Gilbane Group Blog

Adobe to Acquire Day Software

2010-07-29T12:45:01Z

Yesterday, it was announced that another CMS poster child of the late 90’s is to be acquired as Adobe Systems Incorporated and Day Software Holding AG announced the two companies have entered into a definitive agreement for Adobe to acquire all of the publicly held registered shares of Day Software in a transaction worth approximates US$240 million.

This follows Adobe’s acquisition of Omniture late last year and clearly demonstrates their intent in entering the web experience management (WEM) market place that we cover with interest here at Gilbane - as we anticipate they bring together the audience insight gained through the web analytics of Omniture and Day’s CRX content platform.

This will presumably add momentum to Day’s own move into the WEM space with their recent product marketing strategy, as they have reinvented themselves to be closer to the marketer with recent attention paid to functionality such as personalization, analytics, variant testing and messaging around using their repository for marketing campaigns and asset management. We await with interest firm integration plans.

In addition Day are a longtime advocate of CMS repository standards (JCR and CMIS), something that is also close to our heart at Gilbane. This announcement has also sent tremors through the Open Source community, as they wonder about Adobe’s commitment to the Apache projects like Sling and Jackrabbit that Day have been so supportive of.

Whilst Adobe and Day have been very quick to state that they will maintain Day’s commitment to these community projects, it’s hard not think that this commitment inside Day is cultural and we wonder whether this can realistically be maintained as the acquisition matures and Day is brought into the fold.

The acquisition also raises questions about what this means for Alfresco’s two year relationship with Adobe that runs pretty deep with OEM integration to Adobe LiveCycle – and Erik Larson (Senior Director of Product Management at Adobe) has publically stated the intention to integrate Day and LifeCycle to create a ‘full suite of enterprise technologies’. It will be important for the Adobe customers that have adopted the Alfresco based integration, to understand how this will affect them going forward.

One other area that I am sure my colleagues here at Gilbane in the Publishing Technologies practice will be watching with interest is the impact this will have on Adobe’s digital publishing offering.

As we’ve seen with previous acquisitions, it’s best to be cautious over what the future might hold. From a WEM product strategy perspective bringing Ominture and Day together makes a great deal of sense to us. The commitment to standards and open source projects is probably safe for now, it has been a part of the Day identity and value proposition for as long as I can remember and one of the most exciting things could be what this acquisition means for digital publishing.

Let’s wait and see…

Suggested further reading:

Our new Technology Leadership Council

2010-07-21T11:12:36Z

When I last wrote about us becoming part of Outsell, Inc. I mentioned that in addition to continuing to provide our existing services, we would be adding additional products. Last week we announced our first new Outsell/Gilbane product to executive subscribers to our syndicated services.

Our new product, Outsell’s Technology Leadership Council (TLC), is an invitation-only environment for CTOs, CIOs, VPs of IT, and VPs of product development in information and publishing companies. The TLC provides a confidential, peer-to-peer environment for sharing ideas, best practices, strategies, development methods, and other topics of specific interest to senior information product technology management.

While the TLC is a new product, it is modeled after the very successful Outsell Leadership Councils for CEOs, COOs, Managing Directors, or Presidents. There are two off-the-grid meetings a year and year-round networking and communication of research and ideas with fellow council members and the council chairs. The TLC is chaired by me, Marc Strohlein, Outsell’s Chief Agility Officer, and Bill Trippe, VP & Lead Analyst, Outsell’s Gilbane Group. The TLC's first meeting will be in Boston this October.

To find out more about the Technology Leadership Council, download the brochure and email me at frank@gilbane.com.

Into the Engagement Tier...

2010-07-12T14:00:02Z

Recently I wrote an article for my blog – Taking the W out of CMS – exploring content management and content delivery as separate disciplines and this is a follow up to that article.

To summarize that article - firstly, to know me professionally, is to know that when it comes to the tribes of CMS folks, I am firmly in the WCM tepee.

Secondly, I disagreed the first time this discussion rolled around, as the millennium clicked over – we were all going to use portal platforms and content management functionality would be in our application server infrastructure (we don’t and it didn’t).

Thirdly, the difference between the systems we are building for tomorrow and then – our digital engagement activities were single threaded following a website groove and the end was very much the driver for the means.

