"When we collaborate, we work jointly on an activity, toward a common goal," Byrne said. "When we network, it's really about connecting with others for its own sake – it's about the relationship. Also, this is about humanizing the digital experience. Much of our software, to date, has assumed we were autonomous robots working in a cube." Collaboration and networking can be very complementary – for example, networking often introduces people who will later become collaborators, he said.

What workers really want is an environment that allows them to switch smoothly between those two modes of interaction, Byrne said, but most products today are not equally strong in both. For example, Microsoft SharePoint is a strong (although not perfect) collaboration environment but a weak social networking tool. Yammer, in contrast, is almost all about social networking, even though it has expanded its features list, he said. "Yammer is fundamentally a microblogging program that happens to have a few other services."

"WordPress hasn't historically handled rich media and other digital assets in an intuitive way," so the theme customizer and related features is something "many users will appreciate," said Irina Guseva, an analyst for The Real Story Group analyst firm who covers the blogging platform, in an e-mail interview.

“It is called SoCloMo -- social cloud mobile -- it’s a three-in-one actually,” said Irina Guseva, who will be speaking at the conference. Guseva is a senior analyst at the Real Story Group in Olney, Md.

Guseva said the content management marketplace is changing and that vendors are developing products that are moving away from simply managing content for the Web. Increasingly they are managing content as well as the mobile and social media experiences people have as they work with content on the Web as well as other channels. Look for vendors to take more than baby steps in social media and develop more sophisticated capabilities.

“Based on past history, though, customers should not assume that the newly-acquired services will integrate with other SFDC platforms easily or soon. This will likely become a multi-year integration journey” Byrne said.

He added that customers should be careful not to place their social bet on a single vendor. Nor should customers walk away from their existing Marketing Automation investments. Facebook is an increasingly important channel, but one-to-one engagement (critical, for example in B2B scenarios) is comparatively more labor-intensive there than other channels. The key is to sustain a multichannel marketing strategy, and no vendor, including Salesforce, can claim a complete digital marketing suite.

Overall, the analysts seem to agree that its a pretty good move. Byrne said the price seemed high but it's a move that makes sense in the context of SFDC's recent social strategy.

Irina Guseva, an analyst with the Real Story Group agrees with Dallas about the market needing a more mature approach. "The cloud-based file sharing and sync marketplace is becoming increasingly crowded. It's the coolest kid on the block, but as any kid out there, it comes with significant levels of immaturity," she said.

She added, "Its purchase of Syncplicity could be a way of expanding EMC's cloud-based options in addition to the existing 'big brother' Atmos."

Tony will kick off the track with a pre-conference workshop, "Insider's Guide to Evaluating Architectures and Selecting Vendors." As a customer, you have more choices than ever, in terms of architectures, delivery and license models, functional breadth, and integration alternatives; this session will help you sort it all out.

For the conference itself, Kashyap Kompella leads off with "Social as a Layer, Not a Place: Are We There Yet?" This session critically assesses a emerging architectures that posit social and collaboration services as a layer (rather than a place) to apply over diverse workstreams within the enterprise.

Tony Byrne of Real Story Group thinks this is an interesting addition to CloudFront, but it will present some challenges in his view.

"Amazon is clearly taking on CDNs here, and that is a marketplace ripe for more competition, but customers need to remember that to take advantage of dynamic delivery their applications have to be AWS-enabled. Very few packaged applications are, today," he said.

He adds that Amazon is clearly hoping more developers will create native-AWS services that will leverage dynamic content. "And that is possible," he says, "but remains largely in the future." Byrne says it's also important to understand that traditional CDNs have a lot more experience in this area.

"CDNs have learned some hard lessons about dynamic content. Challenges like cache invalidation and editorial integration with a WCXM represent very hard problems. Amazon may find that they are not so easily abstracted," Byrne said. 

Every enterprise wants to succeed at "Enterprise 2.0", but industry research suggests that many initiatives remain experimental.

Irina Guseva, an analyst at the Real Story Group, puts CEM in the context of a larger web content management strategy. “In simple terms, CEM is a multi-channel strategy and practice with the goal of keeping customers happy. This strategy is supported by a set of tools that includes WCM, analytics, CRM, marketing automation, social media management (with things like sentiment analysis and big data intelligence).”

Guseva points out that despite many other plausible definitions, the challenge is not only in defining CEM, but in effectively implementing and practicing it.

One thing is clear though: It still comes back to content in the end. As Guseva puts it, “Content is still King. Context is the Queen.” That’s because providing content in context of what you know about the visitor is so important

Providing quality big data solutions, regardless of the data’s origin, plays into IBM’s plan to offer a comprehensive big data dashboard populated with plenty of cutting-edge elements, said analyst Matt Mullen, who follows the search marketplace for the Real Story Group. “Having a method of filtration or trust-building as one of those elements is eminently sensible if you see that as a big problem,” Mullen said. “All of us nerds love the business analytics side of big data, but IBM is addressing the issue of how practically this data is going to work to improve its clients’ businesses.”

