Today marks the beginning of my new blog for AIIM's Enterprise 2.0 expert group. This is exciting stuff for me because I have seen dramatic changes in AIIM's industry over the last 25 years or so and expect to see more in the future. Back in 1990, I had the great fortune to start Documentum along with my friend Howard Shao and one of our first ports of call to understand document management was the AIIM conference. This was a world where Windows 3.0 barely existed, files were created in WordPerfect or WordStar, presentations were done on overhead transparencies, and documents were more likely to be transmitted via fax than any other means. In the intervening twenty years, we have seen AIIM go from microfiche to document management to enterprise content management.
Starting on January 1st of 2010 I became a member of AIIM's board and have been able to get a glimpse of the big plans the organization has to move beyond enterprise content management to a landscape where CIOs are trying to figure out how to integrate concepts from consumer websites. This is Enterprise 2.0 and it is exciting, because, really, no one has got this figured out yet. However, coming from an open source background as the co-founder and CTO of Alfresco, open source has had a profound impact on Web 2.0 and is having a profound impact on Enterprise 2.0. I am particularly excited as companies start to make the transition to take these applications and deploy them in the Cloud.
Enterprise 2.0 adds a social dimension to a set of technologies that, let's face it, have been pretty dull to the uninitiated and has made them quite interesting and engaging. In this blog, I would like to explore the human dimension of these changes and how they affect business practices. However, I am equally interested in the technological changes that Enterprise 2.0 will bring about. Reuse and scripting will make development a lot easier, but new deployment options and data and storage management techniques will redefine exactly what we mean by enterprise scale. When we start thinking about the Cloud and the agility of elastic capacity to huge dimensions, we have to rethink some of the fundamental principles of what we felt were important for enterprise systems.
The week that this blog goes out, the week of AIIM, sees some really important changes in technology, which makes this initial blog all the more timely. We have been organizing a panel on the first day of the AIIM conference, Tues April 20th at 4pm, to discuss CMIS or Content Management Interoperable Services from OASIS. Finally, we have a content management standard that allows interoperability of applications in a way that we have had with databases for the last two decades. The panel, which includes participants from IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and myself, will look at what organizations can get out of CMIS and where CMIS is heading. Personally, I think this is a standard that will enable a lot of the applications of Enterprise 2.0. And if you were to design a content management standard for the Cloud, I don't think it would look a whole lot different from CMIS.
I am looking forward to blogging about what comes out of that session as well as many other exciting topics in Enterprise 2.0.
#Documentum #CMIS #opensource #ECM