Altien Blog

Is ECM the new ERP?

2007-02-28T16:56:00.000Z

Alan Pelz-Sharpe has made a thought-provoking post suggesting that the impact of ECM technologies on businesses will rival if not exceed the impact that ERP has had over the last twenty years, and consequently the market for ECM solutions has the potential to exceed that of ERP.

Alan points out that the really transformational impact of ERP came from the way it offered businesses best-practice mechanisms to reshape their back-office business processes, and it is this potential to change business processes for the better that will drive ECM adoption forward.
But what ERP recognized was that data centric processes were repeatable, that they were often inefficient and that many manual processes could be streamlined and automated. ERP and BPR went hand in hand.

ECM and the emergence of CEVA's (content enabled vertical applications) are really no different. In its early days, ECM was really just repository management, then structured content management, then it was repository management with a bit of compliance thrown in, and now increasingly it is process centric. It was the process centricity of ERP that lifted it, and it will be the process centricity (if such a word exists) of ECM that does the same for it.

I agree that “process centricity” is a rather uncomfortable phrase, but the point is well made: material productivity improvements necessarily come from changing the way people work, and that means changing their business processes.

Now as everyone knows, changing the way people work is never easy. And if you are a project manager and your starting pointing is an IT toolkit and the question “how would you like to change the way you work?” you are facing an uphill struggle. This is why best-practice, embodied in off-the-shelf applications, is so valuable, because it overcomes scepticism and inertia. Alan references the term coined by Gartner of CEVA's (content enabled vertical applications, and in case this buzzword is new to you, here is what Gartner said about it last year:

CEVAs will manage content within the context of business processes better than straight content management applications or custom applications. To bring unstructured content under process control and to support compliance efforts, companies today spend a tremendous amount on writing custom code, ongoing development, maintenance andsupport — often in independent projects that lead to redundancy. (The cost of customapplications to handle unstructured content easily exceeds the total revenue of the ECM market at present.)

Gartner says it sees increasing demand for off-the-shelf ECM applications that bring best-practice to solve specific business problems, and that are built on common ECM platforms. These off-the-shelf applications can deliver faster implementations and lower ongoing maintenance costs and hence a better return-on-investment than custom development projects. And because they run on common shared ECM platforms, they enable organizations to consolidate their back-end systems and reduce datacenter costs as well.

Back to Alan’s comparison with ERP, he continues:

Where the difference will come is in scale, ECM will on the one hand ultimately dwarf ERP - simply in terms of data volumes (unstructured data volumes are rising at an order of magnitude higher than structured data volumes), but it will be less visible to the user - as in many respects ECM will simply take ERP and Business Apps in general to the next generation of sophistication, rather than displace them.

I agree completely about the scale of the opportunity, and the often quoted statistic that 90% of enterprise unstructured data still remains outside of any management system, reinforces the point that ECM efforts to date have only scratched the surface. And I also agree that it is the emergence of off-the-shelf ECM applications that will start to drive adoption further. However, regarding the scope and nature of these new ECM applications I partly agree and disagree.

Yes, I think that any current business applications that store content in a proprietary fashion will be re-architected to store their content in the market-leading ECM platforms. This will yield benefits to enterprises by improving information sharing, reducing redundancy and meeting their records management goals. Those established business applications won’t be displaced, although the transition to embracing ECM platforms will be disruptive and there will be opportunities for market share gains.

However, this is only part of the opportunity for ECM applications. ERP, and the other major established business application categories, CRM, SCM, HCM, are predominantly focused on automating transactions and streamlining back-office processes. They do not address the more complex, heterogenous work tasks and processes undertaken by the higher-value knowledge workers in the organization– the type of work that McKinsey terms “tacit interactions”.
Here is a quote from the 2006 McKinsey Quarterly article “Competitive advantage from better interactions” on this topic:

Companies boost their productivity by improving the efficiency of transformational activities (such as the extraction of raw materials) or of transactions (for instance, the work of the clerks in the accounts-payable function). But the productivity of marketing managers and lawyers can't be raised by standardizing their work or replacing them with machines…The old strategies for efficiency improvements don't apply to employees whose jobs mostly involve tacit interactions; instead, a company must boost these workers' productivity by making them more effective at what they do.

