Sean R. Nicholson

Continuing with my posts on great Twitter resources, this is a followup to my 99 Great Internal Comms Resources,  99 Great Intranet Resources and 99 Great ECM Resources posts. Below is a link to my list of 99+ great SharePoint Resources on Twitter. If you’re looking for the folks who tweet about SharePoint as an Intranet platform, ECM solution, and a collaboration tool…these are your folks! Pay careful attention and you may see folks who are also providing links to some valuable SharePoint alternatives, as well.

Sean’s list of 99+ Great SharePoint resources on Twitter

Know someone that I missed from the list? Definitely let me know. Shameless self-promotion is also allowed if you think you should be included, just make sure your tweets back up your request.

You can check out the list below, and feel free to leave a comment if there’s anyone else I should add.

Sean R. Nicholson

2009 has been a great year full of exciting opportunities, great projects, engaging conversations, and healthy dialog about the topics of Intranets, Enterprise Content Management, and Enterprise 2.0. As I reflect on the events that have occurred over the last year, I’m amazed at how much has transpired and how many new people I have had the honor of connecting with.

Here are some of the highlights, that I thought I would share. In 2009, I am please to have:

• Started the IntranetExperience blog as an effort to capture some of my Intranet design and implementation experiences and share them with others.
• Created a Twitter account, which drove me to read hundreds (maybe thousands) of articles posted by fellow Tweeps.
• Compiled a following list of more than 600 invaluable resources who tweet on Intranets, Enterprise Content Management, Social Media, and Enterprise 2.0.
• Earned the privilege of being followed by more than 700 folks on Twitter who think I might have something valuable to say everyone once in a while.
• Connected online with some amazing Intranet resources including:
  • Toby Ward of Prescient Digital Media;
  • Carolyn Douglas and Rachel Lai of Intranet Connections;
  • James Robertson and Alex Manchester of Step Two Designs
  • Peter Richards, who writes the Wheat and Chaff blog
  • Jane McConnell of NetJMC
  • Christy Season, who blogs at ChristyWeb.com
  • Wedge, who blogs at kilobox.net
• Engaged in thought-provoking dialogs on enterprise content management with ECM gurus like:
  • Cheryl McKinnon of Nuxeo
  • Martin Sumner-Smith of OpenText
  • Carl Frappaolo and John Mancini of AIIM
  • Sascha Ohler and Mike Wessel of Perceptive Software
• Had incredible face-to-face conversations with other Intranet and ECM professionals including folks like:
  • Karl Geisler
  • Jeff Allen
  • Michele Sperle
  • Dan Dillon
  • Ken Berlack
  • Dan Kneeshaw
  • Angela Cullen
• Developed 20 different subject matter-oriented lists on Twitter of outstanding experts in their respective areas.
• Helped educate others that social media isn’t just people blogging about their families and tweeting about what they ate for breakfast. I successfully convince others that tweeting is a good thing, and some of them have even stuck with it.
• Worked with great folks like Patty Dugan, Matt Feeny, Jill Ducey, Paul Arhnold, and Jeremy McNieve to develop an initial Social Media strategy around Twitter.

All of this, on top of enjoying a great day job, spending quality time with my family, and carving out a bit of time for myself.

Not too shabby, if I don’t say so myself.

What’s even better is I have even higher hopes to build on the foundation of 2009 and expand these activities, conversations, and opportunities in 2010!

A special thanks to everyone I have listed here for their thoughts, comments, and engagement. And to anyone that I might have left off, this post is likely a work in progress and a gentle reminder of any accomplishment that should be added to the list is much appreciated.

Happy New Year to everyone and my 2010 be your best year yet!

–Sean

Sean R. Nicholson

Last week was a great week for online discussions relating to Intranets. On Monday, Alex Manchester of Step Two Designs posted an article to his blog asking whether the term Intranet is dead. His thoughts were sparked by a recent presentation by Jane McConnell of NetJMC and the conversation that ensued was a healthy dialog on the future of Intranets, their relevance in a world of social media, and whether the term “intranet” was really the best way to describe an interactive workplace. The conversation continued throughout the week and I’d encourage anyone who works with Intranets to check out the threaded discussion and add their $.02.

Tuesday continued the interesting online conversations as Jarrod Gingras and Alan Pelz-Sharpe of CMS Watch made his predictions for technology in 2010. One of particular interest to me was his prediction #1 that :

1) Enterprise Content Management and Document Management will go their separate ways
ECM as a marketing and technical concept has great validity. But the idea of having a single overarching platform to manage all sources of content management only works well in those enterprises that follow a unified and services-oriented architectural approach to IT.

