Microsoft Fast, Google and other enterprise search engines have competition. Exalead has decided to create a version of its CloudView platform as an OEM product.

This is a huge leap for the company with their customers now being able to search and organize both structured and unstructured information.  In today’s age of information overload businesses are looking to search technologies to help control the vast information overload that they have to deal with.

A benefit to the CloudView OEM Edition 5.0 is the fact that it boasts a new product architecture for faster search and information management and it embeds existing software platforms more easily due to its service and web oriented architecture.  It can also be used to index and analyze content from emails, PLM, HTML as well as content from social networks and web 2.0 sites.

In  terms of performance : data of over 500TB can be supported per server cluster with more than 100 million documents on a single server. It can also index up to 60GB of data in an hour and 30 million database objects in 10 hours.

However there is still no indication on what the pricing for this product is going to be.

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It looks like Interwoven is finally being picked up by Legal search services provider Autonomy at a cost of $775 million. This creates a synergy between Autonomy’s legal search capabilities and Interwoven’s Web content management platform.In the long run this could mean information management platforms for the legal sector.

Another plus side to this deal is that Interwoven brings over 1200 legal service customers to the table.  It will be interesting how this acquisition changes the road map for Interwoven’s products.

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An extract from an aritcle feature on CMS Watch..

“Sometimes it’s hard to know. The lines between all content technology families are notoriously blurry.

This seems especially case among Portals, Enterprise Content Management (ECM), and Web Content Management (WCM) systems, where we see a lot of overlap in vendors, product functionality, and marketing messages. For example, if you’re looking to implement Intranet-based document management, you could conceivably use any of those three types of products. Some consultancies will try to sell you all three types of solutions, with the obligatory integration project.

We strongly counsel taking a business approach that solves your most pressing needs first. Distill the core of your business problem or opportunity, then build from there. The reality is that these three different types of products do fairly specific things, and tend to address different problems. By understanding what you’re trying to accomplish, you can better identify the types of technology you may — or may not — need. That’s why we take a scenario-based approach to our research (c.f., WCM and Portals).

Three Sets of Scenarios

Take a quick look at the scenarios by which we review vendors head-to-head in some of our different technology evaluation reports.

As you can see, the WCM scenarios are fundamentally publishing scenarios. The type of website(s) you publish plays a big role in your requirements — and the suitability of different vendors. Similarly, there are different types of portals that try to accomplish different business objectives. On the ECM side — as you would expect — the scenarios become more process oriented. Also, in the ECM space, industry verticals tend to matter more, again mostly because of process orientations, which tend to be industry-specific.”

Read the complete article here.

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Here is an interesting article on Enterprise Portals by Janus Boye that i found on CMS watch. A must read for those of you out there researching portals.

“Beyond Scenarios

Many vendors call their products “enterprise portals,” but our research finds that in reality, different tools do better and worse across these different scenarios — and also vary substantially in complexity and cost. As such, scenarios are essential to help you focus on your concrete needs and project goals.

Nevertheless, portals are mature enough that we can start talking about baseline capabilities and practices. As part of my ongoing research with technology buyers for the new Portal Project Starter Kit, I’ve identified a set of features and attributes that any enterprise portal in 2007 should be able to boast. These range across the different services a portal offers, its technical aspects, as well as important vendor intangibles. Any portal project worth its salt will benefit.

State of the Art, Circa 2007

I’ll divide state of the art into the same dimensions that we employ in our evaluation reports:

• Services
• Technology
• Intangibles

Every portal vendor will say that everything below is possible with their platform. That’s because portals are, if nothing else, web application development platforms. Given enough time, money, and risk aversion, you can get them to behave almost any way you want.

The key thing is what a product wants to do natively. Each vendor with a mature offering should be able to provide these capabilities out of the box, without you having to customize the product first.”

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While there is no doubting that Sharepoint is far from an ideally KMS candidate there is no question that its share of the CMS market is increasing at a staggering rate. I recently read a post by an Analyst at CMS watch.

“MS SharePoint continues to grow at a pace - in a presentation to Financial Analysts earlier this week, Microsoft stated that in the past year they have seen year over year 35% growth and revenues of a staggering $800 Million US. They also claim that they have shipped 85 million seat licenses to 17,000 customers since the beginning of SharePoint time.”

This leaves no doubt in my mind the rate at which people are adopting SharePoint across the board. It’s single biggest attraction is the fact that its cheaper than what the competition has to offer and integrates brilliantly with existing Microsoft products ( no surprise there!).

What’s really surprising is that a large percentage of the licenses aren’t used, and most people don’t make full use of the features present in the application.

“Nobody can say with accuracy, but for sure a large percentage of the 85 million SharePoint seats sit idle, and an equally large percentage have been deployed without the knowledge or control of IT or corporate governance. In effect leaving firms with hundreds (and in a few cases thousands) of hidden content silos to manage and legally account for.”

Read the full article here….

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I came across this rather interesting update from CMS watch by one of its Analyst, Alan. He says that a year or two ago, an upgrade to D6 from Documentum would have made industry headline news. However, EMC’s gradual roll out in Q3, 2007 of this year isn’t receiving the same sort of a reaction.

“At first blush D6 is a substantial upgrade to D5, consolidating many of the firm’s acquisitions into a much more unified and standardized product set, and also boosting some areas, such as BPM and transactional document management capabilities. As announced at their recent developers’ conference D6 also goes a long way to burnish the platform’s previously quite dull SOA credentials, and improves developer productivity by standardizing on Eclipse.”

However what was once a vendor’s market now seems to favour the buyer. There are a whole host of players out there competing with what was originally a market dominated by Documentum. The post also talks about the various alternatives to Documentum in the market today.

• IBM/Filenet
• Alfresco
• Nuxeo
• Open Text
• NewGen
• MS SharePoint

You can read the article here……

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Two of my previous posts , Justifying your WCM investment ( Part 1 & Part 2 ), talk about problems a lot of us face when asked by our CIO’s to justify the cost of a CMS or WCM application. Creating an accurate ROI calculation for KM or an application would seem an uphill task for those of you who don’t know where to start.

There is an answer to your problems, ROI calculators for such application have been created after doing in-depth studies of the benefits of using such applications within organizations. These benefits were then given dollar values and grouped together in a rather complex looking worksheet that allows you to roughly estimate your applications ROI after keying in certain information.

One such ROI calculator i came across was from Alinean i have toyed around with their Microsoft Sharepoint 2007 ROI calculator and found that it’s actually pretty good. So if you are looking to get a rough idea on how much your new application might end up saving you I’d advise you to check this out…

ROI calculator on Sharepoint 2007

Do leave a comment here if you found this tool useful, and if not, what you didn’t like about it.

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CMS Matrix is one of the services i use pretty often when it comes to comparing content management systems. While this is definitely not the only checklist you need to use when selecting an application, it does help in giving you an overall picture of applications out there. While the information is more at a features level it does have one of the largest list of CMS applications i have seen on an free site.

However unlike CMS Watch the information here is nowhere near as detailed as you might like it to be, considering its a free service i wasn’t expecting all that much to begin with anyway.

It does allow for members to help with maintaining an updated list of information on the various applications currently hosted on the website.

There are a bunch of additional features that really make browsing this site a little more interesting.
Things like :

1. CMS with most clicks
2. With most views
3. With most compares
4. Most recently updated
5. Best Rated.

These additional bits of information give you an idea of what other people are looking at as well. It also gives you an update on industry news related to content management solutions and website management applications. A great way to keep an eye on the CMS market.

If you have come across another website that offers the same type of service, free or otherwise to leave a comment here….

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