Recently in Enterprise DRM or ERM Category

Are you investigating technology for protecting your company's high-value documents and other intellectual property? Is better content security on your company's plate for 2008? Need to know the current state-of-the-art regarding enterprise rights management?

Gilbane Group is conducting a survey of companies that are investigating, adopting, and using rights management solutions for high-value enterprise content (contracts, HR policies, product strategies, regulatory compliance certifications, and so on). The results will be included in our upcoming study on Enterprise Rights Management: Business Imperatives and Implementation Readiness.

We are seeking input from IT, content management, and IT security professionals across multiple industries (excluding consumer media companies, which are outside the scope of this study). Some familiarity with enterprise rights management (ERM) or information rights management (IRM) is necessary (i.e., respondents need to have at least heard of the term).

The survey is online and takes about fifteen minutes to complete. In exchange for participation, qualified respondents will receive the aggregated survey results and the executive summary of the analysis. Respondents who fill out the survey in full and provide a valid email business address are also entered into a random drawing for a free one-hour phone consultation with the Gilbane ERM analyst team. Take the survey now. Contact us if you have any questions about the research or qualifications to take the survey.

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.

Records management provider Iron Mountain is a company that has intrigued me for some time, as I've watched it morph from a regional to a global player in outsourcing services as well as one of the top best-of-breed RM players amidst the ECM suite and platform providers.

The company appears to have always placed great value on user education and sharing best practices as demonstrated via a continuously expanding Knowledge Center, complete with an "Ask the Expert" section. User interfaces and content breadth/depth within this area is impressive, as is the series of quarterly, role-based newsletters on various topics. Incorporating multimedia into this strategy via the Tour Center has clearly been a major investment.

So, when I ran across the latest campaign featuring one of my all time favorites, John Cleese, I figured I would check out the Friendly Advice Machine. I did not however, count on an inability to tear myself away from it.

Frankly, it is one of the best examples of customer experience techniques I have ever seen. (Adweek agrees.) Targeting mid- to senior-level IT and legal professionals, it is creative, usable, informative, and hilariously funny. It uniquely incorporates "next step" offers and calls to action that quite literally spurs your hand towards the mouse to find out "what's behind that icon?" It bolsters the brand management strategy rather than dilutes it.

Update: Yesterday's Stratify acquisition should help in the "bolstering" department as well....

Check it out -- especially the Dreaded Whitepaper offer -- and stay tuned. I'll be interviewing the company next week about the objectives and techniques that make this campaign stand out. In terms of global customer experience, I'll find out if Cleese has attempted to deliver it in Chinese.

I haven't been very good at blogging about this conference as it has been a busy Winter and early Spring. In any case, there is still time to join us, especially if you are in the Bay area. Registration is still open online as of this post, and is also available on site at the Palace hotel through Thursday. If you can only get away for one day, make it Wednesday for the keynote with Adobe, Google, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle. The technology showcase is also open on Wednesday (with a reception) and Thursday. http://gilbanesf.com/conference_grid.html

There is an amendment being considered in the House of Representative to tackle the digital music phenomenon yet again. Called the "Section 115 Reform Act of 2006," it focuses specifically on "licenses for digital uses of musical works." Having gotten my 11 year old daughter her coveted iPod at the end of May, this caught my eye. The draft discussion is dated May 12.

According to Chris Lindquist over at the CIO Magazine blog, the bill "could make it necessary to acquire licenses for every digital copy of content, even cached, network, and RAM buffer reproductions." Makes one wonder what bills may be in store for digital content in general, not just in the music industry...

As Frank reported in our news, Documentum has acquired DRM vendor Authentica (more detail here). Bill Rosenblatt, who is chairing the Enterprise DRM Conference that is part of Gilbane San Francisco, says it is a watershed event for the industry. I agree. As Gilbane colleagues Glen Secor and David Guenette have pointed out (here and here, respectively), DRM is a piece of a broader network infrastructure that needs to be in place for more comprehensive document and content security. In truth, none of the ECM vendors has taken this very seriously so far, but the Authentica acquisition suggests Documentum may finally be doing so.

Some of you have likely listened to the excellent technology radio show at MyTechnologyLawyer.com. Gilbane Report Senior Editor Mary Laplante and I will be talking about the upcoming Gilbane San Francisco conferences on content management and digital rights management. The interview will be at 1:00 Eastern time tomorrow, Thursday, February 9, and you can listen live here.

UPDATE: If you missed the live broadcast, you can listen to recorded versions here (Real Media) or here (Windows Media). Among the topics discussed at some length were DITA and Enterprise DRM.

Hard to believe if you just joined us in Boston 2 weeks ago, but we are already deep into planning Gilbane San Francisco, which will be at the Sheraton Palace again this year. The dates are April 24 - 26, 2006. We are expanding our content coverage, and in addition to our Content Management, Content Technology and CTW Case Study tracks, we are adding a track on Enterprise Search, a track on Enterprise Blog, Wiki and RSS (and Atom!) Technology, and a special track on Automated Publishing for Marketers.

We have also added a new companion conference on Enterprise Digital Rights Management, which will be chaired by expert Bill Rosenblatt, Editor of DRMWatch.

To submit a speaking proposal for either the Content Management Technologies Conference or the Enterprise Digital Rights Management Conference, see the instructions, and don't delay - we will be completing the program in January, and even though the deadline is January 9 we will be well along by then.

Our blog content is now under a Creative Commons license. The version of the license we chose was pretty much what we always told people they could do anyway. There are some rights reserved which you can read about.

We have not done the same for our main site as the issues are a bit trickier given almost 14 years of content, some of it generated with custom agreements, but you can always ask us about content there, and we are fairly liberal with granting permissions.

When people think of piracy protection, they usually think about music and movies, occasionally about other media such as e-books. But I have always been interested in how Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology can help any company with intellectual property protect these assets. Think of examples like a chipmaker's CAD drawing for its newest design, a drug company's formulation of a new medicine, or the draft agreement that gets shared during a corporate merger. Any one of these things is highly valuable, and easily distributable in digital form.

Enter BASCAP, Business Action to Stop Counterfeiting and Piracy. Bill Rosenblatt has an interesting take over at DRM Watch.