Recently in Administration Category

Fred is our newest contributor, and has already posted his first blog entry. Fred pokes at the challenging tension in search between intent and context, especially over time as context (or intent) changes. Lynda has also posted about intent, and the subject also came up in discussions of search quality around Udi Manber's talk at our conference in this past June.

Fred brings the welcome perspective of a serious software developer, and will be blogging on a few different topics, so he may be posting here on on one of our other blogs. Welcome Fred!

We're growing. Like many of our colleagues in the industry we have found that problems in the housing and financial markets have had no noticeable effect on demand for our services. Of course things could change, but enterprise content technologies are so core to businesses of all kinds that, while watchful, we are not concerned.

Our main concern, as always, is to keep the conversation and flow of trusted content moving between all the stakeholders (investors, vendors, practitioners, IT, consultants, etc.) in the content technology market. If you are involved in content technology or applications in any of these capacities and have expertise or experience you would like to share with our large, growing community, let us know. We have potential opportunities for bloggers, consultants, analysts, educators, or someone who has a particular expertise and simply wants to express an occasional opinion. If you are interest or have questions let Sarah know at sarah@gilbane.com.

I am happy to announce that Fal Sarkar has joined us as a Contributing Analyst. Some of you may have met Fal when he was the Market Segment Manager for ECM at Sun as we did, or when he was at Xinet before that. Fal is currently based in India with his family where he has been involved in some very interesting work. See Fal's post from yesterday, and his bio for more details. Fal will be writing and helping us with research on content management (both ECM & WCM) and social media, as well as what is happening in India.

Fal can be reached at: fal@gilbane.com, or at extension 219, which transparently rings through to Fal in Chennai, India or to his voicemail, but please remember the time difference.

Welcome Fal!

As punishment for not blogging for awhile we discovered last night that the (Feedburner) feeds for many of our blogs had been out of commission since late May or early June. The problem has been fixed, which is why you may have a few more items than usual in your feed this morning.

We updated all our blogs to MT 4 back in January. That upgrade was pretty straightforward, and the backwards compatibility was great. Unfortunately, to take advantage of all the new features possible with Movable Type 4+ it is necessary to use all their newer templates - I'm sure a large number of you who have been involved in CMS projects know what that can mean. Anyway, we are finally getting around to the template changes, as you can see. We should have all the blogs done in a week or two and then will look at some of the new "community" capability.

Suggestions, especially if your are familiar with specific MT features, are welcome.

Our Publishing Practice released a new report this week: Digital Magazine and Newspaper Editions - Growth, Trends, and Best Practices. This is an interesting study especially because it is not an area covered much, if at all, by other firms. Bill Rosenblatt, who co-authored the report with Steve Paxhia, blogged about the report yesterday. You can download the report at no charge from our new "Research Reports" page.

The new page will be the place to find a listing of our most current reports and studies. You can also find information there about Beyond Search: What to do When Your Enterprise Search System Doesn't Work, by Stephen Arnold, which we released in April (and which is not free - but a great deal!).

We have 5 more reports in the works to be published in the next couple of months, and realized we needed a home for this new series of publications. While you can find most anything on our site with our Google custom search, we have reports going back to 1993, as well as many other types of publications, and thought a new home for current reports would make for a friendlier site.

I was talking to someone in the office this morning. I was actually watching tech support change a failed hard drive - that’s how badly I didn’t want to sit down and write a particular document. He told me that I didn’t have to watch him change the hard drive (especially because it wasn’t my laptop). I told him – “I’m procrastinating on writing a client document.” After a few polite questions he asked me what the problem was with the client. I sighed and said the conversational equivalent of: “Senior management is completely disengaged when it comes to setting strategic direction for the web. So, middle management and the web team are just flailing about in a reactionary way putting up whatever content needs to be had at the moment and fighting with each other about what’s the most important content on the site, and watch technology to use, yadda, yadda, yadda…” He nodded knowingly. Then I realized, this statement could be made for just about all of our clients. Most “web site problems” stem from the rotten root of ambivalent senior management. So in a moment of largesse (and finding a more creative way to procrastinate), I thought I would write this blog entry.

If you’re having Web problems, the first thing to consider (before calling a content management system vendor, a taxonomist, a web design firm, or Web Operations folks like us), is whether or not the CEO, Administrator, President or whoever heads your organization is even thinking about the site - strategically. If they are not, then more than likely any changes that the web team makes to the site will just be “interim” or “quick fixes.” For a lot of organizations, the organization’s public facing web site is the first point of contact for business partners and customers, prospects, and information seekers it deserves serious senior consideration.

I’m not just talking about making sure that the web site looks good either. Good web design – while shockingly rare in some segments of the Web - is not a mystery and good web designers and information architects are easy to locate. I’m talking about establishing performance and quality objectives for web sites - objectives, which support the overall mission, service and/or business objectives of your organization and then holding folks accountable for meeting those objectives - like you don’t get your raise if you don’t get it done. If you establish these basic strategic and governance related principles, you will find that a lot of the other decision related to web design, what types of software needs to be utilized, etc. become a lot easier to answer.

So, get your Web Strategy and Web Governance ducks in a row before you shell out the big bucks for a web site redesign or a new web content management system or fancy pants consultants like us.

But if your still dying to talk to someone anyway or just commiserate with other folks with messed up web sites, we’ll be talking a lot about various strategic and governance issues at the Gilbane conference in Washington DC next week.

Hope to see you there.

As our readers know, we are long-time advocates of open-document formats. Over the past couple of years, we have written a great deal about DITA and formats like ODF, but we also have a lot of experience and interest in DocBook and vertical DTDs such as J2008 for the automotive industry and the various DOD standards. We are clearly reaching a point where interoperability among these standards has become an issue. Organizations are more diverse, more likely to be sharing content between operating groups and with other organizations, and more likely to be sourcing content from a variety of partners, customers, and suppliers. Needless to say, not all of these sources of content will be using the same XML vocabulary; indeed, even two organizations using DITA, for example, will likely have specialized DITA differently.

With this need for interoperability in mind, OASIS has announced a new discussion list, regarding a possible new OASIS Document Standards Interoperability Technical Committee (TC). Details on the list, including how to subscribe, can be found here.

Last night we launched our 5th new blog so far this year. We've been so busy launching them that we've fallen behind in announcing their arrival, and we've got one more coming in the next few days. Along with the new blogs we have added some industry veterans as Lead Analysts to help us keep up with the demand for coverage and consulting.

Last night we launched a blog covering collaboration, and we are pleased to have Geoffrey Bock leading the blog and the associated consulting practice. See Geoff's first post for more info on his plans.

A couple of weeks ago we launched our Globalization blog which is being led by Leonor Ciarlone and Mary Laplante, with contributions from Kaija Poysti.

We are also happy to announce that Tony White is joining us as our Lead Analyst for our new Web Content Management blog and consulting practice. More info coming soon on this.

Previously announced are the Enterprise Search blog with Lead Analyst Lynda Moulton, the Publishing Practice blog led by Steve Paxhia, with Bill Trippe, Bill Rosenblatt and Thad McIlroy, and of course our new news blog.

Check out the new blogs and remember that comments are turned on and tagging is supported, so keep in touch. For more traditional communication you can contact any of us via the phone and email info here.

Update: Everything should be working now. Our webmaster would appreciate hearing from anyone who notices a problem. Thanks.

We are migrating our blog to our new design this weekend, so don't be surprised if things look a little unusual or if a few links don't work.