Fusion ECM

Well I *had* a nice long post written on this subject but I lost it all when my 30 minutes of airport network time expired.  Amster-DAMN!

...sigh...

rather than rewrite, I'll sum up and you can imagine just how compelling the original post was.

Fusion architecture is about leveraging capabilities that were designed to work together to build solutions.  Integration architecture is about designing capabilities that need to be leveraged in order to have a solution.

Support, stability, deployment times, coding load implications should be obvious.

Don't get caught in the flexibility trap.  Integration architects will often play up the necessity of flexibility in solution design.  But that is a slippery slope.  It's important but be careful where you stand.  After all, the most flexible tools are a compiler and some machine code.  But really, who wants that?

check out Big Men On Content  (BMOC) - link on the right.

Google Sites (here) is the latest entry into the SharePoint, BaseCamp, Moodle, Alfresco, Magnolia, team Wiki space.  Basically the idea is that you and your virtual team need a web space in which to collaborate, store documents, manage schedules etc. 

Google brings it's name to the game here but what is it targeting?  Some have situated it against SharePoint, others agianst more traditional WCM solutions.  Even Google aludes to the enterprise space (at least in that they suggest you invite your co-workers to uses the team web site you set up).  

But I've got to confess, this looks more like a typical Google offering - put out some capability and see what happens, than it does a bid to take out MS SharePoint or WCM solutions or to abscond with corporate data for marketing purposes (see their legal terms of servic and some harsh analysis about it here in this post from Sarah Perez of RWW).

Right now Google Sites will "compete" against BaseCamp and similar sites.  They all have similar TOS agreements that will make CIO and Corp Legal cringe.  But this is standard MO for the Goog.  If it catches on and there's enough traction, we may see a SaaS version for enterprises that will have a much more palatable TOS and data privacy.

In the meantime, the rest of us in the enterprise WCM game should be taking notes on what *works* and what doesn't from a usability standpoint.  We've got a free, zero risk beta here gang.  Google Sites, BaseCamp and others are piloting new ways of stimulating end user interaction and site usage.  They're getting some stuff right and we would do well to take note rather than keep on our myopic blinders.