Guest Column: Content-As-A-Service — Coming Soon To An Enterprise Near You

By John Newton, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer, Alfresco Software

Some enterprise executives may be sitting at their desk in their corner office thinking, "Social Software is what my kids are into when they waste time on Facebook and YouTube" - not an enterprise-weight technology."

Over the past ten years, Web 1.0 had a big impact on content and customer interaction. For instance, the next time you do competitive analysis where is the first place you go - an internal Word document, or Google and Web sites? There are no longer boundaries between internal and external content and knowledge workers need both to be productive and effective. The shift in how information and content is shared and created is forcing enterprises to blur the lines between enterprise content management and social software.

In order to make the shift from enterprise content to content-as-a-service, companies need to look for ECM solutions that are integrated with social software platforms. This means bring these social computing tools into the enterprise and bring the enterprise sources out to Web 2.0. No matter where the people collaborating are, the tools they want should be available. To facilitate this, the new breed of ECM solutions should include:

• Open Source
• Integrating the Inside Out
• Integrating the Outside In
• REST-style Architecture
• Choice