Stellent's Wiki, Blog, RSS Organizer

By DAVID SIMS

TMCnet CRM Alert Columnist

Stellent, Inc., a content management products vendor, announced today a new product to let customers better manage wikis and blogs within their corporate IT systems.

A wiki is a Web site encouraging collaborative writing of content through collective authoring, and massive linking to new or existing pages within a wiki or other site.

A blog is a Web site facilitating informal discussions on specific topics through author postings/commentary and reader feedback.

The Stellent Universal Content Management helps customers integrate wikis and blogs in multi-site Web content management.

"A blog, or wiki, is simply another Web site among the tens to hundreds of sites a company must manage," said Dan Ryan, executive vice president of marketing and business development for Stellent. "For example, a wiki could be used to create a competitive analysis or review documentation online, and a blog might be used to gather immediate feedback from employees, partners and customers about new product features."

This content can be managed as part of an organization's content management architecture, Stellent maintains.

"Companies increasingly recognize the business value wikis and blogs can generate and are looking for ways to bring these technologies into the enterprise," said Lou Latham, research analyst for Gartner, Inc. "However, there is high concern among organizations regarding how wikis and blogs can be securely managed and monitored to protect confidential or proprietary information and mitigate risk."

Latham says one way to address these fears is to "incorporate wikis and blogs into an existing enterprise content management infrastructure offering workflow, audit trail, and records and retention management functionality that can be easily applied to these types of Web sites."

The company has also recently announced a "new strategy" for using really simple syndication (RSS) within an enterprise content management framework.

RSS is an XML format used to portray a list of Web content via short titles and summaries with links to Web pages and content or blog posts. The technology is quickly gaining popularity because it allows organizations to quickly and easily distribute multiple types of content while giving users the flexibility to subscribe to only the information they want or need.

According to Forrester Research, ECM vendors "need to think out of the DAM and WCM box. Social computing technologies such as blogs, wikis and RSS are natural extensions to WCM."

Stellent Universal Content Management lets wiki contributors create hyperlinks in both pattern-matching and wizard style formats, which in turn allows users to link to other topics and pages within a wiki site, as well as other Web sites.

When an author creates a new hyperlink about a particular subject, the Stellent system will automatically link to a wiki page about that topic. If the page does not exist, it will automatically create a new page.

The Stellent technology also records a history of wiki activity, so readers know who writes or changes content, how many times content is revised and if there are certain topics currently under heavy debate. A locking and revision control feature ensures only one user may change content at a time, and it also keeps an audit trail of all revisions which is then available for records and retention management purposes.

Stellent Universal Content Management now provides short, blog-formatted WYSIWYG forms, enabling authors to post new blog entries without requiring HTML expertise. Contributors can edit or add new posts in real-time and instantly view their changes.

David Sims is contributing editor for TMCnet. For more articles please visit David Sims' columnist page.

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