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that the answer to pulling KM out of the 20th Century structure is to get away from the centralization method and begin re-learning the way that lawyers conduct their business. They identify that the source of lawyers’ “ideas, knowledge, leads, business opportunities, support, trust and co-operation” are developed through their social interactions.

Now, however, a new generation of legal knowledgebase tools based on Web 2.0 technology (including PBworks Legal Edition, which has users at 24 of the top 25 firms on the AmLaw 100) is solving the usability issues and integrating the knowledgebase into the everyday work of a firm.

"At a time when clients are likely to challenge every item of charge, having efficient systems in place for producing work becomes vital," writes Karen Battersby of Nottingham Law School. "The transfer of knowledge from individual lawyers to teams of lawyers is also essential in a climate where lawyer redundancies are increasing and departments need to operate with leaner resources."

The first key is to make the legal knowledgebase easy to use. 

The second key to successful legal knowledgebases lies in searchability.

The final, and perhaps most important key to the success of Web 2.0 knowledgebases lies in their ability to integrate with the daily work of lawyering. 

"I can't emphasize this enough: making lawyers enter information multiple times is a recipe for failure," said Dennis Kennedy of Thompson Coburn. "Lawyers have proven that they will not change the way that they work.

While firms must restrict access to authorized users, they must simultaneously provide authorized users with access to information via different technology.  As more lawyers turn to smart phones and PDA, products must also include mobile access to the knowledgebase (including files) via Blackberry and iPhone to fully integrate with the way most attorneys actually work.

In two of our projects with large law firms we included an RSS feedreader in the social software mix (among wiki, blogs, social bookmarking). We introduced it primarily to Knowledge Management Lawyers (KML) that needed to gather a lot of content from various sources. They also use it to subscribe to updates from the wiki and blogs. They appreciate the fact that it is much easier to plow through a stream of updates rather than going from email to email and deleting every one of them.

Have a look at two case studies: Dewey & LeBoeuf and Allen & Overy

In another project with a large law firm we took a very close look at the production (and consumption) of current awareness material. Current awareness included for example information on current developments within legal practices, latest court decisions etc. The firm made extensive use of newsletters to disseminate that kind of information. There was a multitude of newsletters available, some of them covering similar grounds. Maintaining email lists was very time-consuming and frustrating. Consumers did not know which newsletter were available. Also, newsletters were not personalised nor very timely, as they had a specific publishing date. We therefore recommended using RSS as delivery format, which would make the process of producing and consuming content more efficient and in the end more cost-effective as shown in a business case

Once CRM, DMS, Intranet and other proprietary system vendors thoroughly implement RSS functionality, it will get a big push.

I think a tipping point might come if ERP apps providers (SAP, Oracle, etc.) started publishing RSS feeds of ERP data!

In our company, we had a survey in April (2008), asking managers if they needed a RSS Reader. Some figures: 72 managers responded, 68 managers subscribed to more than one (company) blog. 9 managers already used iGoogle or a RSS Reader, 13 managers replied they did not need a RSS Reader, 50 managers replied they need a RSS Reader. As a result we planned a project to select and deliver a company RSS Reader. The project will be executed mid 2009.

It's with a heavy heart and a sense of bewilderment that we conclude that the market for enterprise-specific RSS readers appears to be dead. Two years ago there were three major players offering software that delivered information to the computers of business users via RSS. Today it looks to us like the demand simply never arose and that market is over.

It's insane - a solid RSS strategy can be a huge competitive advantage in any field. We have no idea why so relatively few people see that.

Neglecting RSS at work seems to us like pure insanity.

If dashboards take off, then maybe RSS will gain traction as the wiring? This probably requires: secure feed displaying widgets, good filters.

Enterprises are scared to disrupt their own structure and command lines by introducing uncontrolled information flows both internally (which can route around management) and externally (which can route around the official PR outputs and sales inputs of the company)

Look at the headline you used.. RIP Enterprise RSS. Now read that from the point of view of a manager in an enterprise. WTF does "Enterprise RSS" mean? What are the business reasons to care? What does it do for them? People don't care adopt RSS, just as people don't adopt XHTML, Javascript etc. They adopt products that use technology to do something that they value. No one cares about the technologies used to display this page... they want to read the page.

Enterprise RSS doesn't mean much. When RSS companies start talking about secure communications channels that intelligently and automatically route relevant information to the people who need/want it, light bulbs start lighting up.

I think Microsoft SharePoint could be the killer app for RSS in the enterprise. SharePoint has RSS built in and uses it to syndicate changes that happen within the SharePoint ecosphere and notify enterprise workers that something significant has happened. Of course, SharePoint RSS could work with third-party RSS readers, but it's really designed to be used with Microsoft's Office Suite, where enterprise workers can interface with SharePoint, through RSS and other means, directly

One thing missing from this (great) post is the cost of these tools. Looking at Newsgator & Attensa, these are expensive enterprise tools and trying to sell them to IT managers that don't fully understand RSS is next to impossible. Imagine saying to a CIO, who barely understands what RSS is, that you need $175,000 for Enterprise RSS software... it isn't an easy sell.

