BUSINESS RULES

When Will Documents Become Content?

by Bruce Silver

I went to the AIIM show this year to try to better understand the transformation of imaging and document management into "enterprise content management," which is how today's AIIM exhibitors now want to be known.

The show organizers obviously went all out to convey that sense of transformation, giving the prized opening keynote slot to Martin Braun, president of Interwoven, today's market leader in Web content management.

But it was as if Mr. Braun had dropped in from outer space onto the Javits Center show floor in New York. "Greetings, earthlings, I come in peace..." He started by explaining that Interwoven's definition of "content" is very broad, comprising HTML Web pages, XML pages, Photoshop images, enterprise data and source code - lots of code, up to 30 percent of the content repository.

Code? What about documents? It seems that to the AIIM keynoter, content means just about any form of information except documents - invoices, claim forms, loan applications, records, contracts, customer statements and reports, which have always been the lifeblood of AIIM. I glanced at the AIIM execs standing around the periphery to detect any expressions of shock or even irony. There were none.

I left the keynote feeling that the so-called convergence of document management and Web content management was all just a giant misunderstanding. This was not one industry, but two, with little intersection between them. Interwoven did not even have its own booth on the show floor. Nor did Documentum. AIIM should just apologize and give attendees their money back.

Spending the next couple days on the show floor, I began to change my mind. There were, in fact, a number of other Web content management vendors exhibiting, and they did have a clear vision for how documents fit in a broader world of enterprise content management.

I now think that although document management and Web content management are distinct industries serving distinct user populations, they are converging. In two or three years, when Web content management truly becomes part of the enterprise infrastructure, it will be one industry, not two. Here's my logic.

The basic problem Web content management is trying to solve is the Webmaster bottleneck. As information is increasingly published to employees, partners and customers through the Web, how do you let users throughout the enterprise push content onto the Web site themselves without messing up the site's organization, visual consistency, integrity or audit ability? Secondly, how can that content be distributed to a variety of new devices, such as cell phones? Web content management attacks these problems through authoring templates that contain both formatting rules and metadata, allowing consistent and automatic application of access control, version control and personalization across the site. Presentation can be tailored to various retrieval devices.

Document management is designed for a different problem, which is securing and finding all kinds of "unstructured" information, meaning any information not in a database. There are obvious overlaps with content management technology in the area of access control, version control and metadata indexing, but there are glaring differences as well.

Web content management assumes content is separate from format, so that it can be repurposed on delivery, while document management has always tried to preserve documents as historical records comprising both content and format. Also, Web content management vendors view scalability in terms of the volume of retrieval requests; they include advanced technology for caching and distributing published content across many servers, but their file system orientation tends to ignore the problems of managing a huge volume of documents. In contrast, document management vendors design repositories that scale to millions of documents, but they tend to ignore the performance issues of real-world, high-volume Web sites.

Both Web content management and document management vendors want to see themselves as enterprise infrastructure, but today, both are closer to departmental infrastructure combined with distinct sets of application services. In that sense, these are still two separate industries. However, the Web is changing the nature of the document itself in a way that will bring the two together.

In particular, as the separation between content and format provided by XML becomes increasingly vital in e-business, it will be increasingly accepted by users and adopted in business processes. Eventually, the separation will be embraced by authoring tools like Word. At that point, today's authoring/publishing dichotomy will largely go away, and enterprise content management will become a single industry. It will provide true enterprise infrastructure capable of supporting millions of documents and millions of Web hits a day.

Both the Web content management vendors and document management vendors bring needed technology to this convergence. Document management vendors have more mature enterprise-scale technology, but Web content management vendors have market cap factors on their side. I wonder who will be left standing when the consolidation begins.

Bruce Silver (brsilver@earthlink.net) is president of Bruce Silver Associates, Aptos, CA, 831-685-8803. Reports are available at www.brsilver.com.