Steve Weissman, CIP, ECMm, BPMp, has been in the content technology business for the past 20 years. Currently President of the AIIM New England chapter and a sought-after independent consultant, Steve has researched, written about, and provided expert guidance regarding the application of both the most mundane and disruptive technologies.

(Note: If you read through to the end, you can hear Steve say “park the car” in Bostonian.)

JZ: I understand that you are the wizard behind the AIIM training video series that covers all of the topics in the Certified Information Professional (CIP) exam. You also offer an accredited AIIM CIP class. Can you tell me about this certification and your involvement in the certification process?

The first thing to note is that I had nothing to do with the certification. It was all AIIM, all the time. They did a good job with due diligence and seeing how professional certifications operate. This CIP certification is part of AIIM repositioning itself in exciting ways, putting the business practice of information management at the center. They are embracing a view of the world that I’ve always had. It was Groucho Marx who said, “I’d never be a member of a club that would have me, and now suddenly I am one!”

I’m excited about this transition… essentially, we are all saying that content is content. I’m the guy who stood up at the AIIM conference in 2003 & said, “Why are we distinguishing between web content and enterprise content? It’s all content.”

AIIM approached me to do the training videos, and the syllabus was already in place. I looked it over and said, “You had me at hello.”

For starters, master data management as a discipline was something that I had never seen before in an AIIM context, but always believed should be part of the landscape, and it’s part of the certification. Content as separate from databases is ridiculous, because business processes pull information from both.

So when they asked me to do the videos, it was a no-brainer. Now, not only are the training videos online, but I have since launched the first accredited classroom course for the CIP. There’s a lot of extra value to be derived from an in-class experience. For example, the course can be delivered in context, e.g. an insurance company would have a different training focus for content professionals than a publishing company. Another aspect of the classroom experience is that students talk to each other about the projects they’re working on, or have done in the past, and that’s a valuable source of insight.

JZ: You must have seen a lot of content management projects in your time. We know that the analysis phase of any project, not just content management, can often be shortchanged, even if it’s the most important phase, often driving the efficiency and smooth progress of a project. How do you help clients with this project phase? Do you ever have to convince people to spend more time and effort on the front end of the project, studying context, people and processes?

The answer is yes, always. I teach an ECM class for AIIM, and in the first session, we talk about the need for strategy to guide the project. When we come back from lunch, someone will inevitably raise their hand say, “This is all really cool, but when do we really start doing the work?”

The fact is, this is the work. How do you know what to buy, or how to use it properly, if you really haven’t determined why you need it?

That’s very much a typical reaction. The strategy work takes time that’s not part of people’s regular work day, so it’s more work. That’s why it’s hard. There are also budget pressures in many cases, requiring that the money be spent before the end of the quarter, half or year, which means that priorities get skewed and corners get cut.

This is always an issue – how big of an issue depends on where it originated. How do I help them with it? Education. There are consequences to giving project strategy short shrift, but those consequences come later, and project teams need to understand that.

If I had a nickel for every time I heard a CIO say, “I wish I had thought about this earlier.” Not that the system has failed, but it could have — and should have — been so much more.

When you buy a refrigerator, you do your research, to be sure that the product fits your needs, and your money is well spent. When it comes to a project that costs thousands, or hundreds of thousands of dollars, why wouldn’t you do the same type of due diligence?

JZ: Another “make or break” factor in technology project success is change management and user adoption. Can you give us some suggestions for managing user adoption? Do you have any war stories to tell us?

This is another one of my favorite topics. Essentially, change management is like parenting: you’re trying to get people to do things that are good for them, but that they really don’t want to do. Instead of “eat your vegetables and clean your room,” it’s “use the system and apply the meta tag.”

It can make or break a project, but in reality, very few systems out and out fail. Sometimes they don’t work well. For the most part, the technology is pretty good. The question is, did you do it right? Buying and deploying a system only gets you so far. Without change management and user education up front, the system can only do so much. You’re not getting the information that you can get from the system – and that’s the point. It all really boils down to the information.

I tend to think about this in terms of preparing a RFP. The only reason to care about the technology is in terms of the information — the information is what matters. Before that, it starts with business processes, and finishes with change management. The earlier you involve the people who are affected by the system, the more likely they are to adopt the change and use the system.

I have 2 anecdotes regarding change management and user adoption to share.

The first is about recognition and rewards as a motivator. I know of a sales organization that has contests, and the big winner gets a big prize. In this case, the grand prize was a Ferrari. BUT, nobody wanted to win it. Why? Because the winner had to pay taxes on the thing. You have to think it through … what are the ramifications on the winner?

In the second anecdote, a department wanted to discourage employees from printing and making paper copies of documents. How did they do it? They took the printers out of the department. If you needed to print or copy something, you had to walk further, to another department on another floor. And that worked.

This is really like parenting — sometimes there has to be consequences. And you have to be sure that as a manager (or parent), you can live with the consequences.

JZ: On your website, you discuss a concept called Maximum Total Value (MaxTV®) for technology solutions. You’ve articulated a pervasive problem of defining a successful project, or technology solution, that crops up in all types of projects, but seems especially relevant to content management projects. Is it enough to define project success as “on time, on budget, within scope”? What do you mean by Maximum Total Value, and how do you help your clients achieve that goal?

Interestingly, we didn’t start out studying value — we were looking at metrics and adoption and this concept came out of that. It’s not often that an analyst puts an idea in the field that came out of research from the field.

The essence is that there’s more to value than just money, but we tend to fixate on money. ROI & TCO are used to measure success, and that’s fine, but it only goes so far. ROI tends to be focused on a specific point in time. TCO suggests that a total cost exists, but really, it doesn’t. The cost isn’t finite. Every technology system has ongoing costs, at a minimum this includes maintenance contracts. But these measures are how technology projects tend to be justified.

Going back to the CIO saying, “I wish I’d thought of this before.” It turns out that what they were getting at was the need to focus on process change and collaboration too – something I now describe as “helping people work better AND work better together.”

So what we have are three legs of a triangle – economics, process change, and collaboration – that support system value. Adjusting those 3 aspects of an initiative is the secret to getting the maximum value at any point in time, over time.

For TCO – I have no problem with total, I have a problem with total cost. I also get worried when people sit down to evaluate how the system performed in terms of meeting business needs, and the cost question tends to not come up any more. At evaluation time, people talk about process change and collaboration instead, which means the solution is being judged on different merits than were used to originally justify it.

The buying decision is justified on one leg of the triangle, and evaluation is based on the other 2. In the end, it may be worth it to spend more up front to benefit the other 2 legs, because over time, they influence the value of the system.

Think of it from a different angle. I got tired of buying microwaves that die after 2 years, so I spent more money, and bought a better microwave that will last longer. I also bought the insurance they offer. If you do this for a microwave, why not take the same approach with a costly, and strategic project?

JZ: In your path to developing the Maximum Total Value paradigm, I suppose you’ve seen many projects that are not deriving enough value from their technology. Without naming names, can you describe a couple of cases on both ends of the spectrum – an initiative that derived a lot of value (maximum?) from the technology, and one that did not get enough value for the investment? What are some common factors of projects in these categories?

Oh yeah, I have stories!

So I got a call from someone who says, “I bought an imaging system, can you help me use it?”
I said, “What’s it for?”
- “Well, my boss came to me at the beginning of the month and said I had to buy something before the end of the month or we’d lose the budget. So I did.”
- “How did you know what to buy?”
- “That’s why I’m calling you.”
- “What are you scanning? Do you need 2-sided? Do you need stapled? What’s the business process?”

In a nutshell, the project didn’t go anywhere.

On the other hand, I worked with a farm credit service bureau that had bought a bunch of other companies and wanted to integrate different systems, claims, policies, and collateral. They set up a task force to study the problem. That’s the right way to do it.

There was a great deal of variation in the levels of experience in the room. The VP was new to system technology, and he didn’t initially understand the concept of hyperlinking within a system. The task force was talking about a single document that different systems link to. For example the claims system, the adjustments system, etc., all link to a single case document. The VP was thinking that you store a physical file in all of the different systems. In one of the task force meetings, it came out that he didn’t understand the concept of storing a document at a single source for all systems to reference. When he understood this, all of the rest made sense.