In this part of the world (SE Asia) we're seeing more & more top management wanting tools for themselves and their teams to connect to "Facebook and these social network things". Feeds and aggregation/search tools are the perfect wiring for this. But the front end? There's a lot of choice and individual needs vary. A decently setup igoogle/netvibes page can work wonders..so why pay?

Also, reading RSS is likely viewed as not work related, and so its frowned upon within the enterprise (remember, those enterprise folks have "real" work to do, they don't get paid to read BoingBoing all day long).

Over the last year, his firm has created three to four thousand pages in the wiki. Lee estimates that 60% of his employees make at least one change to the wiki each day.

Lee really likes the flexibility of the wiki platform. People can work in the wiki the way that they want to work. Of course, that has lead to some disagreements over the way to organize content.

Lee sees a conflict between the need for rules and the freedom to contribute. There are places where the wiki is not organized in a way that works for him. But it does work for others.

Lee also likes that the wiki is externally hosted. He lets PBwiki worry about keeping the server up and all the "plumbing" headaches. He wants to be out of the IT business.

One of his biggest issues is keeping the wiki in people's minds as a way to communicate. It takes some time for people to realize that they can communicate through the wiki. Lee still sees lots of email communication that could be better handled in the wiki. They are also still transitioning some of the content from Lotus Notes into the wiki.

Market Shifts Toward Infrastructure Vendors

Content management is becoming part of enterprises' infrastructure and consequently is being delivered by large vendors of enterprise infrastructure such as IBM, Microsoft and Oracle.

IBM, Oracle and EMC are competing at the high end of the market, while Microsoft is commoditizing the market at the low end. Recently, HP entered the ECM market by acquiring Tower Software, a niche vendor long known for its integrated document and records management.

More than 54% of the market, as measured by total software revenue, is held by just three vendors — EMC, IBM and Open Text

Pure-play content management vendors and vertical-market specialists such as Interwoven, Xerox, Xythos Software and Vignette are fighting to compete. Bright spots for the pure-play vendors and vertical specialists are the mid-market and CEVAs

IBM and Oracle have the potential to drive the market forward by creating a powerful message based on broader enterprise information management (EIM). Since they own the key stack components, such as the database, the information access, business intelligence (BI), analytics and reporting tools (and often line-of-business applications), they can bring together structured data and unstructured content. On the other hand, choosing a suite from a stack vendor may involve tradeoffs as some functional components may not be equivalent to best-of-breed offerings.

Of all the infrastructure vendors, Microsoft has driven the most change in the ECM market over the past 18 months with Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007.

Adopting WSS or MOSS for mass deployment, and an ECM suite for high-end, content-centric processes and best-of-breed Web content, will remain a useful strategy for enterprises during the next three to five years. This coexistence strategy could reduce the costs and some of the risks of content management for an entire enterprise.

For many organizations, the need to increase workers' productivity and innovation is more important than ever. Critical goals include improving users' Web experience and connecting workers to relevant content and to each other.

see "Report Highlight for Dataquest Insight: E-Discovery Market Drives New Search, Content and Records Management Investments"

Specialists like Interwoven and Vignette are moving into Web-based CEVAs and interactive marketing and customer experience. They remain among the few choices enterprises have for high-end, enterprise-class, externally-facing Web content management (WCM) solutions. In the mid-market, Hyland Software, SunGard Data Systems and Saperion use their imaging and archiving heritages to address transactional content applications such as medical records, claims processing and accounts payable invoice processing.

Integration/Federation Grows in Importance as Organizations Look to Establish an Information-Centric Infrastructure

The ideal ECM architecture would enable one repository, or a few repositories with a common database — but this is not an ideal world. Dealing with multiple, siloed content repositories is a fact of life for many organizations. In Gartner's 2008 survey of nearly 400 respondents (see Note 1), 69% of enterprises indicated they had more than six repositories.

see "New Standard Will Make Content Repositories Interoperable"

Enterprises keep a vast amount of information locked up in documents, spreadsheets and other forms of unstructured data ("content"). To maximize the value of this information, enterprises need to integrate the various types and stores of content, integrate content with structured data, and integrate internal content with content and structured data outside the enterprise.

XML is becoming increasingly important for content creation, component management, output and integration with other applications. The term "mashup" has become synonymous with content couplings that were formerly difficult to achieve, even with traditional integration resources. Enterprise mashups that integrate content with business application data or with Web content via Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds or APIs remain rudimentary compared with the explosion of consumer mashups.

IBM intends to deliver ECM-focused widgets for creating mashups as part of the FileNet P8 platform.

User Empowerment vs. Governance

A Range of Needs Leads to Application Specificity and a Fragmented Focus From Vendors

Interwoven, Open Text and EMC are among the ECM vendors focusing development efforts on increased support for mobile clients, such as BlackBerrys and the iPhone, and for offline capabilities.