As for the role that IT can play, the article says:

Companies will increasingly need to deploy technology that makes shared data, information, and expertise available in real time; to offer decision support tools that help workers involved in tacit interactions create insights from data and analyses and that enhance the context and information that interactions require; to improve the ability of employees, customers, and suppliers to interact; and to offer effective collaboration tools for multiparty work flows.

Workflow does have a role to play in improving knowledge worker effectiveness but the jobs these people do are not essentially “process centric” and it is a very different challenge than automating insurance claim handling, or loan applications, or accounts-payable departments – the areas where so much ECM+BPM technology has been deployed in recent years. Applying workflow technology to tacit interactions will require more art than science, and a light touch. It is will need to be flexible, be capable of incremental introduction, put control in the hands of the knowledge workers, and above all, be immediately beneficial to their productivity as individuals – or they just won’t use it. This is workflow, but not as we know it.

This reminded me of what Peter Rip wrote last year on the then emerging concept of Enterprise 2.0:

This is why I think Enterprise Web 2.0 is different from Consumer Web 2.0. Enterprise’s have goals and structure. People around the Enterprise collaborate, but the collaboration is (supposed to be) undemocratic, i.e., ordered and non-chaotic. Ironically, this is not a new category. We used to call it Workflow and it was on the Known Quicksand Sector list at every VC firm, along with Middleware, Knowledge Management, and Enterprise Search. It was a Known Quicksand because no two implementations looked the same. Users couldn’t change the workflow to suit their needs. Users couldn’t automate the dozens of little tasks of collaboration that they do every week.
Despite being Known Quicksand, nearly every VC firm has placed a bet on workflow at one time or another. Why? Because the big Enterprise Apps automate you and me and we’re done. Automating the white space between us is the last untapped source of Big Win in the Enterprise.

So to my mind the opportunity for ECM applications has two main facets: content-enabling the existing transactional business applications, and new applications that address the white space of tacit interactions. And it is the latter that is the bigger market opportunity.

How big might that opportunity be? Well one way to look at it is in comparison to the market for database-driven applications. In my last post I made the comparison between the state of the ECM market today and the relational database market in the late ‘80s. It was the consolidation among database platform vendors and the adoption of the SQL standard that enabled the emergence of a whole wave of new database-driven enterprise applications – ERP, CRM, SCM, HCM etc.

In the ‘80s, forward thinking enterprises were already using database technology to develop custom solutions to improve their manufacturing processes, and to track customer and supplier data, but it was the move to common database platforms, that allowed independent software vendors to create their off-the-shelf best-practice applications. And of course the relationship between the applications and the platforms was very symbiotic. The platforms enabled the applications to be created, and customer demand for the applications accelerated adoption of the platforms.

Fifteen years later it is interesting to look at the relative size and shape of the database platform and applications markets. The database platform market is worth approximately $13 billion per annum and Oracle, IBM and Microsoft have 85% between them. The enterprise applications market is much more fragmented (IDC counts 3000+ vendors) but the aggregate revenue of enterprise applications vendors at $120 billion is almost ten times that of the database platforms on which they are built.

So what might the market for ECM applications be worth? If the market for ECM platforms is roughly $2.5 billion per annum now, could ECM applications become a $25 billion market in 10 years time? This would make it just larger than the ERP market. So maybe ECM will be the new ERP – but there is a long way to go.

A New Era for ECM

2006-11-04T17:02:00.000Z

I think that the second half of 2006 will come to be viewed as a tipping point for the ECM market. Analysts have been predicting vendor consolidation for many years, but it just didn’t happen. That is now changing fast. IBM’s acquisition of FileNet, Open Text’s acquisition of Hummingbird, and last week’s news that Oracle will acquire Stellent signal that the market is shifting into a new phase.

John Mancini, President of AIIM, rightly points out that the ECM industry is following a familiar economic pattern of consolidation, and that we are now entering the final stage when a handful of players achieve lasting dominance. So what will the market look like in the future? Economics tells us that three or four dominant players will likely take at least 80% of market. Many commentators have drawn parallels between the ECM market and the relational database market, and I agree that this is a valid comparison.