With the task force in place, they found ways to make better use of the technology budgets, because they took the time to sit down and map out the project. They identified problems in the beginning, rather than at the end, when they are generally more costly. As a result, the VP was able to go to the IT department and contribute funds from his department so they could buy incrementally bigger and better machines that would accommodate his department as well as the general IT need.

They were able to write a really good RFP, based on real requirements.

So it’s usually not about success or failure, it’s about deriving value from a technology project. I bought a cheap microwave and it worked. Was it a failure? No. It worked for 2 years, and did a what it was supposed to do. But, I got more bang for my buck when I spent more money for a better microwave that lasted longer.

JZ: What’s the most innovative and unique content management project you’ve worked with?

I ran an awards program in a previous lifetime for process innovation. One of the award winners had one of the most effective content management projects I’ve seen in a long time. It was so mundane, but so transformative for their context. It was in the transportation business, and it involved the notion of putting units in trucks to allow the drivers to scan their bills of lading, delivery receipts, and other paperwork back to the home office right from the cab of the truck, thereby allowing the trucking company to shorten the time to billing and, ultimately, payment. Such things also exist in truck stops for fleets without in-cab capabilities. This transformed the entire business.

I like this story, because on the surface, you don’t think of trucks as being on the cutting edge of content management. But in fact, it’s the business process that matters, more than the logistics.

Another project that I like to talk about in terms of content management brilliance was actually a project at MIT called SixthSense. The video clip of the TED talk in 2009 describes a wearable device they developed to read meta information around you, wherever you are. The device consists of a camera, a tiny projector, a mirror, and some hardware components that are connected to a mobile computing device in the user’s pocket. The projector projects visual information enabling surfaces, walls and physical objects around us to be used as interfaces; while the camera recognizes and tracks user’s hand gestures and physical objects using computer-vision based techniques.

The end result is that the device can read and interpret the objects that you interact with in your daily life, and render relevant information with the projector. Some applications could be shopping and choosing the most ecologically responsible paper towels, or reading a boarding pass in a taxi and showing the flight status instantly, without a screen or keyboard.

This is information management in the 21st century. When you’re not in front of your laptop and the content in front of you is a blank piece of paper, how do you then manage that record?

JZ: The mantra at the AIIM conference this year was “SoLoMo,” for “Social, Local, Mobile,” and certainly for content management projects social and mobile aspects are cropping up more frequently. What trends have you noticed in recent years in content management, and how are these trends changing project planning, rollout, and adoption? How have project requirements changed in the last 5 years?

Here are some key themes I heard people talk about at this year’s AIIM conference:

• mobile,
• analytics,
• social,
• collaboration, and
• change management.

Of all those, probably the analytics piece is the most intriguing. It links to the business side of the equation that is near and dear to my heart. Metrics need to be embedded for effective analytics. You can’t improve what you can’t measure. The rest of the list is hot, but I was heartened to hear conversations about analytics. Often, that piece gets lost in the hype.

JZ: These days, it’s hard to have a conversation about ECM trends without touching the topic of the Cloud. Very often Cloud means a big change for IT people, somehow minimizing the need for IT infrastructure and resources. How does the Cloud disruption impact your role and mission in the earlier phase of projects?

It doesn’t! Or at least it shouldn’t. It’s just another deployment option. It can be a really good one, but if you allow it to change your fundamental scope, you’re making a mistake. You need to understand what you’re doing first, and then make a fit. You don’t do it because it’s the cloud, you do it because it’s right for your situation. Ultimately, it’s a business decision — just like all the other decisions.

Lease or buy — you make these decisions about a car — why not about technology?

JZ: You’re a Boston native. Will you say “park the car in Harvard yard” for me with your best accent?

Steve Weissman Pahks the Cah

While asking the previous question, I was thinking about how, in the CMS (ECM or WCM) space, we’ve ended up in a situation where Open Source now holds a very important position in the market as opposed to proprietary solutions and is often cited as a major requirement. However, unlike lower levels of the software stack, I’ve also noticed that almost all projects are now backed by a software company and that there are no community driven projects, well, at least none of importance! This was then my next  question to my panel:

In the CMS, ECM or WCM space, all open source projects are now commercially backed. Do you believe a project could emerge that’s totally community driven?

Of course, as all of them are working for commercial vendors, I wasn’t expecting them to surprise me with a YES, but still, I was really curious to get their thoughts!

According to Tjeerd from Hippo, it’s a lot about the use case that the software is aiming to solve. If the use case is on the business-side, chances are high that any software project will, or will need to be, commercially backed:

“A great idea can arise from anyone and with enough willpower it’s always possible to create a new product. It differs depending on what the end goal is of a software product (framework or solving an end-user’s problem) and if it can become advanced enough to compete. Tony Byrne, founder of the Real Story Group, once showed a presentation at a Jboye Aarhus event on how OS CMS players over time moved from purely community driven into commercial OS players.

In our view the more software is focused on solving a business case, the more likely it is to become commercially backed.”

I like the idea, though you could argue that Linux is still independent and not exactly “commercially backed”, yet still very much solving business needs, no?

For James from Liferay, this is a possible option, and indeed, James is making a reference to Linux, but he also brings the thought that this, first, would be very hard to achieve and, second, would most likely, at one point or another fall into the commercially backed category.

“Of course they could! Most open source projects start with no corporate backing, and a few of them remain that way and are successful (see: Linux). It takes an immense amount of effort to produce and evangelize good and useful software, so there are only a handful of highly successful, non-commercially-backed projects, because most people want to be paid for their work so they can do other fun things (buy new clothes, feed their family, etc).”

Laurent (from Nuxeo) gives some good insight as well, suggesting that first, developers (and their interest centers) are changing and might not be into the kind of projects we’re talking about, still, why not a foundation-hosted project? That is a real question to me as well!
“As much as I would like to believe it possible, I’m afraid it’s not. :) Projects like that are huge, they take lots of work. I’m not talking about lightweight CMS here, but more about full fledged content management projects. Mobilizing developers for that kind of project will probably be hard since the trend right now is more about small, usually mobile, applications. I sense developers are less likely to regroup than in the past, when it was hard to setup a community website, source hosting, ticket systems etc… Now you just have to share your project on github… (Damn…I sound so old school open source right now, http://www.mikealrogers.com/posts/apache-considered-harmful.html)

There might also be a chance on projects backed up by foundations like Eclipse or Apache, but again the scope of those projects is usually a bit thinner than a whole ready-to-go ECM stack.”

And Nicolas, from eZ,actually goes in the same direction…
“I doubt this, given the evolution-pace in the Web today. Development times are boiled-down, shortened down to the wire, and funding is strongly recommended to get dedicated teams to truly innovate.

On the other hand, I can hardly picture a proprietary software editor keeping-up with the innovation pace of the winning duo: vendor + community.”

What did I learn from this? Definitely, times are changing. There was a time when any OSS-marked supporter would tell you Open Source would rule the whole word by itself! My conviction is that there is a lot in Tjeerd’s answer:

• The more the software is solving a commodity infrastructure problem, the more it can easily be co-developed by a community of independent developers, potentially (but not necessarily) helped and guided by joining a foundation, with all its facilities.
• The more the software is made to directly answer business needs, the less it can be developed by a community itself, and even if Content Management is getting close to infrastructure in some ways, it is still very business related. I would say the same is true for other software genres like CRM or ERP…

Do you have a different point of view? Feel free to comment below!

The Pizza ritual at the Liferay Austin User Group

In the next post I’ll share James, Nicolas and Laurent’s answers to my last question, “If your company was bought and you had to explain to your new boss why community management is important, and had only 1 sentence to save your job, what would it be?”

Last week we touched on some initial topics concerning community management, especially how it may be organized internally. But what about the other side of the coin? Ideally, a community has broad support, but garnering it involves looking beyond the sole interest of the business. Or does it? With that in mind, I asked our panel of professionals how community can help, but also sometimes be in opposition to the company that fosters it.

More Pizza, here at a Nuxeo Development Sprint, an event where community members are invited to contribute.

