Over the weekend, James McGovern complained about the lack of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) standards. He was brutally criticising one EMC Documentum blogger for his general lack of enthusiasm on the subject. Many customers don't care one iota about the standards, other than as a "checkbox feature" to be fully buzzword compliant. However, McGovern saw it as ECM's responsibility to push customers in the right direction.

Now, I can understand why an enterprise architect would be screaming for an ECM standard. After all, its their job to make sure their portal server can easily interface with the half dozen repositories in the organization. Its not unusual for a large company to have many ECM systems -- due to mergers, acquisitions, or departments that hate each other -- and it would be nice to have one standard way to interface with them all.

However, I totally disagree that a useful ECM standard will be developed any time in the near term. Why? One simple reason... there are already four separate ECM standards, none of which are much used.

First, there was ODMA, which some used for content management. Then BEA came up with the Service Provider Interface. Then came WebDAV, who's biggest supporter was Microsoft. Then the Java folks chimed in with JSR170. Now, we are awaiting the fifth: JSR283. Guess what? They all suck.

Why??? My opinion is that its because there are 40 different organizations who claim to be "Enterprise Content Management," and they all have a different definition of what that means. Some have limited metadata, some have extensive metadata. Some use a file and folder structure, others realize that an ECM system with findable content must have multidimensional metadata taxonomies which render a folder structure obsolete. Some have workflows and business process management, others barely have revisioning. Some can render a Word document into thumbnails on the fly, others barely support files. Some have compound documents, others don't.

Thus, any standard will be forced to be the lowest common denominator between all 40 systems. Any customer limiting their enterprise to just those basic ECM services will be horribly disappointed at the lack of features. I know of one major customer who was extremely gung-ho about "standard" ECM interfaces, until they realized that the standards lacked vitally important features. Now they never use them. Other customers were more extreme: one actually banned WebDAV across the entire enterprise.

A true ECM system is vastly more interesting than the search/edit/save model that standards bodies would have you believe... A fully-featured "standard" ECM interface won't look anything like SQL. Databases are about structure, ECMs are about semantic and context as well.

Now, there is some value in a highly simplified interface to an ECM repository, but we must all acknowledge that this is the goal, and design a highly simple interface that everyone agrees is barely useful. We should stop wrapping everything in rigid and obtuse XML like WebDAV, or in over-engineered and under-useful standards like JSR-everything. One reader suggested a ReSTful API to simplify things. Now, I'm not a ReST fanboy, but I see the merits of a resource-based interface like ReST for "dumb" content access... as long as the hype acknowledges it's uselessness, it won't cause much harm.

Until the market defines the minimum requirements of an ECM system, there's not much point in making a beefy interface. Almost everybody agrees that such a definition would leave out Sharepoint because of its wretched metadata engine... everybody, that is, except Microsoft... if the analysts continue to support Microsoft's claims that Sharepoint is ECM, then a decent standard will never get traction, because there's no way Sharepoint could support it. Jeez, Sharepoint barely supports WebDAV... what are the odds it will support JSR283???

So until Sharepoint gets its act together, some more consolidation happens in the market, and some of these niche players stop calling themselves ECM, I don't foresee efforts towards a decent standard ever bearing fruit. That might happen by 2009, but don't hold your breath.