Alfresco Fresh Talk…

Applying Web 2.0 Paradigms to ECM

April 4th, 2006

In his blog posting of March 29th titled “Making Enterprise Content Management Easier“, John Newton, Alfresco’s CTO and co-founder noted:

End users, especially high-paid end users, refuse to use enterprise content management. Instead they just put documents on shared file drives and send out emails to their colleagues on where they can that information. Can you blame them?

I certainly can’t… Although some may disagree, and it’s an unscientific observation, I do believe that one of the primary causes of poor adoption of ECM among end-users is due to the very same reasons they wanted to acquire an ECM solution in the first place. In my experience working with, and selling ECM, it does appear that the workflow and procedures imposed on the content contributors and other participants by the ECM (and the group that defined said procedures) make the system cumbersome to use.

This might explain the surge in popularity of wikis and blogs, especially among small teams of tech-savvy collaborators. These systems allow for more ad-hoc collaboration and workflows that enjoy some ECM benefits such as versioning, without sacrificing flexibility. This is not what I’m going to talk about today, although perhaps I’ll re-visit this subject at a later time.

John continues:

The trick to making ECM easier is to fit within the paradigms that users feel comfortable. That means working like the tools that the users already use and may have used for years. Most users do not want to know the details of ECM and would prefer that they remain out of sight and automatic.

I want to expand on the paradigms John puts forth as means for lowering the adoption barrier among users. I encourage you to read the article, but I’ll paraphrase them here and add my own color commentary for your benefit:

• Offer File Erowser/Explorer Integration: Users are quite familiar with their filesystem and shared network drives. Let them use this as an easy means of contributing content.
• Provide Google-like Search: By now, every person with Internet access has had exposure to search engines and know how to refine their queries to obtain specific knowledge or information.
• Leverage Enterprise Portal Integration: Enterprise portals allow for the aggregation of content, application, and services to create a “dashboard” that offers users an “at-a-glance” view of information that is pertinent to them.
• Use Email to Facilitate Colaboration: Like search, email is a well-known medium for communicating with others in an ad-hoc fashion. By incorporating email, the ECM plaform can take a proactive role in encouraging content contribution and communication among collaborators. Additionally the email messages themselves can become “managed content” that can be stored in the ECM along with the documents they reference.
• Adopt RSS: RSS (”Really Simple Syndication”) offers a means by which information can be delivered to a users’ desktop or mobile device almost instantaneously.

John makes very valid points and I’m glad to see that ECM vendors (including Alfresco) have implemented some or all of these paradims within their products. I’m therefore going to take a more “futurist” path and propose that we explore how we may be able to apply some of the newer “Web 2.0″ paradigms and usage metaphors that have become quite popular on the Internet and bring them “behind the firewall” into the enterprise.

• Social Tagging (Folksonomies): This is probably the most obvious one. Sites such as del.icio.us, Technorati and many others have been applying the “wisdom of crowds” to help bring order to the volumes of knowledge on the Internet. Bringing this into the enterprise will allow knowedge workers to apply their own ad-hoc tags to managed content thereby facilitating the discovery of that information by others. This can be done in conjunction with standardized enterprise taxonomies, thereby offering the best of both worlds.
• User Ratings: Allowing users to rate content offers another level on interactivity and more importantly, it offers immediate feedback as to the value of the content in question.
• Mashups: Enterprise portals are supposed to make it possible to integrated all maner of enterprise applications to offer users a dashboard view of all the information pertinent to them. Sadly, in my experience, portals have not always lived up to this promise. Many factors have contributed to this, but looking at the typical enterprise apps, one quickly uncovers a myriad of proprietary APIs, restrictive licenses, inadequate documentation, or simply a lack of desire by the vendor to integrate into a competing product. Mashups leverage open technologies, documented integration hooks, and SOA Web Services that make it possible to bring these systems together in whole new ways. Open source technologies benefit from an almost unfair advantage over proprietary vendors in this arena, but I’m gratified to see that tings are slowly improving among the proprietary solutions. This means that we can integrate an ECM such as Alfresco into A CRM such as SugarCRM to create a whole new breed of application.
• Dynamic User Interfaces: Technologies and web development techniques, such as AJAX, are heralding the end to the “request-response” era of web applications. This promises to make web applications almost as interactive and responsive as traditional “fat client” systems. A related trend I’ve observe revolves around “widgets”, these are pluggable UI components that can provide any kind of functionality but do not require a portal framework to function. This would afford users of web-based ECM solutions a richer interaction paradigm that may overcome some adoption problems.
• Filtering: A natural consequence of having information pushed to us (such as with RSS and email), is that we’ll quickly be innundated with too much information (as if it weren’t happening already). Content filtering will be a vital tool in our arsenal to help categorize and prioritize this deluge of information so we can work more efficiently.

Some of these paradigms are still in their nascent stages, so I’m not proposing we start implementing these things right now, but as producers and consumers of content (and purveyors of ECM solutions) we should keep a close eye on these paradigms and, if they have merit, implement them sooner rather than later. With any luck, we’ll make using ECM as ubiquitous as email.

Your thoughts and notes are always welcome.

Entry Filed under: Alfresco, ECM