Collaboration Cast

Social Media has become mainstream according to Forrester and IDC predicts that over 70% of the content on the web will be user generated content. Content management conferences such as Gilbane Bostons 2008 - “Where Content Management Meets Social Media” are specifically dedicating conferences to the topic of social media.

Although, what I found impressive is that only 5 out of the 14 content management vendors (35%) who were attending really mentioned social media in their bios.  This is specifically interesting considering the conference is focused on how content management vendors address social media.

With other topics such as SharePoint, Search, SEO, Multi-Channel Publishing, SAAS, and Content Management content management vendors have to choose their focus, given their limited resources. Consequently, it looks like many of the sponsors will be learning from the conference. Maybe next year we will see their social media offerings.

For those who are attending the conference to seek integrated content and social solutions you should for sure stop by the following vendors:

1. Vignette

2. Kentico

3. Red Dot

4. Sitecore

5. Fatwire

Then you can let me know how the show turns out.

Recently I spoke to a large fortune 1000 customers who is planning on implementing forms into their enterprise wiki. The customer told me that even though they have an enterprise content management system, many departments have been using the wiki for adhoc content management. Now knowledge management wants to streamline the adhoc content publishing and add form capabilities to the wiki so that content owners can create similar wiki pages for specific content publishing projects.

An example would be a wiki page dedicated to product details. The wiki page should allow users to enter a product name, description, features, contact person, price, release date, latest version, etc…. These product wiki pages would get updated each time a product was released. The forms capability would provide consistency across products.

Adding form capabilities to the wiki brings a wiki one step closer to becoming a content management system. Next businesses will want workflow and improved media management capabilities. It will be interesting how content management vendors will react to wiki’s in the near future.  Could they be another disruptive technology for content management vendors? I think so.

I spend a good part of my time doing research. My primary research tool is a search engine. I use the following research engines:

1. Google for my general searches

2. An analyst research firm’s search engine to find appropriate analyst reports (I mostly use Gartner, Forrester, and CMS Watch),

3. Our own company’s internal search engine to find company related documents

4. Outlook’s search engine to find emails I received that may be applicable to my research

5. My desktop’s search engine to scan my own document repository,

6. My RSS reader’s search engine to find applicable news feeds I received.

7. I use social network search engines to identify experts who can give me greater insight (ex. Linkedin, Xing, company directory, and contact system).

In total, I use at least 13 search engines to conduct my research. Besides having to go to all these search engines to find the appropriate piece of content or person, I also have to figure out what key words to type to find what I am looking for. The process appears simple, but as all of us know, it is very time consuming and does not always give us the results we are seeking.

Just the other day, I was trying to find Microsoft SharePoint’s market share penetration. I gave myself 30 minutes to do the research, but it ended up taking me many hours to get something that I could use. I had to search through several of my search engines and tried many different key word combinations to get the right piece of data.

Another time, I had to produce a report that was going to be used by many different marketing groups and executives. I did a lot of research and spoke to many people to create the report. After the report was released I met one person that refuted some of the data I used because of some key information he had that I did not have available at the time my report was written. If only I could have known to ask this person or look at the data he had available.

These two use cases and many others showcase the problem of our current system. If there could only be one simple solution that could search all repositories and present me the data and contacts I needed as I typed, then this would be a wonderful tool that would save me many hours of work. The key for such a tool to be successful would be to have it easily integrate with several different search engines and document repositories. Also, the tools would have to become a part of my content development tools such as word, mind map, power point, excel, and Google docs. Such integration would allow me to get my research done without having to go to all the search engines.

Now if the accuracy of such a tool could be better than a search engines, then I believe such a tool could possibly replace search engines. No longer would we have to be bothered by all the advertisements, spend countless hours of searching, or guess what the best key-word combination to use. In this world the way we use search engines for research would cease to exist. Maybe the title of this blog is to dramatic, but I believe there is a better way to do research and that a tool could be conceived that could provide us a better solution.

If you find such a tool, then let me know. I would be very interested to be your first beta customer.