According to Gartner, in 2005 80% of the RDBMS market was shared by three vendors – Oracle, IBM and Microsoft. In 2005 80% of the ECM market was shared between eleven vendors. Following the closure of the deals mentioned above, the number is down to nine (Oracle wasn’t in the top eleven). Using last year’s numbers, IBM + FileNet is now the clear market leader with ~26% share, OpenText + Hummingbird is second with ~20%, EMC is third with ~13% and the rest (Interwoven, Vignette, Oracle/Stellent, Mobius, Hyland and Microsoft) are in mid to low single digits.

Of course the relationship between the ECM market and RDBMS market is more complicated than a simple analogy. At one level, today’s ECM server engines are just relational database applications, albeit some of the most sophisticated such applications in the enterprise landscape. Alan Pelz-Sharpe wrote an excellent piece earlier this year on CMSWatch about the future of ECM in which he supported the opinion that “the database vendors will in future own the repository”. The database vendors undoubtedly have a technical and marketing advantage. IBM and Oracle have already shown through their acquisitions that they getting serious about trying to dominate the market. Microsoft is finally getting serious about ECM with the launch of Office 2007 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. Also, the decision to pull the long (long) anticipated relational file system WinFS out of the desktop operating system, and to repurpose the core technology into a future release of SQL Server, shows where their long term vision lies.

So it seems probable that we will end up with three or four dominant ECM platforms. Does this mean the end of innovation in ECM? I think the answer is absolutely the opposite.

John Newton of Alfresco wrote very eloquently in September about the Commoditization of ECM. He argues that despite many false starts, standardization will now come to ECM, largely because it is now in the interests of the major platform players to accelerate it.

“The scene is set for real standardization in content management and commoditization to the point of real replacement and swap out of existing systems. The environment is very similar to that found when the database market first standardized through SQL-89 and SQL-92. This was basis upon which the smaller players in DBMS disappeared and the new era of client-server and ultimately the web appeared. The changes in the ECM market can be just as profound.”

As an aside I would say that Alfresco has an excellent chance to emerge as a major ECM platform player. The open source model had not evolved at the time that the RDBMS market entered its end-game phase. Despite this MySQL has emerged as a significant force. Alfresco is well positioned as the ECM market is just entering the end-game and it will be fascinating to see how it disrupts the market.

Standards such as JSR-170, its upcoming successor JSR-283, and the iECM initiative from AIIM, promise to deliver true interoperability across ECM platforms. It is my belief that this process of standardization, together with the ongoing process of platform-vendor consolidation will actually enable a flourishing of new content-centric applications, which will transform the market landscape.

Why? Well to start with, the market opportunity remains enormous. Analysts frequently state that 80% of the world’s data is unstructured and that only 5-10% of that unstructured content resides today in a content management system. Last year the RDBMS market was worth ~$13bn while the ECM market was ~$2.5bn. I know several customers that have a vision for “total ECM” but none that have actually delivered it. That gap will only be closed by new applications that address the myriad use-cases around unstructured content. It is inconceivable that a single vendor could address this entire market effectively: a single platform yes, all the applications no.

The second point is that until now it has been nigh impossible for a developer of content-centric applications to address the market effectively. The lack of standards and the fragmented market meant that supporting one or maybe two ECM platforms was the limit. The addressable market for a new content-centric application was thus pretty limited, and the ISV had the added headache of hoping they had backed the right platform horse. In the new world, an ISV can write their application once against an interface standard, or if they need platform functionality beyond the scope of the standard they will only need to work with a handful of platforms. At Altien we have already solved this problem by integrating ADM with IBM WebSphere® Information Integrator Content Edition (IICE) which provides a fully-functional bi-directional interface to all major ECM platforms.

And this issue looks pretty similar from a customer perspective. There must be a lot of anxiety right now among customers about what consolidation will mean - especially where they have built customized applications onto what might now become a defunct repository. Large software vendors are generally good at talking about supporting acquired platforms – but in practice, where there is overlap, one platform will be quietly starved of R&D, despite what the marketing rhetoric might say. Given all the uncertainty now about which platforms will survive, customers must be asking how they can best preserve their development investments. The only real answer is for customers to start building ECM applications that are platform independent. With IICE, IBM has a unique piece of middleware that enables their customers to adopt this strategy today. For Hummingbird and Stellent users, the picture is less clear.

