Content Log

The same day that the Large Hadron Collider starts unlocking the mysteries of the universe at CERN in Geneva, the enterprise content management community has decided to explore what would happen if we could all interoperate between each of our respective systems and content could be tapped into with a common set of services. For the ECM industry, this day could prove to be just as momentous. EMC, IBM and Microsoft just announced a new content service interface along with Alfresco, OpenText, Oracle and SAP. The result could unlock the huge potential of the content contained within enterprises and unleash its power for discovery, customer service and knowledge sharing in the same way that databases have become the backbone of many businesses. On this occasion, we are releasing our CMIS implementation of this specification as open source.

A whole new universe of content possibilities

The Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) promises to become the SQL for Content Management. There have been previous attempts to create a universal standard for ECM, but none of them (ODMA, DMA, JCR) got further than a few vendors supporting it. The difference now is that the largest vendors, IBM, Microsoft and EMC have been joined by Alfresco, OpenText, Oracle and SAP to not just endorse this specification, but actually create working versions of the protocol. There is real wood behind the arrow, not just a lot of talk. With the results of an interoperability session, this group of companies will submit this specification for standardization by OASIS.

The only other parallel that I can think of for this type of industry collaboration is when the database industry decided to standardize SQL and its language bindings in the early 1990s. Bitter rivals realized that a bigger pie was in everyone's interest and would encourage greater application development and enterprise adoption. This collaboration resulted in a huge growth of the database industry, the creation of the client-server industry yielding SAP, Siebel, Documentum and Business Objects, and within a few years, the creation of the web and web applications. If the resulting standard creates even a fraction of this success, it can have a significant impact on IT, applications and web sites.

Having been involved in some of the preliminary discussions in iECM, the AIIM alliance that resulted in the CMIS alliance, I find the development of the two flavors of CMIS, SOAP and REST, very interesting. One world, the SOA world of web services, represents the operational, records-oriented roots of ECM where integration with structured business processes is important. The other, REST and Web 2.0-oriented services, represents the melding of content in the enterprise with the social content being created by Web 2.0, business communities and the social networks of companies. The REST style of interface also fits the growing Cloud Computing world much better. It became impossible to select one over the other. Each will find its own purpose. However, having a common set of data models and semantics makes it much easier for vendors fit in both worlds.

Having anticipated CMIS for some time, Alfresco is pleased to announce the first implementation of this specification. We have been anticipating and planning for this day since Alfresco’s creation at the beginning of 2005 and have been architecting the system to support both web services and a REST architecture. David Caruana, Alfresco's Chief Architect, has built our Web Scripts architecture to simplify the creation of CMIS-like services. Since CMIS is based upon the ATOM Publishing Protocol, it meant that we have a pre-existing standard to model how Web Scripts can be modeled and built. We were able to demonstrate interoperability of web scripts and our web services along with other CMIS implementations at the recent Plugfest in Redmond in August.

As we release our latest recommended version of Alfresco Labs 3, you can now try CMIS for yourself. Included are both the REST and the SOAP implementations as a prototyping platform. In addition, we have the latest version of the new SURF platform that simplifies building Web 2.0 types of applications and will increasingly be used to create CMIS applications and components as well. To complete the package, we are also delivering the latest version of Alfresco Share, which we anticipate will become a popular application for accessing not just Alfresco content, but other content in the future. We are very excited about what the future holds for CMIS, SURF, and Share. I would like to thank the Alfresco team for the hard work that they have put into building Share and SURF as next generation content applications and application platforms.

If you want to learn, explore and experiment with CMIS, you can download the Alfresco Labs 3 here. You can join the discussion on CMIS here.

We congratulate EMC, IBM and Microsoft in setting aside their differences to create a common set of interfaces that will create a much bigger market for everyone and solve many customers problems of interoperability. We are proud to be part of the initial submission of this milestone stage in the development of the content management market.

Groucho Marx once said, "I would not join any club that would have someone like me for a member." That was my original concern about attending the Fortune Brainstorm, a three day technology conference in Half Moon Bay California. I met one of the conference organizers, David Kirkpatrick at a couple of the World Economic Forum events and he is a very bright and insightful guy. But I thought it might be another one of these conferences where you spend a lot of money just to attend. Our marketing team convinced me otherwise.

Brainstorm last week was a very connected event with some very influential people. I recognized at least a quarter of them from Davos. The bloggers were also there in force with Robert Scoble, Om Malik and Kara Swisher participating as the first evenings entertainment. The subject matter was also generally more relevant that Davos as well given its proximity to Silicon Valley. Given how far I came, I used part of the time on Monday to do some interviews in San Francisco on our Alfresco Labs 3 launch, so I missed the opening sessions with Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Michael Dell, Mark Benioff from Salesforce and Brad Smith from Intuit. The setting for most of this was somewhat intimate with main room laid out like a giant conference room with lots of Herman Miller executive chairs. (Herman Miller was a sponsor.)

The environment was set up like an office. So everyone ends up doing work.

