Enterprise Content Mashups (ECM)

Web Services are powering high-end enterprise IT make-overs with adoption of SOAs.
But Web Services are also the force behind a grass-roots phenomena being called ‘Mashups’
It’s Web Services for the masses.

What’s happened is that Internet powerhouses like Google, Yahoo!, eBay and Amazon have introduced Web Service and RSS feed interfaces to the data they manage.  The data they provide is available for anyone and the cost is either free or very low.

Mashups are applications or sets of web pages that consolidate data from multiple sources and create unique combinations.  Many of the applications that people have come up with have a mapping component based on Google maps.  

Mashup website examples include Platial, a site that combines geotagging with Google Maps — here people can pin their personal commentary or recollections associated to spot on the map.  Another example is Zillow which has collected data on more than 60 million homes and overlays the data and home valuation estimates on a map with parcel information.

Mashups are part of a trend towards enabling people to better interact with information available from the net.  Consider Microsoft’s ‘Live ClipBoard’ concept that was recently demo-ed by CTO Ray Ozzie.  In a few strokes, Ozzie created an RSS Feed of Flickr images and piped it into a desktop folder so that the folder would automatically update as new images were added to the web site.

More and more easy-to-use tools like this based on light-weight technologies are becoming available to pull together information and for presenting it in new and compelling formats.

Most of the mashup activity has been focused on the consumer side, which follows the recent trend for the consumer market to be driving new technology.  But what does this mean for the enterprise? 

‘Enterprise mashups’ or ‘Composite Enterprise Applications’ have the potential to feed a wave of Business Intelligence.  The ability to define custom presentations created from a combination of data taken and processed from many different corporate, partner and external data repositories is very powerful.   The concept is similar to data warehousing , but with mashups based on web services, the data is real-time, and the presentation is more moldable into appealing and more informative formats.  It has the potential to take ‘what if’ to the next level.

Consider an enterprise application that could pull together the various company-wide data and information feeds to create a project composite resource that might be a combination of project calendar/task list with published schedules, specifications and working drawings from a document repository, related emails messages from an email store, project member availability taken from Outlook calendars, etc.

Companies like ActiveGrid now offer frameworks that accelerate the creation of enterprise mashups using light-weight technologies based on Web Services and AJAX.

Core to the success of Enterprise Mashups is being able to expose enterprise data via web services.  The Formtek | Orion repository Web Service interface is designed to facilitate Enterprise mashups.  Content securely managed within the Formtek repository can form an important component of any composite application. 

Similar to the Google-Map-centric consumer-mashup application space, in the corporate space, Enterprise Content and Document Repositories can become a core component of Composite Enterprise Applications.