Friday, July 06, 2007
More Thoughts on ECM Standards
It is vital that ECM vendors and industry analysts understand how Lack of ECM standards hurts many. I figured I would give the blogosphere a break on the topic of whether ECM vendors should implement enterprise security standards by supporting SAML, SPML and XACML and instead solicit opinion on two other standards that aren't security related...
The debate within the ECM community over SOA vs REST at some level is interesting but I would like to first understand what is wrong with supporting RSS? Most documents that are stored in a repository are usually read-only with very few applications actually needing to change them. Additionally, many products in this space implement the notion of a web cache where they store content closer to applications that consume them. What is wrong with RSS for this usage and more importantly what makes it so difficult to support out of the box?
The second thought that I have is that all ECM systems should also expose a way to export documents in bulk into the repository. To me the best way to accomplish this would be to support the WebDAV protocol where one could upload tons of files via drag and drop. WebDAV specific also supports the notion of locking of files/documents to prevent concurrency issues.
Standards such as RSS and WebDAV feel like a natural fit in the ECM domain. I haven't done much homework on which vendors support out of the box vs the ones who don't. For this I assume that CMSWatch would be the best place to find this answer.
Since I haven't heard Alan Pelz-Sharpe, Nishant Kaushik, Thomas Ferris Nicolaisen, John Newton, Ralph Gammon, Pranshu Jain, Jeff Potts, Apoorv Durga or Eric Severson I would be appreciative of any insights they could provide...
| | View blog reactionsThe debate within the ECM community over SOA vs REST at some level is interesting but I would like to first understand what is wrong with supporting RSS? Most documents that are stored in a repository are usually read-only with very few applications actually needing to change them. Additionally, many products in this space implement the notion of a web cache where they store content closer to applications that consume them. What is wrong with RSS for this usage and more importantly what makes it so difficult to support out of the box?
The second thought that I have is that all ECM systems should also expose a way to export documents in bulk into the repository. To me the best way to accomplish this would be to support the WebDAV protocol where one could upload tons of files via drag and drop. WebDAV specific also supports the notion of locking of files/documents to prevent concurrency issues.
Standards such as RSS and WebDAV feel like a natural fit in the ECM domain. I haven't done much homework on which vendors support out of the box vs the ones who don't. For this I assume that CMSWatch would be the best place to find this answer.
Since I haven't heard Alan Pelz-Sharpe, Nishant Kaushik, Thomas Ferris Nicolaisen, John Newton, Ralph Gammon, Pranshu Jain, Jeff Potts, Apoorv Durga or Eric Severson I would be appreciative of any insights they could provide...
