Social integration, mobility, and the cloud -- with a side dish of social media -- are becoming evermore critical elements of enterprise content management (ECM).
As the use of mobile devices rises, coupled with the popularity of cloud environments and unstructured content such as videos, organizations must look at the business case for upgrading their ECM systems, according to experts.
At the Laserfiche Empower 2013 conference in Anaheim, Calif., Kenneth Chin, research vice president of content, collaboration, and social at Gartner, said companies can expect to see an increased focus on improving and incorporating mobility, cloud computing, and social aspects into content management:
Regardless of whatever technology you deal in, you're going to see mobile come into play in all of the tech spaces, cloud in all of the tech spaces, and from an interface standpoint, the social interfaces will become increasingly important.
For starters, social content management will become more popular as the need to share and collaborate on documents grows, according to Chin: "As we talk about social, we're talking about work enablement and the consumerization of content management." He pointed to organizations that use fileshares and store content in blogs, social media channels, and wikis, all driving social content management.
"The future of social content management... is mobility," Chin said. Companies are distributing content though more channels: portals as well as mobile, and employees are consuming more content on their mobile devices, he said.
By 2015, Gartner expects 60 percent of information workers to interact with content applications via a mobile device. This will drive different ways of building the top level of access to content, driven by a proliferation of tablets and smartphones, Chin said.
But as companies look at mobility, they also need to look at security issues and compliance, as well as whether the number of different types of mobile devices could slow mobile adoption of applications. For example, Apple just came out with a seven-inch version of its iPad -- a smaller screen for consuming data. "That will make it more challenging as [companies] build out applications for different form factors and devices," he said.
ECM increasingly will move toward the cloud to accommodate social and mobile access. According to Gartner, 80 percent of ECM vendors will be providing cloud services alternatives. Chin said, "Some will be dedicated cloud services, supporting single clients. Others will be multi-tenant clouds, supporting multiple clients in the infrastructure."
Companies will want to assess whether it makes sense to create a private cloud or push content into the public cloud. Sensitive content may reside on-premises, but content meant for partners and customers can be easily hosted in the cloud. The cloud works well for deploying applications faster with smaller budgets, but organizations with regulatory limitations and sensitive content need to carefully assess security and compliance risks, he said. The organization's culture and technology should also be considered.
Finally, companies must review social media as part of their content management strategies. While social media is just posting content that comes with some risk when it comes to managing the content, companies are wondering how to archive things like YouTube videos and Facebook posts, part of unstructured content that is largely unmanaged, according to Chin. But once organizations hammer out the details of recapturing and archiving content, they can explore other ways to use social media for content management. One way would be to send bills to customers via Facebook, an idea that at least one telecom company is considering, Chin said.
— Christine Parizo is a freelance writer specializing in business and technology.
I know, I know, rarely do big enterprise execs outside of the publishing world take WordPress seriously. But personally, I think given a great development and security team, WordPress and BuddyPress are a good contender for enterprise content management. The combination combines publishing capabilities and social networking in a user-friendly and customizable package, while many paid solutions are so expensive and hard to use. I don't deny that there'd be security issues; that's why the development and security team will have to do their work. But if we talk UI and customization, WP + BP is a great option.
I remember Sharepoint too and what a pain it was to use it. It really is a good thing to have all these alternatives right now for content management. Saves loads of time and actually convenient now.
There was a time when a lot of content and document sharing was done with Microsoft's Sharepoint solution. I was never a big fan, and I am glad that these days there are a ton of alternatives available on the market. The problem that I always had with Sharepoint is that it was overly complex and not easy to use. Not to mention that these days mobile is incredibly important and the fact that content is now not just restricted to Word files and Excel spreadsheets. Halcyon days are ahead, I think.
Magazines and newspapers seem to be trying to stop you from reading their content, rather than encouraging it.
It's ironic that the only reason I still have a subscription to Time Out New York is that the website is a complete disaster. Periodicals which run good websites--New York magazine, for example--lose me as subscriber, because the content is easily accessible online for free.
@jabailo I noticed the same thing, and more often than not I will leave rather than click to another set that forces me to click through 10 times just to read a really short article. Rarely is it worth the effort of clicking (reading takes very little effort), and I never EVER click over to the intrusive ads that appear along the way.
I do find even with myself that it's easier to interact sometimes through social media in one way or another than in real life. It's easier for them, too--almost as though social media is actually real.
So far, mobile malware hasn't been a huge problem, but it's coming soon... and I'm not looking forward to it. When/where-ever valuable information is transmitted digitally, malware to try to obtain that info illicitly will follow...
Maybe there will be a new way to prevent malware attacks, but we'll have to suffer through the growing pains of mobile anti-virus software, methinks... yay.
