ECMProfessional

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Alfresco has been hosting a series of regional events across the country. Today the Content Management Roundtable was held at the W Hotel in downtown Seattle. The topic was focused on positioning Alfresco One.

In attendance were records and content management professionals from the Government, Legal, IT Services, Environmental Science, Engineering and several software companies including Tibco and IBM. Alfresco seems to be raising the bar in terms of visibility and attracting the attention of industry veterans and competitors alike.

“Companies are struggling today with managing the influx of consumer app-ware in the enterprise”

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Yeah he is nine and he gets it, he is ready for business at the pace of tomorrow. For him and his buddies the use of technology is about playing games. They will be following in the footsteps of today’s millennial gen, they use modern tech not just as a tool, it’s a lifestyle that mixes work and play. They are used to having the ability to communicate instantaneously, giving and getting answers, having fun and completing tasks in the palm of their hand. For them using apps and cloud software is second nature.

This week is BoxWorks 2012 in San Francisco and we are looking forward to hearing about product updates, customer success stories and attending thought provoking keynote presentations. Box provides a dynamic way of managing content and a new communication model for businesses that want to take advantage of mobility. They have done it by taking a simple approach to a problem that many didn’t know existed.

As an example, every day people waste valuable time sifting through massive email inboxes trying to find business documents. Box turned this around, focused on the document instead of the message and created a collaboration tool that provides quick access for managing and sharing of information from any device. Box isn’t the only company doing this but they are a recognized leader and their foot is squarely on the gas pedal. Continue

As consumers, we have totally mastered search. You Google “Where should I eat in Los Altos” and you are directed to a results page that lists the top spots based on community reviews from Yelp and Urban Spoon. Likewise, you can get similar results on Wikipedia, digging into every topic imaginable

 

Let’s compare that to a legacy ECM system or SharePoint.

Full text search is the key to find ability because it works the way users expect. As consumer I want to type in what I am looking for like “places to eat”, or what we remember “when was Elvis born?” and find the proper results. This process is called semantic search, and works by creating relevance based on ranking queries based on contextual meaning. Continue

   

Which came first, the chicken or the egg?  Would you ever put a cart before a horse?  Would the “cloud” market be thriving without the drastic explosion of mobile computing?

My point is does it really matter whether the chicken or the egg came first?  You can’t have chickens without eggs and without chickens you can not produce eggs.  They are a complete synergy.  Naturally you would not put a cart before a horse because the horse is needed to pull the cart.  They also are a complete synergy.  Just like cloud and mobile are a perfect synergy.  My prediction is that interest in “cloud” would not be nearly what it is today without mobile.  After-all, hosted applications have been around a long time.  What’s new is that people can afford mobile devices for personal use, bandwidth is more available and the overall experience is much better than a few short years ago. Continue

Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com CEO, has been famously quoted on his opinion of cloud computing in terms of saturation-point, as well as technology innovation, for a viable business model.

“This is the heyday of the Cloud. This is the Renaissance. We are in the Great Time. ”

…and he continues…

 “So we’re still at the very, very beginning.

We are in the first innings of Cloud Computing.

This is still the Renaissance. ”

While this is just one man’s opinion I personally happen to think he is absolutely correct.  We truly are in the first innings and, in particularly, as it relates to Capture and ECM moving to the cloud.  Future innings have yet to be played.  In this baseball analogy the convergence of old-school “traditional – behind the firewall” technology and new “innovative – cloud collaboration/mobile” technology are on a crash course of epic proportions. Continue