For the mainstream CMS industry it was a web site centric world and in most projects and applications the term ‘CMS’ was interchangeable with ‘WCM’. Today we have a fragmented communication channel; it’s the age of the ‘splinternet’ (in this context, a term coined by Josh Bierhoff), delivering relevant content consistently to multiple places.

This not just devices - our websites are less the single and only web destination, folks consume information about our products and services from other web destinations like Facebook and Twitter (to name two). Plus, of course the needs of customer, consumer and citizen engagement means that we can chuck in multiple touch points, in e-mail, call centres and real life.

We used to get ourselves worked up about ‘baking’ or ‘frying’ content management/delivery applications, about decoupled systems that produce pages and dynamic content – but (as I said in response to a comment on my original blog post) today’s consumer wants super dynamic content fresh caught that day, prepared their way, hot off the griddle - Teppanyaki served to share – family style.

So, we have a new level of complexity and requirements for our systems to support our digital marketers and communicators. A level of complexity of requirements that sits between our content repository and our consumer, which used to be the section of the RFP that simply said “must produce compliant HTML”.

When talking about delivery of content, this is typically where our requirement starts to gain some uniqueness between projects.

The question is, so you have your well-ordered, neatly filed, approved content – but what are you going to use it for?

A requirement for an approval process supported by workflow is fairly ubiquitous – but if you are a membership organisation that engages its audience over email or a consumer packaged goods company with fifty products and a YouTube channel - your Engagement Tier requirements are going to be quite diverse.

This diversity in requirements means two things to me.

1. As an industry we are very good at understanding, defining and capturing CMS requirements – but how are we at identifying, understanding and communicating an organisations engagement needs?

2. If there are diverse requirements, then there are different solutions - and right now it’s is a blend of dynamic web content delivery, marketing automation, campaign management, email, web analytics (etc. etc.) - There is no silver vendor bullet – no leader, no wave, no magic quadrant – its different strokes for different folks.

It’s this that I want to explore, how do we define those needs and how do we compare tools?

So, into the Engagement Tier - my colleagues here at Gilbane challenged me to draw it. Hmm.. right now it’s a box of content, a big arrow and then the consumer.

I am going to need to work on that…

New Web site coming

2010-07-07T12:02:31Z

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!

Why Aren't Publishers Moving to XML Repositories More Quickly?

2010-06-16T01:18:18Z

As we start to delve into some of the interim results of our survey of book publishing professionals, there is a great deal of good data to mull over. While the results are preliminary (and we welcome your participation here), some trends are emerging.

One interesting set of data points surround how publishers are viewing XML, how extensively they work with it, and what technologies they are using to support the management of the XML. Among those using XML, it's significant that only about half have invested in some kind of storage mechanism specifically for XML, including both relational databases and dedicated XML repositories such as Mark Logic server.

While that overall number might or might not be so striking, I am struck by what some publishers feel is a barrier to adopting an XML repository, namely, the "Challenge of building XML knowledge, skills, or awareness." This trumped more traditional barriers to technology adoption such as cost and the maturity of the technology and would seem, on balance, to be a solvable problem.

Click on the thumbnail below to see a snapshot of the current answers to the question.

Call for papers for Gilbane Boston - deadline June 14

2010-06-08T13:59:39Z

Given the popularity of the presentations / topics at our recent San Francisco conference we are organizing the Boston conference around the same theme (Customers, Collaboration, Content) and tracks (Customers & Engagement, Colleagues & Collaboration, Content Technology, Content Publishing).

You can find out more about what we covered in SF from the GilbaneSF-Tweetstream, from Sue Anne's post below, from the videos before and during the conference, and elsewhere.

See detailed instructions for submitting proposals, and send speaking proposals to speaking@gilbane.com. No sales or marketing presentations please.

The deadline for proposals is June 14, 2010.

Guest Post: A Marketer's Takeaways From Gilbane San Francisco

2010-06-02T15:04:29Z

Two weeks ago, I had the opportunity to attend Gilbane SF. The conference brought together some of the top content management people from the U.S. and internationally. Overall, one of the things I really enjoyed about the conference was the mix of people on each of the panels -- you had analysts, developers and content creators responsible for developing content and building web sites.

