Open Source Agility
Adapting to the Evolving ECM Industry
The content management landscape has evolved along with the proliferation of social media and mobile devices, and the Web itself has become an interactive environment for users to collaborate and share information. It's no longer just about managing content, but also enabling workforce collaboration, leveraging the social technologies and creating an engaging user experience that achieves maximum impact. Organizations need to consider each aspect of enterprise content management (ECM)—collaborative document management, Web content management, enterprise social networking, portals and intranets—and take a more agile approach in forming a content strategy in order to find solutions to the challenges and opportunities presented by the social age.
The Changing Landscape
Social software has become an important aspect of how we conduct business in today's world. Social business can be enabled by social technologies that improve collaboration and customer engagement.
However, social software tends to create large amounts of unmanaged content. What most enterprises struggle with is balancing the need for collaboration and productivity on one hand, with management, control and governance on the other.
There are two categories of content management systems: traditional systems of record (i.e. ECM systems), which promote efficiency; and the new generation of systems of engagement (i.e. social business software), that create effectiveness. At the center of this lies social content management, where all social content is automatically stored in a content repository for reuse, repurposing, archival and value creation.
Meanwhile, the Web has gone through some tremendous changes over the years and has evolved into a dynamic environment where users are constantly exchanging information and collaborating in real-time. Thus, creating engaging, rich user experiences has become more important than ever. Furthermore, the proliferation of mobile devices has increased the need for accessing fresh content anytime, anywhere. To meet these increasing user expectations, organizations must create and manage an engaging Web experience. Traditional WCM alone is no longer sufficient, and the broader category of Web experience management (WEM) now predominates.
Moreover, extending WEM to mobile applications creates the need for native-like applications on mobile devices without sacrificing features and performance. Through HTML5-based device-independent applications, content-rich mobile solutions can now be developed more rapidly and cost effectively.
No matter how robust and well-managed a content-rich solution is, it can't be successful without search. The challenge of enterprise search is providing a solution that can index data and documents from a variety of sources across the organization, including file systems, intranets, document repositories, email and databases. And most people today have come to prefer a Google-like search experience from browsing the Web, so the goal is to also achieve a single, unified interface that searches across all enterprise content.
To create a successful content strategy, all of the above considerations must be thoroughly analyzed to determine the importance each role plays in the organization. From WEM to collaborative document management, intranets, enterprise social networks and enterprise search, open platforms provide the necessary flexibility to adapt to the evolving market.
Open Source Benefits
Leading organizations find commercially supported open source solutions attractive for a variety of reasons. They facilitate flexibility and agility, enable enterprises to remain open and not bound to a single vendor, and provide a fundamental cost advantage that proprietary solutions can never match. Open source ensures zero up-front licensing fees, no forced upgrades and no vendor lock-in. Moreover, active participation within the open source community allows development teams to share insights, strategies and knowledge about open source products, capabilities, flaws and features. This level of communication fosters innovation, responsiveness and, in the end, bottom-line productivity. And as open source software has matured over the years, enterprises are also starting to realize additional benefits, including quality, reliability, speed, increased innovation and shorter development times.
When establishing content and collaboration platform goals, a wide range of business drivers must be considered—flexibility, maintainability, user adoption and productivity, and both near- and long-term costs. Open source solutions provide advantages in all areas over proprietary alternatives. Rivet Logic constantly evaluates the open source landscape to identify the best-of-breed platforms suitable for mission-critical enterprise deployments. Today, these platforms include Alfresco, Liferay, Apache Solr, Drupal, Sproutcore, among others.
Alfresco serves as a platform for managing all types of content with a robust set of content services that supports all types of content-centric enterprise applications—collaborative document management, WCM, digital asset management, email and records management. And due to its open architecture, capability and agility, Alfresco provides the foundation for social content management.
Liferay's Portal provides a flexible framework for building collaborative applications and integrating existing applications that results in numerous benefits. In addition, Liferay can be optimized for intended audiences (internal vs. external) and, thus, support a range of business goals.
Apache Solr provides a powerful open source enterprise search platform while SproutCore offers an open source HTML5 application framework for building responsive, desktop-caliber applications for mobile devices ranging from the iPhone to iPad to Android handhelds.
By supplementing these core platforms with additional best-of-breed open source technologies, a complete solution can be delivered to effectively address multiple business challenges. Based on our experiences from hundreds of client engagements, along with our active involvement in open source communities, Rivet Logic has sponsored and developed numerous open source contributions. When combined with leading platforms such as Alfresco, Liferay and Solr, our open source "rivets" allow us to create rich and powerful enterprise solutions for our clients that include Harvard Business Publishing, Sesame Street, The National Academy of Sciences and TaylorMade Golf. We make our Logic Stacks—pre-built solutions using best-of-breed open source software—freely available for download and use.
As the content management industry continues to evolve with the emergence of new technologies and trends, content-centric solutions must be flexible enough to adapt to the change. Commercially supported open source stacks provide the flexibility and reliability necessary to meet the challenges and exploit the opportunities.