I agree with Jarrod and my interpretation of this prediction is that organizations that aren’t able to settle on a single vendor for all of their information systems or aren’t able to invest in a comprehensive services-oriented architecture just won’t be concerned with Enterprise Content Management (ECM) because they won’t be able to address every departmental business process problems with a single ECM tool.

To expand on Jarrod’s prediction, I’m thinking that as more and more vendors build document management functionality into their applications, organizations will be less concerned with where it is stored, as long as it is stored properly, is accessible to the end-users that need it, and can be discovered and produced in time of legal necessity. Instead of costly redevelopment of business processes to restructure where content is stored, organizations will invest in search technology that allows content to be stored in native applications and use search tools like Microsoft Enterprise Search, Autonomy, and Google appliances to ferret out information.

In other words, federated search will become crucial to organizations that choose not to implement a structured ECM architecture.

The results of this kind of shift are as follows:

1. Content and documents  will reside in their native application, allowing the information to have more context than if it were stored in a centralized ECM system.
2. Those ECM vendors who wish to provide value to the enterprise must figure out how to store the content centrally, yet serve it back to end users in a context that is meaningful to their end users.
3. ECM vendors who provide true, enterprise-scale software MUST offer a full services-oriented architecture that will allow business applications to easily access the content and surface documents in the context of the business application.

S0…this brings me to my question of the week. Is Enterprise Content Management going the way of the Intranet and becoming an outdated notion? Will better federated search technologies negate the need for a central repository? Are organizations better off investing in the functional elements of ECM like document management, records management, and business process management instead of buying the whole enchilada?

I’m curious to see what others think…looking forward to thoughts/comments.

Sean R. Nicholson

As a follow up to my 99 Great Intranet Resources post, I have also created a list of 99 great Enterprise Content Management Resources on Twitter. If you’re looking for the folks who know, speak, live, learn, and love ECM, these are your folks! Know someone that I missed from the list? Definitely let me know. Shameless self-promotion is also allowed if you think you should be included, just make sure your tweets back up your request.

You can check out the list below, and feel free to leave a comment if there’s anyone else I should add.

Sean’s ECM Twitter List

Angie Cullen

When developing your Intranet, it’s best not to develop in a vacuum. You may not be the best person to make decisions on how employees will use the intranet to do their job.  Be sure to identify employees that will be involved in the maintenance of the portal and get everyone involved in the design process. Create an Intranet Governance Council that will include at least one member from each department throughout your company. Bigger departments might have 2 or 3.  Let the members of the governance council represent their department and tell you what employees in their department need to be able to do their job more efficiently.

Be sure to let the members of the governance council know that while you value their input and opinions, the final decisions regarding design and functionality are the responsibility of the Intranet team.  In other words, everything that the members of the governance council submit on their wish list, might not make it in to the final product. By setting this clear direction and making the members of the council a part of the design process, you can leverage their excitement and promote collaboration, while ensuring that the Intranet design meets the needs of all departments and employees.

Sean R. Nicholson

A few years ago, I was in charge of an RFP for a Fortune 500 company to select an Intranet portal application and portal content management system. Thinking about the requirements for that portal and how they would change in this age of social networking got me thinking about how the requirements would change if I were to conduct that same RFP today.

Portal Requirements in 2005

Back in the “olden days” of horizontal portal requirements (you know…a few years ago),  the top requirements for our enterprise portal were as follows:

1. Enterprise scalability, with current requirements at 25,000 end-users, but scaling to 100,000 with additional hardware and licenses.
2. Easy to use, graphical user interface that allows end users to view targeted content and easily navigate to pages within the portal using  either an organizational or functional page taxonomy.
3. Provide portal administrators with the ability to secure content to groups, organizations, and individuals.
4. Provide a WYSIWYG rich text editing interface that allows users to create and edit content, based on their permissions and group membership.
5. Provide a single search interface that allows users to search for content that is target to their account based on assigned permissions
6. Provide a workflow tool that allows content to be reviewed and approved prior to publication
7. Provide a customizable portlet or widget-based interface that allows end-users to customize their experience.
8. Provide portal administrators with a flexible design and administration interface that allows administrators to create page templates that standardize on some page elements (e.g. header, navigation, mandatory portlets).
9. Provide functionality to interface with an enterprise Identity Management Solution.
10. Provide analytical reporting that details usage activity, content quantity, and hyperlink status (e.g. number and location of broken links)
11. The ability to integrate with existing enterprise applications such as the document management system, time reporting system, and expense management system using a Services Oriented Architecture.

