I came across a timely article from the consumer centric blog ReadWriteWeb. This blog post from RWW comes straight off the heels of our well attended Content Days in the Asia Pacific and Japan region in February, where we gave customers and partners a sneak peak at the upcoming launch of Open Text Everywhere. Open Text Everywhere aims to provide the empowerment, agility and control you’ve come to expect from an ECM vendor like Open Text, but right in your hand in a mobile device. At the end of my speech on the topic of mobility, we looked into the crystal ball and had a lively forum with the audience about how we as the Content Experts could envision the next generation of mobile applications for ECM. As I mentioned, RRW has made an interesting point in their article dubbed “FourSquare for the Enterprise: Give it 2 Years, Max.” FourSquare, a location based service or LBS, is known in the consumer world for allowing you to share your whereabouts and activities within a social network. It uses your current GPS location of your mobile phone to enrich your experience, allowing you to “check in” to restaurants and cafes as well as see exactly where you friends are at the moment. I happened to use FourSquare as an example of consumer technology that is headed our way within the enterprise during our Content Days in February. Truth be told, the Japanese have been playing the internet-enabled application game for years now, and the rest of the world is just catching up. One of the examples cited from the RWW article is that “A new generation of location-based applications will integrate with microblogging platforms.” This is a reasonable assumption for ECM as well, as location is an integral part of your approach to collaborating with a person. Are you in the office? Are you working from home? Should we meet face to face, or over a unified messaging platform? Automation will be key, as no one wants to have to explicitly state they are on the go, but simply having a mobile device that can detect that you are out of your GPS defined “office” or “home” region should allow your followers to understand you’re on the move. However at the Content Days, we all agreed that there are some interesting applications for location, mobility and even augmented reality for the future of mobile ECM. For example, we envisioned healthcare applications that could allow a doctor to see patient records and casefiles immediately from their mobile when approaching a patient’s bedside. Retail applications that allow you to use the phone’s camera to identify products on store shelves and be presented personalised coupons, rich media and social reviews. Energy and Utility applications that would overlay pipes, cables and pathways in a similar fashion to allow engineers to see a heads-up display of important data. Technicians in the field could be presented with MSDS, PDS and repair manuals on the fly when simply approaching a piece of plant, property or equipment. Even a museum or gallery goer could benefit by snapping photos of a famous painting and then being returned reams of historical information, artist background, related works and video content of that artwork or architecture. As you can see, the future for mobile applications is quite bright and Open Text Everywhere is only the first step in allowing the massive amounts of content organisations have today to be exploited and leveraged by their employees and consumers, at the moment they need it most. Disclosure: Cuneyt Uysal is a Product Manager and corporate blogger for Open Text corporation. You can find this post at http://possibilities.opentext.com

Although HTML 5 is still a draft specification, it's impact is being felt across the technology landscape as this is written. In creating a new standard, the W3C was mindful of the latest developments in applied web application technologies, such as the growing popularity of media-rich Web sites over static brochure-ware, and innovations like AJAX.  I say applied because one of the key drivers behind the new specification was the understanding that the last decade or so of web development can be summed up as "forcing browsers to provide an experience they were never intended to," as I often mention to my colleagues. Anyone who has worked as a web developer can sympathize with the amount of hacks, workarounds and plugins needed to deliver a modern, interactive experience. And that's just within a single browser, let alone making your site cross platform. Hopefully, HTML 5 can begin to address this quagmire by making the underlying markup both relevant and applicable to what the web is actually used for these days. I won't go into detail with regard to the specification and it's potential,  but instead focus on how it will change the game specifically for the CMS software industry. So how will this impact authors, administrators, contributors on the web? Let's dive into the features and see how. Clearer separation of navigation, header and footer elements With the new elements types for navigation items and such, you'll not be surprised that browser safe, standardised and design-agnostic navigation can be provided out of the box in CMS. With standards around the underlying HTML of the navigation, CMS vendors can reliably provide more advanced site creation, navigation management wizards without having to worry about supporting the top 15 AJAX libraries and approaches out there. This portability can be achieved today with good effect using CSS and List elements, but these new elements should also help put to rest the debate about what type of navigation model to use and perhaps more importantly, provide the syntactic sugar to help search engines understand your site structure that much easier; for example, without the need to generate an XML sitemap. Local storage database Arguably the most obvious benefit to software vendors of all types is the local storage facility. No longer do we have to worry about flaky connections and long-workflow-abandonment. With local storage comes the promise of authoring web pages while on your flight to Texas, replying to blog posts in the train tunnel and a slew of other offline scenarios. Immediately, the mobile application development realm becomes far more interesting as offline caches can be stored in the device for interrogation when not connected, and in general, a faster experience when checking the local cache for your documents, as opposed to constantly "pulling" from the web server.  Long, multi-step online business processes won't be abandoned as often when users realise they can pick up right where they left off. Essentially, web apps will behave much more like desktop applications in their statefulness. I expect the memory allocation for each domain to be increased quite quickly, as pressure from vendors to store local caches of binary documents and other rich media will quickly surpass the 5MB suggested limit. Flash, Silverlight and Applets, oh my! The impact of web sockets, or the ability of web pages themselves to call and respond data sources, based on the socket pattern. If that sentence just flew right over your head, think about chat or instant messaging applications. They have traditionally been implemented in Flash or other RIAs du to the in built capabilities of the 3rd party plugin to supply the infrastructure. Although corporations like Facebook and Google have overcome this with their COMET based chat clients at significant development cost; this new infrastructure provided in the specification, could level the playing field for everyone else that is not as fortunate. "Essentially, what it does is lays the groundwork to have equivalent functionality that Flash or Silverlight provides," says RedMonk analyst Michael Cote. With the addition of new elements or tags for video and audio, the specification is pointed squarely at vendors like Adobe and Microsoft in an attempt to swing the balance back in favor of Google, who employ's HTML 5 lead editor Ian Hickson open standards. What does this mean for CMS software as we know it? For one, vendors will have an option outside of siding with Adobe or Microsoft, avoiding allegiance and licensing headaches when it comes to picking a video player of choice. Outside of the media player debate, CMS vendors can hope to bring a level of control and configuration not found in RIAs today. Most CMS struggle with anything besides supplying a basic XML file for Flash objects to ingest. That's about as far as they go today. With the new specification opening up the breathing room a bit, we could see a standardised approach to feeding parameters, content and even deploying objects within the RIA. CMS are great when it comes to deployment, rollback and versioning of code, and up until now, CMS functionality has been for the most part shut out of the equation because it had to hard stop at the executable level: the .SWF file. It was impenetrable. Now, CMS vendors can perhaps go deeper into the actual DNA of the RIA and allow authors to probe, create and adjust the contents and interactions just as richly as pure HTML or any other text markup. As with most trends, we'll have to watch for the final evolving uptake and following impact of these new standards. If the mind-bending Jedi tricks AJAX developers have crammed into ailing browsers is any indication of the future, we're sure to see many uses no one can anticipate right now. What are some ways in which you think the popular CMS platforms will be affected by the coming of HTML 5?