My initial question came down to first principles. Is employee-driven community management even necessary? It would seem to make sense to let community management be driven by community members, and not employees of the company. Hence my question to our experts – Could the Community Management role be outsourced to the community?

Nicolas was the first to answer:
“I think it can, if the community has a clear legal status, and is backed by an organization of a kind. It can be an association, then privileged entry-point for commercial players. Foundation-based, or single-vendor communities will necessarily own a part of the Community building strategy, respectively creating a consortium of Community Managers employed by the involved vendors, or a vendor-based Community Management team. Community Management authority often comes from the financial stakeholders.

Whether it’s a business or a non-profit, a community needs some type of professional organization to drive it.”

I tend to agree, mostly because of the answers from our previous post: Community Management is a full-time job requiring guidance and resources. Individuals, with occasional impassioned exceptions, cannot bring the same degree of resources to bare as a professional organization.

Nicolas added “On the other hand, the daily operations can easily be crowd-sourced to the community. This practice serves a better structuration in the community, and is a strong motivational factor (status dynamics leveraged).” which is totally in line with James’ answer “I think it is very important to ensure that the ‘community is led by the community’, not by a single company or single individual. In the Liferay Community, we have collectively formed a Community Leadership Team, with around 15 members, which serve as our leadership function. So in some sense this is outsourcing. But it is still important to have dedicated individuals on that team whose primary mission is to keep the community healthy and active.”

In the end, it appears as if a strong governance for the budding community is an important factor.. Meanwhile, outsourcing some of the tasks seems to be a goal in and of itself at a more operational level.

Laurent chimed in on that question:  “That should probably be the goal of any community manager. Once you can outsource some work, it means your community has grown and is made of dedicated members. I would say this is a very good sign :) “

This represents a vision of the company as being in an encouragement role, and in the words of Tjeerd “A good community is self-serving, but it helps to boost the community by participating heavily. Almost all successful big open source software projects have a driving force behind it.”

All this is very nice, but still a bit abstract. What about when, for whatever reason, the interests of the community clash with those of the company? Here we come to my second question: What do you do when community interests are opposed to the company interests? And how can community drive the software?

Laurent tells us about this at Nuxeo. Nuxeo is a very technical company, where being open source is very much about the development process, and how to drive it from an operational standpoint. “Nuxeo’s community have different options for exercising their influence: Pull requests on GitHub, Jira tickets, the jira roadmap project, mailing list, twitter etc. We listen and try to take into account as much as possible the feedback we receive. Just keep in mind that nothing’s written in stone, the roadmap can change, especially when you have customers :) This is the time when a conflict of interest between the vendor and the community is, I guess, the most likely to happen. Our roadmap can change when a customer requests a very innovative feature, also if there is a strong call from the community for a feature, especially if this call comes with a contribution. We know there is always a lot of work to be done, but it is a good way to share the work.”

James’ answer is clearly to rely on the governance mentioned above. Having a “management” team comprising pure community representation as well as company representatives seems a wise way to tackle any conflicts!
“At Liferay, my job is to make it easy to get started with Liferay, help connect individuals with others who need their help, encourage contributions back to the community, and evangelize Liferay technology. Of course, it helps that Liferay was founded by open source enthusiasts and the company continues to openly state its open source mission. As a ‘bridge’ between the community and company, when conflict arises, we will work it out over a thread in our forum, or via a Community Leadership Team meeting (with company representatives present).”

Tjeerd also raises the fact that conflicts are not necessarily bad so long as they can guide or inform development. “We encourage a difference in opinion in order to create a better product. Even so, we believe the community needs guidance, because that leads to consistency in the product. This is where community management is key.”

Beyond the purely operational questions, Nicolas, who is passionate about all the topics we’ve discussed, makes a series of interesting points:

“Matthew Aslett proposed a superb essay on the question, discussing Control & Community. The vendor needs to constantly balance the social economy standards with its own interests. I strongly believe that the best results in this balancing-act are achieved when a transparent exposition of respective interests is done, regularly. Eschewing this lack of transparency may lead to irreversible consequences (community diaspora, product “theft”). Trust is a non-negotiable requirement, thus are Openness & Transparency.

An element of control for the vendor(s) is Intellectual Property of the code. An extreme is using a viral Open-source license (GPL-like) and requiring copyright transfer on contributed code. Full control is achieved, and prosecutions feasible. The other extreme is a loose license (MIT-style), and diffused copyright ownership, this mostly is the case in foundations, the objective of which is to jointly develop commodity software that has no real value-added in a stand-alone usage.

From a process perspective, when harvesting the feedback and claims from the community, the legitimacy of the spokesmen must be assessed, to verify that their opinion is representative and not individual, and that they have a significant track-record within the community. In other words : meritocracy, not democracy. Such assessments can be supported, in a fair way, by reputation engines/metrics, per individual.

From a very down-to-earth standpoint, the dangerousness of fork initiatives can also be assessed after from the funding they have available, and the time dedicated to running the development of the forked product, on a long-term.”

This goes beyond the topic of community management topic, clearly impacting the company’s business model, and also may be why a community would need a company backing it up! This inspired the next question, so stay tuned!

And as always, comment, ask, share your view, say how YOU do it below in the comments…

Have you ever wondered what’s the best way to manage your community? I have, and to some extent I am still figuring it out… I am convinced that not only is community management important, but that it is a key piece of the puzzle for a successful software organization. Community organization promotes your solution to a wider audience where it will be recognized and used on a larger scale.

Engaging the user community is just as important as sales, support, and other the other functions that are your bread and butter. I have always advocated allocating the necessary time and resources in my current position at Nuxeo and in my previous ones at eZ. Building a community is not a simple task, but some of the important factors are beyond debate, such as the power and utility of knowledge management tools, like collaborative Q&A ala Stack Overflow. I am unsure of the best way to manage it from an internal perspective, within the organization, and probably there isn’t one single best way!

In an attempt to give shape to my thoughts, I have asked some of the Open Source vendors I am in touch with how they do it, and what they think. If, like me, you are curious about what they have to say, read on!

I was lucky enough talk to James Falkner (@schtool) – community manager of the Liferay project,  Nicolas Pastorino (@jeanvoye) – director of community management for eZ Systems,  Tjeerd – chief marketing office of Hippo (@tbrenninkmeijer) and Laurent Doguin (@ldoguin ) who is community liaison here at Nuxeo. I first asked them to explain how the community management role fits with their company’s organizational scheme.

Community manager, a dedicated role and function within the organization?

James to start:

“We consider our staff employees to be part of the community, and with it the responsibility to further Liferay’s open source mission. Meaning, every employee is encouraged to participate and manage, to some degree, the areas where they have expertise. In addition, since we often hire from the community, many of our staff are already dedicated community members. As community manager, I am more of an organizer of activity to get people engaged, and less of a manager.”
James added “Much like other small companies, our employee hierarchy is very flat and most people report to different individuals based on their role at the time. Occasionally, it is the CEO doing a bit of community management : )” which I can confirm is true as well on the Nuxeo side!

Tjeerd reveals a different setup on the Hippo side.

“We don’t have dedicated staff. At Hippo we believe we get the best results if everyone in our company is involved in the community. That’s why we share and divide responsibilities. All developers and system administrators within the company participate heavily on our mailing list / forum to assist the community. Our marketing people organize Hippo Meetups, Apache get togethers and Boston Java meetup. Our product manager talks and listens to the community and provides feedback on our product roadmap.”

At eZ Systems, Nicolas Pastorino explained that, just like Liferay, eZ Publish community management is a dedicated role within their organization. About reporting and where this staff fits within the overall organization, it looks like here as well, it is distributed, requiring a flexible organizational model

“Disciplinary report of the main manager to VP Product Management, daily collaboration with VP Product Management, strategy building with VP Product Management and CEO.”

Rather than answer myself, I kept my content geek hat on, and asked Laurent for his thoughts directly (a good way to check we are on the same page ;-))

“I’m working full time on community management but I get various help from pretty much everybody at Nuxeo. This company has strong open source roots and all our staff is sensible to it. This makes it natural for them to participate on our community sites, like the collaborative Q&A (http://answers.nuxeo.com) and the forums, or also on social media. When it comes to organization, I’m part of the marketing team so I report directly to its manager, our Products & Marketing VP and the head of our marketing team. ”

Trying to find boxes in the organization is one thing (and it looks like there is no single box at Hippo), but knowing how to fill them is another question all together! What makes a good community manager? It seemed like a natural question to ask –  What is the right profile for a community manager?

