Bridging the Enerprise

With all of this talk about the next generation Internet and Web 2.0 there is another thing happening that will be a challenge to large organizations to roll out these new techologies. If you look back into the past you will see that most innovation took place in the enterprise and eventually made its way to the consumer public. Today it has flipped 180 degrees. Innovation is now happeneing on the consumer side because of the Internet, the great development testbed.


One of the challenges I see with Web 2.0 is that it is a major breakthrough in the way people commnicate and share information. Unfortunately all of that information has to reside on the Internet. If I was a major corporation then I would have privacy issues because a lot of my information is behind corproate firewalls which cannot be seen on the Internet.


If you talk to most people who are developing Web 2.0 applications there is a heavy reliance on the Interent being there for their application to work. In other words if I pointed a Web 2.0 application at my network behind the firewall it would not function.


This is a dilema that most enterprises are going to face and get frustrated over in the near future. I have been reading and reading and following the Web 2.0 material and there is a lot happening that I would like to use and I beleive there is a way to make this happen.


I have defined a hybrid environment that would allow the Web 2.0 tools to fucntion against the corporate data that exists behind the firewall. Since most of the Web 2.0 tools are based on Open Source Standard Tools I would need to find an application or set of applications that could simulate the backend Internet. I would call these applications the "bridge". The bridge would be installed behind the corporate firewall and would understand how to speak to Web 2.0 tools on one side and how to speak to legacy systems on the other side.


I have found the first application that I beleive would be a great "bridge" application. The application comes from "Alfresco.org" a relatively new company founded by John Newton (the founder of Documentum). Alfresco has come up with what is billed as an enterprise content management system. Of course you would expect John and his team to know a little about content management. I sat with John last week and discussed Alfresco and what it does and how it works. What the two of us came up with is that it is a perfect "bridge" product. I have never seen an application that was built from more Open Source Standards then Alfresco. If you look on their web site (Alfresco.org") you will see a whole page just dedicated to all the standards they use or are compatible with.


I am going to install Alfresco here and try to see just how this bridge concept will work. I will let you know.