CMS Watch Trends and Features

Open Text - acquire or be acquired?
Fri, 4 Jul 2008 03:09:00
Open Text is back on the acquisition trail. The company announced Thursday that they had bought Spicer for $12m. Spicer is a document/file viewing tool vendor that markets "Imagenation," software that competes against the likes of Snowbound.

It's a logical enough addition to the panoply of content applications within the Open Text portfolio, and appears to have been bought at a bargain price. It's not exactly a game changer, but it does resurrect the question of Open Text's own future.

Acquire to grow and compete, or be acquired -- those are the current options. It seems likely that if Open Text itself does not get bought by HP, SAP, or Microsoft in the near future (the most likely bidders), then they will themselves acquire again, probably on a more ambitious basis. Now that they find themselves competing against giants like EMC, Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft it seems the only route to survive. Most likely in their sights is Interwoven, an acquisition that would bring near complete dominance in the Legal and Services sectors, along with some interesting new technologies in the bargain. I'll predict that one of these options -- big acquisition or get acquired -- is highly likely to occur in the next year.

But is Open Text really able to absorb so many counter-cultures and technology stacks? The firm has swallowed up rivals at a pace only Oracle could match -- but Open Text is not Oracle, and they simply do not have the resources to handle this kind of acquisition rate. Indeed many Open Text customers that we have interviewed for the ECM Suites Report regularly complain about disjointed and uneven support, confusing product roadmaps, and long-term concern about the future direction of the company. At the same time it's fair to also report that Open Text customers generally like the company and don't regret choosing them, but goodwill can only go so far.

With this small acquisition, Open Text has put itself back under the spotlight. The industry is again abuzz with rumors -- some of which may be true some of which may not. This remains a very uncertain time for buyers and partners alike.

White paper on SharePoint for public websites
Wed, 2 Jul 2008 11:07:00
We've critiqued SharePoint's rather awkward web publishing capabilities in different evaluation reports (on Web CMS tools and SharePoint itself). But we also see customers who seek to deploy SharePoint for their public websites, either because they want to experiment with the platform, or because the business side is being forced to use it (often under the misimpression that it will be "free").

The latter case is a bit ironic, because for years some enterprise web teams had to put up with bloated Web CMS tools from the likes of Documentum or IBM in a mistaken effort by IT to overreach and standardize on a single ECM supplier. Now we sometimes see IT throwing SharePoint over the wall to the business as almost a kind of abdication of any involvement.

But using SharePoint for traditional web publishing is not a trivial undertaking. If you go that route, I'll commend you to a very useful white paper published by our partners at J. Boye, which offers some best practices in deploying SharePoint for web publishing. If you've already decided to take the plunge (or someone has decided for you), "Best Practices for Using SharePoint for Public Websites - A Business Person's Guide" can help you sort out how you should (and should not) proceed.

Some of the advice is germane to any web publishing automation effort, but that's exactly the point: whatever its unique particularities, employing SharePoint does not suspend the need for essential project management. If anything, the complexity of the platform and array of implementation choices puts a premium on dotting your i's and crossing your t's.

Enterprise Social Software Evaluations available for download
Sat, 28 Jun 2008 09:04:00
The Enterprise Social Software Report 2008: Networking & Collaboration Within and Beyond the Enterprise has now been officially published and is available for download.

The report evaluates 20 Social Software vendors against eleven common scenarios, with 250 product screenshots across 450 pages.

If you are a previous CMS Watch customer, check your in-box for a message offering a discount on this new report. Contact us with any questions or feedback.

ECM buying tips from the experts
Fri, 27 Jun 2008 14:35:00
This past week I had the pleasure of keynoting at the DocTrain event in Indianapolis (held at the truly magnificent Union Station venue), and also running a small session on "How to procure Content Technologies." I have been running these small sessions for a long while now and they tend to prove very popular, and though I have been doing this for years, there are always new tricks to be added to the bag.

At the end of this particular session I chatted with the head of a leading US ECM integrator (who wishes for good reason to remain anonymous!) who said he liked the session but would have added two key points.

Never buy at the end of a quarter

Avoid ELA's (Enterprise License Agreements)

And he is quite right -- and anyone who attends these sessions in future will be sure to be reminded of these key lessons.

