Cloud Content Management in a Tablet Era

Author: Jim Lundy Date: May 18, 2012

Topic: Content Management Research Note Number: 2012-12

Issue: How will Content Management market evolve to support new technologies such as video?

Summary: As content storage and sharing moves to the cloud, a bevy of cloud-based content management options are becoming available. Aragon Research introduces the four levels of cloud content management (CCM).

For years, most users shared content with their colleagues and collaborators by attaching a file to an email and clicking “Send.” As email administrators unhappily know, this turns the users’ collective inboxes into a de facto collaboration repository, with the email timeline providing some primitive workflow and version control, but with no real collaboration or content management (CM) services.

This ad hoc approach grew because many users didn’t have CM or collaboration tools, or access to the ECM repository, perhaps due to the cost of per-seat licenses. For users, it has a few advantages: it is simple, requires no planning or IT involvement, and anyone can make use of it whenever they need to. It is not, however, a robust or scalable approach to meeting users’ growing CM and collaboration needs.

Now, however, with cloud-based backup increasingly popular, cloud service providers are expanding their archives into working content repositories. To attract more active users, they have to offer tools and services that enable active collaboration and engagement with this new cloud-based content ecosystem. This Research Note looks at four levels of cloud content management (CCM) that can meet these needs.

Several steps along the way have helped the rise of CCM. Microsoft SharePoint has grown over the last eleven years to challenge established ECM providers. SharePoint’s appeal was that it was low-cost, user-friendly, and easier to implement than a full ECM system. Now, as the cloud becomes an acceptable place to store content, cloud service providers are developing a new generation of content management services that go beyond archival storage to provide robust interactive content creation, collaboration and dissemination functions to users worldwide.

This is part of our archived research. See our topics for a current list of newly published research.