James (from Liferay) comes from an engineering background with significant engineering experience at some big companies such as Oracle and Sun. He added that this is the case for “many of our most valued staff employees who are visible and active in the community”. He also added “we also have individuals with marketing and sales backgrounds (and jobs) that regularly contribute in our community. For example, our Marketing team regularly contributes very useful bits to our Facebook page and Twitter streams, and our Sales team, by virtue of their knowledge of the product, can do technical presentations (while not trying to sell anything) at regular community meetups.” Here as well, the idea of the community manager not “managing” but “organizing and orchestrating”!

At eZ, we see a similar setup. The main manager (e.g. Nicolas) has “a generalist engineering background, and 7 years of experience at an open-source software editor, in consulting, training, software engineering, product management, and finally community management.” He also added: “The team will staff-up with more marketing/communication tinted profiles.”

And about Laurent, “I’m personally an Engineer. Before community management I was working as a developer here at Nuxeo. Being technical is a strong asset, if not mandatory, when you manage an open source software vendor community, especially at the beginning when most of your members are other developers.”

For my last organizational question I simply asked, “Is it a full time job?” Truth be told, we started at Nuxeo with a very part-time post for Laurent, and it seems like a common pattern to think people can take on a community management role while juggling a “real job”! So, is it really a full time job?

I was not surprised by Laurent’s answer, knowing what I mentioned above.

“Definitely. There is always something to do. Your community could be 5 people or 5000 you’ll find some work. You’re always looking to make it bigger or to sustain it. Your goal really is to help, give them what they need to make the community alive. “

Nicolas added, “Absolutely. Only focus and dedication can bring excellent results. The discipline of Community Management requires full-time availability and listening skills, which systematically go beyond the initially expected/forecast workload and working hours.”

James joined in as well  “Yep, much like a party host or a gardener, you have to have dedicated people to keep the conversation going, and to constantly invigorate new and old members alike.” I must say, I concur with this vision of the Community Manager as an organizer or facilitator, rather than as a “manager” per se.

And Tjeerd, while not totally concerned by the question due to Hippo’s strategy for tackling community management still added: “Yes, it’s hard work. As I mentioned it is crucial to us that everyone interacts with the people helping to create and use our software. With everyone combined it’s more than a full time job.”

It looks like there are some common themes emerging for community management among our open source vendors! We’re interested in finding out how others approach this. Feel free to comment below to share your take on these questions with us. And if you are interested in this topic, please stay tuned. In the next post, our community of community managers will tackle the thorny question of balancing the needs of a community with the business needs of a software company.

Hippo Get Together event -- If Open Source is not about free beer, still free pizza and free beer seems like part of the tradition of community events...

Source: Geek and Poke

In this new, evolving context a content management solution must provide a set of features for reuse and re-purposing. Organizations are under pressure to customize and extend applications to integrate with other Enterprise Applications, as well as with Web services outside of the Enterprise sphere. Gone are the days when a content management solution kept its content in a silo and its users locked into a single experience. Organizations need the flexibility to mash-up content and to make it as well as the app itself available through new channels, whether they be public web, mobile web, or embedded in a productivity app–all of which is itself constantly evolving.

APIs are the key to maintaining your solution’s dynamism, extensibility and flexibility. If you are not convinced, please drop me a line in the comments section, and I will be more than happy to elaborate!

Seeing “API” on a bullet item in a feature list does not cut it. We really need to look under the hood at the details to know whether it passes muster or not. So right away, the quality of the API toolkit comes into play. If it is not transparent enough to evaluate the quality of the API, what will it be like when you get to the development phase of your project! Now, onto the meat and potatoes. What qualities distinguish a good Content Management API from the rest?

First off, let’s refresh our memories. API stands for Application Programming Interface. An API accesses and interacts with the system programmatically, and not through a user interface. So the presence of an API doesn’t necessarily mean anything if you don’t explicitly detail what the API covers in the system.

“Check the API coverage and scope!”

Ultimately, a real content management platform API should offer the full scope of what can be done by a user on the system. I would go so far as to suggest that a Platform (and this might be what separates a content management SYSTEM from a PLATFORM) should offer more through the API. The API should cover everything that MIGHT be needed at some point, while the out-of-the-box user interface offers a simple, economical subset. There is always time to create a new user interface, and if you have an API with the needed features, it’s not necessarily a difficult job!

Unfortunately, today’s Enterprise Content Management solutions are rarely equipped to satisfy this requirement. Most of the time their API implements a mere subset of what the application can do, a fact which in no way prevents them from marketing their API and selling it. Truth be told, this is not specific to content management vendors. Marketing over substance is a general trend the world over!

If you are in the process of choosing an ECM Solution, or if you have one, you are probably familiar with its features. How do you check the coverage of the API of the solution you have, or are currently considering? It’s easy: you are probably already familiar with content management features: create / update / delete; user-management features, work-flow features; advanced features: access audit trail, batch processing, renditions, transformations–whatever the user features, they should be found as much as possible in the API and in its documentation, or else you may encounter scope issues down the road.

“Make sure the software is created around the APIs”

More than the scope, you might want to look at how APIs have been designed.
When the need for APIs became obvious, many software makers tried to add them to an existing solution. Whatever the new technology, simple HTTP, web services, more modern REST APIs, client SDK, and so on, this approach of adding a new layer to accommodate it has always existed–sometimes even on top of the user interface, which would in turn re-purpose the Application features into an API. If you are running a specific, custom enterprise application, and not shipping it as maintained, commercial software, this might be an acceptable approach. But we are talking about distributed, supported, and maintained software that should be expected to evolve!
With a little interest in software design and a dash of good sense, it is easy to see that layering new technologies over an existing solution is not the path to sustainable and maintainable software!

“Can the APIs be extended, and is there good tooling to do so?”

The Nuxeo content management platform is a good example of clean and extensive software design, which has emphasized the role of APIs from the beginning. The platform relies on a content repository and a set of other services which are all made available to a wide range of APIs, including CMIS for the content repository interoperability–a subset of what is doable on the platform. For the broader range of services offered by the platform, the Content Automation API is available, a REST-based API that integrates seamlessly with Nuxeo Studio and Nuxeo IDE tools for developers. The API is extensible, freeing you to define your own API services properly, without hacking.

I believe that is the difference between a platform and a single application. Anybody who offers a platform solution should offer a full range of well-designed, extensible APIs, built at the core of the software. Unfortunately, like many words in our industry, the word Platform has been over-used, and is due for a redefinition.

“You stay ahead of programming technology trends. Your API should, too.”

APIs are not technologically agnostic. They are made in a specific technological context, whether its the programming language, the communication protocol, or in other aspects of their design. When thinking about the underlying technology, you must stay on top of the technology trends, but also be able to sort important new technology that is ready for production from pure hype.

Take remote APIs as an example, traditionally called “Web Services”. There are many paths to follow from the SOAP standard to the REST protocol. Generally speaking SOAP APIs are not as effective as REST-based ones, which is a more recent way to implement remote APIs. REST clearly demonstrated it was more than just hype, and it has been thoroughly adopted by the developer community. This is not always the case however, and never take it for granted that NEW equals BETTER. If we are talking about real libraries and not Web services, an API library (client or server) might be more useful in Java than in Scala, despite the current hype surrounding Scala. The size of the user base of a technology still makes the difference and despite the many promises of languages like Scala, Java is still a major language with a broad set of client libraries available to aid developers!

So a good content management solution should pick good API technology, and in some cases should provide options. For instance, while the CMIS standard offers great value and has demonstrated it can enable interoperability, it is not the best option for all use cases, and it would be an error to rely on it as the sole API for your content management system. The Nuxeo approach has been to offer a full range of functionality through its Content Automation Rest API, as well as CMIS access to the content repository–not one or the other, but both possibilities.