Like I said, these were the high level requirements that we looked at. We actually had more than 300 specific technical and functional requirements, but these hit the major functionality we were looking for.

As you can see, though, these portal requirements are based on an “information-push” concept, where a core group of individuals (maybe 50-75 for the entire corporation) create all of the content and push it out to the masses. While we did have requirements for collaborative items like forums, they were listed as optional and we weren’t quite sure whether we wanted to allow end-users to start creating content on their own in a forum environment. Pretty much typical information control tactics that are present (even today) in many large organizations.

Changes To The Portal Requirements In 2009

While many of these requirements would still hold true, an information portal in today’s culture would definitely focus more on collaboration and content management than the pushing information out to the masses. Based on my experiences with some of the popular social networking platforms, my top requirements for the same sized organization would probably look more like this:

1. Enterprise scalability, with current requirements at 25,000 end-users, but scaling to 100,000 with additional hardware and licenses.
2. Easy to use, graphical user interface that allows end users to view targeted content and easily navigate to pages within the portal using  either an organizational or functional page taxonomy.
3. Provide portal administrators with the ability to secure content to groups, organizations, and individuals.
4. Provide both a rich-text content management system that allows portal administrators to deliver content and a WIKI environment that allows end-user to create their own page content
5. Provide a single search interface that allows users to search for content that is target to their account based on assigned permissions
6. Provide content creators (both in the CMS and WIKI environments) the ability to review content additions and comments if they choose to enable the feature.
7. Provide a customizable portlet or widget-based interface that allows end-users to customize their experience.
8. Provide portal administrators with a flexible design and administration interface that allows administrators to create page templates that standardize on some page elements (e.g. header, navigation, mandatory portlets).
9. Provide functionality to interface with an enterprise Identity Management Solution.
10. Provide analytical reporting that details usage activity, content quantity, and hyperlink status (e.g. number and location of broken links)
11. Provide the ability to integrate with existing enterprise applications such as the document management system, time reporting system, and expense management system using a Services Oriented Architecture.
12. Provide end-users with the ability to create custom application and information widgets that can be shared across the enterprise.
13. Allow users to easily share updates with others on their work through personal status updates
14. Allow users to create and manage groups/networks that can collaborate through a WIKI interface or a discussion forum interface. Users should be able to store and review documents as attachments within these groups. Users should be able to collaborate and version these documents and the applications should maintain an audit trail.
15. Allow users to create custom events and invite users and groups to those events. Individual and group events should roll up to a common corporate calendar that displays events to users based on their permissions and group memberships.
16. Allow users to share digital media including photos, audio files, and video files. Users should be able to collaborate and version these files and the application should maintain an audit trail.

So What Just Happened? Those Don’t Sound Like Portal Requirements!

Basically, in the process of writing those new requirements, I changed my RFP from being one focused on a portal, to one focused on an Enterprise Content Management system. Not an ECM as we know it today (which are primarily focused on Web/Intranet content management, document management, and digital asset management), but to an ECM platform that requires the following:

• A customizable presentation layer (the portal)
• A flexible content management system (traditional WYSIWYG content management and collaborative WIKI)
• The ability for end-users to create application mashups
• A lightweight document management system
• Social networking capabilities through collaborative groups/networks
• A lightweight digital asset management system
• Enterprise search functionality

Previously, ECM players such as Stellent, Documentum, and OpenText have not offered a portal interface to their products. Instead, they focused on their ability to interface with portal such as WebCenter Interaction (formerly AquaLogic User Interaction (formerly Plumtree)), IBM WebSphere, Microsoft SharePoint, and Vignette portal.

As a result, some of those solutions are being gobbled up by the portal players in hopes of creating the true Enterprise Content Management System of the future. Some of the portal players, like Vignette and Microsoft have anticipated the merging of portal and CMS, and have opportunities to add social networking to their platforms. In the end, the days of offering a standalone portal are probably long gone and we’ll soon see the horizontal portal players roll into the ECM magic quadrant.

Thoughts or comments? I’m always open to additions and constructive criticism in you comments.

Sean R. Nicholson

Over the last few years, the term “Enterprise Content Management” (ECM) has become a term familiar to those working in the Intranet, Web, or Knowledge/Information Management sectors. The difficulty lies in the fact that, while the term is easy to toss around, the actual definition of what is expected to be encompassed by ECM continues to evolve. As a result, ECM to a Records Manager often means something very different than what ECM means to a Web Developer. In an attempt to more accurately define ECM, this article deconstructs the term into a variety of subcomponents that are commonly included in discussions about ECM.

