They are both Right about Web 2.0. Now Get a Backbone in Place.

“Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as a platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform”, says Tim O’Reilly. “I think Web 2.0 is of course a piece of jargon, nobody even knows what it means.”, says Tim Berners-Lee, “It’s dookie.” They are both right, but it doesn’t matter.

Whether you agree with O’Reilly or Berners-Lee, information technology organizations must deal with the adoption of social-networking, video-sharing, wikis, blogs, and user tagging. Because people use them and businesses demand them, the infrastructure has to control and support Web 2.0 applications.

Public Web 2.0 facilities can achieve inter-company benefits, but those public facilities don’t meet the large organization’s need for control or support in the areas of retention, access, security, availability, and cost. In those large organizations, rogue Web 2.0 islands have likely sprung up internally and increasing adoption has caused unplanned cost and risk. Public facilities and rogue islands were fine when Web 2.0 applications were an experiment, but for many companies, enterprise-caliber infrastructure is now required.

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) technology is a promising backbone for Web 2.0 applications. The appeal of ECM is first in the fit and maturity of the technology. ECM is designed to manage unstructured information such as addressed by Web 2.0 applications and has been proven at enterprise scale for over a decade. The appeal of ECM is also in the potential to leverage existing investments. Most large companies have existing ECM platform investments that can provide needed support and control to Web 2.0 applications.

EMC Documentum Content Server (Documentum) is playing the role of backbone for Web 2.0 applications via two different approaches. First, Documentum has traditionally played a repository role for custom-built or niche front-end applications. Documentum plays a similar back end role when used in conjunction with Web 2.0 solutions built using Crown SiteBuilder and Crown Web Gear products. In the second approach, EMC has built on it’s eRoom heritage of providing application front-ends, and EMC is now extending eRoom solidly into the Web 2.0 era with its CenterStage product.

If you have enterprise-scale Web 2.0 needs, Crown can help you evaluate your options and put the appropriate infrastructure in place. Ask us about our SiteBuilder and Web Gear products and about our experience with EMC CenterStage.

Content Management Platform: A Critical Element in a Knowledge Intensive World

Business is increasingly knowledge intensive. The most successful businesses have the knowledge to do the right things and do things right. That knowledge, whether nascent or explicit, whether instructive or persuasive, produces value when it’s in the mind of an employee, a supplier, a distributor, or a customer. Getting knowledge into those minds drives business results.

Content refers to the documents, web pages, images, videos, and audio segments that enable business results by delivering knowledge to people. Managing content is essential for achieving compliance, efficiency, quality, and other business objectives. Fortunately, software to manage content is reaching new levels of maturity and Crown provides solutions for content management using industry leading products from EMC, Oracle, and Microsoft.

Assembling and delivering knowledge in the form of content is most efficient when supported by a “content management platform”. A content management platform consists of standards, hardware, and software, supported by specific operations and personnel. A platform typically accommodates multiple business needs and serves multiple departments, cost centers, divisions and business units. A platform provides cost advantages that result from sharing expense across a large number of users or applications and the related economies of scale. It also increases service levels, because service-enabling investments that could not be afforded for a single application can be afforded for a collection of applications.

A content management platform provides greatest knowledge advantages when it is used to add and preserve value in each step of the enterprise value chain. Conveying content and knowledge via a single enterprise platform is more consistent and economical than stringing together islands of content management. Below are a few examples of the content produced and used at each section of the value chain. Just as value snowballs through the value chain, content critical for later sections of the value chain should reference and incorporate content in the earlier sections of the value chain.

1. Supply steps in the value chain: raw materials, component, and capital equipment specifications; contractor services descriptions; job skill requirements; capital or financing plans.

2. Central steps in the value chain: procedures that define the integration of inputs with additional sources of value within the firm; management reports; go to market plans; work-in-progress and finished output specifications.

3. Distribution steps in the value chain: sales and marketing material, product documentation, warrantees and guarantees, service descriptions.

With more than 500 content management “go-lives” using industry leading software from EMC, Oracle, and Microsoft, Crown understands the importance of knowledge and how to deliver it throughout an enterprise using content. We look forward to exploring the ways that experience can help your organization get the most out of its knowledge.