So what will these new content-centric applications look like? I think the scope is enormous but verticalized, business process centric applications looks like a big opportunity. I saw Forrester analyst Connie Moore present at the IBM IOD conference and one of her points was that the current major ECM players that weren’t going to win the platform battle would need to verticalize to survive.

I see another key trend converging with the ECM market in the form of Office 2.0. I recently attended the hugely positive Office 2.0 conference organized by Ismael Ghalimi of Intalio. In his wrap up blog post, Ismael refined his definition of Office 2.0 as follows:

"Office 2.0: Office productivity environment enabled by online services used through a Web browser. By storing data online and relying on applications provided as Web services, it fosters collaboration and extends mobility, while promoting a user-centric model that fuels innovation and increases productivity."

What I saw was a host of new companies that are trying to change the model of personal productivity applications that we have lived with for the past 20 years. Some of these applications are about new means of creating content, some are about new means of organizing, sharing and collaborating on content, and the best are using the technologies of the web to combine all of the above.

So are these applications ready for the enterprise? Ismael asks the question "Who is it for?" and answers as follows:

"Individual users and Very Small Businesses (VSB). On one hand, Office 2.0 is not ready for the enterprise, and it’s a good thing. Trying to make Office 2.0 work for the enterprise today will strip the concept off all the good things that make it interesting. The enterprise needs reliability, scalability and security, and such attributes take some time to implement."

He goes on to the make the valid point that Individual users and Very Small Businesses (VSB) represent a huge market opportunity, but ironically much of the debate at the conference was about how to penetrate the enterprise market.

To the attributes reliability, scalability and security I would add integration as a core requirement for enterprise-readiness. Large enterprises today are wrestling with the problems posed by the exponential growth of unstructured content and its fragmentation until multiple silos. The last thing they want is more silos. The integration of Office 2.0 applications into an ECM infrastructure would enable the delivery of all the enterprise-readiness criteria listed above.

And I think the enterprises are ready for these solutions. For a start, large enterprises have moved overwhelmingly in favour of web applications for almost all general business applications. And if you have a few thousand desktops to manage you know why. And second, knowledge worker productivity seems to be being thwarted by the current model, competition for talent is increasing, and organizations want to get more from their most valuable employees.

In summary, I am very optimistic about the prospects for ECM. Rather than representing a simple loss of choice for customers, ECM platform consolidation will provide new choices as it enables the development of a new generation of content-centric enterprise applications. We can already see glimpses of how these applications could dramatically transform knowledge worker productivity. I expect to see a wave of innovation in this market in the next few years. This is an important trend and one in which Altien will play its part.

Altien announces partnership with IBM & availability of ADM 6.0

2006-10-11T00:28:00.000Z

I am delighted to announce some major news about the future direction of Altien. Earlier in the year we signed a partnership agreement with IBM and ever since have been busily developing the next version of Altien Document Manager which is fully integrated with IBM WebSphere® Information Integrator Content Edition (IICE) You can see the official announcement here. We will be launching ADM 6.0 at the IBM Information On Demand 2006 conference next week.

By integrating ADM and IICE we have created a unique value proposition. A next-generation enterprise document management application that is independent of any ECM repository. Our customers can now implement a migration path toward a common ECM infrastructure and away from legacy repositories over time and without disrupting their users.

We have also posted a brief screencast showing ADM working across an IBM DB2 Content Manager repository and a FileNet P8 repository.

Now the annoucement is public I hope to have some more time for blogging. Certainly there have been some events in the last few months which are worthy of comment!

See Altien at the AIIM Expo 2006 in Philadelphia

2006-05-14T14:50:00.000Z

We are exhibiting at the AIIM Expo 2006 in Philadelphia from May 16-18th. Many thanks to FileNet for inviting us to exhibit on their stand. The FileNet stand is #1501 and is right in front of the main entrance to the expo hall so you can't miss it!

I will be giving a presentation on the FileNet stand entitled "Usabiliy Matters! See See how Ajax is changing the face of ECM" on Wednesday 17th at 12:30 and Thursday 18th at 11.45. We will also be giving product demonstrations throughout the expo. I look forward to seeing you there.

If users can't get productive with your application in minutes, it's history.