In the same type of thinking, client libraries can be offered in different technologies. In the case of Nuxeo Java, Android, and PHP are covered by Content Automation client APIs. Others can be added thanks to a core API-centric software design. Client APIs simply rely on core APIs, making the system easily extensible.

In conclusion, there should be no doubt about the importance of APIs, and while it’s not difficult to evaluate an API, there is a lot to take into account. However, with a dash of IT-architecture common sense, a general knowledge of the programming technology on offer, a good understanding of content management, and a grasp of the specificities of each case, you should be able to evaluate what will work for you.

Hopefully this article will help IT decision-makers pick a content management platform and software architecture for their content-centric software solutions. And lastly, don’t hesitate to go beyond the reading and analysis. With software, the best approach is always to give it a try, and implement prototypes and proof-of-concept designs. Not all decisions can be made on paper. As true as this is for user interfaces, it holds equally true for APIs.

(comics source: Geek and Poke, thank you for the awesomeness)

In the not-too-distant past, user experience (UX) was considered an annoying afterthought for enterprise application development and deployment. User adoption was often disappointing, and the disconnect between business and IT seemed like a deep chasm. In recent years, easy access to technology solutions such as Flickr, Dropbox, Google Docs, and mobile apps that require no reading of manuals or training, has changed the mindset of technology users. This exposure is increasingly setting the tone for their expectations of enterprise applications in terms of usability.

CG: We’ve been talking a lot about Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and content technology and as you know, ECM has evolved quite a bit. Recent reports form Gartner, Forester and IDC are totally in line with a move to a more platform approach, where the focus becomes developing content-centric applications and arming developers with a solid foundation rather than providing boxed turn-key solutions to business users. As Hippo is not totally part of this ECM family, but still closely related, how to do you see this move?

I really see a difference between ECM and what I refer to as EWCM (Enterprise Web Content Management). As I shared during my talk at Nuxeo World, I believe these worlds are separate – but must work well together. ECM is more focused on the internal governance of content within the organization.  This includes facilitating collaboration processes, workflow, security, compliance and leveraging enterprise re-use of content among teams. This typically requires a singular platform which serves as the definitive way for the organization to manage content as an asset.  But, the very thing that makes an ECM system work effectively, makes it entirely inappropriate for managing Web content. In today’s world, Web content needs to be dynamic, fast, flexible, re-usable and social.  Web content addresses the ‘outside world’, which is made up of customers, resellers, partners and all of the various organizations that must work together to reach a goal. This could involve providing information to customers, selling a product…all sorts of things. So, it’s much more beneficial to use an ECM to manage the more internal, governance and compliance process, and an EWCM system that is outward facing for the variety and complexity of digital channels.  These are the channels that are simultaneously being handled by different individuals—business owners, marketers, sales, communications, customers etc… This is where having an enterprise web environment that you can build upon becomes critical, which is what Hippo CMS is.

When you have an outward facing platform, you must have a system that can keep pace with the way users interact with online data. The online sector carries with it enormous momentum for change. You have all these new devices opening up, offering different ways to consume content: Amazon just released the Kindle Fire, there’s the iPad, smart phones, and screens displaying content are everywhere—in glasses/lenses, cars, augmented reality—so there’s all these new and different devices to present your content on and it’s constantly growing. This is the challenge for which Hippo CMS is the solution, an enterprise Web content management system that is capable of presenting data in the context of the user. To do that you must have a content store and have context to adapt that content to match the behavior of the customer, such as trying to convert a customer or help them better by looking at their behavior on your website, understanding where they’re coming from…this whole esoteric thing of personalization is a huge part of EWCM.

The final aspect one has to consider when looking at ECM vs. EWCM, is in regards to future growth. Organizations need to determine whether they can upgrade these systems and stay within the same system for the next 5-10 years. With the online sector moving so rapidly, looking this far into the future can be a real challenge, but a web focused platform is better equipped to do this, as it provides you the flexibility to upgrade and grow (and to do so quickly).

CG: Hippo has made the choice of using Java as the technology for its WCM products. Today there are plenty of new languages and frameworks emerging, such as Ruby on Rails, Django, Scala… There are some who criticize the Java EE stack as old, slow, not agile and very heavy. What is your opinion on this, especially in regards to the way the user interfaces with content?

The best way to judge software is by determining whether it solves a business problem. I really like the object-oriented components of Java, but I think the real value is in having open APIs that follow the standards associated with these such as JSR 170, CMIS or in the future WEMI. We’ve done more and more in the last 2 years with the REST interface and that’s the real strength of Hippo. It allows content to be stored in a media-neutral format and retrieved using REST so the language being used in the delivery tier could be Java or could be .net or could be something else entirely. Frankly, Java is always good as it’s capable of running on various software stacks.

We see a lot of clients using their preferred programming language like PHP, Ruby, JSB, or Freemarker to customize their front end web presence and just using a Hippo CMS back end.  This is another place that Java has strength – in that if you’re an enterprise and need to build something that is scalable.  For example if you need to deliver tens of millions of pageviews per month – like Hippo did with Incisive Media – or publishing thousands of documents monthly as our client FindLaw does – then Java can serve as a very scalable, and solid solution.

So, in my mind, it’s less about the underlying programming language and more about how you’re retrieving the data.  The flexibility and speed that I talked about earlier are rarely on the back-end.  They are mostly on the display side. For instance, I’m not concerned with what language Twitter or Facebook is written in, as long as it has an open API that I can work with and it’s stable (so I can rely on it) then in most cases this is the most important factor. Then, even if they were to switch programming languages, it wouldn’t be an issue.

CG: Hippo is providing its solutions as Open Source software. Lately we’ve heard some buzz that Open Source is becoming less and less of a differentiator, at least from a business perspective. How do you feel this will impact your model? In short, what is the value for Hippo to be Open Source and the value for its users and customers?

Actually, being Open Source has always been less a differentiator. It’s a factor, yes, but the bottom line is that Open Source addresses a specific business need that organizations require – and we’re in the business of producing a great product that addresses specific business needs. Again, getting back to the software value proposition—it’s about software that solves problems. The real advantage I see with open source (and this is something that usually comes later in the sales process) is that because of its very nature, it allows us to outpace our competition by pure virtue of the methodology associated with it. Essentially, open source keeps innovation going. Open source has a close relationship with open standards. This combination means no lock-down and no lock-in.

CG: Have you had clients who are resistant to Open Source? How do you try to win them over if this is their first experience?

Normally, we don’t have to win them over. They’re often looking at our solution independent of whether we are a proprietary solution or open source. The value is the solution, a proven track record, and a solid community and commitment to the industry. Hippo has won numerous awards and has been around for over 12 years.  For EWCM, this is significant and we’ve learned a lot in this time.

CG: Hippo is part of this big family of Web Content Management providers, so do we need to call you WEM, WCM or CMS today?

Each year we’ve evolved significantly. The funny thing is that now we see new terminology emerging: some call it web experience management, web engagement management, but we’ve always been in the web content management space. We incorporate these other components, of course, but the big difference is that being in the online space for content management is much different from typical ECM where you’re dealing with legacy paper processes, record management, document management, etc. WCM is much more focused on managing multiple channels, optimizing the quality of content for business purposes – and of course delivering the best experiences online. This is why Hippo focuses on the “empower you audience” message. Our goal is that your audience / your clients should prefer working with organisations which are running on Hippo CMS.

CG: There’s a lot on the Hippo site that refers to content in a context, can you elaborate on what this means?

Well, it’s about how web content is really evolving. For us, the most crucial aspect of a contextual system is that the audience enjoys how they engage with your organization. That means, context is crucial. If someone is using your brand on a mobile device, it means by default you’re adding different elements to their experience versus when they are sitting behind a computer. Your phone has GPS, your phone has a camera, these are components that can now impact the user experience and add or influence the content that you’re viewing or the interaction with your company. More and more companies now have to maintain content in a social ecosystem like Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter. It’s less about looking at a static web site, it’s about developing a content platform that has the ability to dynamically engage your audience.

At Hippo, we also take this a step further and we open up the API, so that developers can build applications on top of your content. You then build a web environment that accesses your content store based on how your audience prefers to interact with that data. It allows you to empower your audience to engage with you on their terms, but to do this properly you have to have context. We see a lot of importance in metadata, adding a lot of extra data to your content so that more can be extracted from the context and then used later in a smarter way.