First, when it gets close to the end of the quarter, vendors sales staff are desperate to boost and close any outstanding deals. Theoretically this puts you the buyer into a strong position. Theoretically you have maximum leverage. But theory is not the same as practice. Just as I would not go into the ring against Mike Tyson, you should likewise recognize that against an experienced account executive from EMC, IBM, Oracle, or any other ECM vendor, you are way out of your league. The great deal you negotiate -- for example the 300 extra seats you got for the price of 150 -- may not seem such a bargain in the long term. When prices drop, the next major upgrade is announced or you simply find them sitting on the shelf racking up maintenance costs. Buy what you need, no more, and stay away from Account Execs when they are trying to close out the quarter.

Likewise my friend makes a very good point about ELA's (particularly popular in large ECM and Archiving deals). These license schemes have been driven in part by the demand of large enterprise who in the past have bought modular licenses and found themselves stiffed when they need yet more modules at every turn. "Oh no madam, you don't have workflow as part of that deal....or frankly anything you need to make that system I bought you operable, you will have to buy more appropriate licenses from me." ELAs seem to make a great deal of sense, since you get everything for a single price.

But they bite in two unexpected ways. One, the ELA almost certainly excludes some vital component that you will only find in the fine print once it's too late. Secondly and potentially more serious: once you have signed an ELA, no matter how big the deal, you are no longer of any interest to the vendor sales team, who have moved on to the next client. I can personally attest to watching a deal worth over $20 Million US get signed -- and watching the account exec leaving the building within 30 minutes, even though they were scheduled to remain for the next two days. Once you have signed an ELA you have lost any and all leverage with the vendor. Think hard about whether you want to be in that situation...

Legal ruling shakes up E-mail Archiving and Management Sector
Fri, 27 Jun 2008 11:49:00
The whole issue of (E-mail Archiving and Management) EAM has come under the spotlight recently - triggered by a ruling by the Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco - a ruling that touches on the Fourth Amendment "Protection from unreasonable search and seizure." In this particular case, plaintiffs argued that when employers read the content of text messages sent by their employees, text messages that were held by a hosted vendor (Arch Wireless), that the employees' fourth amendment privileges were breached. In other words that even though the employees were using company-paid messaging systems, that the employer should still respect their privacy and the confidential nature of personal message exchanges.

It's a ruling that could have a huge impact on the EAM market and in particular on vendors like Fortiva, Dell MessageOne and Google Postini, that all offer hosted SaaS EAM solutions. Why SaaS options in particular? Well the ruling states that employers (when using "outside" third-party text or e-mail services) cannot get access to employees' content without their permission first. The ruling is a bit hazy -- and may or may not apply if the mail and text servers are located on-premise. But regardless of whether this just applies to SaaS or both on and off premise solutions, just think the implications through for a moment -- the impact is potentially huge.

Since the ruling, the story has been picked up widely in the press - and as a result the popular verdict is clear - workplace mail is (for the time being at least) confidential. So how does this impact firms that are using EAM software to check up (snoop and breach confidentiality) on what employees are saying to one another? Where does it leave any employer when it comes to accessing employee messages in potentially legitimate business situations? Currently it leaves them between a rock and a hard place. There will likely be some exceptions to this for example those subject to FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act), i.e., potential terrorists. But for the average employee without murderous intent for now at least the law seems to be quite clear: in the United States your employer cannot assume access to your messages without your permission. And for EAM vendors they are in an even more invidious position -- rather like those shops at the mall that sell drug paraphernalia -- perfectly legal to possess, but use them as designed and you are in big trouble

It's clearly an area that will be debated ad-nauseum over the coming months. But regardless of the ultimate outcome, this ruling is a reminder to us all that technology and vendors do not set law, and are not exempt from it. EAM vendors cannot sell you a compliant system; there is no such thing. It's you the employer and buyer who either is or is not compliant with laws and regulations. And just because technology appears to have run ahead of itself here does not mean that the law will have to run to catch up. Rather it will be you the user and buyer who will have to control and adjust your usage of the technologies.

Fortiva acquired by Proofpoint - tread with caution
Fri, 27 Jun 2008 10:11:00
Fortiva, the Canadian SaaS vendor has been acquired by Proofpoint.

It's an interesting move for a couple of reasons. First and foremost the acquisition itself offers further evidence of a white hot market emerging. In the past year we have Dell, HP, Google, and Oracle all making bold moves into the space. But in this regard the acquisition by Proofpoint is a little unusual. Proofpoint, an e-mail security firm, is not a particularly large vendor; indeed it's quite small and is itself (like Fortiva) VC-backed. One start-up digesting another usually means the VCs see the attraction of beefing up an offering for acquisition or flotation.