2006-05-10T15:27:00.000Z

Business Week recently published an interesting article "The Friendly Face of Business Software" on the increasing attention being given to the usability of enterprise applications. The real thrust of the article is that the success of on-demand vendors such as Salesforce & NetSuite vs. the traditional large enterprise software companies has been driven predominantly by the ease-of-use of their applications and the loyalty this generates with the business people that actually have to use them.

One quote that immediately stood out for me:

To really appreciate the change, consider just how frustrated the buyers of business software had been. Companies spent buckets of money in up-front costs, and then more dough getting that software to work. Even more galling for tech managers is the reality that a lot of people outside of, say, the accounting department, never bother to use the products because they're too geeky and complicated.

This sounds very familiar to the comments we hear from people that have rolled out unsuccessful ECM systems. With the exception of heads-down workers using imaging & workflow apps for things like claims handling or accounts payable, who basically have no choice, getting information workers to engage with ECM has proved to be desperately difficult.

The article also touches on the reason why the big software companies have been so wrong-footed in the last year, and I agree with it.

Good design is becoming more than a nice-to-have feature. Thanks to slick Web sites like Amazon.com, people are coming to expect software that takes no or little training to use.

The Ajax revolution in the consumer web market has simply raised the expectations people have of their business software. It's worth clarifying that we are talking about browser-based software. Starting in the late-nineties, there has been a wholesale shift in large organizations to web apps. The last statistic I saw was from Gartner who estimated that in 2003, 70% of corporate application development was already web-based. The rationale for this was all about saving deployment costs and the drivers of the change were the IS folks who were responding to the leaner budgets of those times. (Great story about an unusable expense-reporting web app that delivered its ROI by deterring the filing of expense claims here...) . However the pendulum undoubtedly swung too far hence the new drive for usability & productivity.

Phil Wainewright at ZDNet blogged on the Business Week article, and in my view summed up the situation better than the original:

The debate is nothing to do with hosted versus on-premise. It's about a completely different philosophy of building applications that people just use, and love using. There was a time when software developers aspired to build the next big infrastructure play. Many of them still do. But now the future is in the long-neglected backwater of usability. If users can't get productive with your application in minutes, it's history.

I completely agree with this, except to say that usability isn't just about getting productive in the first few minutes. Sure, an application needs to be simple & easy-to-learn to get people started. The bigger challenge, however, is to make an application that is efficient so that as people need to use it more and more they don't become frustrated. This is particularly true of ECM where people's need to interact with the system grows in relation to the committment of others and the value of the content being put into the system. ECM projects don't tend to fail at the outset - there is always a honeymoon period - the problems tend to come later.

Efficiency is hard to achieve with traditional server-side, page-centric web application techniques. There are just too many clicks and screen refreshes. Ajax can make a tremendous difference.

Why you need a Web Office

2006-02-28T13:35:00.000Z

There is an interesting post by Richard MacManus at ZDNet on the potential benefits of web based Office applications. He in turn cites a whitepaper by Rod Boothby, a Manager with Ernst & Young's Financial Services Advisory practice. The whitepaper is subtitled "The Next Wave in Productivity Tools" and is well worth reading.

In discussing the collaborative benefits of Web Office, MacManus focuses on a very familiar scenario:

Ever tried to email a Word document to 10 of your colleagues and then keep track of changes or suggested changes? Most of us have been through that frustrating experience - it ends up as a huge and messy email thread. It's even worse if you try to use Microsoft Word's horrendous version tracking feature (all that crossed out red type makes it very hard to read).

As an aside, the last point was precisely why we developed integrations with Workshare. Our integration with the Workshare Compare Web Service gives clear comparison of any two Word documents simply in a browser window and independently of Microsoft's built-in version tracking functionality. To see how this works take a look at the "Versioning & Workshare" screencast here ).

Back to the main point, MacManus continues to paint his vision of a more productive future:

Imagine being able to view the latest version of a collaborative Word document, via your browser window. Instead of using emails to discuss the document, it's all done in one place - the URL of your online Word document. All changes are neatly tracked and versioned. Collaboration is happening, because there's a single point of reference on the Web - and it's not email!

The main benefits that MacManus identifies for a web-based word processor have nothing to do with word processing per se. The benefits are that the document is held centrally, is controlled, and is referenced via a URL. What struck me when reading this was that a browser-based ECM interface (like Altien Document Manager)provides exactly these benefits today.

