By Jim Lundy
For many mobile content management providers, this has been a foreign concept, but for others, it has not. Yesterday, Accellion announced content federation for Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive.
Accellion is one of the vendors who has separated themselves from others that are purely focused on cloud content management and the file/sync movement. Mobile content management is about more than synching files. For Accellion, we think content federation is the right move at the right time. Others, such as AirWatch Secure Content Locker have supported SharePoint connectivity for a while.
There are still many that do not support content federation. Others do but don’t tout it. Box, for example, has ECM Cloud Connect which does offer similar capabilities for on-premise repositories to connect to Box. Our prediction is that content federation for mobile content management providers will be a standard capability by YE 2015.
The fact remains that most enterprises will have 5 to 20 content repositories for the foreseeable future. Making it easier to manage content across them is important, just as the need to manage content across the growing enterprise footprint of mobile devices is.
We will be discussing all of this and more in our upcoming Aragon Research Globe for Mobile Content Management.