SpringCM Cloud provides an enterprise content management platform. It was founded in 2005 by some industry veterans who wanted to go beyond traditional on-premise content management. They have done this and more as I learned when I recently spoke with CEO Christopher Junker and Vice President, Product Management Dan Dosen about their new capabilities.

The cloud is transforming many software apps. First, of all it eliminates the need for end users to deal with software.  You just use it.  This makes ii way faster and cheaper to get started.  If the software is intuitive then you can also bypass IT. This possibility were brought to the attention of the business user through the consumer apps they have grown accustomed to. Christopher referred to this as the consumerization of IT and it has far reaching effects.

SpringCM is built to take advantage of all of these transformative capabilities within cloud applications. It is designed so the average business user can create process aligned content management use cases. It is these process aligned content management apps that allow Spring CM to go beyond traditional content management in function, as well as ease of implementation.

Spring CM refers to this capability as dynamic case management. It is a good term as it allows customers to drive more consistent content management processes, enhance team productivity and increase management visibility by giving them the ability to more efficiently and quickly organize people, tasks and content around document-intensive, collaborative business processes. That is a lot of words but basically it allows you to build the content components of work support around the way you work and avoid confirming to the limitations of a software package. SpringCM also provides templates to ease the task of creating custom work support tools. Below you can see a sample case management dashboard.

To facilitate the use of the case management approach, SpringCM has implemented a checklist model.  They did some research on the best approach and I agree with their selection. It does not attempt to dumb down the job. Checklists are used by experts. They do not tell you how to do things but help you remember all the things that need to be done.  Here is a sample checklist in use.

They also added an activity stream. I think this is a transformative feature for content management and collaboration tools as you can easily see what is going on in an area of interest. There are auto-generated updates based on user activity and you can also manually add updates Twitter-style. Below is a sample checklist with a related activity stream.

Since it a Web-based API you can create you own interface so users are not aware they are operating within SpringCM. This places your content in a better context for your specific work tasks. You can also integrate with other applications such as SharePoint and Salesforce.com.  For example, this allows you to overcome some of the limitations of SharePoint while still using your investment in it. You can place content from SharePoint within SpringCM for more functionality and then put it back into SharePoint once your work is done.

SpringCM has also invested in support for mobile apps including iPad compatibility.  This enables organizations to put content to work for executives and knowledge workers on the go so they can get work done where and when it needs to be. Mobile content management will only increase over the next few years. Below is a sample iPad interface.

I really like what they are doing and wish I had these capabilities when I was hand building content intense process aligned applications in the 1990s.  They need a new term as Spring M goes way beyond what we think of as content management to enable some of the visions within enterprise 2.0.