Documentos de Académico
Documentos de Profesional
Documentos de Cultura
8
October, 2000
www.gilbane.com
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"What is content management?" People may not know what it means, but Associate Editor:
they sure know that it is mainstream. Bill Trippe
btrippe@nmpub.com
(781) 662.6672
The interest in content management arose as businesses moved from sim-
Contributors:
ple low-volume to complex high-volume web publishing, whether e- Mary Laplante
catalogs or portals. Today, content management looks more like the messy mary@fastwater.com
result of web publishing meets enterprise e-business. The integration, scale, (412) 264.8432
Mike Maziarka
and velocity requirements of e-commerce mean content management has maz@capv.com
to keep up with transaction management. It also means there are a lot (781) 871.9000
David R. Guenette
more ways you have to process and reuse different types of content. All this guenette@mediaone.net
means more products to do all the "managing". (617) 868.6093
Production Assistant:
This month we look at various views of content management and describe Sarah G. Dionne
its evolution, its use, and why we think it is a useful term that has staying sarah@gilbane.com
(617) 497.9443
power. Our objective is to help you understand enough to know how ven-
dors and consultants are using the term, and to help you think about which Subscriptions:
sales@gilbane.com
technologies are relevant to your business needs. In future issues we'll ex- (617) 497.9443
plore individual segments of the content management market.
C S i
CONTENTS
What is Content Management? ............................................................ 2
Industry News............................................................................................10
Back Issues................................................................................................. 22
Gilbane Report Partner Events............................................................ 23
Subscription Form & Calendar............................................................24
Everyone needs to manage content, but the similarity ends there. Our goal in
this issue is simple to state: to help you understand the different ways content
management is being used today so you can be comfortable discussing your
needs with vendors and consultants, formulate your own opinion with confi-
dence, and synchronize your expectations of content management solutions
with your business needs.
Management is an even fuzzier term albeit one we have dealt with before.
When we were trying to help companies makes sense of the document man-
agement market a few years ago there was a similar situation, i.e., where doing
anything to a document, except perhaps reading it, was considered managing it
by someone. As a result there was only a very slight chance that any more than a
half dozen of the hundreds of document management products on the market
would actually be appropriate for your specific application. With document man-
agement we classified true management systems as only those with check-
in/check-out functionality. This was perhaps arbitrary, but very helpful in terms
of helping companies avoid, for example, wasting time looking at a search en-
gine product when they really needed a collaborative authoring tool.
Analyzing definitions only gets us part way towards making sense of content
management. What we really need to understand is how the term is actually
used.
Fortunately, the assault on logic and language that was knowledge management
has run out of steam. Well still see the term used by consultants and some tech-
nology vendors (including Microsoft and Lotus), but we wont have listen to spe-
cious marketing pitches claiming that managing knowledge will replace
managing data, documents, content, etc.
Digital assets
Many of the capabilities that are missing in web content management systems
are available in digital asset management systems (Bulldog, Artesia, Informix,
etc.). Like many document management systems have done, digital asset man-
agement systems focus more on general-purpose management than on assem-
bly and delivery. This is why partnerships like the one between Vignette and
Artesia make sense.
E-commerce
Clearly content is, in fact, used to cover a broad range of digital information.
Perhaps transaction data (without unstructured supporting content) and other
"pure" structured data tables are the only types of information that are excluded
from most peoples concept of content management. However, even this pure
data can end up in a content management repository when integrated with
other content. E-commerce continues to be the single most powerful cause of
what kinds of content need to be managed as well as what kinds of systems con-
tent management applications need to integrate with.
The first web sites had content without transactions ("brochureware"), and the
second wave of web sites focused on adding commerce transactions. B2C and
B2B strategists now clearly recognize that differentiation and value comes from
content that surrounds and supports transactions.
ANALYST VIEWS
Analyst views are always to be taken with a grain of salt, as they are typically the
result of an individual analyst or two that is then influenced by the firm's market- "Because of e-
ing needs. Sometimes this has to do with who the firm's clients are, and some- commerce,
times with internal organizational issues, e.g., which group "owns" the topic. personalization,
Nonetheless, these are smart people trying to makes sense of things; they are in- syndication,
fluential; and they have reasonable things to say. Comparing multiple analyst digital rights
views is the best way to get a quick fix on the characteristics of a particular mar-
management,
ket. Not all the analyst firms have a focus on content management, but they all
have an opinion. We have picked just a few we think are worth mentioning. catalog search-
(There are others we would have included given time and space.). ing, product
configuration,
Gartner and other appli-
Gartner identifies four categories of content management solutions depending cations are in-
on what type of content they are designed to manage: creasingly being
tied into
Enterprise internal content. This would include corporate portal, docu-
ment management, media asset management, retrieval, software con-
content
figuration management, and product data management products. management."
Gartner also talks about something they call the virtual repository which inte-
"B2C and B2B grates, logically or physically, four different types of existing content repositories.
strategists now These are: traditional document management, web content management, digital
clearly recog- asset management, and document component (e.g., SGML/XML) management.
nize that This implies a view of content management that incorporates all of the content
differentiation types and features associated with these four repository solutions. They dont be-
lieve such a solution exists yet and suggest, as other analysts do, that multiple so-
and value comes
lutions are necessary.
from content
that surrounds Gartner recommends basing your content management strategy around a con-
and supports tent management life cycle. By analyzing the flow of content, together with its
transactions." use, you can determine what kinds of content management repositories make
sense and how they should be integrated.