So this acquisition unlike others we have seen recently does not mean that Fortiva has necessarily moved into stable hands. In some regards it suggests an "interesting" period ahead as investors pull together a unified company/offering. Clearly buyers need to get very comfortable about where things are headed before investing in a long-term vendor agreements. Hence we would have to caution buyers to tread carefully with Fortiva for the foreseeable future, a shame really as Fortiva certainly has some useful features, as we detailed in our evaluation of their service.

Best bets: a worst practice?
Thu, 26 Jun 2008 21:50:00

As one of the authors of our Enterprise Search Report 2008, I've been spending a lot of time lately looking at search technology and talking to folks who care deeply about the subject (i.e., vendors and their customers).

One thing everyone seems to agree on is that providing relevant results to the user is a very hard problem indeed. People don't want to enter a few keywords and then get 10,000 hits on documents that contain those keywords, 9,999 of which might be irrelevant. They want pointers to the one or two documents that are relevant.

The signal-to-noise problem is so thorny that many enterprise search products include an optional feature known as "best bets." The idea is that certain very common searches should point to particular documents (or intranet pages) that are known, or presumed, to apply. Imagine that a lawyer working for a large legal firm logs into the company portal and searches on "poison pill." A thousand hits might come back, of which 990 are related to medications, allergic reactions, toxicity, malpractice, and so on, even though all the person was really looking for was a link to the company's "merger and acquisitions" resource page. ("Poison pill" is a term for tactics a company can use to fend off hostile takeover attempts.) The idea of "best bets" is that you rig the system to promote the company's "M&A resources" link to the top of the hit list whenever someone does a search on "poison pill."

Sometimes "best bets" refers to presenting the user with a recommendation when, say, several repositories exist, one or more of which could be better-suited to a given search than the others. ("Would you like to search the Parts Catalog for this?") This is more of a navigational scenario. That's not really what I'm talking about here. I'm talking about  the practice of biasing search results by hard-coding certain answers to certain common queries.

Setting up "best bets" is typically a manual process. A person in IT will use search analytics to determine the most common search queries and the most-followed links associated with them. Then those associations will be captured in a database and wired into the search software in such a way that when a user issues a query for which a best bet already exists, the best-bet link(s) will automatically be shown at the top of the results page (either as a regular hit or under a separate heading of "Best Bets").

Not everyone thinks the "best bets" mechanism is a good idea. The problem is that, fundamentally, it's a hack. It's arguably the worst kind of hack in that it involves serious amounts of human intervention. Someone has to create the best-bet database. (Typically there will be hundreds, if not thousands, of best-bet links.) Then the database has to be updated and kept fresh as user needs change and documents are added to or dropped from the system.

In point of fact, the search software should do all this for you. After all, that's its job: to return relevant results (automatically) in response to queries. Why would you sink tens (or hundreds) of thousands of dollars into an enterprise search system only to override it with a manually assembled collection of point-hacks?

Sure, search is a hard problem. But if your search system is so poor at delivering relevant results that it can't figure out what your users need without someone in IT explicitly telling it the answer, maybe you should search for a new search vendor. (And for help with that, see Enterprise Search Report 2008, a free sample of which is available right here.)

DAM vendors coming up short
Wed, 25 Jun 2008 00:02:00
As the Henry Stewart Digital Asset Management Symposium kicks off in London, we comment in today's press release on a few areas where DAM vendors are coming up short, based on our recent research for The Digital & Media Asset Management Report 2008.

In our interviews with customers, many lamented their investments in DAM systems failed to meet their needs for workflow and rights management. My fellow analyst Kas Thomas and I were often surprised to find that what many vendors call a workflow application is no more than a thread of e-mails. You can read more details in the release, and of course, our DAM Report.

JSR 286: The last portlet standard?
Tue, 24 Jun 2008 10:46:00
The final release of the updated portlet specification, JSR 286, which came out earlier this month, marked the end of a long process for the important (Java) portal standard.

As a follow-up to the widely-adopted JSR 168, this portlet specification 2.0 moves to make portals more like integrated apps and less like collections of disconnected windows. Specifically it adds support for events, public render parameters, resource serving, and a portlet filter.

Some vendors like eXo, IBM, JBoss and Liferay have already been supporting earlier iterations of the standard and two years ago, I commented that most commercial portal vendors are behind this new portlet standard. While this is still the case, many significant changes have happened in the marketplace since the initial draft of JSR 286 in August 2006.

