ReadWriteWeb

Some quotes on the theme of content management (CM)...

Gerry McGovern: "The Web may have been the almost exclusive domain of techies. Today, it is increasingly the domain of communicators."

Bill Gates: "Whether it's handling a classified ad or handling editorials, the authoring tools for these things no longer require an IT department to be involved. The actual tools that the reporters, the managers are working with can understand XML."

Matthew Berk: "In five years, content management functionality will move in two directions: out to the desktop in the form of software like Office 11, and down to the infrastructure in the form of file systems that implement the essentials now seen in content management packages."

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The quote below from Dan Gillmor doesn't obviously seem to fit under the topic of "content management". But think about why Google bought Blogger:

Google = Read; Blogger = Write.

Read + Write (seamlessly) = the future of Content Management

Dan Gillmor, writing about Blogger and Google: "The first order of business for Evan Williams and his team was to upgrade the blog-posting software, and to put the Blogger-hosted weblogs on Google's more reliable server computers. But Williams said the team is also looking hard at the element of the read-write Web that Google does so well -- finding stuff."

D. Keith Robinson has written an interesting article about the future of Intranets. He writes:

"...a company's Intranet would be better served as more of an enterprise-wide, network-enabled application than anything resembling a Web site or Web application."

It seems likely that content management systems will over time integrate with office systems. Products like Microsoft's upcoming Office 11 promise to be fully XML-compatible. You will be able to save any Office document (Word, Excel, etc) as an XML file, which will add structure and portability to office data. These days Content Management systems are usually based on XML, so it could be said that office systems are just beginning to catch up. However the main difference between most CM systems today and what Office 11 will offer, is that CM systems are web-based.

So will Intranets become more of an office application than a web one? Needs more thought...but right now I like to think Intranets will remain web-based. We are only just beginning to scratch the surface of web publishing. Weblogs, RSS syndication, XML technologies such as XSLT, and web services are just some of the exciting things that can be implemented on a web-based Intranet. Plus browsers aren't dead yet - they haven't even got to the read/write stage yet ;-)