Recently in Administration Category

It will still be a couple of more months before you see much change, but we are planning a major update to gilbane.com. We know, it is a bit overdue, cobbler's children and all that, but if you had a Web site since 1997 and been using dozens of different tools to create and manage many thousands of pages in almost every version of HTML, and with a mix of CSS / no CSS, etc., you might procrastinate a bit too. Now that we are part of Outsell Inc., we also need to rationalize the two sites. outsellinc.com is also a large site, but fortunately, it was completely updated a couple of years ago with modern tools. We will be refreshing both sites and will be rolling out some incremental updates during the process. Right now we have a team architecting the end result and would love to hear from any of you who have suggestions about either of our sites. Comments are off because of the volume of comment spam, so send an email with suggestions to webmaster@gilbane.com, and thanks!

I am very happy to announce the addition of Ian Truscott to our team as a Gilbane Group Senior Analyst based in London. We have had customers in Europe for many years and have wanted to expand our business with a local presence, so Ian is an especially welcome addition. Ian's focus will be on Web Content Management, which remains our largest area of consulting, and has become even more important with the increasing influence and activity of enterprise marketing in web content strategies and purchases.
 
Ian comes to us from Alterian, where he was VP, WCM Product Strategy. Alterian sells a platform that combines web content management, marketing campaign management and social media monitoring tools.
 
A little more on Ian from his summary on LinkedIn:
"... fifteen years of enterprise software experience, ten of which working with web content management. This experience has come as a CTO, in product marketing, product development, sales and consulting - from starting my career as a computer operator and UNIX administrator. A strong web content management pedigree, having focused on web technologies for the last ten years, working with some of the major vendors and pioneers in this area. During this time I have taken various products to market, engaging with a broad range of organisations (including McDonalds, Diageo, AstraZeneca, WWE and Glaxo) and large central government departments while living and working in the USA and UK. "  
 
You can reach Ian at: ian@gilbane.com, or: +44 (0) 203 137 9600. Ian is an active Twitterer at @iantruscott. You can also meet Ian if you will be at our conference in San Francisco in May. You might even find Ian together with our Senior Analyst Scott Liewehr in the hotel pub amid a gaggle of other CMS industry insiders.
 
Welcome Ian!

(Disclosure: Alterian has been a Gilbane client, and in keeping with our strict vendor neutral policy and our ethics policy regarding clients, Alterian was fully supportive of Ian joining us, and Ian has sold all his shares in the company.)

We're pleased to announce that Gilbane Group has welcomed three new senior analysts and consultants:  Vince Emery, Karen Golden, and Sue Willard.

Maintenance Window:
September 19, 2009 09:30:00 P.M. EST — September 19, 2009 10:00:00 P.M. EST

Our web server is scheduled to have its memory doubled during this maintenance window.  Web hosting services including web sites, FTP, and MySQL databases will be unavailable while the server is down for this hardware upgrade.  Email and WebMail/WebAide services will be unaffected.

The server memory upgrade will serve to increase the performance of our server and everything running on it and will serve as a buffer to help prevent excessive use or bursting activity of some customers from affecting server performance and uptime for other customers on the server.

There are few people who have not heard of SharePoint, but understanding what SharePoint has to offer is another story.  The best way to understand SharePoint is to use it.  This series of posts will provide an overview of the product, and explains how a non techie can get started.

SharePoint is currently in its third incarnation (SharePoint 2007) and within 9 months Microsoft will be deploying the fourth version, "SharePoint 2010."  There are three distinct SKUs:

1. WSS (Windows SharePoint Server)
   - Comes with the Windows Server and is free.
2. MOSS (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server) Standard Edition
   - An extension of WSS, and is licensed per server as well as per user. 
3. MOSS (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server) Enterprise Edition
   - An extension of the Standard Edition, and is licensed per server as well as per user. 

It is also possible to buy a "Public Connector" for MOSS, which is a license  that allows SharePoint to be used as a publicly facing site with no limit on the number of users .

Although Microsoft is trying to showcase SharePoint as an excellent platform to build publicly facing sites, there is general agreement that SharePoint is best used in a closed community where users must login.  Microsoft touts SharePoint as a product that supports six pillars: (These pillars are about to be rebranded in SharePoint 2010, see SharePoint 2010 has new pillars.)  The six pillars are:

1. Collaboration
   - Allowing members of a closed community to share documents, tasks, calendars, contacts, etc
2. Portal
   - Providing a single web site that is the gateway to an organization's web based functions.
3. Enterprise Search
   - Competing with Google for the enterprise, 
4. Web & Enterprise Content Management
   - A publishing platform that allows for simple workflows among authors and editors.
5. Forms Driven Business Process
   - Allows for easy development of electronic forms and associated automated workflows.
6. Business Intelligence
   - Allows organization to build dashboards summarizing data that reside in disparate electronic repositories.

The original intent behind SharePoint was to empower business users to control their own destiny without being dependent on IT and Development staff.  In the author's experience, SharePoint often requires much more planning and maintenance than business users can provide.  Thus one often finds that specially trained SharePoint IT and developer personnel are required to stand-up and support in-house SharePoint deployments. 

Although still quite limited, it is now possible to lease robust versions of SharePoint that reside in the cloud and truly are managed without any hidden costs.  This series of articles will summarize three services that were tried by the author:

1. SharePoint Online - Part of the Microsoft Business Online Productivity Suite.
2. Apps4rent - A robust SharePoint and Exchange online implementation.
3. WebHost4Life - Similar to  Apps4Rent's SharePoint implementation with a non-Exchange email system.

