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Content Circles leverages many of the qualities that are popular in social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. Invitations, micro-blogging, chatting, content posting, tagging, and email notifications provide the key ingredients for online collaboration.

However, unlike these social networking sites, the goal of Content Circles is not to establish a large group of friends and openly follow each other's activities. Rather, the focus is on specific project collaboration with a restricted set of participants.

For example, Content Circles makes it easy to establish new workgroup circles for each of your projects. Just invite the members you want to each circle and they will receive an invitation to join. If they already have Content Circles, they can accept the invitation in the client and immediately receive the circle. If they are new to Content Circles, they'll receive your invitation message and instructions for how they can download, install, and get started.

This two-phase invite/accept for members to join a circle ensures both parties have accepted the responsibilities of membership and have established trust. This is similar to Facebook friends but unlike the one-way follow in Twitter. And unlike both Facebook and Twitter, these circles are private so only the members of the circle have access to the content, comments, and activity tracking for the circle. Finally, instead of everyone having open access, the rights for each circle member are restricted based on the role assigned by the circle owner.

By applying the key qualities of social networking with the controls of content management, Content Circles provides the best platform for team collaboration.

Peer-to-peer technology has great potential. It enables the fastest content delivery possible, insures everyone has the content locally on their desktop, and leverages the full bi-directional power of the internet beyond the client-server design of the web.

From day one, our goal with Content Circles has been to develop a peer-to-peer Content Management system which complements existing Enterprise Content Management systems and guarantees the content shared amongst peers is secure. However, there are several challenges we faced:

• P2P needs connectivity between peers - Regardless of whether each machine has a direct internet connection or is connecting through a firewall, peer-to-peer requires each to be able to discover a route to be able to send messages and content to each other.

• P2P requires both parties to be online at the same time - When someone makes an update, that change can only be sent to the other peers that are online. If one of the peers isn't available, they can not get the update until they are online at the same time as someone who already has the update is online.

• P2P has a bad rap with IT - The historic problems with Napster and other P2P technologies which violated copyright law has caused some in IT to not trust any use of P2P.

With Content Circles, we have worked to address these areas of concern to deliver a solution which fulfills the promise of P2P:

• Support direct and web service assisted connections - Peers which can directly communicate can take advantage of fast messaging and transfers. For those peers which can not be reached directly, our web service hosts a forwarding service which can shuffle blocks between the peers across firewalls. All of this effort is hidden under the hood--users just add content and send messages without having to consider how it is being delivered to peers on the other side.

  Note the use of blocks for passing data between peers enables arbitrarily large files to be sent. Small files or messages are sent in a single block while larger files are broken into several blocks which are reassembled into a single file upon receipt.

• When not online together, use a Store and Forward node - We have purposely stayed away from hosting content for our customers to provide that extra level of security--nobody other than the members of the circle have access to the content in the circle. This does create a problem for teams spread across timezones where they may not all be online at the same time. Out solution is for someone to host a Store and Forward node which is another copy of Content Circles running on a machine that is always on. When configured as a Store and Forward node, registered users can add this node as a member and always know their content is being hosted for other members even when they are offline. In this way, you get the benefits of content hosting without the security risks that go along with pushing your content to the cloud.

  This Store and Forward node does not have to be on a fast or dedicated machine. Content Circles works in the background and can co-exist with web servers and other applications on the machine. The key is having the Store and Forward installed on a machine that is always on. If IT wants to have a role in support of Content Circles, hosting this Store and Forward node is the perfect way for them to help maintain the infrastructure for a robust Content Circles implementation.

• Full auditability - Content Circles tracks every action taken in a circle and provides Content Status so each member can see what each other has done. While traditional P2P systems try to hide as much history as possible, Content Circles captures this detail to help give members the complete view of their circles. This also reinforces that any actions taken in Content Circles are auditable so proper business rules must be followed.

By addressing the risks of P2P, we feel Content Circles provides the best solution for Content Collaboration without barriers.

The future of Content Management is the continued extension and reach of ECM systems. Much of the success of these systems to date has been the integration of document repositories with role based permissions, audit tracking for compliance, enterprise workflow, and web publishing. However, the emerging needs of team collaboration will continue to drive new functionality including:

Leveraging Social Networks
Rather than providing pieces of social networking, there must be direct integration with Twitter, Facebook, IM, and other relevant Web 2.0 technologies. Unlike blog and wiki support which many vendors have partially replicated, these social networks are all about reach and extending information beyond the corporation. Harness the fact that many users enjoy these systems outside the workplace and put the tools to use in-house. Of course there need to be safeguards and monitoring for data-loss prevention, but the benefits of user productivity and adoption are worth the effort.

