Basic Content Services And Web 2.0

Consumers today are the first to get cutting-edge technology. Therefore enterprise technology adoption is increasingly driven by people from outside of the IT department. Changes in social practices also require a more agile way of exploiting new technology.

Basic Content Services (BCS) and Web 2.0 technologies follow these trends. They are both responses to a general call for improved communication and collaboration but are at the same time simpler in functionality, easier to deploy and available at lower cost. But where do they differ?

Seen from an enterprise perspective they target slightly different types of workers, namely:

• The information worker : Characterized by ad-hoc or semi-structured team collaboration
• The social worker : Characterized by personal relationships, knowledge transfer and participatory communities

BCS meets the needs of low-end and enterprise-wide Document Management, meaning support for creation, management (library services) and sharing of office documents for information workers. The produced documents are often relatively static and long-lived intended for consumption within a controlled context.

Web 2.0 technologies for user generated content (e.g. wikis and blogs) and metadata (e.g. social tagging and bookmarks) along with social interaction ( e.g. profiles and social networks) meet the needs of low-end and enterprise-wide Content and Knowledge Management, meaning creation, management (aggregation) and sharing of content snippets for social workers. The content being produced is relatively more interactive and short-lived intended for consumption and reuse in an open context.

These two areas will be integrated within a near future and their combined service offerings will be a threat for established monolithic and top-down oriented Enterprise Content Management systems.