Cloud Content Management to Challenge ECM?

A phrase that instantly intrigued me when I had a pre-brief of Box.net’s new announcement this week (all Techmeme coverage) was the vendor’s newly coined notion of ‘cloud content management.’ VP of marketing Jen Grant (who I’ve interviewed previously here in a podcast) explained that Box is using the term to denote the application of social computing and enterprise 2.0-inspired principles to content management. This gives rise to a dynamic, participative treatment of all forms of content that’s in sharp contrast to the fusty image of conventional enterprise content management (ECM), which many people think of as the place ‘where content goes to die.’

I liked this so much, I Googled the term as I sat down to write this blog entry and, much to my surprise, the top search result was another podcast I published here on ebizQ a few months back called Content Management Moves to the Cloud. That interview is about web content management — in the sense of content that sits on a public-facing website — and is a category of content that personally I see little sense in managing anywhere else than in the cloud. Enterprise content management is different, however. Much of this content is private and confidential to the enterprise and so it has to be managed in a way that allows control and governance over who gets to see it, when they see it and what they do with it.

(Search result number three, by the way, is a news story about open-source ECM vendor Alfresco taking its existing ECM software and making it available as a package that’s ready to deploy to the Amazon cloud. That’s taking ECM into the cloud without changing it, which I would regard as a half-aaSed way of going about things and is certainly not what Box.net means by its definition of cloud content management, which finally makes an appearance as the fourth search result)…