Support inside and outside the firewall
Most ECM systems were designed when corporations maintained all functional teams within the organization. With today's dynamic and economic constraints, it is most likely several key rolls are outsourced whether for marketing collateral, analyst relations, development, or customer support. Rather than having to extract content from the content management system and exchange it with these outside contractors using email, FTP, or some other file exchange, ECM systems should have options for replication or exposing limited content outside the corporate firewall. Enabling this work process while maintaining the auditability and management of the content is key.

In many cases, a cloud or SaaS based offering will best address this need. The lower startup cost and reduced IT overhead offered by solutions like SpringCM, Google Wave, and Content Circles can complement investments made in the corporate ECM by providing the tools needed for distributed teams without significant cost and delay.

Desktop and Mobile integration
The biggest challenge for ECM within an organization is getting users to use it. Most users will review a new system when it comes online or is mandated by IT, but most will abandon the system when it becomes to cumbersome to use or out of their day-to-day work process. Most content is created and maintained on the desktop so ECM systems must include desktop integration to eliminate the rigorous upload/download cycle that web based content management assumes. Desktop integration should also offer local access to content so even when their laptop is offline they have their most important content with them at all times and can sync updates back when they get online.

Mobile integration would take this a step further to enable email or app delivered notification of content updates as well as potentially remote access to content for review or sharing even if the user is away from their desktop. It will be several years before mobile devices can legitimately provide anything more than a read-only experience, but remote access to notifications and content would address the majority of the need.

User-centric auditability and tracking
Gaining insight to the usage of an ECM system is key for an organization to improve adoption across the corporation. The advanced analytics most Web 2.0 web sites have today must be offered within the ECM system so active users, popular content, frequent searches, trending topics, and new uses of the system can be identified and exploited. For ECM to be a vital part of every employee's workday, careful attention should be paid to how those users are using the system and look for ways to further enrich their experience.

Uniform repository access with CMIS
The OASIS CMIS standard promises to achieve what Shamrock, WebDav, and JSR-170 have failed to do -- broad industry support for a common repository API that customers and 3rd parties can leverage to avoid vendor lock-in and enable innovative new extensions. ECM vendors should focus on providing the best tools and capabilities rather than holding corporate content hostage. With strong support from market leaders including IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Alfresco, and Day demonstrating reference implementations of the standard, hopefully we will finally have the right interface for repository integration.

We are very excited about the future of content management and hope to see more and more innovation to help bring ECM capabilities to the masses. Our thanks to Julian Wraith for inviting comments on the "Future of Content Management". You can follow this topic with hashtag #CMSFuture or the MD5 tag 6f82f1d2683dc522545efe863e5d2b73.

Microsoft has been sharing more details about their upcoming release of SharePoint 2010. Last month they announced that Groove will be rebranded as SharePoint Workspace. This is surprising news given that Groove has been a well known alternative (P2P) file sharing and project collaboration platform. However, it reinforces the need for a strong desktop companion to web-based Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems which:

• Reduces the pain of the upload/download cycles
• Supports offline access to content
• Enables collaboration with extended workgroups who may not have direct access to the ECM system

While SharePoint Workspace will be a great addition to the SharePoint suite in 2010, it will still leave several gaps to be filled:

• It only runs on Windows
• It only works with SharePoint
• It is a large software package to download and install
• It will only be offered in the high-end Microsoft Office Professional Plus package

Content Circles addresses these needs by supporting both Mac and Windows desktops, by integrating with SharePoint, Alfresco Enterprise, and Xerox DocuShare, and by being a much more lightweight download to install on each desktop. Content Circles is also a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) with a low-cost monthly or annual subscription so there is no large, upfront investment or IT support required before you can get going.

It is clear every ECM system needs a strong desktop story. For pure Windows shops, SharePoint 2010 with SharePoint Workspace appears to be a great solution. For everyone else, there is Content Circles.

When Content Circles was formed in 2007, our goal was to address some major gaps in the current state of Enterprise Content Management systems. In particular, these systems assume:

• ECM requires large expensive systems that are purchased, installed, and managed by central IT
• Users will adhere to a rigorous upload/download discipline for keeping the central repository up to date
• All users who need to collaborate on a project can access the central repository
• Users work primarily in the office and do not need remote access to their repository

The result of our efforts is Content Circles which was launched in January 2009. It is a Rich Internet Application (RIA) combined with a hosted web service in the cloud and provided as a subscription SaaS.
Content Circles enables:

• Collaboration in Circles where content is only shared with the specific members you have invited
• Uses P2P synchronization so no content is held in the cloud to further enhance content security
• Works across firewalls and cross platform so there are no barriers about who can participate
• Direct access to popular ECM systems including Microsoft Sharepoint, Xerox DocuShare, and Alfresco
• Online and Offline access to your content since you always have the latest copy synchronized to your desktop
• Automatic tracking and audibility of content so you know what everyone is working on in the Circle
• Instant messaging is integrated with the app so you don’t have to leave the tool to chat with other members