The discussion will focus only on SharePoint.  In all cases, the environments are WSS (Not MOSS) and are hosted in a joint tenancy model, meaning that you are sharing computing resources with other SharePoint sites. Although people will tell you there could be a number of reasons why this may be problematic, the author never experienced any issues due to joint tenancy.  Microsoft does offer an expensive service in a dedicated environment.  This service requires that a minimum of 5,000 user licenses are being leased.

Both Apps4rent and WebHost4Life have a simple model that is easy for an end user to understand. In contrast, the Microsoft environment is quite confusing with poor documentation.  Both Apps4Rent and WebHost4Life offer immediate support with chat sessions, and the customer service staff was knowledgeable and helpful.  Again, in contrast to this, Microsoft's support was poor.  Microsoft communicated via a secure email channel, responses took 4 to 6 hours, and the support personnel did not understand the product well...

Title: Administrative Assistant & Marketing Associate

Description:
We are a small but well-known international technology analyst firm covering web information technologies trends and practices. We provide advisory and strategic consulting services, organize conferences, and write reports. Our clients include mostly medium to large businesses and government organizations. See http://gilbane.com to find out more about us.

We are looking for someone to assist management with company operations and communications with our analysts and consultants, partners, customers, and suppliers, and who wants to grow with our company. A large part of the job involves updating our websites and blogs. We are small enough that this position provides exposure to all aspects of a contemporary, high-energy, growing professional services business. There are opportunities to learn about web, collaboration and information technologies, sales and marketing, being an entrepreneur, analyst, or consultant.

We are located in Cambridge with easy access to the Red Line. Travel is mostly not required. Currently, one trip a year to our San Francisco conference, and 3 days on-site for our Boston conference (if you live outside metro Boston).

Experience & Education:
A college degree and at least 2 years full time work experience in a business environment is required.

Responsibilities:

• Update websites and blogs (You don't need to be a webmaster, but you do need some basic web skills)
• Office management
  • Work with our suppliers and partners
  • Schedule conference rooms and meetings
  • Manage corporate phone and email systems
• Maintain customer lists, databases and project information
• Communications
  • In addition to internal and customer communications, assisting with marketing activities including press releases, email programs, collateral and report production.
• Events
  • Managing conference speaker communications before, during and after our events.

Skills & characteristics:

• Organization
  • Organizational skills, self-discipline, and initiative should come naturally.
• Communication
  • strong interpersonal skills, verbal and written
  • customer sensitivity and responsiveness are critical
• Computer
  • Proficiency with Microsoft Office software, especially Word and Excel, Adobe Acrobat & Dreamweaver, and browsers and search engines. Movable Type experience a big plus.
  • Comfortable with basic use of Adobe Illustrator, Google applications, Zoho CRM, Intuit Quickbooks, and various other web and applications.
  • Basic familiarity with HTML is very important.
  • Need to be able to use Apple and Windows machines.

Hours: 25 - 40

Location: Cambridge, MA

Competitive Salary & Benefits

Interested? Send resume and/or questions to hr@gilbane.com

No phone calls and no recruiters please.

Contributing Enterprise Content Management Analyst Fal Sarkar is moving on to the vendor side of the aisle. Fal has always been a pleasure to work with, and I expect we'll be working together again before long, just in a different way. Fal has a great new job that looks like a perfect fit for him. He is "... responsible for marketing EMC's Content Management and Archiving products (Documentum, Captiva, Document Sciences, etc.) in a geography that ranges from Pakistan to the Philippines. The largest market in the region is India." Fal's Gilbane email address will continue to work for a while, but his new contact info is below.

Fal Sarkar
Head of Marketing South Asia
Content Management and Archiving
EMC Corporation

UPDATE:
Oops!
Sarkar_Falguni@sun.com should be Sarkar_Falguni@emc.com
Direct: +91 80 66228013
Mob: +91 9742264725

using default

In case you missed yesterday's announcement, I am happy to announce that Neal Hannon has joined us as Senior Consultant, XBRL Strategies. XBRL has been coming for a while, but with mandatory XBRL reporting requirements now kicking in, companies really need to get serious both with reporting requirements and internal use of XBRL. XBRL requires more than XML expertise, and Neal's financial background and involvement in XBRL provide deep domain expertise, and are a great complement to our existing XML strengths. Neal will be working with Bill as part of the XML Practice. Neal's bio is posted at: http://gilbane.com/consultant_bios.html#nhannon

Neal's email is: neal@gilbane.com and his phone extension is 155.

Welcome Neal!

I am happy to announce that Larry Hawes has joined us, starting today, as Lead Analyst, Collaboration & Enterprise Social Media Practice, along with Geoff. This has been an important area of coverage for us since we started writing about enterprise use of wikis and blogs over 4 years ago - it is hard to believe how unusual such a thing was then. Not so now, and it is great to have Larry aboard to help IT and business managers understand the role of social media tools in corporate and government applications.

Larry has most recently spent 6 years with IBM Global Business Services as a Consultant and Program Manager in collaboration and knowledge management, focused largely on public sector clients. Larry also spent 3.5 years at Delphi Group as an analyst and consultant where he worked with both vendors and enterprise customers. Larry's bio has not been posted on our site yet, but can be found at: http://lehawes.wordpress.com/about-larry-hawes/, and of course on LinkedIn.

Larry's email is: larry@gilbane.com and his phone extension is 154. You can follow Larry on Twitter at:
http://twitter.com/lehawes

Welcome Larry!