Software compaies on the other hand seem to have taken a small note out of  the energy industry players like Exxon. These days we see alot of these organizations playing a part in many niches as well as the standard protocols from cloud computing to browser implementations. Google and Microsoft seem to be leading the charge but IBM and Oracle are not too far away either.  But yet there are many players in the industry who seem to be “ok” with what they are currently doing because of the classic “core-competency” model and do not seem to be looking further ahead. The issue with the “core-competency” model is that, if you end up sleeping on your game for just a second, someone is going to come and gobble your market share or your brand name is just going to be eroded away. Microsoft took a long time to come up with Vista/Windows 7 and in the mean time people have moved to Leopard{if they can afford a Mac}, or Ubuntu or Fedora. Yahoo’s search pioneering capabilities seem to be fading away as players like ask.com and cuil.com are entering the largely Google dominated world.  Even the smaller companies seem to be either stuck between figuring out what their “consulting/services model” is {which is largely due to social networking capabilities these days anyways}, and whether they can come up with efficient solutions for current and prospective clients.

At eForce Global Inc, we seem to have done a great job on this visionary aspect and began the transition phase from a purely consulting firm to a solutions firm about 2-3 years ago and we are benefiting from the dividends during a recession. The products and services we provide range from “collateral consulting” to efficient and cost-effective business solutions. Our management seems to have cut the fat off and our technical experts seem to be doing two things at one time - “what is my business problem” and “how do i fix it fast and effectively”. The diversification I am talking about also refers to the domains that we have entered. We have spanned from system integrators to a certain number of products to identifying broader solutions that cover a particular domain such as the Financial Industry, Retail or the Media Industry. 

It is important that within a software company, people need to take some time out to see where they are headed, projected revenue vs cost-cuts and the tools and solutions they are providing to their clients. By being focused on one particular product or service and not understanding consumer trends - they could just become another Chrysler. At the same time it is also important that during such diversification people are held accountable for what they are preaching and doing  - and the numbers should show the way!

So according to David’s Model, it is very important to analyze the question or debate of “data vs structure”. Now I completely agree with this but what I do not agree with is the practicality involved in these examples. A Blogging module is probably the easiest implementation using a Java Content Repository compliant application - you have a blog, some posts and comments. Great figure out the structure you want or data if that makes you sleep at night and then just build the damn thing! The thing that made me wonder is when David goes on to explain “Using the above content model I can easily allow the “anonymous” user to “create” comments, but keep the anonymous user on a read-only basis for the rest of the workspace”.  OK first off, I think this is part of the JCR 2.0 specs of moving authorization/authentication to the content repository level - but even in such a scenario by applying this theory there seems to be the removal of a security layer on top of the JCR repository. I am not sure whether this is the route to go - why would I allow my content repository to manage my security module? Suppose I am bargaining for more than one workspace - would that mean that I would have to enforce my security restrictions on each and every one? I am excited about seeing how this was adopted in Day Communique’s Social Collobaration module that is about to be released and how it will fit in with the Day Communique CQ 5 WCM application.

The second reasoning where I respectfully disagree with this approach is that I am wondering the performance impact on such a “structure”. Lets take David’s own creation of CQ 5 - now I am guessing there would be a listener in there waiting to see for a comment to be made - it would kick in and than create a new node page? Play this into the hands of a site like blogger.com or huffingtonpost.com and you could see some serious implications as far as performance is concerned if not done right! I like the one on one transaction of information of a particular “page” {concept I love about CQ 4.2.1 - not very well versed in CQ 5.1 just yet - though I am loving Sling without its Security/POST Servlet/ and other bottlenecks} - having its own properties and leveraging a security layer on top to handle such transactions. This would play really well with the whole CEVA approach taken by The marketing team of Day Software AG.

I have much admiration for David and his great contributions to the Apache World/Sling and JCR, but it would be interesting to hear some feedback negating his or my theory.

And yes - I am having a hard time adapting to it too, but WordPress has come to my rescue. While developing this site, I was trying to figure the difference between the concept of “Pages” and “Categories” in this great open source software and was confused about why I should not be able to apply some of my “posts” to a particular “page”.

Some digging into these different concepts resulted in the following understanding

Page - Pages are for content that is less time-dependent than Posts. Therefore a page is considered a “static” part of a website unless of course in the case of WordPress - the home page. In the classic Web Content Management System, a page would be your “information architecture” - and you would associate your components to do some work on them depending on the template.

Category - is basically identifying a piece of content with a particular “set of information”. In the classic Web Content Management System, this would have been only used by components on a particular part of the web page to render the content dynamically using that particular set of data. This is the classical sense of taxonomy in other CMS.

 Now what I seem to like about WordPress is that Categorization immediately could be utilized as your “Information Architecture” and leave the “Page” concept to parts of the site that are truly static like “Terms of Agreement”, “Contact Us” etc. For example, after this post has been published you will see my top navigation appear with two items - “Web Content Management Systems” and “Trends & Leaps”. I can add more categories if I wanted to but it is important to leave this at a high level. Yet the greatest benefit that I have as an author is that I am in charge of contributing to where my content should appear.

I am not sure the functions associated with a structural hierarchy will go away as in the case of Information Architecture and Taxonomy but giving more rights to the author is definetly worth the exploration - after all these are people who know what they write about {hopefully} and thus it would make sense for them to decide where their content should appear on a particular website. Some organizations do want to have a predefined set of IA for their website and separate their Content Taxonomies in another partitioning implementation - I am sure they will give me reasons and make me understand - they do pay for it.

Oh did I mention that the conversation/debate on the topic of Information Architecture vs Taxonomy/Content Storage becomes mute and null at this point!