Wish list for 2007

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I asked my friend and colleague, Kashyap about his wish for the next year and this is what he said:

I want to have a PC integrated into the walls in the house. There will be a slot where I can drop in bills, visiting cards, papers etc and they get scanned and stored in content management system… and I can pull these up using the touch screen on the wall and also be able to access this information from anywhere else. Home PC in its true sense!

And here’s my wish list for the new year. What’s yours?

  • Product licensing would be simplified. Much has been written about product licensing. As if per CPU, per user and other combinations of complex pricing mechanisms were not enough, introduction of Dual Core brings in another variable. How about offering free downloads for development or learning purposes or offering evaluation versions? Will Enterprise Licensing Models be more popular?
  • There will be wider acceptance of standards. JSR-170 (and JSR-283) have not really taken off in a big way. There have been attempts at writing connectors but mainstream products have still not embraced these.
  • Multiple overlapping offerings would be simplified. Too many mergers and acquisitions have increased the chaos. Oracle has multiple portal-like offerings, IBM has multiple offerings is CM space. It would be a good idea to rationalize offerings.
  • Open Source products will provide more viable alternatives to commercial products.
  • Vendors will agree that these products form a part of a bigger picture in the enterprise architecture. So they’ll make efforts to make it easy to integrate with other products or decouple features so that one can plug-in their choice of products for search, workflow, security etc.
  • Users will spend more time in understanding their requirements and then selecting a product. They will also understand that projects in this space are different from traditional projects and hence plan accordingly for usability, performance, training and so on. A CMS project for example, is not just about implementing a rich text editor to submit content. There are elements of governance, processes, people etc that need to be considered.
  • Web 2.0, AJAX and other such things would actually make these products more usable

6 thoughts on “Wish list for 2007”

  2. Here’s my wishlist item:

    Buyers and Suppliers start measuring END USER ADOPTION as a key indicator for CMS solutions. We’ve been on a CMS arms-race for so many years now that many have forgotten that most CMS systems are both oversold and underused.

  3. James,
    Actually I’d meant to include that in the point on integration (I have updated the post now).

    Here are comments by Pranshu and Igonas on why it could be difficult though.

    Best,
    Apoorv

  4. You said, “Web 2.0, AJAX and other such things would actually make these products more usable”

    Touché!

    And, you said, “Open Source products will provide more viable alternatives to commercial products.”

    Amen!

    Thanks for this…Amy 🙂

  5. Tim

    My company actually tried to sell End User Adoption as a serivce package where we will go in and measure the success of the implementation in terms of metrics previously agreed on. No customer was ready to get into it. We scrapped the program and fired the Director hired for creating and selling this specific purpose.

    However, I do agree that it needs to happen for every engagement. How is still up in the air.

    Nikhil.

  6. I wish that outsourcing of document composition and management work becomes easy considering lincensing complication in this space. We are planning a startup in this space to service clients in the composition space

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