Although this was a tech conference, some of the focus was on how relevant tech is. The level of discussion was what you would expect in an article in Fortune magazine. That level of discussion is good to understand how the big trends are moving to affect everyone's lives, not just those in tech. The first breakfast session that I attended was on Cloud Computing with Marissa Mayer from Google, Adam Selipsky from Amazon, Kevin Lynch from Adobe, and Zach Nelson from NetSuite. Cloud Computing is increasingly attractive from a cost perspective, but enterprise customers are still worried about security and reliability. Google does not allow encryption and Amazon does not guarantee recovery and recommends that you back up your data on S3. So I asked the panel when we can expect security AND reliability. Marissa didn't answer and the other panelists answered the part of the question that they wanted to.

Cloud Computing: Michael Copeland (Fortune), Charles Fitzgerald (Pi/EMC), Zach Nelson (NetSuite), Kevin Lynch (Adobe), Adam Selipski (Amazon Web Services), Marissa Mayer (Google)

Mark Anderson hosted a session on the direction of technology with several CTO and technology leaders including Sophie Vanderbroek from Xerox, Padma Warrior of Cisco, and Bob Iannucci of Nokia. The discussion range as far as their technologies. Xerox is looking at collaboration and sees the future in intelligently understanding the content being handled in that collaboration in something called content-centric networking. This is something that Alfresco can get its head around. Cisco sees the internet morphing from a primarily messaging based platform to more of an entertainment platform. Video being a more natural form of communication will become more pervasive and that the real requirement will be more filtering rather than generating. Nokia took us on a cosmological tour of technology trying to show us that the bigger issues are around mobility and the data that affects our lives. In addition, data privacy will become one of the biggest issues to tackle.

CTO Forum: Mark Anderson (Strategic News Service), Sophie Vanderbroeken (Xerox), Padmasree Warrior (Cisco), Bob Iannucci (Nokia)

Vinton Cerf, inventor of the Internet and now at Google, kept sitting in front of me and always asking questions. It made it difficult to get a question in myself since the moderators would always move to another part of the audience. Get your own seat Vint!

Nicholas Negroponte showed off for the very first time a dual-boot One Laptop Per Child XO machine (the famous $100 laptop) that is now configured to run both the OLPC operating system and Microsoft Windows.

David Kirkpatrick and Nicholas Negroponte showing of the latest dual boot OLPC XO

In "How Green is Your (Silicon) Valley?", VJ Joshi from HP, Rob Lloyd from Cisco,  Jonathan Schwartz from Sun, and Michael Spliter from Applied Materials discussed the role that Silicon Valley can play in creating green solutions. By and large, as you would expect, IT makes things more efficient and eliminates the need for travel and face to face meetings. VJ kept it relatively small with the practical steps that HP is taking like making two-sided printing the default. Jonathan kept it big getting us to think about what will happen when IT services as a utility will be 10 times bigger. Jonathan Schwartz talked about MySQL's approach of no office buildings at all. But, I found Rob's and Cisco's point more insightful. When we start architecting our buildings (and homes) with information systems and controls in place, that is when we will really start to reduce our greenhouse footprint. Meeting rooms, transportation and environmental control facilitated by IT (and of course internet routers) will allow us to reduce transportation of ourselves and our resources.

Greening the Valley: James Manyika (Fortune and hidden by the Fortune sign), VJ Joshi (HP), Rob Lloyd (Cisco), Michael Spliter (Applied Materials), Jonathan Schwartz (Sun)

David Kirkpatrick is writing a book on Facebook called The Facebook Effect and used this position to interview new COO Sheryl Sandberg. She puts on a much more media savvy front than Mark Zuckerberg, but not quite as much out-of-the-garage appeal. It all sounded a little too glib. Apparently she used to work in the White House at some point and Google. I was surprised to learn that co-founder Matt Cohler had left Facebook, although he was attending the conference. She announced that he was becoming a partner at Benchmark Capital. I bet Peter Fenton had something to do with that. I had interacted with Matt in relation to some work that we were doing with the World Economic Forum and it seemed that at least part of his role at Facebook was now taken up by Sheryl.

David Kirkpatrick and new Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg

At this point, my camera ran out of battery :-( I participated in a Lunch Lab on Healthcare facilitated by Marissa Mayer of Google and Zoe Baird of the Markle Foundation, but they did most of the talking. There were a few experts who got a word in edgewise, but I didn't really feel that I could participate despite having working with pharmaceutical companies on information management and classification for the last 15 years.

In World without Exits, Andrew Braccia (Accel), Danny Rimer (Index), Dana Settle (Greylock), David Siminoff (Venrock) and Quincy Smith (CBS Interactive) all talked about how there are no exits aside from acquisitions. Danny, one of the best investors in Europe and backer of MySQL and Skype, said that there are still acquirers for good companies. He said all of his portfolio that had been acquired since the beginning of the year had been enterprise software companies. Andrew said that he is telling his portfolio companies to hunker down for the next couple of years. I have heard such talk since 1994 before the big launch of Netscapes IPO.

Life on the Net 2018 was pretty interesting, although probably a little too diverse like several of the sessions at the conference. We had Larry Lessig - open source intellectual property specialist, Phil Rosedale - founder of Second Life and Half Moon Bay resident, Joichi Ito - chairman of SixApart. Larry's "the sky's falling and your privacy is gone" position was pretty scary. He said that the Patriot Act came in so fast that it must have been pre-written before 9/11. He said that he had sources that have told him that is exactly what happened and that there is an internet-based Patriot Act waiting to be put in place as a result of any sort of catastrophic disaster on the Net. Phil believes that virtual worlds of some sort will be the future of user interfaces to the internet because they are easier for older and non-experienced users to use. Obviously, we need more technology improvements for this to happen. Perhaps the biggest technical obstacle to be overcome is the notion of a single identity that is secure and non-repudiable.