I focused on my time on the Customers and Engagement Track and also went to a few sessions in the Content Technology Track. As expected, there was a lot of talk of Web 2.0 and how to implement social into your content management strategy. There were also several sessions examining return on investment (ROI) for implementation.

Keynotes:

Jeremiah Owyang from the Altimeter Group kicked off the two day conference with a presentation titled "Your Corporate Website Can be Relevant Again". His slides and video of his keynote are now available online. Jeremiah laid out an 8-step plan on how corporate websites can evolve into social websites that integrate the social experience into their web site. The best part of his presentation, which you can see on the slides is the real-world examples of sites along each step of the integration process.

Jeremiah was followed by Daniel Rasmus who spoke on The Future of Collaboration. My notes from his session are available. My key takeway from Daniel's presentation was the importance of building a collaborative process within your organization. Everyday policies, such as how workplaces are designed, are all an important part of the social culture of an organization. In simple things, like meeting planning and design, everyone should have a voice. He also spoke a bit about millenials and how to create a work environment that is both supportive of millenials, but also encourages them to knowledge share about things that they know about. [Slides]

Customers and Engagement Track:

Audience Engagement Frameworks Case Studies: Gert-Jan Schikker from Voetbal International presented on how a leading sports magazine in Holland has incorporated social into its online presence and seen a large increase in traffic and engagement. They've not only added social, but they also created mobile platforms, added video and worked with their advertisers and online storefront to create custom experiences based on user data.

Michael Fisher from Alterian and Steven Alessi of American Greetings Interactive gave a joint presentation about work they did around the Super Bowl. Alterian used its platform to create a campaign to show 46 different brands the value of monitoring customer sentiment. American Greetings talked about the work they have done to make the online card giving experience more interactive and allow brands to connect to consumers in a positive way. As Michael put it, the key is measurement. If you're not measuring, there's no way to know if you're being successful.

How to Mold the Customer Experience: My favorite panel of the entire two days was moderated by Ian Truscott and had Melissa Casburn (ISITE Design) and Randy Woods (non-linear creations) speaking about creating a customer experience on your web site. The thing that made this presentation great was that Melissa and Randy had obviously worked together to build the presentation and incorporate examples from both of their work. The presentation was all about how to research your customers and build personas based on customer research and then use those personas to shape the experience on your web site. The approach to building personas is a great idea as it allows you to use aggregate data. Melissa and Randy also provided some useful information on how to get started with a limited budget and use crowdsourcing to help with the process.

WCM as the Digital Marketing Hub: Ian Truscott and Robert Rose gave the final panel of the two days. Being the final panel is not an enviable position as people have been sitting around for two days, but Ian and Robert brought a lot of energy and humor that kept things interesting. Ian set things up by talking about the opportunity of working with customers on your web site. They are coming to your web site because they are looking for information. You have a chance to engage with them, but it's a brief opportunity and you need to make the most of it. Ian shared an awesome anecdote about a small town men's suit shop business owner and how he knows how to ask the right questions to provide a custom experience for each person that walks in the door.

Robert followed Ian and gave some great real-world examples about how web content management relates to online marketing. Back in the early days of web development, the process was owned by the IT / Tech departments, but your corporate website is really a marketing tool. Marketers need to have the ability to be creative and be able to try things (either A/B testing or multivariate testing) without having to go through a long and involved process. Robert gave a list of things that people could start doing immediately to help separate the marketing process from the technology process.

More detailed notes from these sessions and the others I attended can be found on my blog.

My thanks to Gilbane San Francisco and Robert Rose, who gave me one of his speaker passes to the conference. I'm already looking forward to attending Gilbane Boston later this year.

--
Sue Anne Reed
http://www.sueannereed.com

[ The Deadline for Speaking Proposals for Gilbane Boston is June 14, 2010 - STT ]

Crowdsourcing Solutions for the BP Mess

2010-05-31T14:39:27Z

It is not always the obvious experts who have the best solutions to problems. Since it is clear the gulf oil disaster is resistant to the most obvious solutions, crowdsourcing the problem seems like a no-brainer. The cost of a small team to sift through all the ideas to pick out any with current or future promise would be negligible. See Anthea's post and call for action.