These benefits are also independent of whether your application is internal or external to the organization - it is just using the technologies of the web browser. Web interfaces to enterprise applications have an obvious benefit in terms of deployment cost, but for ECM the impact is more profound because of the "linkability" web technology provides.

In ADM we provide a range of URL linking options: to individual documents or specific versions, to multiple document sets, to folders, to stored searches and search templates. End-users simply have to right click on the object they wish to link to and can then paste the appropriate URL into another document, web page or email. We also offer a dynamic search URL which allows parameters to be passed on the query string so developers can easily integrate with other applications or portals.

I don't want to get into the whole "turning data into information" cliche, but we have found this type of simple, flexible URL linking to be a very useful tool in enabling organizationss to gain greater value from their ECM systems.

One final point. Most of the comments on the MacManus post were negative in tone and concentrated on the typical doubts raised about SaaS - availability, performance, security etc. It seems to me that the value of browser-based Office-type tools should be considered separately from the value of SaaS. In my opinion, the kind of large enterprises we talk to would be interested in deploying browser-based applications of this sort today, but would not yet consider SaaS. For one thing they are presently deploying ECM systems to try and control the mass of unstructured content in their organizations and the last thing they need is a new external content silo. But this is a topic for another day.

The CM Pros debate on taxonomies

2006-01-11T19:18:00.000Z

On the TaxoTips website there is a set of videos recorded at the recent CM Pros Summit in which two taxonomy consultants, Theresa Regli of Molecular and Seth Earley of Earley & Associates, debate a number of taxonomy issues.

I thought the list of questions was well chosen to reflect many of the big up-front issues that organizations wrestle with when embarking on a content mangement project. I also really liked the format and was impressed by the ease with which both presenters were able to argue the alternative sides of each question. As they say in the intro, they can do this so well because these are arguments that they have had with their own clients many times.

Most interesting for me were items 8, 9 & 10 because they relate most closely to the issues concerning Altien's customers. The real conclusion of #8 "Can taxonomy development be managed as a project?" seems to be that when you are starting you need to run it as a project to get focus and involvement within the organization, but don't think you have ever finished. The taxonomy will inevitably need to evolve and only by recognizing this and actively working on it will the ongoing success of the content management system be ensured.

Most of Altien's customers have been doing document management for between five and ten years. Through this time they have really learned what works for their organizations and one thing that stands out is that they all now put serious effort into their taxonomies and the quality of the metadata in their systems. As one customer said to me a while back "you have to think of a DMS as a garden - if you don't look after it, it will get choked with weeds".

As the two presenters say in items 9 &10, there are tools that can play a part in this, but you cannot succeed without human intervention. The problem of course is that people and taxonomies don't always get along. If you make your taxonomy too granular and rigid, then you risk deterring users from adding their content at all. If you make the taxonomy too loose, you risk getting a patch of weeds.

In developing Altien Document Manager we have put a huge amount of effort into making the interaction between the user and the taxonomy as efficient as possible. We have customers in a wide range of industry sectors including Energy, Utilities, Telecoms, Financial Services and Government but one thing they have in common is that they all take the issues of taxonomy and metadata quality seriously.

New Altien Document Manager screencasts

2005-11-25T19:23:00.000Z

We have updated the demos section on our website with a new batch of screencasts which show a bit more of what ADM has to offer. The Topics covered are:

Introduction to ADM
Accelerate to FileNet P8
BPM Integration
ADM Application Integration
ADM Sync
Versioning & Workshare
Advanced Property Management

All feedback is welcome.

Security flaws and public web betas

2005-11-25T16:29:00.000Z

Following up on my previous post, events of the past week have shown a much more obvious reason for the missing security model in Google Base - it isn't secure even in its present state. Jim Ley first pointed out a cross-site scripting flaw last Wednesday: More Google security failures. CNET reported another error which allowed the sea of porn already uploaded to Google Base to bypass the Google SafeSearch filter (see Google fixes glitch that unleashed flood of porn). Apparently, both these issues were fixed quickly but I don't expect this to be the end of it and the publicity can only attract more hackers.