Wikis, blogs, podcasts and instant messaging have become staples in many enterprises, especially as marketing tools or as means of communicating with customers, prospects, employees and partners.

Enterprise and information architects should assess how able their ECM vendor(s) are when it comes to providing Web 2.0 features or integrating with third-party solutions for collaboration and communication to avoid creating more content silos. Usability remains a critical characteristic of perceived success or failure for ECM.

Social software encourages informal collaborative activities that fall outside the traditional scope of transactional applications, formal workflows or engineered teams. The rapid growth of social network interactions and the desire for open innovation will require IT organizations to develop a new approach that balances the need for corporate security with the requirement to accommodate frequent customer and partner conversations. IT staff will still be expected to manage this content at the back end of the life cycle.

Today, however, all this content creation and sharing typically happens outside any formal content management strategy. Organizations should take advantage of evolving, richer user interfaces and tools for content creation, consumption and multichannel output.

Alternative Delivery Models

The capital outlay required for ECM, and the internal resources needed to implement and maintain ECM suites, can be daunting. It is not unusual for an organization to spend $1 million or more on software and services for a large deal. In a 2008 survey (see Note 1), 22% of the respondents indicated they were spending over $1 million on content management software purchases in 2008, while 14% were spending between $500,000 and $1 million. In addition, it can take at least six to 18 months to deploy an ECM application.

Gartner clients are increasingly asking about SaaS, shared services and open source as alternative delivery approaches to implementing on-premises, commercial software. Yet the penetration of open-source and SaaS solutions today represents less than 5% of the overall ECM software market (based on total software revenue)

Market Definition/Description

Gartner defines today's ECM suites as encompassing the following core components: Document management for check-in/check-out, version control, security and library services for business documents. Document imaging for capturing, transforming and managing images of paper documents. Records management for long-term archiving, automation of retention and compliance policies, and ensuring legal, regulatory and industry compliance. Workflow for supporting business processes, routing content, assigning work tasks and states, and creating audit trails. Web content management for controlling the content of a Web site through the use of specific management tools based on a core repository. It includes content creation functions, such as templating, workflow and change management, and content deployment functions that deliver prepackaged or on-demand content to Web servers. Document-centric collaboration for document sharing and supporting project teams.

Though not explicitly identified as a core component, information access, or search, technology has always been a critical component of an ECM suite, and it will play an even bigger role in helping companies sift through structured and unstructured information. All ECM products ship with a search engine embedded as a core component, so that users can create a full-text index and search the content stored in repositories. Most ECM vendors re-license the search engine from another provider, typically Autonomy-Verity or Fast (see "Q&A: ECM and Information Access Technologies Grow Ever-More Entwined").

Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria

Evaluation Criteria

Vendor Strengths and Cautions

Interwoven

Interwoven has increasingly focused its strategy on being a best-of-breed content management vendor, with a strong message around Web-based and vertical-specific solutions.

Although Interwoven has all the core ECM capabilities and related components such as DAM, it delivers and emphasizes these as stand-alone offerings for different business scenarios. The suite is only loosely coupled, and cross-selling opportunities are limited.

Gartner believes that Interwoven's future lies in high-end WCM, analytics and marketing solutions. It can continue to carve out a successful position with its consistent marketing messages and Web-based solutions, but this won't be easy given the increasing competitive pressures and changing market dynamics. Interwoven must continue to penetrate the accounting, legal and professional services markets and expand into adjacent markets such as the government sector — otherwise, like others, it faces a stagnant future in the traditional document and records management arena.

Microsoft

More so than any other vendor, Microsoft has driven ECM market transformation with SharePoint 2007. Microsoft has brought BCS to the masses by bringing the cost per seat down and tying simple content management to the familiar desktop tools that users use every day.

With MOSS 2007, Microsoft provides an integrated product suite that provides at least basic capabilities in the six core ECM functional components, along with portal and search capabilities. The fact that it is built on the Microsoft stack will appeal to a broad range of organizations for whom Microsoft is a strategic partner.

While MOSS 2007 has attracted interest and gained some traction as a records management tool, a WCM solution and a platform for building CEVAs, it still has to mature in these areas.

Feedback regarding large, decentralized deployments of MOSS 2007 indicates a need for improvements in scalability and in management and replication functionality. Microsoft has begun providing tools and published guidance to address these challenges.

Microsoft must continue to ramp up support, training and partner certification as there is a clear "skills gap" between the demand SharePoint has created and the supply of well-trained implementation personnel.

Objective

Objective, an Australia-based vendor, has a strong vertical-market focus on the public sector in Asia/Pacific and Europe

The Objective suite, which has evolved through development rather than acquisition, is well-integrated and addresses the core ECM functional components.

Historically, Objective has delivered most professional services itself, rather than through partners. Recently, it has begun to establish relationships with major system integrators, but it needs to expand further and extend this partner channel.