Facebook Goes Corporate

Here's an important straw in the wind:

Content-oriented Facebook Applications may now easily be developed using the Alfresco platform. This means that enterprise content management capabilities can be mixed with the social graph of Facebook.

The first of many.

Documentum Opens Up (Not)

Hm, not my idea of opening up:

EMC is inviting independent software vendors, system integrators and channel partners to help develop, integrate and sell new content/ records management products and related professional services for specific vertical markets in the mid-market based on its Documentum 6 platform.

But mark my words, it will do, but probably too late, once the open source enterprise content management systems have completely redefined the market.

Alfresco Sees the (GPL) Light

So, Enterprise Content Management (ECM) company Alfresco has moved from the Mozilla Public Licence to the GNU General Public Licence (with the horribly-named "FLOSS exception"). This is good for Alfresco, and good for the GPL commons. It's also a nice confirmation of some of the things I was saying in this recent article about licensing, with the witty title "Lizenz zum Geldverdienen". Oh, yes, it's, er, in German (but an English version should follow in in due course).

The Land of Lost (Enterprise) Content (Management)

ECM - enterprise content management - may seem like a highly obscure field. It's actually critical important to businesses, but what interests me more is that this is one of four or five fields where open source is going to clean up soon.

So this post by Matt Asay about John Newton's thoughts on ECM consolidation caught my attention. For what it's worth, I shall be weighing in on this subject in due course (but don't hold your breath).

More ODF Support Out in the Open

Alfresco, probably the leading open source enterprise content management company, has announced that it will support ODF. Not earth-shattering in itself, but a useful, incremental, step forward. (Via Bob Sutor's Open Blog.)

The Once and Future Lock-In

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is not going to win any prizes for excitement, but it's important: it's a matter of how companies keep all their organisational stuff these days. So this piece warning about Microsoft's attempt to lock users into its standards at the content repository level makes a good point.

And as it also points out, there's now plenty of open source ECM software out there: Alfresco, eZ Publish, Joomla, Mambo, Midgard, Plone - so there's really no reason to take the one-way road to Redmond.