Jim Ley also made a very prescient post ten days before the Google Base launch ( Public betas risk all our data) in which he wrote:

There’s been a big increase in making all your website projects beta in public, however most companies seem to have decided this means they can avoid actually testing their product before they release it. It wouldn’t matter much if was Joe’s random web application, but it’s not these beta products share the same domains as existing heavily used sites. This means domains are trusted by users, but people are expecting something different, this means that both compromised site phishing attacks like I described when I demonstrated the Google flaw last year, and attacks on user data stored on the same domain become very easy for an attacker. I’m not a security consultant, I’ve no idea how to hack sites, I don’t go looking, but it’s trivial to find cross-site scripting (XSS) flaws in these beta’s, it’s almost too difficult to miss them, which is why I believe the public betas are getting so little testing that there are bound to me more.

There has undoubtedly been a big increase in public web betas, and also an increase in the duration of these betas (Gmail is still in beta almost 20 months after its launch). My first thought is that this must be a reaction to litigation risk, but looking at the Google Base terms of service I think they have this well covered! Nevertheless, flagging a service as beta should warn potential users of its weaknesses and help mitigate PR risk. If an unwitting user were to suffer because confidential data were exposed through using one of these beta services then public reaction is likely to say "it's a beta - you should have known what you were letting yourself in for".

I think this does raise a problem for the many Web 2.0 startups that should be emerging from their beta phases quite soon, unless they have deeper pockets than I imagine. Particularly in the web-based office space, once people start to pay for a service I expect they will want to use it to create content that is not public. I expect most of these companies will follow Google's Limitation of Liability clause:

YOU EXPRESSLY UNDERSTAND AND AGREE THAT GOOGLE SHALL NOT BE LIABLE TO YOU FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL OR EXEMPLARY DAMAGES.....RESULTING FROM.... (iii) UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS TO OR ALTERATION OF YOUR TRANSMISSIONS OR DATA

It remains to be seen whether concerns over security and consequent liability will hinder the development of these businesses and it probably won't until something really bad happens. However, it does reinforce my view that if you have developed a brilliant Ajax application which is attractive to businesses (rather than individuals) you will probably see a faster return if you offer an intranet deployable version as well as a hosted service version. Before its acquisition by Yahoo, Oddpost was pursuing both routes to market, although I have no idea if they had any success with the corporate deployable version. But this is a topic for another day.

Google Base has got us all guessing

2005-11-18T09:43:00.000Z

The covers have finally been taken off Google Base and there seems to be little consensus in the blogosphere on its likely impact. Some quite strong negative reaction (see Techcrunch Google Base Launched. Yuck. ) but mostly a wave of speculation.

Michael Parekh hits the nail on the head regarding the implications for Google's Search business and also neatly summarizes the way in which most commentators on GBase have reflected their own particular fixations:

To put in mainstream terms, Google Base is a Lego set for users to submit and categorize any kind of content that's important to them.

This makes Google Base kind of the elephant being described by blind-folded folks:
1. "It's Online Classifieds" and will go after Craigslist.
2. "It's Online shopping" and will go after eBay and Amazon.
4. "It's an Online repository for photos, music and videos" and will go after Flickr, iTunes and others.
5. "It's a way to tag content" and will go after del.icio.us and others.
6. "It's a way to to put resumes online" and will go after Monster, Indeed and others.
7. "It's a way to do online photos, music, videos, etc." and will
go after Flickr, iTunes, and others.
8. "It's a way to back into online databases, potentially word processors and spreadsheets", and so go after Microsoft.

I'm not sure what happened to item 3, and 4 and 7 are the same, but its number 8 that I think is significant (but then that's the closest to my particular fixation.) Google Base looks to me like the beginnings of a general purpose content management platform. As Phil Windley and others point out, what is missing is a simple, flexible API. Charlene Li at Forrester puts it well and looks to the longer-term implications:

But as comments to my original blog post on Google Base point out, just having the data isn't enough - you've got to be able to DO something with the data and no, just being able to search the information isn't nearly enough. And this is where I think Google is on to something very big. At its core, Google Base is just one very big database of highly structured information. I can't believe Google will just let it sit there, and instead, will develop APIs on which developers can build applications, in much the same way it allows them to create mash-ups around Google Maps. So rather than have to figure out, build, and maintain lots of different applications, Google will allow developers to access the information, on the condition that the applications be "Base enabled".

