Ecm News & Articles

ECM company Alfresco (news, site) heads for the clouds with a small biz beta version of its social ECM, hosted on Amazon EC2.

Today at Empower 2010, a handful of developers showed us what’s cooking in the Laserfiche (news, site) lab. These features are still in the early, early stages of development and may not even make it out of the kitchen, but let’s take a raw look.

Possible coming attractions include several usability updates to PhotoDocs 8.2, an online Laserfiche admin console called WebAdmin, overhauled and enhanced integration with Microsoft Office for Laserfiche 8.2 and Laserfiche Mobile for the iPhone.

Energy ran high yesterday during the first keynote at Empower 2010, an annual Institute Conference held by Enterprise Content Management solution provider, Laserfiche (news, site). Armed with good spirits, several analogies and Coldplay on full blast, Laserfiche President and CEO Nien-Ling Wacker addressed this year’s audience—a record 1,200 attendees—with the gusto of a really, really proud parent.

Alfresco (news, site) is expanding its cloud horizons by offering complex configuration deployment options in the cloud for its Enterprise CMS via a partnership with RightScale.

The joint solution is aimed to provide faster full-blown deployments and better management of the cloud infrastructure. RightScale is a cloud computing management company that has a SaaS cloud management platform and supports Amazon EC2 among other clouds.

The RightScale Cloud Management Platform has several features that many organizations may find appealing, including prepackaged cloud-ready ServerTemplates, ability to manage entire deployments centrally, automation throughout the deployment lifecycle, and visibility and control of all levels of a cloud app.

For Alfresco customers it means that they have a way of deploying fully-configured, fault-tolerant and load-balanced Alfresco cloud instances that can automatically scale to meet various infrastructure needs as they arise. As often it is with the cloud, one of the benefits is reduced costs, when customers only pay for what they use, when they use it.

In addition to the recently released Alfresco EC2 image and the Cloud Content Application Developer Program aimed at developers wanting to try out the Enterprise CMS in the cloud, the vendor now also offers a hosted Amazon cloud-based trial of a full implementation of Alfresco Share, using Alfresco Enterprise Edition 3.1, for you to explore.

Hyland (news, site) offers a tool to make it easier for education, governmental and health institutions to find funds for their CMS projects.

Companies today are not always prepared to respond effectively to protect mission-critical operations. And yet when you consider the many standards and regulations they must meet, why aren't companies spending their time to integrate business strategies with Governance, Regulation and Compliance (GRC)-related policies and procedures? The answer often comes down to time and money, and these days there aren't a lot of either to go around.

Archer Technologies aims to offer companies, whether Fortune 1000 or state and federal agencies, a viable solution. The provider of enterprise governance, risk and compliance (E-GRC) software has launched its Business Continuity Management (BCM) product. With its three-in-one approach, Archer looks to help companies improve their GRC programs by seamlessly integrating business continuity management into their IT-GRC and E-GRC initiatives.

The people over at Gartner (news, site), bless their hearts, want to help everyone implementing an enterprise content management solution save some money.

The advice is more than welcome, considering how pricey the process typically is on top of the fact that we’re experiencing a time in which IT budgets are especially tight. Tony Bell, Gartner’s research vice president, has identified six different ways to deal:

A new CMS Watch (news, site) report shows the growing importance of Enterprise Content Management in an increasingly mobile world. 

Blame the BlackBerry or the iPhone, but a generation of users are expecting all the data they are used to seeing on the desktop to be available on their mobile devices as well. This evolution in working style frames part of the 2009 ECM report from CMS Watch that highlights the move to mobile.

Open Text (news, site) said it’s a done deal. The planned acquisition of all of the issued and outstanding shares of Vignette (worth approximately US$ 321 million) has been completed late yesterday following a shareholders’ meeting where the voting and approval took place.

While Vignette (news, site) is busy nostalgizing, Open Text says it’s working on the strategic aspects of what may come next. Let’s not forget that Open Text already has a WCM-centric group called Open Text Web Solutions. Offering an even broader range of (quite similar) products is going to take some brain activity. Then again, this would not be the first quilting exercise for Open Text.

In the meantime, there’s still some Vignette cash to recognize on OTEX’s balance sheet.

According to the “big brother,” support will continue for Vignette's products and (the relatively quickly decreasing) installed base (bringing in the licensing revenue). The same applies to existing Web Solutions products and customers. No comment has been made in regards to new(er) Vignette products.

There is a talk about a “combined product,” but no details on what it will be, except for providing a supersized meal of a “full set of feature options, from… fast-to-deploy web publishing application, to… enterprise-class e-business platform for large-scale deployments.”

Vignette's social media, DAM and personalized content seem to be some of the most palatable notes in this content management connoisseur combo. Open Text also expressed intent to potentially leverage some of Vignette’s components in its ECM Suite.

More details on the product strategy and the product roadmap are not likely to be announced earlier than October, when Open Text’s annual conference -- Content World 2009 – will take place.

Restructuring is expected. We should know more about the range of that initiative around the end of August.

KnowledgeLake (news, site) brings a new CMS offering to cater to the starter document imaging market, leveraging a familiar platform -- SharePoint.

Let's take another trip to the cloud, shall we? Yes, the adage may be old: to cloud or not to cloud? The open source Enterprise CMS vendor Nuxeo (news, site) solved this poetic dilemma and took its document management product to the cloud.

It would be an understatement to say that social media is a hot topic nowadays, including in the enterprise. You may be terrified of using it in your organization, but you really have no choice. Social media is here to stay, and you may as well embrace it rather than fight it.

Open Text (news, site) watches this trend closely and acts accordingly, in its true “candy and aspirin” fashion. Today, the vendor has announced a new addition to the Enterprise CMS platform -- Open Text Social Media, which may help conservative organizations to (safely) warm up to social media.

Something’s stirring in the UK document management industry. This time it comes in the form of Cheshire-based Version One (news, site) which has just announced that it is setting up shop in Florida to take on the US industry.

The move comes hot on the heels of recent figures that show the document and imaging software company has announced a rise in pre-tax profits of UK£ 1.2 million to UK£ 1.32 million to the end of March.

Spearheading the expansion will be Lynn Munns, general manager of Version One UK, who is moving stateside next month.

Another new coupling in the Content Management industry has just been announced. This time it's between IBM (news, site) and Quark, a vendor of publishing software. This partnership, they say, will see the adaptation of XML across entire enterprises by integrating Quark XML Author in the IBM FileNet Content Manager.

This new integration is designed to eliminate existing problems surrounding the creation of enterprise-wide DITA-based XML and allow any user working in Microsoft Word to author content that can be used and reused in multiple channels or formats.

CMS Watch studies the content management industry very closely. It's their job. They write a number of good research reports on technologies like web content management, enterprise content management, social software and SharePoint. Every so often they take all that knowledge and wrap it up into a neat little subway map, giving us a bird's eye view of who's who and where they fit in the industry. 

An updated version of that Subway map has been released and it is certainly worth taking a look at -- if not using some of that color printer ink you hold so dear.