When I read about this here, I initially thought that it’s yet another incarnation of what Fatwire used to call Integration Centre. But then I noticed that as part of this platform, they have included an EMC Documentum connector with plans of more such connectors.
I recently heard about an Alfreco Drupal case study and from my blog’s access logs, I’ve noticed people searching for “Filenet Drupal” and “Documentum Joomla” integration. There are numerous cases of “Sharepoint + Documentum” as well.
This clearly shows that Site Management and Content Management are increasingly becoming niche disciplines. Site Management is more about managing the end user experience while Content Management is more about the back end efficiencies. Business people need more control in the way the content is delivered to the end users – they want the look and feel to be flexible, want the ability to run campaigns, add functionality (Polls, Voting etc) and this trend seems to be catching up. The ease of use and simplicity that Site Management focused products like Drupal provide to create end user applications is simply not matched by more heavy weight products like Documentum and FileNet. Alfresco, though is trying to make improvements in this area.
There are obvious overlaps but vendors are also using these terms to differentiate from competition in this crowded market. So for example, Fatwire does not sell Content Management, it instead sells what it calls “Web Experience Management”.
From Fatwire’s perspective, I think it’s a good move. Instead of trying to build Document Management features, they are building connecters to Documentum (and possibly others) and targeting to become the site management software of choice. They already have strong WCM capabilities and features like Blogs and Wikis, some of which came as a result of Infostoria acquisition.