Yesterday, in the As the pendulum swings - Users vs. the Enterprise, I discussed how the balance between the needs of staff users and those of the enterprise that employs them has recently swung strongly to favor users as a result of consumerization.

There have been two traditional enemies of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) adoption:

1. Email
2. Shared network folders/drives

For most users in an enterprise (i.e. staff), it is simply easier to send a file to a colleague through email than it is to first deposit the file and then send a link instead.

Today was my first day after I left OpenText. I had a great 11 years with the company that afforded me fabulous opportunities to learn about content management, the enterprise content management (ECM) field and how it relates to business process and enterprise architecture. In recent years our view of content greatly expanded to the digital media perspective.

Showing a collection of PowerPoint slides pulled from anOpenText Content Server was the subject of a recent post. At that time, I used presentations from ourContent World Users' conference of a year ago to show how a collection of related materials from a secure enterprise repository could be embedded in the post using OpenText Widget Services (OTWS).

I’m a big fan of video for work applications. It’s the best way to get information to staff quickly. As such I’ve been using the OpenText Video Service (OTVS) for some time. In fact, we recently developed a ‘Success Story’ about our own use of the service that will be out soon. We already have over 600 internal videos for staff running on OTVS, mostly made in the last year.But while OTVS is easy to use, it really isn’t practical to train everyone in an organization to use it.

Sometimes providing someone with a simple list of choices is not effective because they'll find it boring. Users may have been spoiled by the newer, more immersive online experiences. You need to create a more engaging experience.At other times you want to package up content you have in source or original repository and provide it to users through some other website, wiki or blog.