Recently in Content Management - CMS Category

Gilbane Conference sponsor OASIS is hosting an informal "learn more" session about the new Content Management Interoperability Services, CMIS, at Gilbane Boston, tomorrow, Wednesday, December 3, at the Westin Copley hotel. The CMIS gathering is at 1:00 pm in the St. George room. Meet some of the developers of the standard.http://gilbaneoston.com

We have always had some kind of an executive panel where senior managers from content management vendors are questioned on their views of what is happening technology and trend-wise. This is not so much a "face-off" as it is an interactive discussion aimed at providing the audience a chance to hear the different world views of competing suppliers. Understanding the visions behind the marketing, product development, and partnership activity of vendors is at least as important as comparing a feature list and watching demos. Of course, you'll want to see the demos of these and all the other vendors at Gilbane Boston as well.

WCM-3: Web Content "Management State of the Industry"
Thursday December 4th 11:00am, Westin Copley, Boston

This distinguished panel of technology and market experts will discuss their perspectives on the three or four most important concerns of business managers and IT professionals in planning for and executing WCM initiatives over the next year. The panelists are chosen based on their depth of knowledge within WCM and their ability to identify, analyze, and articulate what the current key concerns are for WCM customers. This interactive discussion will help attendees to identify and address potential liabilities in their own WCM strategies as well as to understand what leading practitioners and technology suppliers envision in their own project/product roadmaps.

Moderator: Tony White, Lead Analyst, WCM, Gilbane Group
Speakers:
* Erik Aeyelts Averink, President, SDL Tridion
* John Girard, CEO, Clickability
* Ben Kiker, SVP and Chief Marketing Officer, Interwoven
* John Newton, CTO & Chairman, Alfresco
* Dmitri Tcherevik, CTO, Fatwire

The design brief is simple: integrate the outgoing supply chain that takes corporate product or service documentation out to users with the social media that may arise to address those same products or services. The benefits are also clear: leverage user experience, interest, and advice to everyone's advantage.

After that, it gets confusing.

Corporate structures are brand-directed and very controlled, while social media is uncontrollable, individualistic (if not anti-brand), and hyperbolic. That's why we love it, but how could a corporation trust it with their babies?

What does integration mean in this context? If you hire someone to help with social media, you may lose the integrity of independence. If the social media is independent and you endorse it, do you taint it? It's likely to change rapidly, so how can you keep your position up to date? If you just react to it, how is that different than focus groups? I'll argue that integration means, somehow, placing social media into an iteration loop in the documentation supply chain.

The scariest scenario is bringing independent outsiders to your breast and having them blast your new release. On the other hand, they'll do that anyway, so the question is how quickly you'll respond, and how? Who said "Keep your friends close and your enemies even closer?"

But let's draw a distinction between unaffiliated commentators and those who are working in companies that are your customers. The former are always going to be less controllable, while the latter will likely cooperate with a cross-company integration. Just as an enlightened company will look to incorporate social media into its communications strategy, its customers will be exploring social media for its user-centric focus as a means of improving its own business practices.

Let's assume that when social media is being practiced by independent outsiders, it will be a matter of chance whether their behavior is consistent with a corporation's goals. When it works because all of the stars have aligned, as has happened at moments for Apple, Google, and even IBM and Microsoft, then it can be great. At other times, it may be ugly. Perhaps it's just too early to draw those people too close.

But when the audience is composed of social media practitioners at client companies, then the field is open to all forms of social media: blog, wiki, twitter, IM, and other practices. For example, it's easy to imagine deploying a documentation set via a wiki that issuing and client companies can both update, perhaps with a dedicated editor at the source company to keep brand, message, and metaphors consistent. That leaves the challenge of how that material gets integrated back into the supply chain so that it can feed the next release...

These are early thoughts, and tools such as wikis are low-hanging fruit. How will the less document-centric media be integrated? What new forms of relationship will develop around these practices? How can this be extended to independent outsiders?

Mary Laplante will be moderating a webinar at noon eastern time today, Web Experience Management: Essentials for Engaging Customers and Winning Loyalty. The sponsor is Fatwire, and the speakers will be Yogesh Gupta, President and CEO of FatWire; Sovan Shatpathy, Manager of Web Infrastructure at Linksys; and Erik Kulvinskas, Web Coordinator for the Colorado Department of Transportation. We are seeing a lot of activity in Web Experience Management, and Mary offers the following definition:

Web experience management is a business practice that formalizes an organization's approach to relating to its audiences through web-based channels. WEM is based on the premise that engagement that delivers high value to all participants does not happen by accident, but rather, by design. Only when experience is deliberately managed does it become repeatable, predictable, and capable of being improved and optimized. WEM, as a business practice, is enabled by a range of technologies, including web content management, personalization, dynamic content delivery, analytics and optimization, and emerging tools for social computing. As such, WEM calls for integrated marketing and IT processes.