The evening event started with a Tweet Out in the platform overlooking the Pacific Ocean. I now have more respect and interest in Twitter as a result of meeting so many Tweeters. Dinner was hosted by the government of Singapore and I met so many people that evening I can't recount it all. However, I didn't stay up so late that I didn't get a chance to get up early and take some pictures of the harbor I was staying next to. I waited too late to stay at the Ritz-Carlton in Half Moon Bay, but sometimes that can be an advantage, especially cost wise.

   

An early morning stroll around the harbor at Half Moon Bay.

I was up early enough to sit in on a breakfast roundtable on Programming for the Web and Social Networking. Now I thought this meant programming like programming a computer. They meant programming like NBC is setting up it's Fall line-up. Still interesting. I am getting a sense that there is still a new big wave of video and much richer content coming than just YouTube. And the opportunity to manage it, organize it, categorize it and monetize it will be huge.

Finally, I sat in on a real programming session with the Future of Code, featuring David Hansson of BaseCamp and Ruby on Rails fame, Grady Booch - early pioneer of Object Oriented Programming and at IBM, and Charles Simonyi of Intentional Software, creator of Microsoft Office and Space Tourist. They all take very different approaches to architecture and they spent a lot of the time telling each other that the others were wrong. They all have points and my biggest insight from this is what prejudiced guys they all are.

Neville Roy Singham (ThoughtWorks and moderator), David Hansson (37signals), Roger Simonyi (Intentional), Grady Booch (IBM)

Grady Booch: "There are systems built upon systems and then you have a lot of crap. But that's enough about the Bush Administration."

I missed the rest because I had to head off to Sun Computers, but you can read more below about Eric Schmidt and Neil Young. We had gone to meet with Jonathan Schwartz who had left the conference the day before. He said that although there were interesting things there, he does go to a lot of those things. I asked him if they were all the same. He nodded. Lucky guy. Living 5000 miles away from the valley, I don't get to go to that many events of this quality.

Philip Rosedale Doesn’t See Browser-Based Virtual Worlds As A Threat to Second Life.  Is He In Denial? - Erick Schonfeld, TechCrunch

A glimpse into the future of the Internet - Tom Forenski, ZDNet Blogs

Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg: Making money isn't a priority (except for her) - Nicholas Carlson, Valleywag

Liveblogging Eric Schmidt/Google Interview at Brainstorm - Erick Schonfeld, TechCrunch

The best Fortune Brainstorm Tech Talk: Neil Young challenges tech industry - Robert Scoble, Scobleizer

The blog editing system in action - Robert Scoble, Scobleizer

I am pleased to announce the beta release of Alfresco Labs 3, our new version of Alfresco targeted at collaborative content management and the first open source alternative to Microsoft SharePoint. Alfresco Labs 3 is a natural evolution of the Alfresco platform that started with the first preview release of Alfresco three years ago. As Alfresco has grown more powerful in capabilities, we have strived to simplify both usage and development of Alfresco web clients, web sites and web applications. This release has leveraged the Web Script architecture that we introduced last year and provides simple user interface components allowing knowledge workers to collaborate on and share content. You can find out more here and download this latest version here.

New Alfresco Share application previewed in Alfresco Labs 3

We believe that the Enterprise Content Management market is evolving from specialized software for information intensive activities to become a major component of business and infrastructure for knowledge workers. Although over 90% of the Fortune 1000 have at least one type of ECM system, less than 10% of the employees in most of these companies use ECM, despite the huge increase in regulatory compliance and information explosion. Microsoft SharePoint, through its hooks to Microsoft Office, has made significant inroads into this yawning gap in the ECM market, and growing at 35% per annum as a result. We believe that open source has an even greater opportunity to reach into this portion of the market through its ubiquitous internet reach. With Alfresco Labs 3, our opportunity is to provide an alternative to, provide interoperability with, and be complementary to Microsoft SharePoint.

New Alfresco Surf RESTful platform uses Yahoo's YUI AJAX library for a more interactive experience. New thumbnail service provides previews before opening.

Much of the development of Alfresco Labs 3 has focused on building the Alfresco Surf platform, a robust, enterprise-class web application and site assembly framework that bundles a full site construction object model and toolkit for building class-leading web and collaborative applications. The Surf platform is designed to work in a number of different web environments, including as a Web Part in Microsoft SharePoint Portal. It includes content oriented components designed around the YUI (Yahoo! User Interface) AJAX Library and Adobe Flex for dynamic uploads and previewing of content and other information. The new user interface components make it much simpler for users to develop new collaborative web applications.

New Activities, Tagging and People services provide a social collaboration experience for the enterprise. Collaborative sites also have wikis, blogs, calendars and discussion forums.

