The Dawn of New Age of Collaboration?

Ever since there have been departmental systems, Collaboration has been departmentally focused. eRoom, Lotus Notes, and SharePoint owe their success to end user functionality on the one hand, but also to departmental deployment and control models that support viral adoption across the enterprise on the other hand. Given the trends of enterprise consolidation and cloud computing, the time may have come for the pendulum to swing back to a centralized model for collaboration software. (Remember collaboration before Lotus Notes?)

The pendulum should not swing to complete centralization of responsibility and costs. Rather there should be a shift that lets responsibility and cost lie where it is most effective. In such a shift, enterprise policies would be controlled centrally. Work structures would be defined and implemented in decentralized fashion, for greatest responsiveness to the demands of work on the front lines. Each business would fine tune the balance of what is centralized and what is decentralized according to its own needs.

Consolidation within enterprises and cloud computing are driving the infrastructure for centralized computing, but what about application software for centrally deployed collaboration? EMC Documentum CenterStage targets this space. More will be revealed about CenterStage this week at EMC World 2009 and we’ll all be better able to gauge the alignment of the trends toward centralized infrastructure with the centralized control model of CenterStage.

Here are a few things to look for:

• Does CenterStage provide the end user functionality that users and businesses will readily adopt?
  
• Does CenterStage fully deliver the back end capabilities of Documentum Content Server?
  
• Does CenterStage have the flexibility to allow enterprises to centralize or decentralize administrative responsibilities?
  
• To the extent administrative responsibilities are decentralized, does CenterStage allow safeguards to keep departmental administrators within bounds of enterprise policies?
  
• Does CenterStage have an advantage in accelerating mobile computing applications?
  

A good portion of the 2009 EMC World content management agenda is allocated to CenterStage. The next few days will shed some light on whether CenterStage is a sign of the dawn of a new age of collaboration.