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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.

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).

Autonomy’s growth has continued since then: in its third quarter of this year, announced in September, it posted sales of $127.1m, up 42%.

The great irony in all of this is that Lynch does not want Autonomy to be pigeon-holed as an enterprise search company.

IDC’s Feldman though says that, “At this point, it is clear that Autonomy should no longer be considered purely a search vendor. It builds search-based applications to answer market demands for better information-centric software.”

What does that mean? Autonomy’s website explains: “Autonomy's software powers the full spectrum of mission-critical enterprise applications including pan-enterprise search, proactive information risk management, information governance, e-discovery, consolidated archiving, call centre solutions, rich media management, security applications, customer relationship management (CRM), knowledge management (KM) and BPM [business process management].”

Lynch says Autonomy now has in the region of 500 OEM customers, writing applications that embed Autonomy’s Meaning-based Computing, or MBC. Their own software products rely on Autonomy’s pattern matching algorithms to extract ‘meaning’ from unstructured information.

One of the differentiators over its smaller rivals in the space – including Endeca, IBM (smaller in terms of search, at least), Google Enterprise, Simplexo, Sinequa, Recommind and many more – is the list of supported file types that can be handled by Autonomy’s IDOL platform. “By supporting more than 1,000 different data formats, including structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data, located across 400 different content repositories, Autonomy can search all categories of information repositories in an organization,” the company says.

This is a disaster. It removes the communications aspect of the wiki.

Alternatively, Kwizcom have a Sharepoint wiki which might do the trick (plus a free evaluation version). http://www.kwizcom.com/ProductPage.asp?ProductID=524&ProductSubNodeID=525

The top three on my list are Mediawiki, Confluence and SocialText. All of very INexpensive.Mediawiki is open source and free. We have not used open source software before, so it presents some new challenges.Confluence has a free download and a sharepoint connector.SocailText also has a SharePoint connector. The company is one of the thought leaders in wikis and social media.

I introduced Confluence in my previous job, and was very happy with it. However it's a challenge to maintain it with pure Windows point and click trained IT staff.

With Confluence, many many plug-ins and macros are available to present access to content on your web page.

Traction TeamPage has the feature you request (and then some) which is to send e-mail notification that shows the DIFF view of the old and new pages. You can fine tune which spaces you want to monitor at this level - and even fine tune it by author, tag or other search facility.

For categorizing any SharePoint items or documents cross-site based on centrally managed taxonomies and browse it by default navigation, category tree or A-Z directory you can use the Taxonomy Extension found at:http://www.sharepartxxl.com/products/taxonomy/default.aspx

Document management is all about workflow, control, and risk mitigation. Its objective is summarized perfectly by the two words in its name: "documents" and "management". It got its start in the legal departments of pharmaceutical companies, who were concerned to make sure that their companies were producing documentation in full compliance with regulatory requirements. A DMS thrives where there are a) documents already being created as part of a business process; and b) those documents need to be closely checked in, checked out, supervised, edited, approved, and stored following a consistent and audit-proof process.

Collaboration, by contrast, is all about people working together to share ideas, notes, questions, comments, etc. Collaboration does not typically follow a standard process; it is much more free-form and free-flowing. Documents are not typically the format of choice. Asking a question or creating a meeting agenda or to-do list doesn't require a document; it just requires typing some words and putting them where other people can see and edit them. That's why so many people simply fire off an email when they collaborate; it spares them the unnecessary step of creating a document.

When asked about the relationship between DMS and collaboration tools, what I said was that some of the content in a typical DMS really belongs there. These are the documents associated with highly regulated processes. But most of the content in a typical DMS--to-do lists, meeting notes, press clippings, conversations, working papers, personal observations--doesn't really belong there. It's in the DMS because there was no good place to put it. That's where a collaboration suite can do a much better job. A good collaboration suite can liberate that content from the tyranny of documents and nested folders, and will encourage people to use it for actual working materials.

In many cases, you will want to integrate the two. Law firms, for example, are absolutely dependent on their document management systems to manage their filings and other legal documents. But we're increasingly seeing them set up collaboration suites to capture all the discussion around the documents, how to use them, what they mean, and so on. The two systems are integrated with links from the collaboration suite into the corresponding DMS records.

What I'm saying amounts to this: Use your document management system to manage documents, and use your collaboration suite to collaborate.

unfortunately SocialText is not very good at linking to the documents in the obvious place (attachments).

