Social Content Management
Social software has become an important aspect of how we conduct business in today's world. The consumerization of IT has driven enterprises to redefine how they think about information management, control and governance in order to deal with social technologies. Furthermore, organizations today have become more collaborative in their daily operations in order to better facilitate communication—both internally within departments and externally with global stakeholders. Social business is then, in effect, leveraging social technologies to improve collaboration and responsiveness.
Business Value of Social Software
In a research report by Gartner, social software is said to have the most impact in improving connectedness, promoting unplanned collaboration and capturing informal knowledge. Moreover, significant business results can be achieved if leveraged in a proper way. In fact, in a McKinsey survey, 69% of executives whose organizations are already using social networking applications reported significant business results, with the most improvement originating from better sharing of ideas, knowledge and content, faster access to experts and lower operational costs.
However, just like any software, there are risks and downsides associated with social software. 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, and management, control and governance on the other hand.
To tackle this question of addressing the need for content management related to social software applications, AIIM recently convened a task force of leading vendors. The task force was led by noted author and visionary Geoffrey Moore, and after interviewing more than 20 senior IT executives from end-user organizations, put together a framework to use when thinking about the future of content management.
From their analysis, content management systems can be divided into two categories: traditional systems of record (i.e., enterprise content management systems); and the new generation of systems of engagement (i.e., social business software). In systems of record, content is authored as documents and is easily searchable, users generally need to be trained, access is regulated and constrained and there is a strong focus on enterprisewide security and policies. Social software falls into the systems of engagement category, where content is developed collaboratively and can be of any type (audio, video, images, etc.), the systems follow Web 2.0 principles so little training is needed, accessibility is wide open and security is limited to individual user privacy.
In order to leverage both types of systems, they must co-exist in a cohesive manner. While a system of record promotes efficiency, a system of engagement creates effectiveness. The resulting social enterprise architecture is that in which the system of engagement operates on top of and in touch with the system of record.
Introducing Social Content Management
Due to its open architecture, capability and agility, the open source Alfresco content management platform is well positioned to provide the foundation for social content management.
Alfresco serves as a platform for managing all types of content with a robust set of content services that can support any and all types of content-centric enterprise applications—collaborative document management, Web content management, digital asset management, email and records management. It also provides numerous interfaces to interact with content and its content services. Out of the box, Alfresco can be accessed through its native Web application, shared network drives, Office applications and portals such as Liferay. Alfresco also provides numerous programmatic interfaces, or APIs, that enable integration of Alfresco with other applications—including the Confluence Wiki, Jive and Drupal to name a few—allowing multiple social business systems to operate on top of Alfresco.
Many enterprises will want to use their content management system as a social business system—or at least take advantage of social features when they are focused on content creation and collaboration. Alfresco comes bundled with Share, a Web-based application for social content management and collaboration, which can be thought of as a social business system for collaboration, with content as the focus. Alfresco Share provides out-of-the-box features that include easy creation of team sites with collaboration tools such as user profiles, activity feeds, shared calendars, blogs, discussion forums and even wikis. Just as importantly, users can use document management without changing their behavior, so users can check-in a document, discuss it inside Share and then publish it to the Web, all with Alfresco.
Social content management is at the intersection of where typical content-management functionality meets the content-generating capability of social software. In today's socially driven business world, enterprises need to consider the enterprise architectures and solutions that will help them harness the value of social content. Open and agile platforms such as Alfresco are best suited to meet the challenge.
Rivet Logic is an award-winning consulting and systems integration firm that helps organizations better engage with customers, improve collaboration and streamline business operations. Through a full suite of solutions for content management, collaboration and community, Rivet Logic enables organizations to fully leverage the power of industry-leading open source software. With deep expertise in technologies such as Alfresco, Liferay, Apache Lucene/Solr, Spring and JBoss, Rivet Logic crafts content-rich solutions that power next-generation Web properties, enterprise 2.0 applications and collaborative communities. With offices throughout the US, Rivet Logic serves clients across a wide range of industries. Rivet Logic-Artisans of Open Source. Visit us at www.rivetlogic.com.