CG: Like Nuxeo, as well as other vendors whether they are open source or not (for instance, Adobe, formerly Day Software being a good example of a closed source vendor contributing to open source software) you are actively working with the Apache foundation. How can you sum-up the experience of relying and contributing to FOSS open source projects as a software vendor. Is it a lot of work? What is the value compared to the investment? Can you provide a little summary on your experience in this regard? (links to nuxeo and apache to be added)

We’ve been with the Apache Software Foundation almost from the beginning, which is why we have a lot of people playing an active role in this regard. I think currently we have about 11 people who are Apache committers and we really try to donate as much as possible. The Apache Foundation is a great environment to grow and also maintain your projects because you directly benefit from the collective knowledge of an audience tuned into the open source community. Our customers benefit as well, because they know that working with Hippo means that they are working with software that is measured by stringent standards and they can see equality in the metrics. We just started a new project called Apache Rave and we’re really excited to see how this grows and the value it can bring to our users. In short, it’s been well worth the effort. I think if you’re an open source company, it’s the only way to go—being open source means you have to participate in the open source software community.

Poorly estimated maintenance cost negatively impacts ROI

On this last post of this series, we will look at different ways to evaluate the real business value of a content management platform technology. This can of course be seen in many different ways, qualitative and quantitative ones, and this article provides insights for that, in order to help any user to make its own business analysis.

Most architects know, or at least suspect, that implementing a platform centric approach to building content-driven applications has some organizational value. Ad-hoc processes, multiple tools and inconsistent practices are rarely in the best interest of any enterprise. However, “just trust me” is typically not a sufficient justification for an executive to champion changing business processes, introducing or changing staffing and/or investing in new technology platforms.

It is critical that architects define or contribute to the definition of a business case. What is a business case? A business case justifies the rationale for architectural recommendations in a cohesive and compelling manner. A well-defined business case should include qualitative reasons, and if possible a quantitative justification, or return on investment (ROI) for undertaking a project – not just the technical perspective.

The following sections present a sample model for calculating ROI and general (qualitative) benefits of using a platform to manage enterprise content.

Qualitative Reasons

Implementing a platform approach to building content driven applications has a number of benefits such as:

• Reduced training needs for technical resources, since a single approach is in use throughout the enterprise. Architects, developers and designers can learn the strengths, weaknesses, features, constraints and interfaces once and build numerous applications. This allows the resources to focus on delivering high-value features instead of learning vendor tools.
• Improved content reuse and consistency
• Lower costs due to a reduced number of tools required to support the requisite use cases
• Reduced time to market, since a consistent tool is being used to deliver multiple applications.

Keep in mind these are only generalized benefits. An effort should be made to identify the benefits specific to the organization adopting the ECM platform.

Calculating ROI

Project Return On Investment

Adopting an enterprise content management (ECM) platform may mean significant organizational investment. And, like any investment, it is important to understand when the acquisition will pay for itself – ROI. A number of techniques can be used for calculating the return on investment (ROI), however, a simplistic approach involves identifying the benefit of implementing the new solution, quantifying each benefit and deducting the cost. The categories below include sample benefit and cost areas. They will vary for each organization/project.

Benefit Model:

• Business Benefits
• User Productivity
• Reduced Support Costs
• Reduced IT Costs
• Integration
• Information Reuse
• Increased Usage of Content
• Reduced Information Redundancy
• Future Benefits

Cost Model:

• Infrastructure Costs
• Training and Education
• Application Software
• Consulting and Personnel
• Ongoing Operations
• Integrations and Process Changes
• Organizational Changes
• Communications

In addition to identifying costs and benefits, you may want to segment one-time items from reoccuring items (e.g. annually) to depict initial ROI with reoccurring ROI or project ROI within a time-frame.

Sample ROI Calculation

The following tables depict an organization’s ROI estimates for delivering three applications using a single purpose application to deliver a business solution versus leveraging a content platform. In this example, the applications can all be classified as content-centric applications.

• Project A is a generic Document Management project to serve the organization’s requirements for managing internal documents. The content platform approach is compared here to a project deciding for a specific approach, buying software from a DM provider.

• Project B is a content application that is more process oriented; an implementation of an extranet application to manage customer product returns. It must integrate with the ERP system. The content platform approach is compared here with a specific approach where the application would be developed from scratch, using a low level development framework

• Project C is a Digital Asset Management application for the Marketing and Communications team. The platform approach here is evaluated versus the choice for buying an out-of-the-box DAM solution

This example assumes the “content platform” is open source, delivered under a subscription model. Because of this, most of the software cost for the content platform approach are operational, as opposed to large upfront CAPEX costs like the traditional packaged Document Management and DAM solutions. Do not assume open source means free. It does not. Open source has a cost, it’s just not an acquisition cost; the cost of open source is mostly in reoccurring maintenance and support.

This fictional model can be used as a starting point for your own ROI analysis of adopting an ECM platform. Keep in mind that to assess the true value of adopting an ECM platform, you must look beyond a single project and examine the impact over time.

Let’s look at initial costs for these projects.

Let’s look now at probable operational cost on the next 3 years for these projects and calculate the Total Cost Of Ownership on 3 years:

Let’s look now at the Total Cost of Ownership for the organisation, for the 3 projects on the 3 years:

Although this model is purely fictional, it illustrates the value of adopting a content platform instead of leveraging single-purpose applications or custom developing solutions. Notice that consulting, infrastructure and software costs for the point solutions remain high over each application implementation, while these costs decrease or are eliminated for subsequent implementations using the ECM platform.

CG: Your company provides electronic signature, timestamping and cryptographic archiving solutions. Can you tell us a little about how customers use your solutions? Is it a direct solution-based method between Cryptolog and them or do you provide technology to be integrated into a comprehensive ECM architecture, with components such as document management, digital asset management or content management? In short, do you sell more to IT people or business people? Who are the buyers for digital signing, timestamping and encrypted archives?

The primary thing is that we sell tools; tools to perform electronic signature, timestamping, and cryptographic archiving. We also sell services, but these need to be integrated in one way or another. We can sell either to IT or business people, but in the end we will always have to interact with IT people so they can integrate our solutions. We frequently go through partners to sell our solutions so that the partner can integrate the solution with their own applications or with the existing tools a customer may have. As for the kind of customers that use our solutions…it’s very very broad. We have customers in all sectors: telecommunications, banking, the food industry, institutions, government, etc. The tools we provide allow customers to sign many different types of documents. It’s very horizontal in that respect, and so can be applied to countless industries and user scenarios.

CG: Your discipline is a very technical one, where security algorithms, encryption and trust are key, but also a very regulated one where lawyers and other non-technical authorities dictate a lot of the requirements. How would you describe the challenges you face, are they primarily technological or legal and business ones?

The short answer here is that the challenges we face are primarily in legal and business, but this is because we’ve invested years into R&D in regards to the technological aspects. But the real answer is a bit more complex—the greatest challenge we have is setting the bar at precisely the right level between technology, legal, and business. One of the hardest things with the electronic signature is finding the right balance between the exact security you want to have. There’s a huge range…you can opt for the highest level of security at greater cost or choose something lower, but then you can end up at risk on the legal front. This is especially true when you start crossing geographic boundaries, things get much more complex. So, to address these challenges you must have a system that is flexible enough to allow you to set the right tolerance level that meets the customer’s expectation and complies with third-party regulations.

CG: Are certain customers more demanding?

They’re all extremely different. Actually, the type of system we recommend to a given customer really depends on the underlying goal that the application is meant to enforce. Let’s take a simple example:

Say you insure your house and sign the insurance contract electronically. Five years later (unfortunately) your house burns down. In this case, you typically wouldn’t claim that you never signed the contract, that wouldn’t be in your interest, but what you might claim is that the contract on file is not exactly the same one that you signed—that its words have been modified, you were supposed to get more money, etc. So, in this situation it’s not a matter of whether the signing happened, it’s a matter of challenging the integrity of the content of the document. This is totally different than just a transactional type of signing to initiate the next step in a process, so the technology that we use in these cases is very different.