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.

What Have Law Firms Done?

Even with these IT and KM investments in law firms, it seems the frustrations remain: I can't find anything. It takes too long to find what I need.

What is ‘The Answer'?

the focus of law firms over the last decade has been absolutely correct: to concentrate on people and processes through KM, and on new information technologies and tools through their IT budgets. But maybe there's a third prong that's been missing from this focus? The messy middle: the content assets, the actual information itself contained in documents, e-mails, web pages, blogs, journals, books, video and podcasts etc.

The huge investments for enterprise search - providing lawyer and legal information professional alike with a single search box sitting over multiple repositories and offices - have certainly seen great improvements in uncovering information within a law firm.

Developments out there on the Web in faceted search (e.g. filtering a search for cameras by brand, price and resolution) have begun to seep through the walls of our firms and organisations.

Enterprise search has started to uncover some of the mess that we didn't even know was there. As well as showing, rather too starkly, the mess that we haven't wanted to deal with over the years: the poor tagging of content with useful terms or even consistent terms across different repositories; the lack of rigorous info management processes to identify the valuable, useful and re-usable information, or equally, to identify the duplicate, out-of-date or inaccurate information.

law firms are now thinking and willing to invest in ways to actually clean and fix some of this information mess. Reviewing and improving a firm's Enterprise Information Architecture (or Firmwide IA) through an information housekeeping initiative is becoming a priority. What does that involve?

Well-defined and understood business rules and workflow for the firm's information and knowledge are essential components to Firmwide IA

Systems & Tools

Information & Information Architecture Assets

Governance

The benefits of investing in Firmwide IA and these four themes, may be broadly stated as:

What happens now?

Last year just 7 percent of librarians mostly or totally disagreed with recent decisions made regarding the library. This year the figure was 16 percent. Similarly, in 2008, a mere 3 percent were dissatisfied with their job. In 2009, 8 percent were unhappy.

One might think that the library's continued work in assisting marketing efforts -- 62 percent of respondents said the library is their firm's main source for marketing research -- might upset librarians trained to research statutes and legal issues. But the problem isn't the work, say several library chiefs; it's the recognition that comes with it. Or more often, doesn't come.

Still, librarians have become tougher, more successful negotiators when it comes to renewing contracts with publishers -- thanks in no small part to the metrics they get from new tracking software.

now there's commercially available tracking software -- like Onelog, from the U.K.-based company Info Technology Supply Ltd., and Advanced Productivity Software LookUp Precision.

A third package mentioned by some library chiefs was Research Monitor from Priory Solutions.

costs for electronic re­sources other than LexisNexis and Westlaw rose in 2008, with the average firm spending just over $1 million, compared to some $929,000 in 2007. (Lexis and Westlaw spending decreased slightly.)

it's no shock that more firms are starting to ask a question that, up until now, seemed almost blasphemous: Lexis or Westlaw? Last year just 12 percent of firms said they intended to move to a single-vendor strategy. This year, 31 percent did.

Multimillion-dollar knowledge management systems were something that more than a few firms invested in. Newer platforms, such as Microsoft SharePoint -- which five library chiefs praised as a tool that made their work easier and three more planned to launch in 2010 -- just do it better. "SharePoint lets us splice and dice pieces of information, creating all these little repositories without going through IT or ten years of programming," says one library head. "You want to create a database full of Madoff stuff? There, it's done. And anyone can access it through a Web browser."

Five other firms gave a shout-out to Ozmosys' eponymous service, which helps them provide personalized news delivery to users.

Debevoise started using Ozmosys last September. Since then, some 500 of the firm's 750 attorneys have signed up for the service.

The Full Survey: The Librarian's Expanding Role Electronic Resources Staffing Finances

Email is most often the channel that the wiki-wary fall back on during this kind of transition, and the most dangerous for locking knowledge into a recipient list.

Mashable () has also published two large round ups of available wiki software in the past year: 30+ Solutions to Start Your Own Wiki and 100+ More Wiki Tools and Resources.

"We probably over-invested in a platform that clearly didn't have the user base," said CTSi CEO Etienne Taylor.

The concept behind SuiteTwo was right, said Forrester Research analyst Oliver Young. Companies are adopting blogs, wikis, enterprise RSS and other Web 2.0 technologies to improve collaboration and communication among their employees, partners and customers. "The market has moved in that direction pretty aggressively," he said.