Registration for the webinar is still open.

Attention: technical writers! In the spotlight next week: the availability of authoring assistance technologies that bring a living, breathing corporate Style Guide into content creation environments. Creating team-authored product support content with consistency and globalization in mind has come a long way. More on that over on the Globalization blog.

Join me on April 9th to discuss the value of translation-oriented authoring with technology provider across Systems, language services provider Argo Translation, Inc., globalization consultant Richard Sikes, and QuadGraphics, a customer reaping the benefits of authoring assistance technology in a FrameMaker environment.

Register here.

Congratulations to the new board at CM Pros!
The results were announced last night. The new directors are:

• Joerg Dennis Krueger, Managing Director and vendor-independent consultant and analyst with Cara Europe Ltd in Germany, is committed to expanding the CM Pros community in Europe.


• Tony Pietrocola, President and Co-founder of Tenth Floor Interactive has more than 10 years in the content management industry and will work to market and expand the recognition of CM Pros.


• Paul Trotter, Founder and CEO, Author-it, New Zealand has worked with content management for the past 12 years and plans to use his practical "make it work" experience to champion CM Pros member benefits.


• Andrew Wilcox, president and founder of Everage Consulting, Canada, has served as Technology Manager for CM Pros and plans to follow through with the technology initiative currently in process.


• Barry Schaeffer, president of X.Systems.Inc, focuses on handling the organizational impacts of information technology changes and is dedicated to developing a body of CM Pros knowledge.

The four new Directors replace two outgoing board members, Mary Laplante and Emma Hamer, whose terms expire this month. Directors Linda Burman and Travis Wissnik remain on the Board until January 2009. Barry Schaeffer joined the board in late 2007, filling the remainder of resigning Director Joan Lasselle's term.
It's great to see the association continue to grow, and to have generated enough board nominees for a competitve election.

By the way, I believe the Executive Director position is still open.

The deadline for proposals for panel participation or presentations for:
Gilbane San Francisco 2008 at the Westin Market Hotel, San Francisco, June 17 - 19, 2008 is January 15.

Visit http://gilbanesf.com/ to see the topic areas we are focusing and then see how to submit a proposal.

If you've never been to one of our events and want see what we have been covering in our conference programs you can view the programs from Gilbane Boston 2007 and Gilbane San Francisco 2007.

If you have additional questions about speaking, send them to speaking@gilbane.com.

As we reported last month, CM Pros is looking for a new Executive Director. There is now a full job description available on the CM Pros site.

I received a number of emails after my blog on Iron Mountain's Friendly Advice Machine, including some from non-John Cleese fans who still thought it was a fun experience. I even know of some colleagues who have visited the site multiple times ;-)

Still, I thought it would be interesting to get the real statistics on visits and impact from the company themselves. Iron Mountain's Karen McPhillips, VP Marketing, answered my call for an interview. Here are some interesting excerpts:

• Aimed at IT managers, a marketing research team developed the campaign by creating a literal "buyer persona" resulting from over 100 interviews with existing and target prospects. This was not a "closed door brainstorming" session. The team identified and aggregated a long list of common process and technology IT-based pain points to drive targeted messaging with a healthy dose of humor.
• By end-October, the first month of release, the site received 19,000 hits and exceeded viewing expectations by 20%. Audience segmentation revealed 60% U.S.-based views and 16% Eastern Europe-based views.
• The previous Cleese-based campaign featured the comedian as Dr. Harold Twain Weck, Director of the Institute for Backup Trauma. By the end of its run, the site had received more than one million hits from IT professionals alone.
• The company markets the campaign globally, but it is available only in English. Given the difficulties of true context-driven translations, especially for "Cleese humor," this seems prudent. McPhillips reports no complaints on the decision from the company's major global markets, including France and Germany.

The company expects an 18-24 month shelf-life for the campaign.

In the Global Information Age, mere information availability no longer suffices. Today's customer expectations demand relevant information that is culturally acceptable, appealing, and most important, understood. Delivering contextual, multilingual information - communications that make sense in the customer's language of choice - is fundamental. Translation is a corporate requirement.

However, any company with a multinational revenue profile knows that fusing quality and translation is a significant challenge. Our take? Quality translation within the global content lifecycle can be elusive, but it is achievable. To learn more, download our latest whitepaper, "Quality In, Quality Out: The Value of Technology in the Global Content Lifecycle" and listen to the recording from the companion webinar hosted by Sajan.

We'll also continue the quality discussion throughout Gilbane Boston's Globalization track, particularly in the session, "Quality at the Source: Creating Global Customer Experience."