CG: In your domain, regulation is very local, at the country or state level. How do you deal with these differences and how can you expand your market to offer your solutions outside of your own country?

Let’s be honest, it’s tough because regulations vary. In Europe, it’s not so bad since regulations don’t vary quite as much, and if they do, they are often still in the same spirit. However, other geographies are vastly different…I could even say opposite at times. This is a great challenge. However, being that we’re a European company, we’re in a fairly good position as we face the most demanding legislation regarding respect of private information as well as the level of security required to perform e-signature and qualified timestamps (timestamps with real values). Additionally, the two countries which have even stricter sub-regulations within Europe are France and Germany, and our software has been compliant with these countries for quite some time. When you have to make your products and services strong enough for the places in the world with the toughest regulations, then it’s very likely that you’ll have covered the requirements for the rest of the world as well.

So, expanding to the rest of the world isn’t a legal problem, it’s more a cost and a pricing issue. In countries where regulations don’t require as much security, you build solutions that are less strict and then end up competing with solutions that have a lower price point.

CG: How much does your company deal with the US market?

Hmm….there’s some strange wall in the middle of the Atlantic ocean in regards to the US and e-signature. [laughs] In Europe, the law says that for your e-signature to be legally valid you have to do x, y, z… In the US, they say, “Okay, you can do e-signature and then we’ll see you in court.” Of course, this is really a simplification of the issue, but in general there’s much more freedom of interpretation in regards to whether an e-signature can have legal value in the US than what is established in Europe. The two markets have taken radically different approaches.

CG: Can you say a word on how laws and regulations are evolving?

Well, it’s a great time to be in this business. In 2009 the European Commission launched Mandate 460, which is aimed at harmonizing all active e-signature systems throughout Europe. This means also synchronizing a number of the technologies which are strongly related to e-signature, but may not have been covered well enough in the previous rounds of legislation, such as timestamping, e-archiving and the like. So hopefully we’ll soon have a more consistent framework throughout Europe. And, I’m happy to say that Cryptolog is heavily participating in all of these activities. I’ve been in this field close to 15 years and from a practical and business standpoint the industry has never been as active as it is today, and this is mainly due to this strong European push.

CG: Do you think the market is maturing and getting ready for browser-based solutions?

It really depends on what you call browser-based solutions. At the time being to obtain an e-signature with the highest possible legal value that is defined, you need to use a smart card or USB token, but we do offer a number of solutions that allow companies to have their customers sign contracts on the web quite easily, but it’s definitely an area that’s still evolving.

Realistically, the issue of browser-based solutions is a far more in-depth subject as there are two radically different solutions: one in which you use a browser, but you use either an ActiveX or Java applet, in which case the browser acts as a medium to transfer an application which then runs locally, while the other solutions we get into involve doing signing in the cloud and there’s still a lot of countries debating the value and issues related to this. But, this is an over-simplification of this issue. Actually, we recently published a white paper on the various legal values associated with e-signature and how it relates to current regulations and market trends. You can find it on our web site, it’s called Contractualisation en ligne : réussir son projet de signature électronique, currently only available in French.

CG: How have you seen the public’s perception of this technology change in the last 10-15 years as far as them trusting it, accepting it and then making it part of their workflow?

In the last 10 years we’ve seen major growth in electronic exchanges, major growth in cyber attacks as well as growth in consumer awareness and mindshare. These aspects are pushing our industry to increase electronic security and utilize e-signature more and more. A vast majority of documents that we use on a daily basis today never exist in paper form—they are generated on a computer and so will never be scanned. They are transferred and archived electronically; so, in fact, the entire life cycle takes place electronically. It would be a waste of time and a waste of paper to have to print these documents out only to sign and rescan. Plus that would then require you to archive the original paper document with the signature. I think that the growing need of e-signature and timestamping is very clear. Ten years ago people did  not see the value of e-signature or they saw it as too complex. Today, the cost of having an e-signature project has reached a level where even SMEs can implement it. The market has definitely matured here, that’s my take, but I also think that this is just the way history is supposed to move forward.

CG: Your solutions also share some similarities with DRM solutions. How would you relate these technologies to each other in the context of what your company does?

I spent a lot of time studying DRM solutions when I was doing my PhD, and although the underlying technology has a basis in cryptology, they are very different. DRM is a vertical application that can rely on a number of technical tools, such as low level e-signature, low level encryption, and timestamping, but I wouldn’t qualify what we do as DRM and none of our customers use our tools in this manner. The difference is that with signature and timestamping we add value to documents, we enable you to enrich a document by adding an e-signature, time value, and secure the document, but we don’t perform any kind of access control on the document itself.

CG: We met you at Nuxeo World and know you are working with Nuxeo on a connector to integrate your solution into the Nuxeo Platform. What’s your take on ECM solutions? Do you have any predictions or ideas on the future of ECM and what we can expect?

I’m not an expert on ECM, but in regards to how it relates to my field, I’m pretty sure all ECMs will have more security features and specifically that ECMs will allow timestamping and e-signature of documents—this is a natural progression. ECM manages the life cycle of a document and the Nuxeo platform is one of the most flexible solutions that I’ve seen in regards to life cycle management. In real life, the document life cycle means that sometimes you sign and sometimes you want to archive a document in a safe way, for instance, a notarized document or a document that we might want to put it in a sealed envelope so no one touches it. We need electronic equivalents of this, so to me it seems very natural for ECM to include e-signature and timestamping as a strategic component.

Nuxeo is the first platform that we’re starting deeper integration with. As software companies we share a lot in common: culture, being committed to the standards in our various fields, we’re both technically oriented without forgetting the business aspects of what we’re trying to achieve, and we both believe that flexible tools are often more important than creating a vertical product.

Standards matter, but don't be blind

Last but not least in this series of posts, while all software platforms are somehow made on standards, for Standards, most of them are showcasing this as a strong selling point, we will try to explore why standards really matters and try to give some hints on how to look at standards’ support in a content management platform in a pragmatic and meaningful way!

Why Standards

Non-technical users really don’t care about which standards exist and which are emerging. They care that platforms play well together; they want interoperability. They want solutions that can communicate with each other without excessive effort and cost. They want to be able to move content between platforms if a new tool is selected. It could be said that standards in the ECM space are more about avoiding content lock-in than vendor lock-in.

Standards provide a set of guidelines and mechanisms for interacting with a technology. Adoption of standards has a number of benefits, with the most frequently cited being interoperability. No organization wants to be tied to a single vendor or product option for implementing a technology solution – no matter how well the vendor’s solution functions or the vendor provides service. Standards adoption has a number of additional benefits such as:

• Lower the technology adoption costs
• Increased development consistency, simplicity and predictability
• Improved code reuse
• Reduced cost, time and effort to transition between vendors and solutions
• Reduced focus on commodity and infrastructure
• Ability to create composite interfaces that are tailored to the needs of specific job roles – mashability
• Improved application portability
• Enable faster time to market because it is easier to purchase off the shelf components and applications that can integrate and provide features for the solution

Organizations should understand which standards provide the benefits that are most important for their needs when adopting an ECM solution.

Existing and Emerging Standards

They say the good thing about standards is that there are so many to choose. This may be humorous, but seasoned technologists know that, unfortunately, the quip has some truth – the world of enterprise content management is no different. There is no single standard that is more important than all others. There is no universal definition of what is most valuable; it always varies by the unique technical and business needs of the organization.

Not every ECM vendor and product will support every standard. However, it is important to determine the standards that are most important for future business and technical strategy and ensure they are supported by the potential ECM platform. For example, an organization concerned with the publishing industry might have a strong interest in adopting the NewsML standard, whereas an organization with more generic and horizontal coverage might have more interest in supporting Content Management Interoperability Standard.

Standards impact a number of areas in the ECM market and it is important that these be understood.

Interoperability

As noted above, interoperability is one of the primary drivers for standards adoption. Interoperability takes many forms. In ECM, interoperability is primarily targeted at providing a standardized way for content-based applications to share their content assets.

The main standards related to interoperability for ECM solutions include Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) and Java Content Repository (JCR). CMIS has grown slightly more popular than JCR due to the technology agnostic approach taken by the standard.