Analyst Matt Mullen, who covers search for the Real Story Group isn't sure what IBM is trying to do with this purchase. He says, on the surface it appears to be about Big Data, but when you read the release carefully, there is something else.

"On the face of it, what IBM has done is acquire a nice bit of technology that has proven to be pretty good at federated search. This is in itself not really that big a news story, until you factor in the bracketing of this as being related to buzzword du jour: 'Big Data,'" Mullen said.

But Mullen later says he sees IBM using the technology to cull smaller data sets, which is a bit confusing.

"While I understand this process, it leads me to still have a couple of questions about this strategy; Isn't the point of Big Data that it purports to allow you to analyze data sets at a magnitude that wasn't previously possible? [Yet] Vivisimo is to be employed to build reduced data sets prior to Big Data analysis? Has IBM just invented 'Slightly Smaller (and maybe better quality) Data'?" Mullen asked.

Matt Mullen, who covers search for Real Story Group doesn't think it's necessarily a big threat to enterprise search vendors, at least not yet, and he believes it could require more work than Amazon claims. "First impressions is that it is a set of basic search functionality for public facing documents, suited to relatively tech-savvy small and medium enterprises," Mullen said.

Getting into the technical details a bit, at least based on Amazon's description of the service, Mullen said it could require a fair amount of work to prepare the documents for the service. Although, that could be said about a lot of search products--but not all products are claiming you can be up and running in an hour.

Alan Pelz-Sharpe, principal analyst at The Real Story Group, told El Reg: "I can't say I was too impressed. Getting a web app connected to what essentially is a spreadsheet in four weeks is fine, but this should never have gone live at this stage."

"It's the quality and veracity of the information delivered that matters most. That information is nowhere near ready for consumption right now."

Alan Pelz-Sharpe, analyst at Real Story Group said: "From what I can gather 250 firms submitted information on a total of 1500 services they could deliver to the public sector, and all of them have gotten duly listed on the site. That was the first red flag, and indeed further investigation reveals that as of now not one of those services has been tested or certified in any way at all; the claims have just been taken as verbatim. Even so, Cloudstore allows you to circumvent thorough tendering processes through the Official Journal of the European Community (OJEC), yet cannot guarantee whatsoever the quality or fit of the services it promotes."

As we all know, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, so when you attempt to reduce duplication across systems in IT, you have to keep this in mind.

We’ve all seen through departmental purchases or sprawl or mergers and acquisitions, companies can be saddled with a dozen content management systems, multiple customer relationship management packages and so forth. What’s more, when users get frustrated by overly complex enterprise software, they sometimes take matters into their own hands and use simpler cloud services instead.

What’s an IT Pro to do?

This morning on Twitter, Alan Pelz Sharpe from the Real Story Group suggested that consolidation might not be as clear cut as you might think, and in fact, even if you sucessfully combined systems, what would stop them from proliferating willy-nilly all over again.

The enterprise content management and document management industries have turned the corner, according to Real Story Group principal Alan Pelz-Sharpe. CMS Wire talked to Pelz-Sharpe, whose group recently released its annual report on the enterprise content management industry. The growth and movement in the industry is going to bring some new trends for 2012 and on.

The Real Story Group published its annual report on the enterprise content management industry last week. We talked to Real Story Group (RSG) Principal Alan Pelz-Sharpe, who outlined some of the main findings and who argues that the industry has already passed a turning point which will result in some established and newer trends gaining ground in the year to come.

The first thing to be said, apart from the fact that it has turned a corner, is that the document management industry is growing, says Pelz-Sharpe. The RSG research shows that far from hitting the industry, the current recession has seen many enterprises sticking with traditional vendors.

Pelz-Sharpe also points to the level of activity in and around newer cloud-based offerings. Enterprises looking for solutions that provide efficiencies to carry out their business dealings with reduced work forces see the cloud-based offerings as one possible solution.

Despite all the hoopla surrounding Software as a Service (SaaS), organizations are taking the slow path to migrating to cloud web content management (WCM) systems, according to analysts, who say there’s more talk about the move than action.

“In general, there’s no big shift toward the cloud when it comes to WCM,” said Irina Guseva, an analyst with Real Story Group in Olney, Md. “I wouldn’t say companies are transitioning away from traditional on-premises software to the cloud even though the cloud has major impact, especially as it relates to open source software. It’s more of a complementary option for organizations, but the liftoff hasn’t happened.”

Like any SaaS software, cloud-based WCM promises advantages inherent in the delivery model, including quick time to deployment, reduced investment in hardware and infrastructure to run the system and the option for scaling to accommodate the ebbs and flows of business. While the ability to be up and running quickly is one of the more heralded aspects of cloud-based WCM, some experts say the ease-of-management promise has far greater appeal, as companies look for more efficient ways to administer and update burgeoning content stores to support a multichannel, global delivery strategy encompassing mobile, apps and the Web.