Does this sound familiar? Microsoft's Windows Live and Office Live are built on a similar premise (albeit sans database -- at least for now) where Microsoft supplies the backend infrastructure and hosting, some tools and data, and a place where developers can market their applications to users.

And in her conclusion she points to the issue that has been bugging me the most - why is there no security model in Google Base?

One last thought on Google Base - right now, anything I post to Base is public, but I may want to keep something private, or accessible to a specific social network. At some point, Google is going to have to allow users to set up these permissions, which adds a layer of complexity to searching. If I'm doing a search for a particular recipe, and I have permission to look at my extended family members' Base content, Google would have to parse out that information in real time. Not an easy feat, at least on the surface.

So why build a content management system with a rich(ish) metadata model but no security model? It seems like a really strange decision because these have always been the two fundamental components of content management. Sure, building an ECM-style, role-based, hierarchical security model that works at an item and container level might have been a bridge too far, but basic private/public flagging and a simple "invite to share" mechanism must be in their kitbag.

I think this omission is very deliberate. Part of the decision may come from the general restriction of functionality in this first release. This in itself is pretty cunning - put out a tool with limited functionality and little explanation and see what the market says you should do next. Given the 60,000+ blog entries generated so far they should have plenty of ideas!

I also feel the lack of security is somehow connected to Google's slant towards personal rather than enterprise applications because without controlled sharing, GBase is pretty useless for companies. However, it is OK for sole-traders to post their wares on GBase and this is one of the use cases suggested by Google themselves (and the root of the eBay killer palaver). So this could simply be another reflection of Google's rather hypocritical "Robin Hood" positioning.

The other thought that occurs to me (and which I feel is more probable) is that the launch of GBase has been carefully calculated. Google's stated aim is to "organize the world's information". If they had added the security model, GBase could have been presented as a ubiquitous and infinitely scalable store for all the unstructured content (private, shared & public) generated by individuals and enterprises. Because it has a metadata model, the content can actually be "organized" rather than simply found.

But what would the public reaction have been? Would you trust Google to look after the entire contents of your hard disk or company shared file servers? I'm sure plenty would but paranoia about Google's ultimate potential power is growing. Maybe a softly-softly approach is just what Google needs at present.

So what does GBase actually do today? My first impressions are that the interface is pretty clunky (although given that Altien's entire focus is on making user-interaction with content management systems as efficient as possible I admit to strong bias). For my first use case I tried to add the latest Altien Document Manager Brochure. I created a new Item Type "Brochure" and started adding attributes: Company, Product, Version etc. I added some "Labels" (what's wrong with tags?) and the URL to the PDF on our website. I then tried to Publish it but my content was "Disapproved" because "Altien" is a misspelling. We had this same problem when we started with Adwords. Obviously those dictionary extensions are not in GBase yet. So I appealed for review (pointing out that Altien is our company name and trademark). More than 24 hours later it is still "disapproved".

Not to be deterred I thought I'd follow one of the suggested use cases and add a "Product" entry. Unfortunately the only products I have that are not Altien branded are my children so I entered the details for my two year old daughter and this time I passed the thought police first time. So far no one has reported this as a bad item nor have I had any offers. Others have pointed out that GBase will be chock full of spam in no time. Maybe then we'll see the security model implemented.

Back from Vegas

2005-11-17T19:06:00.000Z

Just about recovered from last week in Vegas. I'd like to send a big thank you to everyone we met with - it was a great event and your feedback on ADM has given us a lot of confidence. Some of the Altiens liked Vegas so much they tried to disguise themselves in the hope I would let them stay.

Tuesday I gave a presentation at a UK government sponsored trade & industry event on IT SMEs exporting to the US. My main conclusion, which I doubt helped many there, was that you need to find an active, focused, relatively-small community you can connect with regularly (even if you have a decent marketing budget). That's what we found in the FileNet UserNet and we've met most of our US customers through the event in one way or another.

Launch of Altien Document Manager

2005-11-01T21:12:00.000Z

Today we made a major announcement - the launch of the Altien Document Manager suite. This includes significant enhancements to our existing products and some important new ones as well. This is the culmination of a year of hard work by everyone at Altien and it is an exciting time for the company. We will be giving presentations and demos of the new products at the FileNet UserNet conference in Las Vegas next week.

The other rather obvious piece of news is that we've started a blog. Please post a comment - it will make us feel loved.