7 March 2008 by Simon Mone
On Tuesday evening (GMT) our partners, Open Text, broadcast a webinar entitled 'The Future of Web Content Management'. Sounded right up our street so I registered and then asked Doug to login and listen on my behalf (Celtic vs Barcelona, what can I say). Much of the presentation was a repeat of one we were given at the Red Dot conference in Cologne last November and it lays out the intention to make the WCM (in this case Red Dot) the primary access medium of content owners. This layer will sit on top of all of the IT clever stuff (not that Red Dot's not clever just not as Enterprise clever as ECM ect) and various content silos around the business. The presentation also included a first look at the new Red Dot offering and we (i.e. Doug) were very impressed.
The focus in the industry is apparently back on personalisation and, therefore, classification either via top down taxonomies or bottom up tagging. Our friends at Cintra were obviously ahead of the game by a long way.
We have also been advocating the advantages of classification and the benefits to personalisation (particularly for intranets) for some years; hence the relationship with Cintra, but there is a body of clients that have reservations about the practicalities of implementing classification policies or the accuracy of automated tools. The answer to this is of course that you get out what you put in and it is worth the effort, no question about that. The problem I see is that most sites don't try to provide solutions of the depth that require such functionality and users, therefore, don't know to expect it.
In the early days of the web the big buzz phrase was 'content is king'. Well, this is still true it's just that most users are still republican. Nevertheless, look out web 2.0 is actually coming to a browser near you and when it gets there we will see another big shift in internet usage patterns. Facebook et al are toys. Once you've registered and collected all the contacts you no longer have in the real world and realise why you haven't kept in touch with them, there's little mileage for most over 25's and, despite Microsoft's interest, there is still o real business model. Remember Friends Reunited? Soon we'll see real value to users coming out of the long tail of social networking and some profitable business models on the back of those.
As we say in the office too often to retain any credibility for ourselves - 'interesting times'.
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