Forrester
Forrester was one of the first of the major market research firms to target the
Internet and web applications, particularly for e-commerce. Their concept of
transactive content has been influential in helping drive home the critical role
of content in commerce. There is now quite a collection of terms used by other
analysts that are similar (processable content, dynamic content, active content,
actionable content, transactional content, etc.).
They have not had a specific focus on content management. But that is not be-
cause they dont see it as important. They consider content management to be a
critical component of an e-business infrastructure.
Giga
Giga also considers the content management market as consisting of four cate-
gories of solutions:
They make the point that none of these types of systems will meet everyones
content management requirements and so will often need to be combined.
They also argue that e-commerce requirements will ensure that content man-
agement and e-commerce servers become increasingly integrated. This integra-
tion will include personalization and analysis features.
CAP Ventures
CAP Ventures' current view is that content management is an "umbrella" that in-
cludes numerous technologies including, but not limited to:
Content Enrichment: Tools that help refine the selection of content for
delivery or viewing, including taxonomy, categorization, personalization
engines, and analytical tools, etc.
Market size
Many of the analysts we mention are also market researchers who measure the sizes of various markets. Obvi-
ously, since the firms have different views on what content management is, they will measure it differently. It
is not our goal to analyze their individual methodologies. However, there are three basic approaches these
firms use and if you are interested in the size of the market you need to interpret their results based on both
their definitions and on their methodologies. The three approaches, all with their advantages and disadvan-
tages, are:
Vendor revenues. That is, measuring the revenues (total or relevant proportion) of all the vendors that
call themselves content management vendors. This is simple and straightforward but it is depend-
ent on picking the right vendors and ignores money spent on in-house developed installations as
well as implementations using other technologies.
Analyst view. An analyst decides on a market definition that makes sense to them and then measures
either relevant vendor revenues or user spending. This approach usually has a consistent and cohe-
sive definition, but it may not match with vendor positioning and in fact could be just wrong.
User view. This approach depends on the users interpretation of what they are doing. If they say they
are doing content management, they are. The market size is based on their spending no matter what
kind of vendor, or internal department, the money goes to.
1
From "The Content Supply Chain", David Yockelson, The Meta Group.
CONCLUSIONS
We have learned over the years that it is not always useful to force-fit products
and applications into neat categories. The process of trying to fit products into
categories is always educational and helps reduce confusion, but product mar-
keting is not a slave to logic or science so most organizational efforts are doomed
from the start. And let's face it; you know your business problems are not exactly
like everyone else's, even those of your direct competitors. We need to deal with
the fuzzy boundaries of our own business needs along with the fuzzy boundaries
of analyst market, and vendor product, descriptions.
Another reason not to get too hung-up on precise market categories, especially if
you are a vendor, is that the sometimes-subtle differences category concepts are
based on don't always translate well. A third of our readers are non-native English
speakers and we know, for example, that both "content management" and (es-
pecially) "knowledge management" have totally bewildered many of them. And
it is not because they don't understand English.
We think the broad view of most of the analyst firms is appropriate, at least for
now. We are sure that a number of subdivisions of the content management
market will emerge as businesses re-organize their processes and workflows to re-
flect the incorporation of e-business requirements. Vendors will also be choosing
different business processes to target and will therefore be adding different types
of features. The landscape will look very different soon, and we'll be watching. In
the meantime, any of the various approaches proposed by the analysts we've
mentioned can provide some help.
--Frank Gilbane
Volume 8 2000
Number 7 Syndication, Actionable Content and the Supply Chain, Bill Trippe David R.
Guenette
Number 6 Digital Rights Management: It's Time to Pay Attention, David R. Guenette
Number 3 XML on the Front End: Connecting People & Processes in B2B E-commerce
Environments, Mary Laplante
Volume 7 1999
Number 10 E-commerce Evolution & Content Strategies, Frank Gilbane
Number 6 Repository Solutions Which Category is Right for You?, Frank Gilbane
Number 3 Procurement, Nets and Butterflies: Content Applications for New Web
Business Models, Mary Laplante
Number 2 Metadata, ICE, & New Horizons, Tim Bray, Bill Trippe
AIIM Presents an Enterprise Content Management Special Interest Day at Graphic Communications
Association's XML 2000 December 3-8 in Washington, D.C. AIIM Members Save $100!
XML has been bandied about as the panacea for just about every web effort that organizations are
undertaking. Content management is no exception. AIIM International will present a full day edu-
cational program that will help you understand the real role XML can play in ECM (Enterprise Con-
tent Management). Topics will include what enterprise content management is, how both new
and legacy data and document integration can be handled, what kinds of architectural approaches
make sense for different types of content management business needs, and what the IT infrastruc-
ture ramifications are. These are some of the major challenges that must be addressed in order to
use XML effectively. The program will be filled with "real world" advice, examples and actual case
studies.
AIIM Members will receive the GCA member price of $365 (a $425 value) for the Special Interest
Day on Monday December 4, 2000 in Washington, D.C. This price includes:
Luncheon
Entrance to the Exposition (Tuesday-Thursday)
Special Interest Day handout
Print & Electronic (PDF): $179. OR Electronic (PDF) only $99. .... (Call for site license prices)
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