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.

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Robin's post has grabbed a lot of people's attention over the last 24 hours, and its not surprising. When Paolo from eVectors demo'd their technology to me I was really impressed too - in fact, the front end of the Climate Pulse example gives only a few clues about the engine that enables the curating process that Robin describes to happen.

However, my immediate thought when I saw Climate Pulse was, wouldn't this also make a good concept for an intranet?

Could it in fact be possible to shift from the idea of managing content on intranets and instead think about curating it instead? Its an interesting idea that could make intranets more relevant - just like dashboards for metrics have become popular, can we also imagine dashboards for content and activity that are curated by people, not dumb algorithms?

I think its going to be a couple of years before Google really builds up its 'wave front' - but thisl an open standards based protocol - stop thinking of Wave just as its seen in the flashy demo video or the sandbox developer account you managed to scrounge that you can't do much with.

Bottom line - stop thinking 'new fangled email crossed with IM and social networking' and think powerful content centric collaboration and document editing.

Some good analysis by Jed. It also explains why I'm watching, but not too worried about playing with Google Wave just yet...