will offer some collaboration features, many of the big vendors in the marketplace have developed software aimed at bettering collaboration.

So who is producing what? It is impossible to list everything from everyone, but some of the major players in this emerging market, listed alphabetically, include:

Autonomy

Just about everything Autonomy (news, site) is built or based around its Intelligent Data Operating Layer (IDOL) server and its ability to discern patterns in information.

As a result, one of its major collaboration efforts has been with its Collaboration and Expertise Networks (CEN), which aims to build communities of expertise through collaboration.

These social knowledge networks overcome “situational myopia," by which we mean the inability of individuals, or groups, to see and relate the different elements of a problem.

IDOL forms a conceptual understanding of how users interact using information as it is used and created. Autonomy relates that information by mutual interests bringing similar groups together. Autonomy offers users

Implicit Profiling: Recommends experts and relates them based on the enterprise information they use in email, IM, documents and voice
Explicit Profiling: Users can describe their own expertise and relate to others with similar interests and expertise, while IDOL can relate them based on metadata
Alerting: Users are informed when data and people are added to the network that have similar interests and goals and brings them together
Clustering: IDOL clusters disparate pieces of information by concept, matching them to the conceptual profiles of experts in real time

These are only some of the features that stand out here, but there are many more.

EMC

EMC aims to enable enterprise collaboration through its Enterprise Project Collaboration solutions that offer what EMC (news, site) says are the key elements in enterprise collaboration: Task scheduling, team collaboration and portfolio visibility.

EMC builds collaborative components using EMC Documentum eRoom that provide:

Global collaboration: Provision of a collaboration workspace that pulls together geographically displaced teams
Standardized processes: Using workspace templates, enterprises can offer predictable and repeatable processes
Extended portfolio visibility: With project visibility, enterprises can prioritize tasks, attribute resources and streamline processes
Improved performance: Compare projected costs and actual costs to ensure compliance with enterprise resources

Documentum eRoom enables collaboration on documents, group activities and the development of products and services by global teams. Features that facilitate this include: