My thoughts about Collaboration

Some weeks ago I stumbled over a quote, not sure if in a tweet or a blog. The quote said that the user interface to each content management should be a collaboration tool.

I liked this quote since collaboration is what I professionally do since ten years now. The best collaboration platform ten years ago was eRoom, no question. eRoom succeeded over a large number of competitors. The name of the competitors got lost in the history, Sharepoint was not there at this time.

It is not easy to make the key reason for the success of eRoom out. There might be a couple of things that generated such a good solution in combination:

• The slick user interface
• The eaze of use
• Drag and Drop
• The delegation concept for management tasks

All in one eRoom was a good solution which made it easy to contribute.

eRoom was and is used as a content management solution. Since it offered most features that a end user would expect from a content management system, eRoom never did a good job in delivering content management.
Lots of content management feature that are expected by enterprises are missing in eroom.
There are no true federations, the repository is not well designed, search is weak, there is no synchronization and no deduplication, there is no classification, no renditions and much more.
This resulted in a situation where most eRoom installations got messed up and got maintenance monsters with tons of data in it where nobody knows if the data is valuable or could be deleted. A good content management use case, or?

eRoom Inc. just was in the process of starting the work on eRoom 8 when documentum took over that Boston based company. The integration for eRoom into the Documentum looked like a perfect match. I don’t want to point to the awful webtop user interface here.
So Documentum made an important step for the future of the eRoom product. A third party eRoom/Documentum integration was bought and brought to market. This integration later was integrated into eRoom 7 and is known now as Documentum Connector which upgrades eRoom to eRoom Enterprise.
I was ever wondering how Documentum wanted to integrate eRoom into their own platform. This was never a technical question, since from the technical point of view such an integration is easy. The question was more about the product design since the philosophy of the products is too different.
The things that made eRoom great would never fit into the philosophy of Documentum and vice versa. The final decision was to build a collaboration platform from scratch which is now known as CenterStage.

CenterStage was created to fit the collaboration concept into documentum. It was a product that aligns the strategy of Documentum as an ECM vendor with collaboration. Not easy to do. I don’t want to asks about the compromises that had to be done during the design process.

Andre Goodale explained yesterday at Laurence Hart’s blog that features like blogs, RSS feeds, tagging, federated search and more could make a good collaboration. I disagree with that.

All these features are good to expose content from a content management tool to users. So these features are good when a user wants to browse the enterprise content. But collaboration means more. It means that users work together. So the most important thing for a collaboration solution should be to generate an environment that encourages users to work together. This is something I can see for eRoom but not for CenterStage.
There is not much to do to get CenterStage to that point: adding drag and drop (very important), Simplifying the user interface and an improved performance are a leap into the right direction. However, I would expect more features that make CenterStage a better repository browser rather than a better collaboration tool in the next future.

This all depends from a point of view. If you look to it from the Documentum/Webtop side then CenterStage probably looks like a good collaboration tool that could replace Webtop. If you look to it from the eRoom side it looks like a pain because of the many things that got lost. I am confident that feature parity would not make CenterStage to a better collaboration tool, it just enables existing eRoom owners to perform a migration.

• Collaboration is not about features and nothing about feature parity with eRoom.


• Collaboration is not repository browsing


• Collaboration is contribution.

This leads me to a inconvenient conclusion: CenterStage will not be the next generation collaboration tool, it will be the next generation content browser (Webtop).

If you look to the enterprises, where Sharepoint will be the collaboration tool for the next couple of years and take the quote from above where a collaboration tool is be the interface to content management then it is hard to see where CenterStage fit into the next generation content management setup for the enterprise.