Content Software Technology: Why Contextual Workspaces Are The Real Answer To Productivity

Today, most workers find and retrieve information and bring it into the software applications they are using. This Briefing describes the next stage in the evolution of content integration (CI), contextual workspaces. A contextual workspace combines tools, information, and processes that support a knowledge worker and embeds content into processes and tasks. The concept is a radical departure from the way most content and technology companies have approached CI; rather than encompassing every tool and warehousing every scrap of information that a worker might need, contextual workspaces focus on the work to be performed, and present only the information needed for a given task and process. The Briefing identifies the four major players that have the critical mass of tools and capabilities to create wide-ranging workspaces: Microsoft, Adobe, Oracle, and IBM. For content deployment professionals, the creation and deployment of contextual workspaces requires a broader set of skills, greater cooperation with IT, and a narrower focus on user applications, than any other kind of content deployment. For content software technology vendors, the Briefing calls for a greater focus on partnerships with content vendors and the business processes of users. For commercial content vendors, it prescribes a change from looking at the retrieval of content as an end in itself, to seeing content as an enabler of specific work tasks.