Applications with open architectures that are suitable to enterprise processes have a value that is hard to overlook.
What’s even harder to overlook is the data and how it is disrupting the processes in ways that blend enterprise architectures with connected devices and petabytes of information from any variety of sources.
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How is all that data managed? It’s the question we come back to again and again. The relevance of the issue is ever present due to a number of factors.
The effect of that fragmentation is the coining of a new term by Gartner Research called social content management. It’s a terrible term but we’ll work with it for now as it does touch on how data from the social Web is integrating with content management systems.
Alfresco Software has adopted the concept of SCM. Alfersco believes that SCM is better suited than enterprise content management, which was developed before the reality of Web-oriented applications in the enterprise.
Alfresco’s push is also part of its strategic adoption of CMIS, an open standard for integrating content into enterprise environments. This allows Alfresco to integrate with IBM’s Lotus Quickr and Drupal as two examples.
Bryan Ruby, the owner and founder of CMS Report, says that SCM is the outgrowth of what has been called social publishing. He says SCM, ECM and Web content management all fit under the content management umbrella:
In this case Alfresco is using the social business systems as another catch phrase to describe what I know to be social publishing systems. Alfresco on the other hand identifies its product as as a social content management system that co-exist to manage the social content created by all these other systems. A CMS that is needed to clean up after the mess created by all these other social publishing systems. I’m not sure I buy the argument that there is much difference between a social content management system and a social publishing system. But I will bite that social content management has a much better ring to it than social publishing system or any other term we use to describe the management of social content.
What does this mean? To us it means that ECM is not as relevant as it once was. Social publishing is a term that describes almost anything. SCM at least helps us understand a bit more how the mass amounts of data from the Web are fitting into networks and applications.
Alfresco, at least, seems to get it. They see the issue as about accounting for what data streams in and out of the enterprise.
Companies are managing new applications from such companies as Salesforce.com Chatter, Jive Software and Liferay. The goal is to make people more effective. But there is also the need to account for the data. That’s where CMIS plays an important role. It serves as a foundation for how to differentiate using the streams of intelligence and understanding that flow as more people become accustomed to not just reading what is on the Internet, but writing to it, too.
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