Transform Magazine - When the Music Stops, Collaboration Will Go Back to Basics

Transform Magazine - When the Music Stops, Collaboration Will Go Back to Basics: "There's a game of musical chairs under way in the world of collaboration, with content management, document management, records management and knowledge management increasingly overlapping with messaging, conferencing and workflow (as well as other applications whose terms are no longer in vogue, such as groupware and teamware). There will be a significant shortage of chairs when the music stops, and some of the categories will be subsumed into others and in some cases into underlying platforms from IBM, Microsoft and others. Industry standards will accelerate the consolidation, with especially strong industry momentum behind XML and XML Schema.
The consolidation of content and collaboration technologies will produce both challenges and opportunities for enterprise planners. There will be the inevitable disruption, but with it will come compelling new capabilities, pricing, licensing and management models; it's all lining up to become a classic 'do more with less' scenario. Consolidation will also produce stark new realities for software vendors that already are having trouble differentiating their products. The strikingly similar marketing material on the Web sites of Documentum (with eRoom), FileNet, Interwoven, Open Text, Plumtree and Vignette, for example, is indicative of the challenges some vendors now face.
The industry is on the verge of a major back-to-basics phase in all things related to content and collaboration. There will be an industry-wide shift toward a new communication and collaboration foundation based on the following concepts:..."