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A Brief History of Cartella

It all started three years ago. It started with a small project in "Ingeniux Labs" to build an e-portfolio solution for higher education. As we began to whiteboard and define the requirements we realized there was something more here. This was before the idea of enterprise 2.0 or social business or community software, it was just an insight that the Web was going to change and Web CMS needed to change with it.

Original Cartella E-Portfolio prototype. A lot of innovative ideas came out of this project.

For a number of years we had seen a shift in how Web content management software was being used. Less people were working in formal content management systems. The CMS was becoming the place for Web managers and trusted subject matter experts, while more people were working with Web 2.0 tools outside the CMS.

Our customers are generally large or content-centric organizations. They either have lots of content or lots of people or most often, both. Many of our customers are also highly decentralized. Think of a large corporation with multiple offices or a university with autonomous departments and schools, or a large trade association with tens of thousands of members and hundreds of chapters.

What was happening in these organizations was that each department, group, or often individual person was using their own blogging tools, wikis, photo sharing, micro websites...Much of their information was stored on shared drives or locked in email, or simply out on the public web. Web 2.0 was accelerating the amount of content in the organization - and none of the Web 2.0 content was being truly managed or kept in compliance or was easily reusable.

*Lightbulb* - What if there was a content management solution for social content? Customers needed one system that could manage all of their Web 2.0 collaboration, from micro-publishing, to social media to unstructured documents and file storage - For lack of a better term, a "Social Content Management System."

With this novel idea in mind we went to work on some prototypes. Working with our Ingeniux friends in Spain, including original Ingeniux co-founder Alan Westerbroek, we roughed out some prototype apps. My twins were just born and I remember working on wireframes in the hospital as my wife and girls slept. We chose the name Cartella, which is Italian for Folder or Folio. It seemed the perfect name for a solution that was meant to organize and manage content one person at a time.

Despite making great progress with Cartella, a pivotal moment came when we decided that we would launch Ingeniux CMS Xite Framework, a Web application solution for user generated and live web submission into Ingeniux CMS, before Cartella. The thought was that Xites could get to market sooner and were an essential solution for meeting the needs of increasingly distributed CMS user base who wanted more access and more control for Ingeniux CMS. Xites are a good solution for Ingeniux CMS and taught us a lot about building Web 2.0 on the CMS. The underlying technology also eventually became the new AJAX client for Ingeniux CMS 6.0, the CMS InBox, and other solutions, all very good things. But it was painful to see Cartella delayed.

Even with Xites ahead in the queue, we knew we could make progress on the user experience and product definition before going to development. We talked to customers and they validated the problem and need for a solution. The problem was so pressing many customers were willing to license the software unseen and to join a Pilot Program to help us define the feature set and develop solutions.

California State University Monterey Bay was an early partner. People like Mark Oehlman with CSUMB Academic Technologies provided infinite feedback, ideas, and requirements; including accessibility, granular access and sharing permission (our special sauce), and single sign-on identity management. Pilot programs with CSUMB faculty provided great usability insights.

Other customers came on to the Pilot, including Tarrant County College District, which a few weeks ago generated 3,000 faculty workspaces in Cartella out of their SunGard Banner ERP and are launching Cartella campus-wide to provide academic collaboration.

The opportunity to build Workday Connect, an on-demand Sales 2.0 Extranet solution, was the first time we competed with Cartella. We ended up winning the deal against arguably the leading Social Business Software product on the market, which told us we were doing a number of things right. When we were able to launch the Workday site from design to Web in four days we knew that the implementation process was right as well. Workday also leant us their expertise in SaaS software delivery to get our on-demand security processes locked down.

Our work with Microsoft helped us understand the world of Sharepoint and how to write deep integrations to poll and store content, as well as pushing the envelope for our video solutions.

Cartella took a huge step forward when Nathan Eggen, our Director of Development, took charge. Nathan brought the business vision and the technical know-how to make Cartella a real product, with a deep set of APIs, features, and capabilities.

With the pilots in full swing, we made a pretty radical decision: Let's re-architect the platform using the latest Microsoft ASP.NET 3.5, MVC 1.0 technology. One of our Rocket Scientists / software engineers (Arnold) had started doing some amazing development with .NET. He argued MVC would provide a very open and extensible system for building modules - one that many customers and partners could understand. The Web Services and REST capabilities would allow us to deliver Cartella content anywhere on the web or in the enterprise and really deliver the vision of the product. Never mind that no one had ever built a commercial software application on MVC, especially one the scope of Cartella. Bite the Bullet, Back to the Salt Mine, (insert cliché here).

Cartella 1.0 neared completion we brought on Buzz Builders, a boutique PR Agency who had launched the Aventail Secure VPN product as well as Web 2.0 solutions like Wet Paint. Michele and Deana brought new focus and energy to the product launch and shepherded us through a frenetic round of press and analysts tours and meetings. The feedback was near unanimous - "the market desperately needs social content management solutions, Cartella is the right solution."

Cartella Default Theme developed with our friends at Turbo Milk.

In terms of the user experience, we called on our amazingly talented friends Yegor and Denis with TurboMilk in Russia. Of course the message was the same as always - "We need a UI design that will change the world, and by the way, can we have that in two weeks." As always - "No Problem."

Throughout the development of Cartella, the Big Question everyone keeps asking: "Why don't you build Cartella on the Ingeniux CMS platform?"

The short answer is that a Web CMS is on the wrong side of the firewall. Most social interaction occurs on the Web server, not the CMS Application Server. To realize the value in social media it needs to work and be managed within the live Web environment. That is why the bolt-on approach that most CMS vendors have taken will not work. The longer answer is that Social Content Management has emerged as its own discipline, just like Document Management, Records Management, and Web Content Management. Cartella is worthy of its own platform.

The advantage is that now Cartella works seamlessly with Ingeniux CMS, stands on its own, and can work with other Web CMS products. The Ingeniux CMS Cartella In-Box allows Cartella content to be moderated, managed, and reused within Ingeniux CMS. Cartella also provides complete in-product administration and stands on its own as a CMS. For organizations running Vignette or Open Text or Interwoven or any other Web CMS - Cartella provides a powerful community and social content solution that will work with your existing website.

Almost three years later, two continents, multiple product incarnations, a cast of thousands - and here we are: Cartella is now an official part of the Ingeniux product family. Congratulations and THANK YOU to everyone who turned this vision into a reality. Cartella is not only a new product; it is a new product category. Social Content Management is a reality. This brief history is only the beginning.

Posted by David Hillis at 4:00 pm