Recently in Document Management Category

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.

As many of you know, we will be publishing a new report by Stephen Arnold in the next few weeks. The title, Beyond Search: What to do When Your Enterprise Search System Doesn't Work, begs the question of whether there is such a thing as "enterprise search". The title of Lynda's consulting practice blog "Enterprise Search Practice Blog", begs the same question. In the case of content management, a similar question is begged by AIIM - "The Enterprise Content Management Association" (ECM) and the recent AIIM conference.

The debate about whether "enterprise fill-in-your-favorite-software-application" makes any sense at all is not new. The terms "Enterprise Document Management" (EDM) and "Enterprise Resource Planning" (ERP) were first used in the 80s, and, at least in the case of EDM, were just as controversial. We have Documentum to thank for both EDM and ECM. Documentum's original mission was to be the Oracle of documents, so EDM probably seemed like an appropriate term to use. Quickly however, the term was appropriated by marketing pros from many vendors, as well as analysts looking for a new category of reports and research to sell, and conference organizers keeping current with the latest buzzwords (I don't exclude us from this kind of activity!). It was also naively misused by many enterprise IT (as opposed to "personal IT" I suppose) professionals, and business managers who were excited by such a possibility.

ECM evolved when the competition between the established EDM vendors and the fast growing web content management vendors reached a point where both saw they couldn't avoid each other (for market cap as well as user requirement reasons). Soon, any vendor with a product to manage any kind of information that existed outside of (or even sometimes even in) a relational database, was an "ECM" vendor. This was what led AIIM to adopt and try to define and lay claim to the term - it would cover all of the records management and scanner vendors who were their existing constituents, and allow them to appeal to the newer web content management vendors and practitioners as well.

We used to cover the question "Is there any such thing as ECM?" in our analyst panels at our conferences, and usually there would be some disagreement among the analysts participating, but our mainly enterprise IT audience largely became savvy enough to realize it was a non-issue.

Why is it a non-issue?
Mainly because the term has almost no useful meaning. Nobody puts all their enterprise content in a single ECM repository. It doesn't even make sense to use the same vendors' products across all departments even in small organizations. - that is why there is such a large variety of vendors with wildly different functionality at ECM events such as AIIM. The most that you can assume when you hear "ECM vendor" is that they probably support more than one type of content management application, and that they might scale to some degree.

There are many who think it not unreasonable to have a single "enterprise search" application for all enterprise content. If you are new to search technology this is understandable, since you may think simple word or phrase search should be able to work across repositories. But, of course, it is not at all that simple, and if you want to know why see Stephen's blog or Lynda's blog, among others. Both Steve and Lynda are uncomfortable with "enterprise search". Steve prefers the term "behind the firewall search". Lynda sticks with the term but with a slightly different definition, although I don't think they disagree at all on how the term is misused and misinterpreted.

Why use "Enterprise ... Whatever" terms at all?
There is only one reason, and that is that buyers and users of technology use these terms as a shortcut, sometime naively, but also sometimes with full understanding. There is just no getting around the barrier of actual language use. Clearly, using the shortcut is only the first step in communicating - more dialog is required for meaningful understanding.

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.

Frank, Mary, Tony, and I attended the Adobe analyst meetings in New York this week. To say that Adobe had a lot to share would be an understatement, but this was my first time attending this kind of event, so I have nothing to compare it to. Having said that, I have to say that I was impressed with the progress Adobe has made in several key areas--bringing Macromedia and its products into the fold; building out a much more compelling offering and clearer message with LiveCycle; and further solidifying its commanding presence in the creative tools space.

Along with the major focus on Creative Suite 3 (which was announced on Monday) and LiveCycle, Adobe executives also spent a fair bit of time on Software as a Service, discussing offerings like Adobe Document Center, which I have been playing around with since yesterday morning, and Acrobat Connect, nee Breeze, their web conferencing software. (And without having evaluated Acrobat Connect in detail, I have to say as someone who is on Webinars all the time that Connect is by far the easiest product I have ever used. It also seems to load like any other URL, but perhaps that is because I already have Acrobat professional on my system--not sure.)

A few other things that caught my eye:

• Kuler is, well, cool. It is a collaborative online application that allows users to discover and upload color themes that can be used with Creative Suite tools. Ryan Stewart has a nice writeup over at ZDNet.
• Apollo is impressive. We saw a number of demos, including the eBay one that has been written about (see here, and you can see a video of a demo here. The coolest Apollo demo, by far, is the one you can't currently see, the Buzzword word processor from Virtual Ubiquity; their Website will tell you they have gone back underground after the alpha release. Again, Ryan Stewart has a nice overview and screen shots over at ZDNet. And there seems to be uptake for Apollo in the broad developer community. According to CTO Kevin Lynch, as of Wednesday the 28th, 30,000 people had downloaded the client since it was posted on March 19.
• There's a new Beta of Acrobat 3D available for download. I have looked at the manufacturing space a fair bit over the last couple of years, and few areas seem to have more areas of meaningful technical interchange than do manufacturers, their suppliers, and their customers. PDF files are everywhere in these applications, so a more functional 3D Acrobat makes all the sense in the world.
• Adobe's efforts to be more active in the standards world with PDF are clearly paying off. While we were there, they announced a win with the mortgage industry's MISMO standards.

