WebDAV and RSS for ECM Standards?!? Holy Crap, NO!

Just a brief rant before this gets out of hand...

James McGovern and other are back talking about Enterprise Content Management standards... his latest advice is to take a closer look at RSS or WebDAV as a standard. Others chimed in that there may be something there...

If I may offer some advice: HOLY CRAP, NO!

RSS is a nice model for consumption of streams of text, but it has many many problems. It doesn't have revisions. It can't handle large binary data streams. Even by jumping to ATOM and adding metadata, you still can't do searching, editing, or contribution for crying out loud. In a word, NO!

WebDAV is good for quick changes to web files on a shared filesystem... but authentication is a mess, it cannot handle dates properly, nor metadata-based search, nor metadata-based contribution without massive kludges. AIIM says that Records Management will be a huge factor for why people purchase ECM... and WebDAV just doesn't have the metadata muscle to keep up. In a word, NO!.

Also, I believe Laurence Hart completely misses the point of Billy Cripe's comment. Standards only enable business if they have sufficient features. The entire point of a standard is that you lose functionality by standardizing, but you gain flexibility. The question is, does that help more than it hurts? At present, it hurts more.

I totally disagree that a standard -- or anything else for that matter -- is inherently good. If they were, then everybody would stop whining about the lack of ECM standards, and freaking use one of the four existing standards. Stop worshiping technology for technology's sake, and make something useful.

The four existing standard are crap, and the next 4 will be as well... unless:

1. The analysts stop letting Microsoft get away with calling Sharepoint an ECM system,
2. The top 5 (or 10) ECM vendors get together and decide what a real ECM standard needs to be useful, and
3. All these niche repositories either write an interface, or go away.

Like I said, probably not before 2009. Those niche products are still pretty useful, even if they aren't ECM.

Alternatively, a large neutral company -- like BEA, Sun, or Sybase -- designs a "universal connector" for each specific ECM system. Several small firms have made these, but they were bought up and shut down by Documentum. IBM used to have a good one for WebSphere, but it also has languished because it means people could dump Content DB or FileNet whenever they wanted. Great for the WebSphere team, but bad for their ECM team.

And forgive me if I find Microsoft, EMC, and IBM to be completely disingenuous when calling for decent ECM standards. Those 3 companies either blocked decent open standards, or shut down universal connectors.