ReadWriteEnterprise

I started using my first content management system around 1997, when things were crude and clumsy. You would think in the past 15 or so years time would heal all and improvements would be made, but you would be wrong. The modern CMS is still in a state of flux.

In the early days of the CMS we had major players such as OpenText (which didn't really have true CMS functionality until around 2002), Vignette (which was a separate company before being acquired by OpenText in 2009), and Fatwire (which was acquired by Oracle this past summer), among others. Note a trend here? These were gigantic software installations, requiring six figure PO's and a phalanx of consultants to care for and feed these beasts. They were and still are the exclusive domain of the IT department, who treated them like other big-ticket software installations. If you wanted to build a corporate website, you need plenty of time to plan your requirements and implement the code.

No single Web technology has survived longer on life support than the intranet - the broader goal of employee intercommunication and content management, to which enterprises still aspire. Despite an over-abundance of very capable tools over the years, including content management systems and collaboration platforms such as Microsoft SharePoint, the element that companies have lacked to date has been inspiration. It's as if a construction firm had dumped all the best building materials into one big pit: With that much treasure in one place, how come no one builds houses with it?

This year's version of the spark for inspiration comes from social media, and the realization that while a low percentage of employees uses the company intranet, a higher percentage uses Facebook. Coinciding with this week's Gartner Symposium/ITExpo in Orlando, Florida, where "the social organization" is a principal topic, CMS market share leader OpenText's latest Social Communities 8.1 upgrade adds a curious new feature that's sure to get businesses talking: social data mining.

As we've said before, consolidation is a watch-word for 2011. Every week we're seeing acquisitions in the cloud, data analysis and enterprise social software market. We've already covered one of this week's biggest announcements: RIM's acquisition of Gist. Here are three more acquisitions worth taking note of.

Gartner released its 2010 Magic Quadrant for Workplace Social Software report this week. The same five vendors held onto the Leaders and Challengers quadrants, while the Visionaries and Niche Players quadrants thinned out. IBM, Jive and Microsoft remained the "Leaders" and Atlassian and OpenText remained the "Challengers." Several vendors dropped off the list completely. XWiki, a "Niche Player," was the only completely new vendor to make the cut.

Open Text, Canada's largest software company, released two new social enterprise products this week: Open Text Content Server Pulse and Open Text Social Communities. The company also released a new version of its Open Text Social Workplace software, adding microblogging and instant messaging features.

Pulse integrates social networking, status updates, and content collaboration into Open Text's flagship content management offering Open Text ECM Suite. It also adds social features into existing ECM Suite installs while maintaining existing access controls and other configurations.

Info-Tech Research Group released its evaluation of enterprise collaboration software earlier this year. Microsoft's Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Open Text's Open Text Social Media 7 won the highest praise. But as worker expectations change, there's clearly room for competition on usability.

Wikis, micro-blogs and collaboration technologies get a lot of attention for their use in the enterprise but one need remains constant.

Search.

Who wins the search battle will come home with a lot of prizes and big wins in the enterprise. Search may even prove to be a differentiation for companies that are choosing collaboration platforms.