Jason E. Shao from the CampusEAI Consortium asks in a blog whether the next generation portlet specification really matters and over at the TheServerSide.COM you can find a healthy discussion on the final spec release.

Standards generally go missing in this marketplace, but judging from the very limited attention this new version of the portlet spec has received, it makes me wonder whether the marketplace has already left the need for it in the dust. As a buyer the new industry standard might seem the preferred option over the many proprietary implementations that build on the shortcomings of JSR 168, but make sure to study the emerging implementations of the new standard carefully to avoid an early mover disadvantage.

Migrating from HBX to Omniture
Tue, 24 Jun 2008 00:50:00
Web Analytics Report readers know that one of the biggest issues about Omniture SiteCatalyst is the complexity of the implementation. Former HBX customers (now part of the Omniture stable) are finding that SiteCatalyst is a significantly different tool because of the amount of customizations required.

Migration becomes a double-edges sword: you can get more functionality, but you have to work harder at it, and you may lose out on some of the things you liked about HBX, such as tagless campaigns. Although I hear reports of HBX customers leaving Omniture forCoremetrics' and WebTrends, there still seems to be a lot of interest in simply staying the course and enduring the migration.

As I've argued before, if you have a contract coming up for renewal, use this as an opportunity to check your requirements and test the waters.

However, if you want to go for the migration and you'd like to get a vendor-neutral take on how to deal with Omniture's ins and outs, I recommend taking a look at the Implementation Toolkit for SiteCatalyst published by Semphonic, the firm I work with. It's comprised of 6 parts: Implementation, Best Practices, Migrating from HBX to SiteCatalyst, SiteCatalyst Coding Standards for Flash, AJAX and DHTML, a Project Plan template and Functional Spec template. It's written for web analytics managers who are actively involved in HBX to SiteCatalyst migrations, SiteCatalyst administrators, and CMS managers and application developers who need to make sure that data is collected properly for Omniture SiteCatalyst.

As always, whether you plan to migrate or are considering another option, make sure you have figured out not only your metrics requirements, but whether stakeholders are actually using the data you're providing. I see too many situations where reports are simply thrown over the fence to stakeholders and they have to figure it all out on their own -- a waste of time and resources, whether you're using a free solution, like Google Analytics or Omniture.

Oracle's new plan to save you money
Mon, 23 Jun 2008 15:53:00
There's something vaguely Orwellian, at times, about the language that turns up in quarterly and annual reports (the kind U.S. public corporations are required to file with the Security and Exchange Commission). Remember the classic slogans from Orwell's 1984? War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

Perhaps we should now add, "Higher prices mean lower cost of ownership."

I'm reading a well-known software company's quarterly report dated April 1, 2008, wherein the following rather noble-sounding statements are made:

"We have focused on lowering the total cost of ownership of our software products by improving integration, decreasing installation times, lowering administration costs and improving the ease of use. Reducing the total cost of ownership of our products provides our customers with a higher return on their investment, which we believe will create more demand and provide us with a competitive advantage."

This comes from a company that many consider to be a master of extortionate pricing. And indeed, what makes the foregoing passage so Orwellian is that the company recently increased its prices across-the-board by an average of 15 percent. I'm talking, of course, about Oracle.

Prior to last week, Universal Content Management 10gR3 sold for $100K (plus $22K per year for maintenance and support). The same software is now $115K (plus $25,300/yr for maintenance and support). Note how the higher license engine pulls a bigger support caboose.

Oracle's BPEL Process Manager product was $50K before the price increase. It is now $60K.

The Event Driven Architecture Suite has gone from $60K to $70K.

Fusion Middleware adaptors that were $30K are now $34.5.

In fairness, many (perhaps most) of the products on Oracle's price list have acquired new features over the past year, and so one could argue that the price increases merely translate to "you get what you pay for."

On the other hand, software is an extraordinarily competitive business. Enterprise customers have ever-higher expectations as to feature richness, quality, and adherence to industry standards. In fact, some people (i.e., users of open-source software) expect to pay nothing for the bits and bytes, and only a modest amount for support.

Oracle isn't going in the pay-just-for-support direction, of course. New software licenses account for a third of Oracle's business. It intends to grow that side of the business, organically as well as through acquisitions -- including acquisitions of direct competitors. And guess who gets to foot the bill?