CMIS is one of the most recent standards in the content management space; it was specifically designed to support interoperability among ECM solutions. Officially adopted in May 2010, managed by OASIS and supported by a large number of vendors, the standard defines a vendor agnostic domain model, abstraction and set of bindings that allows the sharing and accessing content across multiple ECM tools. Key services provided by CMIS include:

• Repository Services: Enable information discovery of the content repository and the object types defined for the repository
• Navigation Services: Supports navigating the folder hierarchy in a CMIS repository
• Object Services: Enables management of repository objects (Create, Retrieve, Update, Delete)
• Discovery Services: To search for objects in a repository
• Versioning Services: To manage the lifecycle of repository items.

A number of vendors have dedicated themselves to moving the CMIS standard forward. An example of this is the Apache Foundation reference CMIS implementation, developed within the Chemistry project, with support of developers from various content management vendors, such as Day Software and Nuxeo. Another notable effort is the contribution by Nuxeo of its content repository to Eclipse, demonstrating their willingness to work on a reference implementation of CMIS in a content repository. The project, originally called “Eclipse Enterprise Content Repository”, has been officially approved by Eclipse and was rebranded “Apricot.” It relies on the Chemistry project.

Other official or de facto interoperability standards that architects may want to explore because they could impact the overall ECM solution interoperability include:

• Windows SharePoint Services (WSS): Not actually a standard, but a set of services for accessing content in Microsoft’s SharePoint products
• Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV): a HTTP-based standard that facilitates collaboration between users in editing and managing documents and files stored on web servers
• Java Content Repository (JCR): a low-level Java specification, although adapters have been created for other languages, defined under the Java Community Process
• Common Internet File System (CIFS): a protocol that allows applications make requests for files and services on remote computers via the Internet.

Metadata

Metadata augments content stored by ECM solutions with additional details such as taxonomy, relationships, security attributes, usage characteristics, auditing information, and any number of additional attributes. How important is metadata to an ECM solution? It is critical. Without metadata, it becomes almost impossible to manage, maintain control and find content in an ECM tool. There are a number of standards that impact metadata creation and management within ECM solutions such as XML, Dublin Core and semantic technology related standards (e.g. RDF). Support for some of these standards, like Dublin Core, is important, but not sufficient for solving all ECM metadata needs. Keep in mind that many standards that address taxonomies and semantic technologies are still maturing, so adopting a platform with the flexibility to support the standard in the future will be key.

The most important standard, although it is a much lower level standard than many of the others discussed in this white paper, is without a doubt XML. The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a standard managed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The human and machine-readable text-based markup language, similar to HTML, is now familiar to most technologists. Unlike HTML, XML does not have a single defined set of tags and attributes; it allows adopters to define their own elements or utilize a vocabulary defined by another party. XML is a core technology for defining structured content and data, and of course, metadata; it is the foundation for a number of other standards like Dublin Core and XMP.

XML has been such a core technology that almost all vendors will promise support. However, like with computing, architects must examine what “support” means. Not all vendors fully support XML equally for integration and transformation, storage and publishing. Architects should explore in detail the XML capabilities of an ECM platform when it comes to managing, storing and processing XML-based data.

Another domain that is mentioned more frequently related to metadata is semantic technology. Semantic technology allows association of meaning or context to digital content – not just meaning for people – but for computers as well. If computers can learn the meaning behind content, they can learn what users are interested in and provide assistance with common tasks, such as search or augmenting data with existing details based on known relationships. Without semantic technology, content is typically just links between structured and unstructured resources. Semantic technology provides context to these resources and their relationships so that machines can recognize entities such as people, places, events, organizations, etc. within the content.

Support for semantic technologies is limited in the majority of ECM platforms, although some forward thinking vendors are beginning to incorporate the technology. If semantic technology lives up to its promises, the enhancements it provides for metadata, categorization and content enrichment will substantially improve ECM technology. This can be seen in research and open source projects like the Interactive Knowledge Stack (IKS) project. IKS is an European Union-funded research project involving vendors like Nuxeo and Day Software, focused on building an open and flexible technology platform for semantically enhanced content management. The IKS initiative has resulted in different Open Source projects, such as the Apache Stanbol project, that provides a connection between Semantic Web data sources and traditional content management solutions. The growth of Public Open Data (as illustrated by the W3C SWEO Linking Open Data community project in figure 13) is clearly advocating for this kind of initiative, bridging traditional ECM and Semantic Web technology. The use of a modular ECM platform will no doubt make this easier!

Other Non-Content Related Standards That Matter

Technology and development languages are evolving and there is a range of technical standards that are “must-have” and high value for a modern content development platform.

OpenSocial is one of them. OpenSocial was originally created as an open specification for accessing and sharing user profile, relationship and activity data across social networking sites, instead of working with the proprietary interfaces each site offered. However, its adoption has now grown beyond social networks into the enterprise, to provide a general-purpose web application integration technology. It is especially practical for creating dashboards where end users can find information from different applications in one place.

OpenSocial is comprised of two high-level concepts: gadgets and APIs. Gadgets are small, pluggable, HTML/JavaScript based components with a basic lifecycle that run in containers responsible for providing the gadget with the rendering environment and JavaScript APIs. The core OpenSocial APIs provide capabilities for managing people, activities and data and are exposed via JavaScript and REST. OpenSocial gadgets can also be used to provide a simple and light integration solution between applications, and they can access any piece of information in the enterprise that is exposed via REST.

In addition to the existing capabilities of OpenSocial, there are efforts underway to provide tighter integration between OpenSocial and CMIS; the changes are targeted for version 2.0 of the OpenSocial specification.

There are a number of additional standards not directly related to content that are important for ECM development, such as OAuth, REST and LDAP. Each of these technologies can play an important role in solution delivery.

OAuth is an open protocol standard for delegated authentication. It provides a standard way for developers to offer their services via an API without forcing their users to expose their credentials. From a user perspective, the standard allows a user (resource owner) to grant access to a protected resource from one application (service provider) to another application (service consumer). OAuth is a form of delegated authentication, which enables a single identity to be shared across multiple sites without sharing credentials. In addition to providing a standard way to grant access between applications, OAuth also provides a mechanism to restrict the scope and lifetime of a service consumer’s authentication. This is a much more secure strategy than sharing credentials and granting unlimited access to a third party. It is also convenient for users, who are freed from creating more login credentials. Prior to OAuth, there were a number of other proprietary internet authentication protocols. Unlike many of these earlier protocols, OAuth supports use by non-web based applications.

Given that enterprise content is core to many business processes, it is important that a well-designed platform provide a standard way to control access to its services. Instead of reinventing the wheel, vendors like Nuxeo are integrating OAuth in their platforms to control which services and data are shared between applications.

Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) is another protocol standard architects should consider. The LDAP protocol allows applications to access information stored in an LDAP server. LDAP servers can store any type of information, but they are most frequently used to store contact information, security credentials and group information. The majority of organizations that support secured access to resources or email store user information in an LDAP directory. LDAP servers are so common, ECM platforms should support integration, at least at a read level, with LDAP servers so that user information does not have to be replicated in multiple locations.

Representational State Transfer (REST) is an architectural style based on how the web works, not a standard for application integration. RESTful interactions involve two components – clients and servers. Clients make stateless requests to servers; servers receive requests, process them and return a response. Requests and responses transfer representations of resources. A resource is any object at an address (URI) that can provide information or have an operation executed against it.

Given the growing popularity of RESTful style services, architects that have embraced this style of integration should carefully examine which services a platform exposes via REST. Some vendors indicate they support REST, but have very limited features exposed.

And finally, at a lower level, standards like OSGi are concretely delivering software modularity and extensibility. Technology architects who are still associating the Java technology to the heavy and hard to extend early versions of J2EE should definitely consider exploring OSGi. It provides the Java stack with a new approach to modularity and extensibility. Software like the Eclipse Equinox project, Spring Java development framework and Nuxeo’s platform extension point system are leading the way, and demonstrating the value of modularity, extensibility and component-driven software architecture.

Related articles

• AIIM’s CMIS Product Guide!!! (markjowen.wordpress.com)