ECMHUB 2.0 – Another Comprehension Resource for ECM

This seems to month for new ECM sites. First, I mentioned Fierce Content Management, Last Friday, it was Informatics by AIIM. Now I recently heard about ECMHUB 2.0. It is described as the world's largest mashup focusing on the ECM and KM industries and married it to web collaboration.

Here is what they did. First they created a generic Yahoo Pipe that reads Google Spreadsheet information that lists hundreds of ECM industry RSS feeds including blogs, news, webcasts, questions, RFPs, and videos. Then they take the feeds and caches them into Google. Using Google App Engine they built an "on demand" feed caching and refresh application. This means the latest articles are instantly retrievable within only a few seconds and the individual feeds are automatically rebuilt with a push of a button. They then built "cloud communities" around the feeds adding comments, ratings, web conferencing, and 3D chat. Currently, they have support for over 40 communities with over 5,000 daily articles. Finally they wrap the entire application using Javascript with an AJAX foundation. The site says that "this means instead of navigating from page to page like a traditional website, you navigate by retrieving web page data on demand. When you click on a community, for instance, the main page area will clear and show an animated star indicating that new data, such as the latest news, is currently loading."

This is a good use of the aggregation capabilities in the new web. They have a tag cloud for their communities, ECM, KM, and Web 2.0 are the largest communities. They have this blog, Portals and KM, appearing in the KM community and this is appreciated. You need to log into your Google account to fully participate. It will be interesting to see how this site evolves.

The ECM Institute is an independent Association of Content Management Professionals. It services both the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and Knowledge Management (KM) Industries and their members include IT professionals from both private and public organizations, including specialized vendors and consultants. The site also serves as a clearing house for service providers and seekers.