Tech Watch | InfoWorld Staff » Blogs reshaping content management tools

February 10, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Blogs reshaping content management tools

TAGS: Blogs and blogging

Blogs and editable Web pages called wikis are gaining popularity with enterprise users, introducing to these organizations a new level of content contribution and participation.

ECM (enterprise content management) apps, which over the past few years have been gathering a variety of collaboration tools under their wing, are still figuring out what to with these easy to use and highly accessible newcomers.

Unlike collaboration tools that came before, the deep and broad participation that blogs and wikis enable are forcing ECM vendors to address new security and access control challenges.

Because blogs allow corporate content to come from a wide spectrum of users, both inside and outside the organization, the personal publishing tools have created a new level of participant. It's no longer just the company's Content Editor or Senior Marketing Writer who is funneling content to the Web site, applications, and systems. Your customers, for instance, could become blog contributors, adding corporate-branded content right alongside the blog posts from the CEO.

ECM systems weren't designed to handle this democratization of information creation and sharing.

"While the majority of ECM products enable various levels of workflow and third-party integration, they are not yet good at managing the participatory nature of blogs and, particularly, wikis," said Maurene Caplan Grey, founder and principal analyst at Grey Consulting.

ECM vendors should look to partner with companies that understand how to exploit participatory media, she added.

Some of content management products and services are starting to change with the times.

Robin Hopper, CEO of SaaS content management company iUpload, sees blogs as another level of corporate content that needs to be managed with the same platform used to manage more traditional content. Although many companies are testing the blog waters with a blogging platform that is detached from the ECM system, in the long run that approach doesn't make the most sense, he said.

"We've seen a trend [of] companies needing to manage more discrete bits of information. [You] can't do that with traditional content management. Companies need a different way to mange those bits of information from another level of author. We think an integrated approach in important," he said.

iUpload recently launched its Customer Conversation System, which brings blogs and wikis into the content management fold with workflow, compliance, security, and integration functions. .

The idea is to have one platform that can harvest content from a level of participation that wasn't possible before, according to Hopper.

Furthermore, increased flexibility is needed so valuable blog content, for instance, isn't stuck in that one format.

"Blogs are an authoring metaphor. The content can be presented in different ways: a group blog, an individual blog, it could be wikified, can be edited. It doesn't even have to look like a blog. Our suite can bubble up pieces of blogs," to be used elsewhere in the organization, he said.

Posted by Cathleen Moore on February 10, 2006 01:41 PM

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