Dismantle Content Management Systems (CMS)! Rebuild them with Social Media Features

I don’t know how many times I’ve heard people want to use a wiki and a blog for their intranet. They want to bypass the corporate intranet silos and allow bottom-up and created content by the employees. It’s faster, cheaper, and less work for the Intranet management team…or is it? There can be a ton of challenges of letting anyone install and create a blog, wiki, forum, within an intranet. What about permissions, identity, scalability, duplicate content, versions, logins, security and any other challenge that emerges from a distributed content framework model.

As a former web manager, I know the challenges of content management systems, asking for the 2.0 features to emerge out of 1.0 CMS systems ain’t going to happen easily. I’ve experimented with Sharepoint Blog and Wiki features, but have yet to hear from anyone when that will fully roll out. Their webpage has SO much content, it’s difficult to navigate.

Interesting trend, many emerging software vendors are packaging up what works in today’s modern web, and is creating turn key suites for companies to deploy. The term “White Label” is being thrown around lately, as these platforms are plain, and ready for your to customize and brand yourself.

Video: Koral Content Management with Community
Scoble video interviews Tim from Koral, which is much like an Office Document management tool that overlays community tools, tagging, rating, versions, comments, RSS, and other collaborative tools. This could replace your antiquated CMS system.

Video: Blogtronix Social Software Suite
Blogtronix is an out of the box community suite that offers blogs, wikis, tags, rss that you could brand.

Community Server
Although I don’t see a video, most know to look at Community Server which powers Channel9, Xbox, and Dell one to one blogs. I’ve had a demo of this product, and thought it was worth exploring.

Watching Google
Recently, Google launched Gmail for small business and a college in San Jose, with the recent acquisition of Writely, Jotspot wiki (covered at Web SIG), blogger, and other collaboration tools, they may be able to provide social software suites that provides enterprise, collaboration, and social features.

What else?
Is there another turnkey suite out there that has features like the above companies? If so, leave a comment, I’ll add to the list.

Do you think we can get rid of the broken Enterprise Content Management systems (CMS) soon? I’ve managed four enterprise Intranets (or been on the primary teams) I’ve used four CMS systems in my career, and they have tremendous problems with scalability, flexibility and vendor lock in. It’s just a matter of time before enterprise CMS companies look to acquire companies like the above.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 3rd, 2006 at 9:34 am and is filed under Podtech, Social Media, Technology, Video, Web Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.