But don't worry. Remember, your total cost of ownership is going down. Well, at least it was going down, until your vendor recaptured the savings with higher license fees...

A Tale of Two Days at Web Content 2008
Mon, 23 Jun 2008 12:55:00
Here are some wrap-up thoughts from a couple of days at the Web Content 2008 conference in Chicago last week. I thought there was a fascinating dichotomy between days 1 and 2 of the conference (at least in the sessions that I attended.) I'm not sure if the conference organizers intentionally positioned the talks like this, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. Day 1 was a crash course in Web 2.0 offerings, with speakers exciting the sold-out crowd by talking about releasing control of your brand, letting users create your content, hypersyndication, and the new rules of marketing. Attendees left all fired up about the possibility of using Social Software in their enterprises.

Day 2, however, was a jarring jolt back to reality. The day began with Human Factors International's Jerome Nadel talking about the necessity of employing tried and true usability testing best practices, and then Welchman Consulting's Lisa Welchman claiming that Web 2.0 efforts will fail without employing governance practices through Web Operations Management. These keynotes were then followed by several presentations (including my own) on the pitfalls and trappings of any software selection and implementation endeavor.

So, the conference served as a microcosm for the state of the current Social Software industry. There is certainly fervor in the marketplace to adopt Social Software in the enterprise. However, we are seeing many enterprises quickly jump into the Social Software arena without performing the proper due diligence that they would with other enterprise software like Web Content Management, Enterprise Content Management, or Enterprise Search. Our research for The Enterprise Social Software Report 2008 showed that many early adopters of social software are encountering unforeseen pitfalls when implementing these tools, even as they reap obvious benefits as well. Lesson: do not lose sight of proper best practices when it comes to selecting, implementing, and managing social software.

I am a firm believer that Social Software is here to stay and can be extremely powerful within the enterprise. However, like any new technology, there is bound to be some growing pains. The extent of these pains will almost certainly be mitigated by how enterprises are able to apply the lessons learned from other content technologies. Social Software seems revolutionary, but many of the same rules apply.

More ECM acquisitions for Oracle
Mon, 23 Jun 2008 11:00:00
Oracle keeps moving down ECM trail with two new acquisitions to add to their growing portfolio. Both Skywire and AdminServer are specialist vendors who have developed niche offerings for the Insurance and general Financial Services sectors. Oracle have already seen some success in Insurance, but the acquired technology -- and just as importantly the domain expertise -- gives Oracle a bit more heft against EMC and IBM.

Of the two acquisitions, the Skywire one is the more interesting. Skywire provides multichannel, component-level publishing software. Though currently selling mainly into the Insurance sector, under Oracle's ownership this could expand into the much broader CCM marketplace.

As with any acquisition, the devil is in the detail. Oracle appears to have bought a couple of strong offerings, but integrating such small niche firms into the huge mass of Oracle is will be a challenge, as will porting the software into the UCM and Fusion stack. As always it will take some time before things settle and we really see how this will all work in practice, and as always you can rest assure we will continue to evaluate the progress in detail in our ECM Suites Report.

The value of archiving and the limitations of e-discovery
Thu, 19 Jun 2008 13:49:00
Today we read about yet another major financial scandal allegedly exposed through the discovery of an e-mail message from a fund principal that apparently stated that their fund was going to be"'toast."

The first thing I thought about this was that (if true) it was a fantastically stupid communication to put in an e-mail exchange. Secondly, I wondered why it took so long to find this mail -- surely such high-profile financial managers would have their mail exchanges monitored automatically and an exchange like this should have rung every major alarm bell in the firm within seconds. Of course they could have been using an external system to get around that; we don't know at present. But this case once more highlights the limitations of e-mail monitoring (discussed here the other day) and e-discovery, and conversely the value of content archiving.

E-discovery is in many regards simply glorified Enterprise Search technology, but with the added ability to apply legal holds to data. Just as Enterprise Search is limited by the quality and location of the content it indexes, so too are e-discovery tools. Though in the case of e-discovery the limitations are often more severe: evidence may or may not be conveniently located in an e-mail message, as seems to be the case at Bear Stearns. More commonly evidence has to be culled from not only e-mail stores, but also from instant messaging systems, document systems, ERP systems, financial and business applications, external drives, and so on. The idea that e-discovery is limited to mail -- as many vendors (and worryingly many buyers) seem to think -- is naive in the extreme. Yet this misplaced belief is based on the reality that the bulk of the data you will have to search will indeed be mail. Mail represents the largest form of data in any organization, typically by an order of magnitude (10x) or more.

