2009 Retrospective, Food for Thought and Seasons Greetings

Here we are on the brink of the night before Christmas, if that's your kind of thing. And this time we're indulging ourselves by shuttering the shop from now until the first Monday of 2010.

For us it's reflection season. In that spirit we've cooked up a concise retrospective of 2009, including items our readers took particular interest in, and some things we found generally interesting.

Without further ado we leave you to some holiday reading. May the end of 2009 treat you and yours well.

Enterprise CMS Highlights

It was largely business as usual in the ECM sector this year, with a few notable exceptions.

• SDL's acquisition of XyEnterprise made sense.
• But it was Autonomy's acquisition of Interwoven that was the most talked about.
• That is until Open Text's acquired Vignette -- although many suspected Vignette was on the market.
• In November Forrester fingered EMC, IBM, Microsoft, Open Text and Oracle as the leaders in their Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Content Management while Autonomy, Day Software, Alfresco and SpringCM were placed in the visionaries box.
• In early Q4 at Open World Oracle announced plans to integrate their enterprise Applications with their ECM document services. Details were slim, so we'll have to look for more facts there in 2010.

Beyond acquisition activity, open source players stepped up their game and look to be positioned well for some 2010 combat.

• Alfresco got more attention from analysts and chalked-up an important DoD certification. Adobe and Alfresco continued to work together on Adobe's LiveCycle Enterprise Suite. The company also made strides with their cloud offering via a partnership with RightScale.
• Paris-based Nuxeo launched US operations in the ever popular Boston area, added Digital Asset Management (DAM) to their offering and hired Cheryl McKinnon -- previously of Open Text -- to run global marketing programs.
• The DoD was on our radar again as it voiced support for open source software in the procurement process, in the form of a DoD memo.

SharePoint in the Limelight (still)

• SharePoint remained so dominant that vendors big and small rushed to build integrations and connectors. All year long people found the topic of Web Content Management with SharePoint intriguing. However, we heard more about frustrations than successes.
• The anticipation and early previews of SharePoint 2010 dominated the annual (and sold out) SharePoint Conference 2009. The event brought tidbits for technical administrators, covered the 2010 upgrade plans, and spurred partners to announce support for the product.
• For project managers, Dux Raymond Sy wrote up a brief on project management with SharePoint 2010. He followed up this article with a two-part treatise on why SharePoint ignorance is not bliss.
• The SharePoint 2010 beta was released this past November. And Microsoft -- ever keen on inspiring upgrades and enabling the partner channel -- followed up this month with the launch of an official SharePoint 2010 upgrade service offering.
• Yet despite progress in the field, many organizations still struggle to go beyond using SharePoint as a file sharing service. Still, dear Steve Ballmer's confidence is higher than ever. He even described how SharePoint is like the PC.

Web CMS a Super Dynamic Space

Perhaps it's been web content management that has seen the most change this year:

• Vignette and Interwoven acquisitions were mentioned above, but we'll shed a tear and pay them homage one more time here. Confusion was voiced fairly broadly around the Open Text grab of Vignette, notably around their 2010 platforms roadmap. There were also some whispers and chirps about Open Text layoffs. More on that in 2010.
• Yes, we like strong opinions as much as the next fella. Catering to such appetites analyst firm Forrester Research announced that Web CMS 1.0 was officially dead. Weee!
• We all learned that the second most used Web CMS, Drupal, will -- with the brains and funding of Acquia -- go from not so user friendly framework to easy as pie SaaS with the release of Drupal Gardens (now in early alpha). This something to watch in 2010.
• At the J Boye conference in Aarhus, Denmark key practitioners voiced some inconvenient truths and focused on web content management industry challenges. Our recent article Emerging Trends in Web Content Management touched on this again. Certain voices from the field are calling for the death of the WCM acronym, but suitable replacements have yet to be put forward, with a straight face. Stay tuned to the vocabulary space. We're either going to move forward, move backwards, or stay put. I think that about covers the options.
• Mass market WCM options shifted around a bit in terms of brand strength and popularity. Yet  the most popular open source Web CMS products remained Drupal, Joomla and WordPress. You can get the skinny on the top 20 open source CMS brands in the 2009 Open Source CMS Market Share report.

Standards Abound, Gain Ground

The subject of standards was never far from anyone's mind:

• Enterprise CMS and document management vendors realized part of the key to their success is the ability to interoperate via CMIS. The greatest common factor interoperability specification made good progress over the course of 2009 and version 1.0 is now out for public review.
• HTML 5 continued to gain traction even if it's more years away than we like to admit.
• CSS3 brought support for mobile and multi-column layouts
• Increased use of the mobile web brought the need for standards.
• Even Microsoft expressed support for open standards and interoperability
• At J Boye Aarhus in November, Day Software's David Nüscheler, covered 8 Key Trends in Web Content Management. They fit well with Day's plans and offerings, but nevertheless were good food for thought and quite standards oriented.
• Discussions at the Gilbane San Francisco event also shone light on standards. Irina Guseva's article Content Integration Standards -- CMIS, JSR-170, JSR-283 is a worthwhile read.
• For a great overview of hot content management standards, read Jon Mark's article WCM Field Notes: The Skinny on JCR, CMIS and OSGi.

Enterprise 2.0

The adoption of social computing in the enterprise was big news this year.

• Google took the beta tag off its apps to show it was enterprise ready
• Then they released Google Wave, supposedly the next generation collaboration platform.
• We learned four reasons you should adopt social media in the enterprise
• That Twitter and Facebook are the most persuasive technology of all time. And now the real-time fire hoses are open (watch what you say!).
• But despite all the hootin and hollering, not everyone thought this Enterprise 2.0 thing was necessary.

Industry Themes: Search, Speed, Analytics, Semantics, Real-time, Open Source and more...

You can't go through a year without major industry shifts, 2009 had its share:

• Microsoft challenged Google in the search arena with Bing. Have the Search Wars begun in earnest this time?
• Google brought new meaning to less is more with the Chrome browser.
• Just about everyone was talking about the real-time web. Google unveiled real-time search, Twitter opened the real-time fire hose for all developers, as did Facebook.
• The analytics space was taken for a roller coaster ride when IBM acquired SPSS for US$ 1.2 bil and Adobe acquired Omniture for US$ 1.8 bil.
• The semantic web pushed forward with an HTML+RDFa Draft, RDFa metadata moving it the Drupal core and some interesting research on applying semantic web metadata to large data sets. Tim Berners-Lee continued work on linked data and semantic web technologies, with an official mandate in the UK.
• Open Source went to the White House in the form of the Drupal Web CMS. And the U.S. Department of Defense said open source software was a-OK for them.
• Looking forward, CMS Watch recently made their 2010 predictions.
• And looking backwards (to October 2008), Gartner predicted the Top 10 Strategic Technologies of 2009 ...were they right?

That's it for the holiday brain food fun. Thanks for supporting us in 2009 -- we'll see you right back here in January.