Many PHP based CMS tools are now available for hosted web applications and provide many of the basic features found in SharePoint and Documentum WebTop. While it isn’t surprising to see folks attempt to build out a high quality, feature rich, affordable solution these days, there is an interesting twist on the story. Most of the open CMS tools have focused more on “composition” capabilities rather than extending core library services. In a nut shell, today you can register a domain, pay for hosting, select one of many CMS tools pre-installed by the host provider and create your web presence or application by simply clicking through the UI. Let’s equate “Composition” with “No-Code Solution”.
As an example (albeit simple one), this web site uses WordPress (http://wordpress.org/) and was created in far less than a day and allows for direct integration with Microsoft Word 2007 for publishing content like this article. There are many CMS applications out there that an average user (with some patience) can successfully use to manage limited content and multi-user workspaces. The following is a partial list from Internet Solutions hosting services:
All of these tools provide for no-code solutions that can handle many tasks… plug-ins exist for many of these that include calendaring, time-card entry, etc…
So where do the big boys stand? SharePoint actually embraces much of this new composition attitude that has flowed into the IT world as part of Web 2.0. SharePoint is template based pre-structured web hierarchy that supports most general user/group solutions and activities out of the box. Basically, anything that you could do in the past with MS-Access and or MS-Excel is easily accomplished in a way that can participate with the larger business scope without hiring a bunch of folks like myself to save the day (there are some caveats to that statement however). SharePoint 2010 is due out in the next few quarters and pushes the composition model much further (for SharePoint) to include complex systems integration solutions that support CRUD operations by self generating the code required (again, no need for me).
EMC|Documentum has perhaps made the largest strides forward in the last year, but few realize the magnitude of what they have been up to in Pleasanton, CA. The Business Process Suite updates through D6.5SP2 now include an extremely powerful process engine that allows for composition (again, no-code) creation of complex strings of related tasks (think BizTalk with more functionality and no need to for a compiler!). Along with the new process engine is a retooled TaskSpace user interface that is configured through the UI much like the free CMS tools are (rumor has it the next release will be Adobe Flex based) and includes some slick AJAX functionality.
I am pretty excited to see the innovation of open source CMS tools and their focus on ease of implementation begin to be reflected in the large ECM/CMS tools like Documentum and SharePoint which are often the best solutions for large scale storage and scalability… many of the larger implementations requiring both to get the job done.