"The problem with SuiteTwo wasn't the idea. The problem was the execution. They were trying to cobble together products from five or six independent companies, and it never looked like anything more than a bunch of applications that were duck-taped together," Young said.

While SuiteTwo failed to gain traction, vendor partners like NewsGator and Socialtext noticed that demand for a suite like that was real and expanded their own offerings beyond their niche areas to offer more comprehensive collaboration and communication functionality.

Ironically, Intel still seems interested in Enterprise 2.0, judging by a demo of a workplace social-networking system that its CEO, Paul Otellini, gave in November at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, two years after SuiteTwo's introduction. The demoed system included Web-based enterprise collaboration tools for social networking, blogging, wikis, online meetings and syndicated feeds.

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.

The keyword method has been very useful to-date, especially when searching within large structured databases. It allows users to search by date, location, category, etc., to come up with useful results.

The problem with keyword searching is the expanding mass of unstructured information we now have. Keyword searching has become inadequate and at times counter productive to finding the right information quickly and affordably.

Concept search is one method for solving this problem. My definition: The ability to extract structure from unstructured data.

Concept searching is just coming into the market, with players like Recommind, Autonomy and Collexis. As an emerging technology, the challenge is good implementation. Companies and firms are attacking this problem now, so I would expect this challenge to diminish over time.

Semantic search is truly Web 3.0. Sir Tim suggested this concept over a decade ago and now efforts are under way to make it a reality. My definition: Attach meaning to each piece of data. In practice this means describing each piece of information by its relationship to another piece. In the geek world this is referred to as “subject, predicate, object” and is defined with a standard called RDF (more on that in another post).

In fact in this environment the machine can discover knowledge. By connecting all the triples via their relationships, the machine will answer questions we never ask.

Semantic search currently lives mostly in the minds of geeks and venture capitalists (with some exceptions).

There were wikis for different practice groups and they were searchable.

Their early success created a big demand. Every group wanted wikis. Updating was given to assistants, clerks & associates. However the technology was not perfect. You had to sign on separately for each wiki and they were creating silos of information. To solve this issue they looked at a number of enterprise tools and found most too feature rich and complex for lawyers to use them.

They went with Thought Farmer for its simplicity and ease of interface. (see my review - ThoughtFarmer – Intranet 2.0). It has Web 2.0 features – staff profile, tagging, RSS, social networking, email publishing, - also search with relevancy ranking.

The presenter’s thoughts on lessons learned include: select an easy to use tool, do not force participation, transfer the process of updating to groups and develop a process for each group. You should also offer training and share success stories. They held individual training in 10 to 15 minute sessions.

They have found that not all users will be active contributors and the ROI is hard to measure. The tool should also be more Blackberry friendly. However, overall it seems to be a great success.

"Enterprise RSS": It's A Middleware Decision

Social Analytics: Redefining Business Intelligence

Enterprise 2.0: Long-term Issues

Enterprise 2.0: Vendors To Watch (alpha order)

Jive: Perhaps the most successful "mini suite" in the market right now and a good option for organizations that don't want to commit to SharePoint and have reservations about IBM.

Telligent: Telligent could be the "Jive of 2009" given its latest release (which rounds out the features), its integration with SharePoint, and alignment with a Microsoft environment overall.

Enterprise 2.0: Open Source Efforts To Watch

Mindtouch: A vendor I hope more organizations consider - sound underling architecture that perhaps is over-branded as a wiki solution but is more of a mash-up server (kinda) based on a hypertext and service-oriented platform.

Alerts are another tool in your content control arsenal. Any wiki user may request an alert at the wiki or page level.

One aspect of SharePoint wikis that is not readily apparent is that each wiki page is a specially formatted Web-part page. As such, given the appropriate permissions, you can add your own Web parts to create a hybrid wiki page. At my firm we've used this trick, in conjunction with a custom workflow, to automatically add Web parts to each new wiki page as it is created

The adoption and use of wikis within law firms follows an evolutionary path from indifference to skepticism, to partial, then full adoption. The rate at which a firm moves along this adoption curve will depend both on how quickly legal professionals embrace the belief that collaborative authorship can efficiently produce high-quality reference materials, as well as how effectively technical professionals implement the tools for control and organization of the authorship process that lawyers demand.