With Alfresco Labs 3, we have also introduced a few important concepts as New Content Services to support collaborative applications and social computing including Sites, Thumbnails, Tagging and Activities. The Surf platform uses the Sites to construct a collaborative site and store framework information on how pages and components are constructed. The Thumbnail service generates previews of documents and content to show what you will open before you open it, enhancing the more limited view of an icon that only tells you what time you have. The Tagging service provides a simple folksonomy view of content as well as providing tools for constructing tag clouds. Activities are similar to Feed inside of Facebook, providing a stream of information on what activities people are working or commenting on. To support these services, the People services have been enhanced with more information and the ability to connect people to one another for social networking. These services are accessible through REST-based APIs and from JavaScript allowing their use in construction of new Surf components.

Integration with Flex and YUI provides simultaneous loading of files.

Alfresco Share, which we are previewing with Alfresco Labs 3, is built on the Alfresco Surf platform and is designed to be modified by end users or through programming to fit a wide range of collaborative and social computing applications. Share provides a simple web site paradigm for creating collaborative applications by aggregating Surf components and incorporating new Surf components as they are developed. This is an early release of the Share application, but we encourage our open source community to develop new components based upon the examples of the basic components provided. With Share, users can create a collaborative site either inside or outside the organization, invite users and share and collaborate around content. Share includes document libraries, calendars, wikis, blogs, and discussions.

Microsoft Office can access content in Alfresco as though it were a Microsoft SharePoint Server

Also previewed in Labs 3 is Microsoft SharePoint compatibility from within Microsoft Office that makes Office applications think they are talking to a SharePoint server. Microsoft released the SharePoint protocols this spring as part of its compliance with the European Commissions’ decision issued on March 24, 2004 along with an increasing tendency by Microsoft toward interoperability. Alfresco is the first ECM system to implement the Microsoft Office and Windows SharePoint Services protocols as a compatible server. This allows Office users to browse and find documents within the repository, checkout / checkin / version documents, share the documents in shared workspaces and access the additional menus and task panes reserved for SharePoint. All of this is available with no additional software needed to be added to Office.

The entire team is getting way too big to congratulate individually, but everyone has done a great job so far getting this beta to realization. For this, I am extremely grateful. We look forward to providing the next update in early September where the following will be provided:

Our current plan is that the Enterprise version of Alfresco 3 will be available in mid-October.

We think that Alfresco 3 will provide our users and customers choice in developing collaborative application and in supporting basic content management and collaborative sharing for Microsoft Office users. Rather than a single fixed platform, Alfresco offers a choice of operating system, database, application server, development environment, and web browser, including those provided by Microsoft. In addition, through our work with Unisys, we have demonstrated a platform that is much more scalable. By providing this new platform as open source, we hope that you will also help us in making it a better platform and contribute new collaborative capabilities and components that we could not even have conceived.

I just read about former Google employee Anna Patterson's new search engine Cuil. Apparently, the name is pronounced "Cool". It automatically categorizes the results and claims to have the largest index of the internet of any search engine, including Google.

If you try it out on Alfresco, It organizes and summarizes the pages neatly, although I have no idea why Alfresco magazine in New Zealand shows up first. The categorization panel on the right is interesting, although not 100% relevant. And why does an OpenText image come up next to the Download Alfresco link? Must be a few bugs, but it all looks promising.

It would be nice to give Google a little bit of competition.

As I mentioned in a previous post, an analyst firm has asked a set of questions around futures. In this answer, i have elaborated on the points so that they stand on their own, but the four points are essentially the same. Our vision is in reaction to where we think that ECM is heading.

What is your product vision and what are the benefits that customers gain from your product?

Core to Alfresco's product vision is open source, which allows us to distribute ECM with near zero cost, use open source components and our open source community to substantially lower the cost of development and build a community around our open source code to guide and disseminate Alfresco into enterprises that may have never even used open source before. This allows users who have never even tried ECM to experience it, organizations who cannot afford ECM to deploy it and to allow the community to participate in the evolution and innovation of Alfresco. Our goal is to lower the cost of ECM and expand its use in the process.

We align an open architecture and open standards to complement the open source. It is in our interests to make our system as replaceable as possible, since this eliminate any fear of use and empowers the user to deploy ECM where it is needed, not just where it can be justified. We design the system to modular and pluggable so that anyone can extend functionality that may be needed or missing. If a re-factoring of a component is needed, then it can be replaced. We have moved to make more components of the architecture script-oriented to make them more accessible to a wider audience of developers and to speed the development of those components.

We strive to increase the accessibility of content through re-usable content components and services as part of our Web Scripts architecture. These components are focused on the most common use cases of content management and are designed to work in many different types of environments, not just our own product suite. We make content accessible by addressing ease of use and familiarity and blend into the environment of the user such as shared drives, Office applications, Web 2.0 systems and enterprise portals. Content management capabilities should be ubiquitous, nearly invisible and intuitive to spread its use from specialize applications to widespread use throughout the enterprise.

We endeavor to innovate enterprise content management by challenging the conventions of ECM and applying new paradigms and metaphors of Web 2.0 and Social Computing. Open source has been particularly important in this innovation by working with other open source communities and integrating new technologies as they are developed by other projects. We believe that extending content beyond mere objects to include people and their relationships to each other as social networking extends content beyond limited departmental uses to customers, partners and the wider business community of an enterprise. Integrating Web 2.0 techniques and actually integrating into popular Web 2.0 platforms will allow users to apply the tools that they use as individuals in the context of the business processes of the enterprise.