Lots to digest, but I came away impressed.

In my last post I said that composition vendors weren't very far along with their content partnerships. Nasser Barghouti, the Chief Technology Officer at Document Sciences set the record straight before I could finish my Thanksgiving turkey. Mr. Barghouti informed me that Document Sciences has had a long and successful integration partnership with both Filenet and Documentum. In fact, the next major release of the Xpression Product Suite, will offer an embedded OEM version of Documentum. Document Sciences wants to be able to give customers the choice of a bundled solution or open integration. I expect to see a lot more partnerships of this type and more CM OEM deals with leading composition players.

On August 15, 2006 another Gilbane blogger, Rita Warren, queried whether a marriage between CMS and CRM made sense. “Circa 1996… it was all about one-to-one customer communications. That (broad) vision was apparently too hard to realize back then! Maybe it's possible now.”
Well, circa 2006 it’s still all about one-to-one, but I think we understand what that means a lot better. One-to-one customer communications are not only possible, but they are happening in many small and large businesses. In most cases they are not coming from major CRM implementations ala Siebel – they are coming from composition tools. Many composition tool vendors now refer to themselves as personalization or customer communications management products. If you look at some of the case studies from the composition vendors included in my last entry you will find case studies for communications such as statements, enrollment books, and invoices that tailor messaging, educational content, product content, document format and delivery channel based on customer data or stated preferences.

Okay – so as a CMS professional why should you care about composition tools? Several reasons:

• Personalization is a beast that feeds on content. Lots and lots of content. Many composition experts have never even heard of taxonomy – CMS architects needed!
• Many composition tools have rudimentary content capabilities – but integration with “real” content management tools is necessary to feed the beast – CMS integrators needed!
• High volume composition tools are getting to the point where they can serve printed and electronic transactional channels equally well and are starting to move upstream into driving personalized web content. CMS and composition tools are not on the same path – visionaries needed!

It’s only a matter of time before some of the composition vendors decide that they should be in the CMS business. Personally, I think that trying to tightly couple those capabilities with composition would be a bad idea. Composition tools are complicated enough as it is. CMS vendors who have been trying to deliver the holy grail of print and web content management across document types are still not there yet. I find it hard to believe that a composition solution would leapfrog over the current CMS vendors. I suppose this is one instance where it would be nice to be proved wrong.

Meanwhile, an easier path to integrating current CMS technology for managing web and print content with leading high-volume composition tools would be welcome. Document Sciences has worked with Documentum and a few others. GMC Software has partnered with Interwoven a couple of times and Exstream and Metavante have both partnered with IBM OnDemand. I have also seen a number of Exstream - Vignette combos. Few vendors have broad and established content management partnerships and the market is ripe for this kind of collaboration.

In preparation for our panel on Content Globalization Workflows on Thursday November 30th at our Boston conference, we have created a survey to gauge how organizations are dealing with increasing market demand for localized content.

We hope to see you at this session. But whether you join us or not, contribute to it by answering our survey questions. We'll publish the results in a blog entry after the conference, including the results from our audience survey. Give us your input and you'll be eligible to win a free conference pass for one of our future conferences!

Here is a short URL to the survey you can share with others: http://tinyurl.com/yjy694

Here's what we'd like to know:
1. Which issue is your most pressing business driver for providing localized content to your customers?
2. Who is responsible for purchasing translation software in your organization?
3. What is the most difficult challenge within your localization processes?
4. Do you have one or more content/document management systems in house?
5. Do you have one or more translation management systems in house?
6. If you do not have a translation management system in house, who do you work with to manage your translation processes?
7. If you have both a content/document and a translation management system in house, are they integrated?
8. If the systems are integrated, select the most appropriate description of the integration.

I had planned on introducing Elizabeth Gooding, our newest guest blogger, with her initial post, but Elizabeth caught me off guard and already posted twice last week (here and here)! In any case, Elizabeth has a design and consulting company she founded 18 years ago that has been focused ever since on the document design, processing, and delivery needs of financial services companies. Elizabeth is a hands-on CEO who may know more than anyone about technologies and strategies for financial service industry document-oriented applications. Elizabeth brings a new area of important expertise to our blog. Welcome Elizabeth!

Disclosure: I am on her board, but I would still say nice things about her if I wasn't!

I’m a firm believer in the value of user groups. I think that they are most valuable when the user community has enough energy to manage them independently from the software publisher. This is rare and getting rarer in the composition software industry.

In the absence of an independent user group, and not to be confused with same, many vendors sponsor User Conferences, which are great opportunities to mingle with other users and see presentations on “real life product implementations” albeit under the watchful eye of the vendor.

A number of vendors have their 2006 user conferences coming up in the Autumn:

Your definition of "document composition" will largely depend on your perspective.

A graphic designer might immediately think of Quark Express or Adobe InDesign. A desktop publisher could probably name various plug-ins to those environments or perhaps list database-publishing tools like Corel Ventura or Adobe PageMaker. If you are approaching this question from an operations, IT or print production perspective you have a much longer and more granular continuum of needs which can only be met with high volume composition software. In my work, I deal with both ends of the continuum from the graphic designer to the high-volume output specialist (see www.ArtPlusTechnology.com)