Paresh Suthar's Radio Weblog

Paresh Suthar's Radio Weblog
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Friday, October 18, 2002

Infoworld : Interwoven manges enterprise content [via Jeroen Bekkers' Groove Weblog]

InfoWorld: Do you agree the average IT guy is very excited about Web services because it allows him to do .Net on the client and Java on the server and he's just using it as a bridge?

Cochrane: That's exactly right, that's the one side. The other side is when you're looking at the collaboration that teams of people do to create information for ultimate publication out to certain audiences, that type of peer-to-peer environment; we will be providing those services to our customers. That process of collaboration is what people do today in our environment with both Team Site and some of our new collaboration applications like Team Doc and Team Portal. As part of that collaboration, oftentimes I need to have my local workstation synchronized with the integrated content because I'm a mobile professional. If, for example, you're working on your C drive and you drag and drop some asset into an Interwoven folder, I may need to have that on my laptop's C drive as well, so that if I disconnect I can still work with that asset offline. With things like our Desktop Integration Suite, when you publish information you can persist it down to the user's local drive as well. So it's peer-to-peer in a sense, but it's not pure peer-to-peer; it's going to the server first. The trick is, when you put something on your C drive I still need to enforce things like security, business process, I still need to get the asset tagged. I don't necessarily know that Kevin Cochrane should have that asset yet on his local drive, because it may need to go through an approval process first or it may not be suitable.

InfoWorld: Isn't that similar to what Groove is doing?

Cochrane: Groove has a good thought, but it has the wrong idea. The great thought is that as soon as you're finished with something, I have it on my own system and I can completely disconnect and have access to it. That's a great thought. But the idea that information that you immediately put on your local system should be immediately available on mine is wrong, and it's wrong for a couple of reasons. I need to enforce some control around that information you're publishing; it may be very sensitive information. I need to understand what that content's about, because I don't necessarily know that Kevin's the right person to access that information.

The major thing that our customers want is [for] information to be shared amongst everyone within the organization, but they do need to control the process by which information is shared and distributed. They're looking to have a centralized set of services that enforce the business process, that enable the version control, that enforce things like componentization of the asset, and the tagging of the asset. The trick is you need to enable the peer-to-peer networking of content but you still need to have an intermediating central service that can determine whether or not this is something that should be transformed into XML and, if transformed into XML, componentized. And if componentized, who do the components go to? Do they go as XML into a relational database or do they get generated as a PDF and syndicated to Kevin Cochrane?

I think Groove [has] the slickest product I've seen in years. It's very cool. And the great thing about something like Groove is, out of the box Groove works with our product. So if you wanted to do the peer-to-peer sharing of assets today using Groove on Interwoven, there's no integration required, you just simply re-enable that. If you wanted to just do peer-to-peer, Groove is the best platform for pure end-user to end-user peer-to-peer. Interwoven and the resources that we'll develop in our R&D don't want to mimic and re-create Groove's pure peer-to-peer functionality. Groove will work out of the box with Team Site; even if it becomes part of Office, we're still going to leverage it. But where you're really looking to transform profits and information, that's a set of services that I personally don't see someone like a Groove or even a Microsoft thinking about at a really deep level. That's what our value-add is.

Once again, Groove's strength is [incorrectly] positioned as "pure peer-to-peer" replication software. Groove's strength lies in the ability to take content from center based systems, to allow secure adhoc collaboration around the content and finally to publish content back to center based systems. This is exactly why the demonstration/announcement of Groove's integration with Sharepoint Team Services has received such an amazing response.
8:16:34 AM comment []