No matter how social, connected or Web 2.0 your web site is, no matter how Facebook-like your web site is, it is not Facebook. With a reach of over 70 million participants and reputation for defining the new features of the Social Graph, Facebook has become the metaphor by which we describe the features of social networking. In addition, no other web site, save MySpace, could reach a connected community of users ready to respond to using and enhancing that social network. It's no surprise that many brands are tapping into the infrastructure of Facebook rather than going it alone in the wider internet.

Consumer-oriented companies are looking to expand their brand into the Millennial generation are creating a Facebook presence the same way that companies a decade ago created a web presence. Most are using out of the box groups and fan pages to recruit new advocates for their products. The next generation of consumer companies are creating their own applications leveraging access to the friend lists of their members and encouraging sharing of new news, information, photos and content. The consumer experience on Facebook is just as content-oriented as the experience on the web, but accelerated through social networking and sharing.

ConnectedWedding.com is an example of this type of web property (site doesn't really do it justice). ConnectedWeddings lets Facebook users plan weddings, invite guests, keep people up to date on plans and share in all the fun and frustration that goes into the process. It also allows the couple to create a professional looking presence in the process. Of course, I mention this because they are using Alfresco to build this, but I think it is a great example of how we can't just be satisfied with our current notions of how you use the internet. Smart consumer-oriented companies continue to move where their customers are.

If you are on Facebook you can find out more on http://www.facebook.com/pages/Connected-Weddings/19881944105. If you aren't, here's the old way of finding them: http://connectedweddings.com/

Recently, we filled in some questions for an analyst that I thought we should share with the community. These are all part of our strategy and I hope that strategy is open, transparent and clear. It is part of our differentiation. This first question is one that I actually got asked twice yesterday, so I will start with this one.

Question: What do you see as the 3-5 key technology trends in the Content Management space?

The ECM industry will continue to be commoditized and, as a result, will continue to consolidate. The maturing of existing ECM technology makes it difficult for any traditional vendor to distinguish itself from the others with a new level of complexity in handling or processing content. As a result, mass deployments will be dominated by Microsoft SharePoint and Open Source. Currently, although ECM is now deployed by 95% of all Fortune 1000 enterprises, it is only being used by less than 10% of all employees in most enterprises. Microsoft SharePoint has been able to spread beyond the current high-value space of ECM into mass deployment through a lower cost base, the Microsoft distribution channel and exploiting Microsoft's 95% monopoly of the Microsoft Office productivity software. The only other alternative that has been able to challenge Microsoft's distribution channel is open source and Alfresco expects to be able to exploit this trend. The combination of SharePoint and open source will continue to put tremendous price pressure on traditional ECM vendors.

ECM standards will continue to evolve influenced by evolving internet standards. Internet standards will have more widespread adoption and force enterprise systems to comply. The very slow adoption of various SOA/Web Services standards will continue to move slowly, while the Java JCR standard will continue to have limited adoption in the open source domain, although Alfresco will continue to support JCR. W3C, IETF and de facto standards such as OpenSearch, Atom Publishing Protocol, OpenSocial and others will become more widely accepted standard for interoperability. The recently published Microsoft interoperability protocols, released as a result of mandatory compliance with an EU anti-trust case decision from March 2004, will provide a set of de facto standards for interoperability between clients and servers managing content. Adoption of these standards will ultimately create the environment that the relational database systems experienced in the early 1990s. Freed from creating solutions for specific DBMS vendors, application developers were emboldened to invest in new development that could be used on multiple databases and created a much larger market that enabled the creation of the SAP's, Peoplesoft's and Documentum's. In addition, the market for DBMS systems grew 10 fold.

ECM as we knew it, monolithic suites of content functionality that spanned imaging to records and multi-media, will give way to a more service-oriented view enabled by REST-oriented application development that reflects the rapid changes of Web 2.0 that encourages mashing up services and content. Many corporations are disillusioned with the long development times and poor reception of end users of ECM deployments. In addition, IT architects and CIOs that have invested many millions into the development of Service Oriented Architecture based upon SOAP have not seen the expected payoff of interoperation promised by vendors. Even IBM, who has invested hundreds of millions in web services, has firm foot in the REST camp and is actively investing in technologies such as REST, with Sam Ruby actively participating in the Atom Protocol set. Protocols that are web-friendly and encourage access from the browser for mash-ups will encourage integration and interoperability that was unimaginable along the SOAP path. Web Service standards will still have their place in transactional systems, but they are ill-suited to the content streaming required by content-oriented application and will give way to REST-oriented, mashable content services.

Web 2.0 and Social Networking will also affect the way users use content applications. A generational shift of new employees accompanied by the graying and retirement of the baby boomers are bringing in a new expectation of usability that enterprise systems will work as easily as Web 2.0 properties such as Facebook, Flickr and Google and that they will be as democratic and participative as Wikipedia and YouTube. This puts tremendous pressure to make enterprise systems much easier and inclusive. AJAX will become the norm and new Flex and other rich application interfaces, such as Silverlight, will develop that will make thick clients obsolete. Enterprise controls will continue to be important, but more isolated to regulated and controlled portions of the enterprise. Enterprises that value participation of employees and customers will be rewarded with greater loyalty and provide a competitive differentiation. Adoption of these technologies will become less a technical obstacle and more cultural shift that will be won by the next generation of growth companies that utilize the energy of participation of their younger workers and customers.

