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.

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.

Ok, more flag waiving

, I know. I'll stop eventually, but for now, I have to admit that we're all really proud about the accolades RedDot has been receiving. RedDot's first appearance on the KMWorld list was back in 2000 when the industry-rocking WYSIWYG editing environment was dropped on the scene.

Red dots to edit the web page? You mean I click the red ...  aaahh, ok, got it. Sold.

Now that RedDot has been acquired thrice in the last 9 months, our return to the list was not motivated purely by technological gains, but more as a result of the market validating our strategic positioning of ECM for the mid-market. This sector is slated to have a substantial compound annual growth rate of 19% in the next 5 years as organizations seek to reap in the benefits of tried and true, low cost solutions being that they are the peak, or "middle of the bell curve" in the product adoption lifecycle. This, of course, is the period in the lifecycle with the most volume under the curve, and hence, the most sales. This has gained traction with both Forresters and Gartner, as they dubbed RedDot "the leader in mid-market ECM."  Not to liken Google to the state of collective conscience around the globe, but see for yourself what the search keywords "mid market ECM

" yield. Throughout all of the bids for RedDot, we have shone as the jewel of the parent organization: not unlike a humble yet exuberant Gretzky

in his rookie year. Ever since the Hummingbird aquisition, RedDot has been a key differentiator in Hummingbird's sales cycle, and as mentioned in my previous post, was a strong motivator for Hummingbird's own aquisition by OpenText. Given the recent M&A spree in ECM (high-noted by IBM's bid for FileNet), I would not be surprised if an even larger player such as HP or EMC acquired OpenText to round out their battle chest.