Update: BTW, neither Outsell, nor Innocentive have any financial or commercial gain associated with this piece. It is not fee-for-hire, advertising, nor is Innocentive a client. We simply want to help and believe the voice of the information industry must be heard as part of finding solutions that can work.

Calling All Speakers

2010-05-28T16:02:27Z

The call for speakers has been issued, with June 14, 2010 being the deadline to submit a proposal for presenting at Gilbane Boston this year.

Guidelines can be found here: http://gilbane.com/speaker_guidelines.html

Feel free to ask us any issues you have that aren't covered above!

What's Happening at Gilbane San Francisco

2010-05-13T17:39:24Z

We've been providing regular updates on Gilbane San Francisco over on our dedicated announcements and press release blog, as well as on Twitter, but since not everybody subscribes to either of those, here is a quick summary for both conference attendees and technology exhibit visitors, with links.

Open to all:

Opening Keynote session with: Jeremiah Owyang, Partner, Customer Strategy, Altimeter Group & Daniel W. Rasmus, Strategist, Author, Listening to the Future
Industry Analyst Debate: What’s Real, What’s Hype, and What’s Coming with: Forrester, Gilbane, IDC, The Real Story Group (CMS Watch)
Technology showcase with 34 content management technology vendors
Sponsor Reception, Wednesday May 19
Access to Product Labs on Wednesday and Thursday

Conference options:

Follow the conference Twitter stream. The main hashtag is #gilbanesf. You can join (dm @gilbane sf) or follow the list of twitterers at Gilbane San Francisco.

Hope to see you there.

Ask the Analysts about Content Technologies & Strategies

2010-05-04T11:41:27Z

Or collaboration, enterprise social software, search, analytics, market trends, customer engagement strategies, intranet architectures, multi-channel publishing ..., or a prediction one of us has previously made that was prescient or presumptuous.

To learn more about the analysts on the panel including links to their blogs and Twitter accounts click on their name below.

K2. Industry Analyst Keynote Debate: Industry Analyst Debate - What's Real, What's Hype, and What's Coming - May 19th 4:00pm - 5pm, Westin Market St, San Francisco

We invite industry analysts from different firms to speak at all our events to make sure our conference attendees hear differing opinions from a wide variety of expert sources. A second, third, or fourth opinion will ensure you don't make ill-informed decisions about critical content and information technologies or strategies. This session will be a lively, interactive debate guaranteed to be both informative and fun.

Panelists:
Rob Koplowitz, Principal Analyst, Forrester
Hadley Reynolds, Research Director, Search & Digital Marketplace Technologies, IDC
Tony Byrne, Founder, The Real Story Group & CMS Watch
Scott Liewehr, Senior Consultant, Web Content Management, Gilbane Group

How to submit questions:

If they are short enough, DM @gilbanesf or tag a tweet with #gilbanesf
Comment on this post
Email me

http://gilbanesf.com

Now Live: The Gilbane Group's Web-based "Blueprint" Survey for Book Publishing Professionals

2010-04-27T17:13:47Z

The Gilbane Group’s new web-based survey for book publishing professionals has just gone live. This “Blueprint” survey is one of the research mechanisms for our upcoming study A Blueprint for Book Publishing Transformation: Seven Essential Processes to Re-Invent Publishing. The study will be published in June 2010, and all participants in this survey will have full access to the full-length study posted on The Gilbane Group website and through the websites of the sponsors of the report.

Please note: This survey is for high- and mid-level book publishing professionals. If this does not describe you, please do not take this survey.

TAKE SURVEY

This 10-minute survey seeks to gain detailed information about what is really happening among the full spectrum of book publishers related to ebook and digital publishing efforts, and will identify the "pain points" and barriers encountered by book publishers when it comes to their developing or expanding digital publishing programs. Issues such as royalties, digital format choices, and distribution difficulties are addressed.

For more information about A Blueprint for Book Publishing Transformation: Seven Essential Processes to Re-Invent Publishing, or other activities of The Gilbane Group Content Technologies and Strategies practice, please email Bill Trippe.

Engage with a Persuasive Web Experience

2010-04-26T10:23:12Z

Hi, I'm Ian Truscott and as you may have seen I've recently joined our WCM practice (you can get a bit of introduction to me here) - I am pleased to say this is my first blog post (hopefully of many) for Gilbane.