The Atom Publishing Protocol could be the biggest thing to hit you in programming that you never heard of. If you do a search for Atom Publishing Protocol or AtomPub as it is also known, you will only get obscure references to technical issues, discussions and description around AtomPub. I was surprised that many analysts and editors of significant technical publications and journals have never heard of either Atom or REST. However, AtomPub is the embodiment of the principles of REST-based programming on the web and is likely to have some of the most significant impact how we program the web going forward.

Atom started when Sam Ruby from IBM sought to define what makes a blog entry and what is a conceptual data model necessary to model a well formed blog entry. After creating a wiki to develop this idea, eventually a collection of people started an IETF working group with Sam as the secretary. Sam had previously been active in Apache and is vice president of the Apache Software Foundation.  Tim Bray, one of the co-editors of XML and now at Sun, co-chaired the Atom Working Group along with Paul Hoffman. This group ended up working on two aspects of the protocol. The first was the Atom subscription format, which you may have seen in conjunction with RSS feeds. This is not surprising since much of the motivation for creating Atom was the divergence and inconsistency of the RSS format. The other side of any subscription protocol is publishing and so the Atom Publishing Protocol specification was born edited by Joe Gregorio, who now works for Google, and Bill de hOra.

Sam Ruby of IBM

The concepts behind AtomPub are simple and powerful. AtomPub is designed to publish and edit web resources. Since everything is accessible from the Web, eventually this means everything. It uses HTTP and the basic operations of the web: GET, POST, PUT and DELETE. What is retrieved and posted are simple concepts of Collections, Categories and Resources organized by Workspaces described by a simple, extensible XML schema. Descriptive information is stored in Service Documents, which describe what Collections are available, and Category Documents, which contain lists of categories available in a workspace. Most data, information and content operations map very nicely into these concepts. AtomPub has quickly moved from its original intention of managing blogs to managing all sorts of information on the internet.

It's significant that the brains behind this standard work at Google, IBM and Sun. Their effects on the standard are becoming pervasive and endemic in Web 2.0. They are defining how REST is being used on the Internet. Google has used AtomPub in the creation of its GData or Google protocols as Joe Gregorio tells us. GData is expanding its use in everything from Google Docs to Google Apps and Google Maps. IBM uses AtomPub in providing mashable interfaces to Lotus Notes and is expanding it use elsewhere as they develop REST-based tools like QEDWiki and Lotus Connections. Sun has been slowly moving Java in the direction of REST and AtomPub, although there is still a lot of work to do there. OpenSearch also supports Atom. In fact, even Microsoft has been developing AtomPub as part of their Microsoft Live Platform after trying to dismiss it with their Web3s protocol.

I credit Rich Howarth at IBM for making me aware of the significance that both REST and Atom will have on the content management industry. During an IECM content management standards meeting hosted by IBM in Boulder in Spring 2006, Rich put forward his views on REST and Atom. Dave Caruana had already been looking at REST that ultimately help create the Alfresco Web Script architecture as well as our OpenSearch interface. However, during debates of Web Services vs. REST, Rich's initial belief and then strong opinion that Atom would become significant helped sway us. Rich was also probably helped by the fact that Sam Ruby works for IBM. My initial reaction was that Atom may be okay for subscriptions like RSS, but how can that help in content management. After discussing this over several meetings, it became clearer that Atom Publishing actually aligns itself quite nicely to content management - content is a resource that streams well using HTTP and is organized into collections - normally folders. In addition, mash-ups are becoming the more common way of integrating information, particularly content, on the web and Atom lends itself nicely to mash-ups due to the REST nature of the protocol.

Boulder in Spring. Brrrr.

We are busily working on an Atom Publishing Protocol for our 3.0 release over the last several months, although it won't be available in the initial release at the end of July. David Caruana and Andy Hind have been heads down working on AtomPub APIs and new query languages based upon the JSR-283 SQL. This will become a very easy way to build scriptable, REST-oriented applications that integrate well with AJAX components and our other REST-based Web Scripts. The now year-old Web Scripts infrastructure has been instrumental in our ability to create a complete, robust and scalable AtomPub set of content services.  We hope to get this out before the end of Summer. We don't expect SOAP and WS-* standards to go away and we will continue to invest in them, but REST and AtomPub will continue to make significant in roads into the market, the web and increasingly content management.

The following is an article that I wrote recently for a magazine...I'm sure the marketing team will shorten it.:-) Feedback welcome...unless of course you are posting a URL to cheap watches.

Speaking to the IT architects of multi-national corporation about their plans around using Web 2.0 in enterprises from the largest oil and pharmaceutical companies to global banking and accounting firm, it is clear that most, but not all, have plans and intentions to use the new technologies that have changed the way we use the internet. Forrester predicts that by 2013, social software, the application of Web 2.0 for the enterprise, will grow at an annual rate of 43% per year to $4.5B by 2013. This is quickly becoming the fastest growing sector in the Enterprise software industry. However, many people are generally confused by what Web 2.0 is and it's significance in the workplace and in culture, including those planning to adopt it. The term has been for around four years old now and was coined by technology gurus Tim O'Reilly and John Battelle to describe the resurgence in activity, venture capital and huge audiences that surrounded new emerging web sites. However, in that time, there is no concise definition of what Web 2.0 is.