Magazines and newspapers seem to be trying to stop you from reading their content, rather than encouraging it.
As counter-intuitive as it sounds...yes, this appears to be the case!
It seems that more and more the pattern of "news reporting" is putting a Troll Headline link that appears in Google News with something like The Five Candy Bars That Make You Smart. You click on the link, and it takes you to an article. Is there, in text, a list of the five candy bars? No, there is a 2 page Introduction about the study, then a link to a Slide Show where each entry is presented, one by one. At the end of it is a video news story giving you the missing details.
Business is business of course, and the only reason for presenting a web page is to get people to view and click ads. If you simply told them the news, they'd take it and leave.
Designers want control. Businesses want to cram more and more information onto the page. That's where all those floating bars and other annoyances come from.
Magazines and newspapers seem to be trying to stop you from reading their content, rather than encouraging it.
Similar issues exist on intranets, where everybody in the company wants to be sure to get their all-important message out to employees. Meanwhile, the poor employee who just wants to find out whether they get Martin Luther King Day off has to dig to find that information.
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Last week's official US release of the BlackBerry Z10, the BlackBerry 10 touchscreen device, on the AT&T network marked the official entry of BlackBerry as a player in the formidable US smartphone market. While most consumers may not be swayed from their shiny, sleek iPhones and Android devices, businesses may still have a compelling reason to deploy BlackBerry 10. However, BlackBerry needs to do a few things before businesses will jump on the bandwagon, including opening up their management API and luring consumers to their device.
Whenever I whip out my BlackBerry Bold in public, someone will undoubtedly say, "Oh, how cute. You still use a BlackBerry." Yes, I do, and I'll use it until the day I die.
As legacy applications outlive their usefulness, companies look toward the cloud for maximum efficiency and minimum expense. But nothing is as simple or easy as just “moving to the cloud.” Legacy applications need to be modernized, and data has to be migrated. It’s the kind of headache that makes any seasoned IT pro reach for the coffee maker -- and a fistful of Advil.
Multi-tenant clouds assure security for clients, but not necessarily for their ideas. Here's one thing you should discuss with your cloud provider before you sign on.
"Social Enterprise" is an increasingly trendy term, and Salesforce.com has been leading the way. At its Dreamforce conference last week, the theme was clear: From here on, enterprise applications must have social capabilities built in.
Enterprises are discovering that using social networking within the secure setting of a SaaS provider's network gives them an unusual opportunity to freely collaborate with partners, suppliers, and even competitors.
Elizabeth Pizzinato, SVP of marketing and communications at Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, calls content marketing "the new black" and explains how her brand engages its target audience.
Linda Descano, President and CEO of Women & Co., and managing director of partnerships and branded content of North America marketing at Citi, explains her firm's marketing opportunities and challenges.
Companies are still getting their feet wet with social networking and what employees should and shouldn't broadcast. But they don't always involve HR and PR. Here's why they should, and what they risk when they don't.
A combination of an announcement by DT and a Pew survey is showing us what the next-gen Internet may look like, and why. The demand for flexible services, created by rewired, iPhoned, social brains, combines with cloud and optical technology to create something totally new!
Dave Austin, communications director for Multnomah County, discusses why he's excited to move from the county's "old and clunky" intranet and onto an open-source platform, and how this change will help him do his job.
Big-data and analytics tools enable marketers to understand customers as individuals, identifying unmet needs and addressing each customer as a "segment of one," says John Kennedy, VP corporate marketing, IBM.
New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority is conducting a pilot test of digital kiosks to guide subway users to where they want to go more efficiently and at lower cost.
The whole Amazon.reader debate is a double-stupid. It's stupid to think that there's any e-book buyer who doesn't know Amazon's URL, and it was stupider to let ICANN launch the whole free-form TLD initiative to start with.
While NFC's original goal was to enhance mobile commerce applications, it is finding its way into a number of other uses, which is creating both opportunity as well as challenges for IT departments.
Enterprises would like to move to cloud computing but are hesitant because they are concerned about providers’ ability to secure company data. Here are some tips that help to ensure that if breaches occur, the business is not left holding the bag.
Edmunds separates customers into segments based on the info it collects on its site and from partners, and uses that to push out custom content, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
The IBM Smarter Commerce Global Summit in Monaco kicked into high gear today, and we've already begun to see news emerging from that lovely city-state by the sea.
Expert Integrated Systems: Changing the Experience & Economics of IT In this e-book, we take an in-depth look at these expert integrated systems -- what they are, how they work, and how they have the potential to help CIOs achieve dramatic savings while restoring IT's role as business innovator. READ THIS eBOOK
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