Functional Overview, aka “What will it do?”

As announced at Gartner’s Portals, Collaboration & Content Summit this week, the integration (known as the “Jive Toolkit”) is a set of pre-built components that allows Jive to store documents in Alfresco while still offering all of the same social features as “native” Jive documents (commenting, rating, discussions, etc.). While not yet all-encompassing – Jive’s “social” content cannot yet be stored or managed within Alfresco – the Toolkit will provide a foundational level of document-centric integration, allowing implementers to focus on more use-case specific integrations as required (hence the positioning as a “toolkit”, rather than a fully fledged solution).

Sometimes technology surprises us, but this example of integration between a social platform and content management system is something we've been anticipating.

Incidentally, I've been talking about architecting for collaboration and there is a currently active discussion on my post about broken mental models in the way many people try to manage intranets.

I also noticed that this isn't a pure CMIS based integration, which highlights opportunities for better support from social platforms to support it and also that CMIS needs to be improved to support the needs of social platforms.

Clearly, there is still a little way to go but we're heading in the right direction.

Hat tip to ReadWriteEnterprise. Like them, I'm a little dubious about the term 'Social Content Management', but I think Alfresco raise some good points in this video. I've been following the development of CMIS for a while and I think this is an important part of the story.

The stakes a are high for Project Eden, the codename for a long term project to rollout a single electronic document and records management system across all arms of Australia's Defence forces.

The scale of the project is huge and the final cost is expected to lie somewhere between $A100m-$A500m.
Defence estimates it will need to handle 50,000 users within two years and up to 100 million new objects per annum. There will be users at up to 600 locations in Australian and overseas .

Defence has been evaluating vendors since 2006 and has missed previously announced deadlines for making a selection.

I felt very nervous reading this.

I've previously been involved in a very large electronic document and records management system (EDRMS) project for a large international mining company using one of the major systems, so I have a pretty good idea of what the ADF is trying to achieve. I also have a pretty good idea about the challenges, which aren't necessarily technological (and where there are, there aren't necessarily what you might think).

One of the things that concerns me about any implementation like this is that we confuse the desire for a single information system architecture (e.g. one logical EDRMS system to rule them all) with creating a homogeneous information environment that they will try to make everyone use.

This goes beyond simply making the EDRMS easy to use. The typical approach is to use a uniform user interface to meet that goal but all we really end up doing is meeting the lowest common denominator rather than actually satisfying different user needs. Similarly, we also risk ending up with a rigid information architecture that makes the conceptual information system architecture easier to implement, but doesn't actually fit how work is done.

Often these things look great to the guy designing them from his desk in a nice air conditioned office, but the view is very different once you are on the ground (or in my case, 500 metres underground).

Of course, it doesn't have to be that way. I hope they are considering:

• The organisational change aspects and dealing with what I call the "what's in it for me gap" (a user-centred design approach is essential);
• Applying open information access policies within the ADF, with information restricted by exception and managed through activity monitoring and version tracking*;
• How they can apply a Web Oriented Architecture approach, and standards like CMIS, concepts like De-perimeterisation, and even new database architectures like NoSQL; and
• Learning from recent experiences of applying social computing techniques to how people organise, discover and use information (rather than just relying on taxonomies and mechanical search engine techniques).

*Radical I know, but necessary unless you want to end up with a more complex and expensive version of the existing file shares! This isn't about changing information security classifications, but about dealing with information, which is currently hidden by obscurity.

No, this isn't a product endorsement ;-)

However, the Drupal crowd make a lot of noise in my online neighbourhood and have been getting some good press coverage recently. So, this new Drupal-based intranet package caught my attention today. However, its not the fact that its Drupal powered that interests me, but more the pattern of features in it. Open Atrium includes features such as a dashboard home page, wiki pages, blogging, editing, project spaces, private microblogging (Twitter-style status alerts) etc. This is of course a very similar pattern to what we have already seen emerge in products like Thought Farmer, Social Text and Confluence - and even to an extent SharePoint (with the right Webparts and 3rd-party extensions of course) and IBM Lotus Connections (when partnered up with the right wiki solution).

There is a growing gap between these wiki- or collaboration-centric "suites" and information structure and publishing workflow centric web content management systems that have been the bread and butter of large corporate intranets.

Records management and enterprise content management is probably the one big omission in these new Intranet 2.0 suites, with products like Alfresco being one of the few to bridge both worlds with its Share module. However, out of the box Share lacks some of the richness of the other solutions out there.

If people really want strong document management features in their wiki suite then the open standard Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) should make it achievable in the future. But I think the trick is that there needs to be demand for this type of integration to be made available... and being tired with the constraints of old publishing-centric intranets, I don't hear many people calling out very strongly for that just yet. The reality is that those people who are adopting the new style of intranet suites want to use them as a work platform, not a place for managing content for the sake of it.