Web 2.0 is explained more by example than by defining the technologies that make it up. A collection of brands provide the metaphors for what exactly is different in the way we use new web technologies, such as Google for search, YouTube for video, Flickr for photos, MySpace and Facebook for social networking and Wikipedia for wikis. There are a few more examples and there may be new sites, like Twitter, that may expand our understanding of Web 2.0, but we are coming close to a complete list. These brands as metaphors become the nouns and verbs of describing Web 2.0 as a new way of socializing, communicating and sharing with each other in huge, consumer-scale markets. By being the first to create critical mass in the internet space, these brands have been able to define the way we will live and the way we will work. After all, it wasn't really a PC until IBM named their desktop computer a Personal Computer.

However, Web 2.0 is not really so much a revolution in technology, but in how people use technology and how people interact with each other as a result of that technology. The amazing technological innovations have really been happening behind the scenes with the huge build out of inter-networking and creation of new scalability technologies through open source. The open source sharing of code used to build these sites have made it possible to build and manage the sites on a modest budget and deliver incredible new content and services to absolutely anyone with great performance. This in turn has allowed a whole new class of people have come to use technology that wouldn't have had access to it before. Now even your granny was connected to the internet. The internet and desktop technology was no longer the domain of the geeks and nerds. Real people, average people, artistic people, old people, young people were connecting to the internet and discovering each other. The web sites, in turn, were reacting and evolving a very rapid rate to adapt to these new users.  Sites that appealed to these new users grew out of a Darwinian natural selection and became a lot more facile and adaptable in the process and very large and profitable.

As a result of the introduction of the internet, rapid infrastructure build-out and the new generation of Web 2.0 sites, we have seen one of the most dramatic democratizations of technology since at least the PC, if not the telephone. Through universal access, users discovered that computers could be used for far more than information; that they could be used as a medium of expression, sharing and revelation. Although the PC gave access to computing power to most office workers and many home users, it was generally within the constraints of software created by others using information created by others in business domains defined by others. The information that users created and shared tended to be very textual, columnar, organized and very factual. If you wanted to liven this information up at all, you would add in a few sappy clip art pictures to express what you were really trying to say. In short, it was an environment that was invented by geeks and nerds (like me!) and generally appealed to similar personality types.

By broadening access to information and technology and broadening the types of users accessing that information, new and more expressive types of people looked for ways to use the technology that suited their personality. Users voted with their mouse for sites that appealed to their personal sense of expression. If you were musical, visual, artistic, auditory, adventurous, sympathetic or caring, you could share art, prose, music, visuals or images with those who shared your interest, rather than a production studio in the State of Washington. The place that these people met were generally at sites that catered to introducing one friend to another - first Friendster, then MySpace and slightly more recently Facebook. Depending on your mode of expression, you may end up going to Flickr for photos, YouTube for video, or Last.fm for music and then linking it all into your personal page on your favorite social networking site. The socialization and communication enjoyed by this expression and sharing created a truly different feeling that no spreadsheet or presentation could ever possibly provide. You were Flickring, YouTubing, Googling, Twittering on your MySpace or Facebook, sites that almost have a feel like a real geographic location. For many people, these activities have become compulsive and addictive in the process. This is why the average age of television watchers in the US has now risen to 50 years old and a new generation of users will not be willing to go back.

These compelling experiences have attracted huge numbers of people, which in turn makes the experience even more compelling in a positive feedback loop. Just as in any revolution, once critical mass is achieved, the revolution takes on its own momentum and is self-adapting. A critical mass of people were dictating what is interesting and what is not. What is acceptable is far more likely to be those sites and capabilities that minimize constraints and empower people. Those that put constraints on reasonable behavior were quickly discarded. Sites that allowed individuals to write, like WordPress blogs, to edit, like Wikipedia, or to tag interesting content, like Digg, rose quickly up the internet charts of popularity. Once Facebook removed restrictions on who could join or who your friends could, it quickly grew exponentially to over 60 million users. Web 2.0 became a very democratic revolution with core principles of freedom of speech and freedom of assembly on the internet. The notions of controls are not determined by central authorities, but by the users themselves in terms of their access to the site.

By lowering the barriers to participation, this provides platforms for anyone to contribute to a site like Wikipedia or YouTube. Actual active contribution of content can be a relatively small number, less than 1% of all users according to an article in Time on the 25th April 2007 and much lower for YouTube, but as high as 4.5% for Wikipedia visitors. However with a critical mass of large numbers of people, this can still represent hundreds of thousands of authors and contributors. It also doesn't take into account social networking sites where everyone is a contributor by simply creating their home page and being compelled to enhance and adorn it in response to their friends doing the same thing. I have seen several large corporation that have skills or profile pages for their users, but even senior executives may be more likely to update their Facebook or LinkedIn profiles than their corporate skills page.  In addition, this doesn't include what might be the most powerful aspect of this participation - feedback of the masses. Many people comment on blogs when they feel passionate about a particular subject and are more likely to rate information provided such as reviews or products available on-line. In a world swamped in information, feedback on popularity and rating, hallmarks of Web 2.0 sites, provides a valuable indicator of what is important and what are leading trends.

