A recent CMSWire article noted that content management and social business are two very different technologies, and while vendors try to incorporate social business functionality into traditional ECM solutions, that there is no real effective way for a system to fill both shoes.

While traditional ECM systems are considered “systems of record”, social business tools are in a newer category of “systems of engagement“, and the differences between the two seem to be at opposite ends of the spectrum.

“These aren’t just differences of philosophy or look and feel. They extend to the software architecture itself. CMS has its roots in transactional, database-driven systems. There are no provisions for essential social constructs such as activity streams, user profiles, social feedback and reputation mechanisms, a centralized view of community activity and collaborative messaging. These capabilities come from a bottom-up design, not just slotting in some new modules or slapping a new UI on top of an existing CMS foundation. Actually, adding social features after the fact can make matters worse, creating more walled-off information that is hard to manage and search.”

To support the argument, SharePoint was used as an example, where a user survey concluded that enhancing SharePoint for Social Business could cost between $500,000 to over $1 million, with more for ongoing maintenance, and that organizations serious about social business should consider a purpose-built tool, rather than a customized SharePoint solution.

While a lot of what this article states is true, I don’t necessarily agree with the argument that the same application can’t have both traditional ECM and social business functionality, and be able to do it well. A good example is Alfresco, which has a robust content platform for building a variety of content-rich applications, along with a social user-interface for collaboration and document management. Alfresco’s focus is on a new vision of Social Content Management, which sits at the intersection of traditional ECM and Social Software, with its own social applications to the left, and a strong content repository on the right.

And by focusing on this intersection of Social Content Management, users have the ability to discuss content, and then capture the results of that discussion inside an ECM solution in order to retain it and derive value from it.

So while ECM systems and Social Business solutions do serve very different purposes, it doesn’t mean the same technology platform can’t be used to satisfy both sides and be able to do it in a cohesive manner.

Alfresco has formed a technology partnership with Ephesoft to bring together open source document capture, enterprise content management and CMIS for intelligent PDF capture and search and workflow management.

Ephesoft’s open source cloud document capture platform enables intelligent document capture for mailroom automation solutions.

Through this partnership, enterprises can archive document metadata or kickstart document-driven business processes in their enterprise ECM through Ephesoft’s intelligence capture. Document capture will be managed through scanners, email and fax to create searchable PDFs with metadata tags. The cool part is, documents are more than just captured, but also learned, meaning Ephesoft can classify the documents and separate them from other documents while saving key data elements that enable users to send it into other business processes when needed. Beyond document capture, Ephesoft also offers scanning, classification, data extraction and document delivery.

Rivet Logic has also recently partnered with Ephesoft to provide our customers system integration services for Ephesoft.

AIIM (Association for Information and Image Management), released its “State of the ECM Industry 2010″ report yesterday. This report, underwritten by Rivet Logic, surveyed over 750 members of the AIIM community and yields some interesting facts about ECM, and in particular, open source ECM.

The study revealed that open source ECM solutions are only used by 6% of organizations, along with 3% for WCM and 2% for portals. But the good news is that an additional 9% plan to adopt open source for ECM, WCM or portals within the next 2 years. Most respondents also have an open mind on open source usage, with 64% saying that they would consider it mainly due to its cost benefits.

The report also covers other ECM-related topics including ECM business drivers, SharePoint, and Enterprise 2.0.

To download a full copy of the report, click here.

The annual AIIM Expo & Conference is less than a week away, and this year, Rivet Logic will be an active participant. Not only will we be exhibiting on the show floor, we will also be hosting a seminar and cocktail reception.

The reception will be held on Wednesday, April 1st, at 5pm at the Philadelphia Downtown Marriott adjoining the Philadelphia Convention Center where the AIIM Expo will be held.

The topic of the seminar will be Open Source ECM in Action, an opportunity for attendees to learn from our real-world experiences implementing Alfresco across a wide range of vertical markets & application areas, including a case study from the pharmaceutical industry.

To top off the free food, drinks, and engaging topic, we will also be raffling off a Kindle!

For full event details and to register, please visit
www.rivetlogic.com/reg/mar09/aiim-expo.

And if you’re planning to attend the AIIM Expo, don’t forget to come visit us at Booth #524 or our virtual booth!

We hope to see you there!

With the “going green” trend gaining popularity, more businesses are starting to migrate towards a paperless office. Green computing is more than just choosing the right hardware for maximum energy efficiency, it’s also about reducing the amount of paper waste in our daily office operations. Going paperless would not only reduce clutter and increase productivity, but also help conserve natural resources at the same time. Think of all the times you’ve had to look and sort through piles of papers just to find that one small piece of information, all the while making more of a mess to make it even more difficult the next time around. Imagine that multiplied by the number of employees in your organization. That’s a lot of time wasted right?

With the right enterprise content management system, all those paper documents can be managed electronically. Better yet, those items can be tagged with keywords to make finding and sharing that piece of information hassle free. All that time saved can be used more productively. The fact that you’re helping to conserve natural resources is an added bonus. We all want a better environment for our future generations, right?

We just published a new case study on one of our projects in the public education sector. The Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) does great work for advancing public education goals at the US Federal and State levels, and open source portals and content management from Liferay and Alfresco help them collaborate, find, and share critical information in support of many of their projects.

Learn more from our new Case Study: CCSSO Increases Project Efficiency Through Open Source Content Management and Collaboration.

Our latest white paper on Open Source Document Management is now available.

Register for it here.

In it, we talk about how open source ECM and portal software can help with fundamental document management requirements including:

• Rules based repository that can replace shared network drives
• Effective search and retrieval
• Standards based interfaces, including WebDAV, FTP, CIFS
• Library services
• Forums and other ways to facilitate team collaboration beyond email
• Workflow
• Scanning and document imaging support
• Records management
• Security