Social rubber, meeting content management road - Alfresco / Jive Toolkit
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.