Everyone here was excited to see the announcement of Google Wave last week at the Google IO conference. Even though Google set out to redefine how email and instant messaging work, we find many similarities between Google Wave and Content Circles including:

• A Wave and a Circle are defined as a set of users working on a specific project who always need the latest state shared amongst all members
• Focus is on the workgroup and the work they need to complete rather than the constraints of a traditional ECM system
• Support for Mac and Windows based users
• Commenting and Instant messaging integrated with team collaboration around the documents
• Change tracking with the ability to track the history of project from the beginning to current day
• The results of collaboration in one Wave/Circle can be published to another
• We envision a rich ecosystem of extensions built on top of our APIs to expand the use of the system beyond the current implementation

The differences between our approaches include:

• Google Wave is a pure cloud / browser delivery whereas Content Circles is fog computing
• Google Wave has direct, character by character editing of shared documents by the multiple participants in the Wave
• Content Circles allows continued use of your desktop applications rather than having to move everything to the cloud and browser based interfaces
• Content Circles integrates with existing ECM systems to preserve corporate investments and allow access to historic content and ongoing projects
• Content Circles allows offline productivity since you always have your content with you and can synchronize updates when you are back online
• Content Circles is available today for production use

We look forward to helping users break out from the constraints of traditional systems and leverage the power of these innovative new systems like Content Circles and Google Wave to better address the needs of the modern workgroup. Together we can change the document collaboration world for the better. Catch the wave.

With all the hype these days around Cloud Computing, it is hard for people to remember there was a time before Amazon, Google, and Salesforce with their huge data centers and application hosting. It is also hard for people to believe there will be something after Cloud Computing.

Cloud Computing is not the solution to every problem. Users must ignore their inner voice and trust these remote applications and data centers are secure with their precious, private data. Users of Cloud Computing must accept they can only use the service when they are online. And one of the biggest flaws in Cloud Computing is the incredible power of the desktop being wasted by hosting a plain, old, kiosk browser. What we need is a way to bring the cloud to the desktop - to make it Fog Computing.

Content Circles enables Fog Computing with a rich-internet application (RIA) that integrates with your native applications to enable seamless content collaboration on documents. Instead of moving your favorite office, engineering, and creative applications to the cloud, Content Circles shares your local updates automatically with the other trusted members of your circles. Everyone gets a copy of the latest documents without having to download from the cloud and the files are stored locally so even when you are offline you have the most recent content with you. The service works both within and outside of corporate firewalls so there are no restrictions on who can participate in your circles for file sharing. And since everyone has a copy of the content, there is built-in backup/restore whenever someone loses their computer and must rebuild their circles.

For cases where not everyone is online at the same time, you can install Content Circles on a desktop that is always on as a store-and-forward. With this store-and-forward node as a member of a circle, it will always synchronize the latest content and will make it available to other members when they come online. In doing so, you still maintain complete control of your content without having to let it be hosted in the cloud, but still get the benefits of immediate synchronization when members of the circle come online.

By blending the best of Cloud Computing with the strength of the desktop, we feel Fog Computing with Content Circles is the best solution for team collaboration around content. Long live the Fog!

One year ago today, we started Content Circles, Inc. with the idea of changing the way people manage and collaborate on content. From our experience in content creation with Adobe PDF and content management at Xerox DocuShare, we understand the value of documents and their essential role in business.

However, with all the maturity of content creation and content management systems over the years, the fundamental problem of content collaboration remains a relatively unsolved mystery. There are several basic problems in content collaboration today:

• Almost every document requires multiple collaborators and multiple review cycles.
• The majority of business documents require collaboration beyond the comfortable confines of an internal team.
• Large Enterprise Content Management systems require too much change in user behavior to be used reliably and effectively.
• Email is fine for simple content collaboration between a couple of users but fails miserably as more users and more documents are involved.

At Content Circles, we have challenged ourselves to rethink content collaboration. We believe:

• Content is created on the desktop so that is where collaboration needs to begin.
• Existing tools for content creation are mature and do not need to be replaced.
• Existing systems for storing and managing content are mature and do not need to be replaced.
• Email is not going away and will continue to be a major collaborative tool.
• Never forget that the user is the source of documents so the system needs to fit their work process--not the other way around.

As a result, we have designed and built Content Circles as a rich desktop client which interfaces to existing content creation and content management tools but allows users to work they way they want to work. No more manual upload/download. No more wondering if you have the latest content. No more worrying about how to collaborate with someone outside of the company.

It took longer to get to this point than we had anticipated, but we think you will find it was worth the wait. Content Circles eliminates the biggest headaches in content collaboration and once you use the system you will wonder how you ever got along without it.

Content collaboration will never be the same. Enjoy the Beta.