But here's the rub. Most of that e-mail mountain consists of redundant data or as the technical terms goes, "crap." As we discuss at length in our E-mail Archiving & Management Report, typically 80% of mail data consists of a duplication. Yet any search tool has to treat each piece of data equally, slowing the process down massively and shooting discovery costs through the roof. How much more sensible to use an archiving method to capture, filter, and reduce that volume -- and ease the burden and cost of discovery?

What did we learn today from the Bear Stearns scandal? Not much really, other than mail (and messages) continue to the be the key "gotcha" elements of the data mountain, and that we need to monitor and manage them ever more closely. Though the monitoring elements are far from mature, EAM tools today archive and filter very efficiently indeed. The need to take mail and mail content seriously is now an imperative, and building a strategy, agreeing methods and policies, and selecting the right tools -- however complex -- is a must.

Web CMS Thoughts from Gilbane Day One
Thu, 19 Jun 2008 10:48:00
After participating in the first day of the Gilbane San Francisco conference yesterday, here some short observations in no particular order.

By my count, once-little Ektron has seen four years of hyper-growth. The company says they now have 200 employees. If accurate, I'll guess this head-count puts them at about US$30-40m in revenues, which sizes Ektron in the ball-park of some of the larger standalone Web CMS vendors (like FatWire, or Tridion before the SDL acquisition), or even the CMS product groups of some larger vendors. You're probably not surprised to hear that Ektron customers tell us this growth has not come without associated growth pains.

Forrester analyst Rob Koplowitz, who once worked on SharePoint Portal Server 2003 at Microsoft, called the MOSS 2007 platform a "collection of festering boils." You can ask him for clarification, but he seems to have meant it with love...

Speaking of SharePoint, two channel partners told me that their local Microsoft reps were marketing MOSS for public websites really hard. Evidently Redmond wants to beat the rap that the tool is not ideal for public-facing sites, and doubtless would like to lengthen this customer list. So the integrators are asking themselves, "when Microsoft hands us a great lead to follow, how can we have a candid conversation with the prospect about their real alternatives?" Not a new story in the channel business, but a pressing one right now, and you the buyer should understand the institutional dynamics. See, this presents you a bit of a dilemma as well: ideally you'd find a vendor-neutral consultant to help you sort out your choices, but if MOSS wins your competition in the end, you really want to go with a partner who brings very deep skills in Web Publishing in SharePoint, because it's not a simple beast. If Redmond keeps pushing its partners, then "vendor neutral with very deep SharePoint skills" could become an oxymoron.

If the exhibit hall is any indication, the Web CMS marketplace continues to expand, especially at the lower end -- perhaps dispelling the myth of a SharePoint steamroller, at least in this space. Smaller vendors here -- some of whom have participated for multiple events now -- include Acumium, Bridgeline, Broadchoice, Hippo, Telerik, and The Level, plus many of the other usual suspects we cover in our Web CMS Report 2008.

Of course, exhibitors come and go from year to year. One thing doesn't change though. Despite all the talk about Web 2.0, a lot of customers bring some very basic questions they want addressed about web publishing and CMS tools. I hope I can answer some of them at my tutorial tomorrow.

Web CMS versus Social Software?
Wed, 18 Jun 2008 10:10:00
People frequently ask me about where their Web Publishing efforts should end and Social Software begin. Like so many things, the answer is, "it depends." For example, one important question is whether you are talking about intranets versus a public site, which will likely exhibit very different interaction and security models.

I can certainly understand the confusion. Our recent research on Web CMS and Enterprise Social Software suggests a definite overlap from a tools perspective. But our research also found most Web CMS tools coming up short when it comes to deeper forms of Social Networking and Collaboration. (See today's press release for more details).

Meanwhile, most Social Software tools lack -- in some cases deliberately lack -- the sort of heavier-duty systems and administrative services that you would want behind an enterprise website.

Some enthusiasts argue that multidimensional platforms (like Drupal or SharePoint, to name just two) give you the best of both worlds. I disagree. But perhaps it's best to look at this less as a competition between two different types of software and more as distinct approaches to addressing two rather different objectives: one for enabling the publishing of "official" information, and the other supporting the creation and social interaction around unofficial content.

For most cases in most enterprises today, I think this means investing in two (or more) different types of tools to get you there.

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