My thoughts on “Where are the ECM technologies heading towards?”
sudhakar kanakaraj
If you think, what the heck we got to do with this recent NEWS, think again. We know all ECM vendors are currently looking for imparting various XML capabilities into their products. EMC's recent (not so recent) acquisition of X-Hive Corporation is an example. Oracle's latest database version Oracle 11i has rich XML features wherein Oracle may plan to impart these features into their ECM product Stellant. Same is the case with IBM. IBM may have plans to impart its latest DB2's XML capabilities into their ECM products, IBM FileNet and IBM Content Manager.
Now come back to the NEWS that is mentioned here. Whether India accepts Open XML or it's rival ODF XML format, soon the world is going to have a common XML format in which all the content creating/authoring/publishing products like Microsoft's Office suite of products, Adobe, Apple's iWork suite of products, IBM's Lotus Symphony etc are going to produce. So far, it has been just unstructured that has to be dealt, but now, the challenges for ECM systems are efficiently managing and delivering the structured/semi-structured XML content. No wonder why ECM vendors are currently looking for XML databases to face this challenge.
This may be a great shift in the ECM industry as of how Database systems had momentum when they stepped into an era of from being normal Database systems into Relational Database systems by adopting SQL as their standard way of programming/accessing RDBM systems. ECM industry may have the same momentum soon. The standard way of programming/accessing content repositories may be standards like XQuery, XPath etc.
So, how should we be prepared to face and support this ECM industry shift? The answer would be, get our selves be prepared by learning XML standards like XQuery, XPath, XPointer, JAAS, XSL, XLink, XUpdate, WebDAV, XML Schema, DOM, SOAP etc.
These are just my thoughts and if you have different views or some more points to add, write back to me.