It's an exciting time for this segment of the CMS industry and to be joining Gilbane and I am looking forward to sharing my passion for web engagement - hence the unashamedly buzz word laden title.

Depending on the commentator; we are either in a social media age, or we are post the social media revolution - in either case the Internet is no longer an extension of the traditional passive consumption media channels, it is a place where information and brand consumers get involved.

In fact, folks are now arguing that it's no longer 'social' it's just 'media' - the way we create, consume and socialize content has changed forever and for everyone. And of course, there is so much of it - how do you make your message stick?

This has mean't a shift in focus for our industry, we've seen the age of the IT developers platform, been through the focus on 'easy to use' for content contributors to now - where being audience centric has become mainstream thinking (and a business imperative).

This has spawned a number of descriptions for this extension of WCM and the tools and practices we need to apply to become audience centric, including Persuasive Content, Web Experience Management, Customer Engagement or Web Engagement.

All of these have something in common; a cycle of listening to the audience, understanding their needs and behaviour, using that to create and optimize content and some form of relevance based delivery.

At it's simplest, from a tools perspective - it's the intersection of WCM, web analytics and personalized delivery. But it gets more complex, with the inclusion of social media, CRM, marketing automation, e-mail, mobile delivery, auto-categorization, search - this list can go on.

Yes, you can throw the kitchen sink at this one - but software and industry best practices are being aligned, for sound business reasons and they are aligning behind the audience, the citizen, the consumer.. you in fact.

I'm going to finish on a couple of quotes from Frank Gilbane - from the foreword to 'Web Engagement' by Bill Zoellick (a book I've enjoyed for a while):

The most unique characteristic of the web is in the way that it changes the relationship between your business and it's customers.

You will not be able to take advantage ... and know your customers without engaging them in a way that encourages them to share information with you.

Engaging your customers requires understanding the new tools and data that are available and applying them in a way that nurtures a new level of trust.

Not just saying that to be nice to the boss (although it can't do any harm!), or to point out that the book was authored by a Gilbane alumnus - I think the most relevant part of the quote is the date that Frank wrote that foreword - it was February 2000.

Hence my excitement in joining Gilbane, a firm that has a great, long standing pedigree as an authority on web engagement, which is, as I say, my passion and I look forward to the privilegeof contributing to that.

Interested in reading more on Web Engagement? - I suggest reading this White Paper by Mary Laplante or check out our guide for marketers at Gilbane San Francisco - where our speakers will be discussing a lot of the subjects I touch on here.

Marketing, Web Content Management and Social Software

2010-04-09T13:48:05Z

At the industry analyst session at Gilbane Boston last December, one of the points of discussion was how well spending on web content management systems had held up during the depths of the recession compared to other parts of IT budgets. Everyone on the panel agreed, and Forrester and IDC both mentioned research showing a healthy market for WCM and expected growth (if someone remembers the numbers please comment). This was a surprise to much of the audience, but obviously not to the vendors (well, at least to those reaping the benefit).

Why has/is web content management growing? The one word answer is 'marketing' - not vendor marketing, although they are mostly in tune with, and encouraging, the more aggressive pro-activeness of enterprise marketers. And why are marketing executives now better at demanding, and getting, budgets for WCM? There are a number of reasons, including the paradoxical "to save money" (system costs have come down, large system service contracts costs have not, and SaaS solutions and open source solutions are growing). Most importantly however, is that most organizations have finally figured out that 'marketing' means 'multi-channel, digital, and interactive/social marketing'. This is fundamental. The companies who took advantage of the recession to invest in learning what this means, experimenting with tools, customer interactions, and system integrations, have gotten a bit of a head start, but nobody can ignore this - this is not a 'nice to have'.

Why is the focus on 'web content management' and not something else? All product categories are fluid, and eventually there will be a category, buzzword/phrase TBD, for multi-channel content management that includes tools for social, mobile, tablet, channels etc. But for the foreseeable future, the corporate website(s) will be the hub, however it is accessed.

Well, all I really meant to do in this post was point to the special guide to marketing-focused sessions at Gilbane San Francisco in May, but now you know why. These sessions will also be useful for those in IT (along with our technology track) who support marketing initiatives.

Ian Truscott Joins Gilbane Group as Senior Analyst in UK

2010-04-01T11:15:08Z

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.)