Content Management is Key, when it integrates new tools

Content Management technologies have been expanding their core functionality over the years
Past are the times when CM is just about web publishing. To understand what your content management
system should behave in the future, look ahead.

Interesting post by Gartner today projects a clear picture - that you may or may not
agree with - but that gives a clear sense of direction for those who build, and those
who implement and buy, their next CMS

Three major themes, says researchers, are experiencing significant activity and which include new or heavily hyped
technologies, that is worth keeping in mind when rolling out your next website


Web 2.0

Web 2.0 represents a broad collection of recent trends in Internet technologies and business models. Particular focus has been given to
user-created content, lightweight technology, service-based access and shared revenue models. Technologies rated by Gartner as having
transformational, high or moderate impact include:

* Social Network Analysis (SNA) is rated as high impact (definition: enables new ways of performing vertical applications that will result in
significantly increased revenue or cost savings for an enterprise) and capable of reaching maturity in less than two years. SNA is the use of
information and knowledge from many people and their personal networks.
It involves collecting massive amounts of data from multiple sources, analyzing the data to identify relationships and mining it for new
information. Gartner said that SNA can successfully impact a business by being used to identify target markets, create successful project teams
and serendipitously identify unvoiced conclusions.

* Ajax is also rated as high impact and capable of reaching maturity in less than two years. Ajax is a collection of techniques that Web
developers use to deliver an enhanced, more-responsive user experience in the confines of a modern browser (for example, recent version of Internet
Explorer, Firefox, Mozilla, Safari or Opera). A narrow-scope use of Ajax can have a limited impact in terms of making a difficult-to-use Web
application somewhat less difficult. However, Gartner said, even this limited impact is worth it, and users will appreciate incremental
improvements in the usability of applications. High levels of impact and business value can only be achieved when the development process
encompasses innovations in usability and reliance on complementary server-side processing (as is done in Google Maps).

* Collective intelligence, rated as transformational (definition: enables new ways of doing business across industries that will result in major
shifts in industry dynamics) is expected to reach mainstream adoption in five to ten years. Collective intelligence is an approach to producing
intellectual content (such as code, documents, indexing and decisions) that results from individuals working together with no centralized
authority. This is seen as a more cost-efficient way of producing content, metadata, software and certain services.

* Mashup is rated as moderate on the Hype Cycle (definition: provides incremental improvements to established processes that will result in
increased revenue or cost savings for an enterprise), but is expected to hit mainstream adoption in less than two years. A "mashup" is a
lightweight tactical integration of multi-sourced applications or content into a single offering. Because mashups leverage data and services from
public Web sites and Web applications, they’re lightweight in implementation and built with a minimal amount of code. Their primary
business benefit is that they can quickly meet tactical needs with reduced development costs and improved user satisfaction. Gartner warns
that because they combine data and logic from multiple sources, they’re vulnerable to failures in any one of those sources.

Real World Web

Increasingly, real-world objects will not only contain local processing capabilities—due to the falling size and cost of microprocessors—but they
will also be able to interact with their surroundings through sensing and networking capabilities. The emergence of this Real World Web will bring
the power of the Web, which today is perceived as a "separate" virtual place, to the user's point of need of information or transaction.
Technologies rated as having particularly high impact include:

* Location-aware technologies should hit maturity in less than two years.Location-aware technology is the use of GPS (global positioning system),
assisted GPS (A-GPS), Enhanced Observed Time Difference (EOTD), enhanced GPS (E-GPS), and other technologies in the cellular network and handset
to locate a mobile user. Users should evaluate the potential benefits to their business processes of location-enabled products such as personal
navigation devices (for example, TomTom or Garmin) or Bluetooth-enabled GPS receivers, as well as WLAN location equipment that may help automate
complex processes, such as logistics and maintenance. Whereas the market sees consolidation around a reduced number of high-accuracy technologies,
the location service ecosystem will benefit from a number of standardized application interfaces to deploy location services and applications for a
wide range of wireless devices.

* Location-aware applications will hit mainsteam adoption in the next two to five years. An increasing number of organizations have deployed
location-aware mobile business applications, mostly based on GPS-enabled devices, to support queue business processes and activities, such as
field force management, fleet management, logistics and good transportation. The market is in an early adoption phase, and Europe is
slightly ahead of the United States, due to the higher maturity of mobile networks, their availability and standardization.

* Sensor Mesh Networks are ad hoc networks formed by dynamic meshes of peer nodes, each of which includes simple networking, computing and
sensing capabilities. Some implementations offer low-power operation and multi-year battery life. Technologically aggressive organizations looking
for low-cost sensing and robust self-organizing networks with small data transmission volumes should explore sensor networking. The market is
still immature and fragmented, and there are few standards, so suppliers will evolve and equipment could become obsolete relatively rapidly.
Therefore, this area should be seen as a tactical investment, as mainstream adoption is not expected for more than ten years.

Applications Architecture

The software infrastructure that provides the foundation for modern business applications continues to mirror business requirements more
directly. The modularity and agility offered by service oriented architecture at the technology level and business process management at
the business level will continue to evolve through high impact shifts such as model-driven and event-driven architectures, and corporate
semantic Web. Technologies rated as having particularly high impact include:

* Event-driven Architecture (EDA) is an architectural style for distributed applications, in which certain discrete functions are
packaged into modular, encapsulated, shareable components, some of which are triggered by the arrival of one or more event objects. Event objects
may be generated directly by an application, or they may be generated by an adapter or agent that operates non-invasively (for example, by
examining message headers and message contents). EDA has an impact on every industry. Although mainstream adoption of all forms of EDA is still
five to ten years away, complex-event processing EDA is now being used in financial trading, energy trading, supply chain, fraud detection,
homeland security, telecommunications, customer contact center mana