Core Functionality for ECM

Recently, when conducting a search for an ECM solution for a Fortune 500 organization, the following core requirements were set forth as required elements to participate in the selection process. These core components provided a basis for what was expected to be included in an ECM offering:

• Document Management (DM) – Centralization of millions of documents was core to the functionality of this particular business and document management is probably the most consistent component in the definition of ECM. In this case, the DM system was required to have a browser-based folder view of the repository as well as check-in/check-out document collaboration, robust full-text searching, and the ability to secure documents at the organizational, folder, and document level. In addition, the solution required full auditing capabilities of each user and object within the repository. Finally, integration with the enterprise email system, while not required, was favorable.
• Web Content Management (WCM) – Although the goal of this particular RFP was to select a content management system (CMS) for an Intranet portal, the principles were the same as the selection of a Web Content Management System.  The solution had to include a “What You See Is What You Get” (WYSIWYG) rich text editor that allowed content creators and managers to easily edit and permission content. In addition, the solution had to offer the ability to schedule content for future publication.
• Records Management (RM) – To comply with the corporate retention schedules, the RFP required that the selected solution provide Records Management functionality that included the ability to schedule the review and destruction of items marked as corporate records. The ideal solution would allow for the creation of a variety of retention categories that allow for the movement of corporate records from real-time storage, to secondary, and eventually tertiary storage as the lifecycle of the record progressed.
• E-Discovery Tools – With E-Discovery weighing heavily on the minds of corporate attorneys everywhere, it was required that the selected solution provide the ability to locate content based on keyword searches or metadata and place those documents or records on legal hold for review. These documents, while in hold status, would be exempt from the records retention/destruction policies. In this case, the E-Discovery tools were only required to access content and not data. The distinction is that the ECM tools were focused on content stored in document and portal/Web content repositories and not in application databases such as customer relationship management (CRM) solutions or billing systems.
• Enteprise Search Integration – To provide a single search interface to users, the solution was required to provide search integration through an Application Programming Interface (API) using the Web Services Definition Language (WSDL) or other suitable messaging platform. The implication was that users should be able to search many sources of content using a search interface integrated into the corporate portal.

Just to participate in the selection process, each vendor was required to demonstrate that they offered the above functionality. That doesn’t mean, however, that these five elements completely defined ECM for that organization. Even after the solution was selected and implemented, the definition of ECM continued to evolve as users identified new content types and needs. Discussions of blogs, Wikis, and digital assets identified new potential content and required the reshaping of how content would be captured, stored, and governed. As this evolution progressed, several additional components were added to the organizational definition of ECM.

Secondary Functionality For ECM

• Transactional Content Management – Activities such as claims scanning and processing, invoice processing, and human resources employee packet processing all require that data be captured via scanning or electronic methods, and processed through a workflow until completed.
• Business Process Management - Activities that require documents or content to be passed through a workflow needed to be automated using a business process management tool. These tools allow the Business Process Owner to lay out the business process in a graphical manner and then create worflow rules that govern the routing of the document or content to various roles in the organization. The classic example is that of the content creator/editor/approver. The content creator creates the content and then routes the content item to the editor queue for editing and review. Once the content is edited, the editor forwards the content item to the approver for final review and publication.
• Digital Asset Management – In this age of digital media, the protection of electronic assets such as coporate logos, images, videos, and audio files is becoming of increasing concern to organizations. Digital Asset Management (DAM) systems focus on securing and protecting those assessts, restricting whether they can be used, duplicated, or altered by users and tracking when those activities occur.
• Knowledge Management – Knowledgebases, Wikis, blogs, microblogs, forums, and mashups are surfacing more frequently in the enterprise and the content created by their authors is key to capturing information once trapped inside each employees head. Using these tools, content authors can share their experiences and understanding of the organization. Each comes with its own challenge, however, as the content is often controlled by the creator and often has not review process.

Clearly, to this organization the definition of Enterprise Content Management went far beyond the ability to simply store a document in a centralized location and locate it when necessary. Just as in this example, organizations are continually being challenged to define what should be included in their Enterprise Content Management solution. As new types of content are identified, the need to store, secure, and locate them becomes more and more crucial to business operations. As a result, the definition of ECM will continue to evolve and the solutions offered to manage these content types will be required to either specialize in specific aspects of the content or grow to become all-incluse of the various content types.