I had a great discussion with Bill Dawes, Editor of Image and Data Manager online. We talked about how my organisation has already made the switch to Enterprise 2.0 tools completely out of viral growth. We never sent a "thou shalt use the new system" braodcast email or enforced it's use. It completely gained traction and adoption on it's own merits of high usbaility and effectiveness as a collaboration tool. Read more here.

Something big is cooking and you'll be seeing it live from the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston if you're lucky enough to be there. At the recent Content Days in Australia, I had the pleasure of showing off a brand new product that put a fresh face to collaboration. It was mentioned in the press more than a few times, especially KMWorld. The crowd was awed by the novel concept of collaborating via streams of information, grouped together by the teams communications such as email, blog posts, documents and wikis. Completely browser based, these conversations and status updates happen in real time as threads of discussions weave seamlessly in this new paradigm of collaboration. So what was this new magical product? Google Wave, you say? No, in fact, it was our about to launch OpenText social media initiative aimed at making enterprises bloom. Imitation is the highest form of flattery we suppose. See for yourself at http://wave.google.com/. Open Text Social Media will be generally available in July, 2009. To learn more, go to: http://cli.gs/OTSocialMedia

In a move that closely follows the recent acquisition of Interwoven, Vignette is rounding out the latest move in consolidating in the WCM space. The full scoop is here. This is another sign of how important WCM is to mega- enterprises who are recognizing web as their primary strategic channel for information. All hail the death of the document!

Finally, a startup that addresses the most glaringly obvious feedback from the user community who wish to leverage the inherent benefits of GoogleDocs yet still are hesitant to make the switch. In my consulting organisations who are trying to make the switch, they see the value in GoogleDocs - I mean, who doesn’t? A free ECM system by Google is nothing to shake a stick it. However, in practice, everyone who has actually tried to use this web office platform in earnest realises that for the enterprise space, there’s very little chance you could actually get a researcher, or business analyst at a firm to sincerely drop MS Office in favor of Writely. The reality is that users, as always, fear change are not willing to abandon their most sacred of trusty tools. And for good reason, the online variants are clearly leagues behind at present. Enter OffiSynch. Reiterating my advice to my clients, I’ve blogged before about the need to maintain the desktop productivity tools such as Word and Excel, and layer in the content management and collaboration goodness of GoogleDocs. This is what my clients have been doing manually with good success, and I can guarantee you that these synching tools will become mainstream tools for the web office innovators and leaders. Then I hear the discussion of business model, monetization. I regret to inform you that there is but a single, uninteresting business model for these companies. There’s little doubt in my mind that tools like OffiSynch are aiming purely to be purchased by their friendly ecosystem giant. It’s a path several prior ventures have taken to great success, and will continue to do so. From a Google product management standpoint, what I find most interesting is that these synching tools are noticeably missing from so many Google product lines. Google Reader lacks a native synching tool for the iPhone, lacks a synching tool for Outlook, etc. Contrast this to the understanding of prior ECM software vendors who immediately knew that to make an impact upon the existing customer base, they created desktop file explorer and Word integrations immediately because they analysed a typical user’s day to day work patterns and approached their product from a user-centric design philosophy. This is opposed to Google’s browser-centric philosophy, that continues to hold them back from virally growing their application suite. Good thing smaller players like OffiSync can fill the gap.