Dubbed "Wisdom of the Crowds" by James Surowiecki in 2004, a mass of individuals on average is smarter than anyone person or expert could ever be. At some point excesses of disclosure and impropriety go off in their own direction and those seeking refuge of appropriateness find it in communities of like minded people. Those looking for accurate or appropriate information just move off to more appropriate communities. This provides the feedback loop of control through democracy of participation. Wikipedia is a good example of this as it has demonstrated that it can be just as accurate as encyclopedia Britannica, but much faster at correcting mistakes. "Lord of the Rings" provided feedback to the community  on their website on how the story was evolving prior to filming and ultimately became one of the most popular series of films. The "Da Vinci Code" kept everything secret and, despite the popularity of the book, did not fare well in the box office.

Michael Lynch, CEO of Autonomy, suggested in Financial Times on the 30th of June, that Web 2.0 was something that must be tamed. Perhaps this is missing the point. Web 2.0 is not anarchic nor is it necessarily bad for business. Web 2.0 To try to control Web 2.0 is like trying to put one's finger in the dyke. It is happening and there is nothing that business can do to prevent it. In fact, when companies try to restrict access to Web 2.0 they either find that the roadblocks have been circumscribed or that potential employees will go elsewhere. Generation Y, the generation born between 1978 and now, is expected to grow from 25% of the US workforce to 47% by 2014. This is a generation that has only known the empowerment of the internet and have become accustomed to their vote counting. To try and control it now would only disenfranchise them. To empower them would yield not only an optimistic workforce, but also provide an engaging conversation between employees, their customers and their partners in a participatory and enlightened collaboration. In addition, my generation, the Baby Boomers, are starting to retire now, taking with them some of the most valuable knowledge ever accumulated in some of the biggest numbers ever. Knowledge management programs over the last two decades have failed to capture that knowledge, is Web 2.0 our last hope of retaining it? Interestingly, the Time article suggests that those over 35 are more likely to contribute content to Web 2.0 sites, so this may be an indicator that older generations want to contribute their knowledge from experience and are willing to do this through Web 2.0.

Software vendors are now jumping on the bandwagon with social software and collaborative features smelling a bit opportunity. Many are repackaged capabilities from another era of enterprise software. Some are looking at their portfolios and asking whether this is what they were doing all along. This misses the point. Web 2.0 has so far outstripped enterprise software as we know it in usability, accessibility and empowerment, that it causes mass rolling of eyeballs at its mere sight of not just the new generation, but most others as well. Those who are familiar with the ease of use and empowerment of Web 2.0 sites like YouTube, Wikipedia and Facebook are aware of what is possible and have much higher expectations. I believe that the enterprise software vendors will get there, but with much coaxing and coaching of a new generation. It will take a few years, but eventually they will figure out that Web 2.0 is not just a few new collaboration features and highly interactive web technologies, but empowerment of their users and the ability to draw in a critical mass of users from outside the trusted circle.

Enterprise systems won't change immediately, but it will probably change faster than people expect. Care should be taken in what is opened up. However, rather than treating Web 2.0 content and technology suspiciously, corporations should ring fence the information that must be controlled and open up the rest to participation. At the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston this June, Pfizer presented how they were using open source technology to enable Web 2.0 collaboration. This is a brave move in the highly regulated world of pharmaceuticals, but they have recognized clear boundaries of what must be regulated in content, particularly in manufacturing and research practices and what can be opened up, such as redefining process or identifying new potential areas of research. The scenarios of "Doctor 2.0" are available on the internet, but they have created a vision and a reality that uses the same technology as Wikipedia to create Pfizerpedia, a wiki of process and ideas that feed into the main areas of research and manufacturing.

Change in the Enterprise is more likely to come from outside as well. In all likelihood, if you are information worker, you use Google more than any of your internal IT systems. You may even rely on blogs to track what is happening in your industry more than you rely on industry press. You and your co-workers are likely to use these and other Web 2.0 technologies to track what is happening in your business world as well as your social world. These web sites will set further expectations on the internal systems you use and a requirement to integrate internal information with these external sources of information. Web 2.0 has an answer for this as well with an integration technique known as "mash up", the ability mix information from multiple sources using the web browser itself as the point of integration. These external sources of information also provide something that our internal information systems could never provide, a critical mass of opinion utilizing the Wisdom of the Crowds. We will ultimately need to combine external opinion with our internal opinion to get more accurate predictive decision making with our own unique insights inside the enterprise.

Ultimately, the most profound effect Web 2.0 will have is on the way we do business rather than just the technology we use. Employees will use this freedom of speech to provide valuable and fearless feedback for the business. Employees will have the freedom to assemble teams with customers without interference. Customers will become part of the decision making process and allow us to design the most imaginative products and services. Control will be limited those areas that ultimately must have control and free up the creative process to speed and enhance business. Empowered employees will build more productive businesses and become more fulfilled participants in the business. With any opportunity comes risk and embracing Web 2.0 is not without its risks. However, smart businesses can already see the opportunities and are willing to take those risks.

Extent of polar ice at the end of Summer 2007 - far less than three decades ago



Tree Hugger reports that scientists at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, CO have an informal betting pool that ice will melt away from the geographic north pole by the end of this summer. I saw the above image in a Ted Talk given my Al Gore recently, which made me nervous. I'm no climate specialist, but if the potential for a melting away to the north pole is true, I can't imagine this not having consequences on world weather patterns.