Gilbane Group Blog

Web Content Management Executive Panel

2008-11-19T12:15:15Z

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 Tchevervik, CTO, Fatwire

One-stop updates on Google's 74 blogs

2008-11-17T12:41:56Z

Stephen Arnold, author of the report Beyond Search, as well as two books on Google, has put together a free service that aggregates the headlines from Google's own blogs. The service is called Overflight. "Overflight is an RSS aggregation service. The service that is now publicly available aggregates the headlines from Google's 74 Web logs. We group the most recent headlines using the same categories that Google favors."

What a great idea. Thanks Steve!

Social Networking in the Workplace Increases Efficiency in Europe

2008-11-13T19:43:48Z

There sure are lots of surveys on social media and networking tools these days. I just noticed one Dynamic Markets did for AT&T. Here are some of the highlights from their website.

A pan-European survey of more than 2,500 people in five countries shows that the use of social networking tools as part of everyday working life has led to an increase in efficiency. The study shows that 65% of employees surveyed in Great Britain, France, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands say their company has adopted social networking as part of their working culture. The research also reveals that the rate of adoption is most popular in Germany, leading the way at 72% while Great Britain lags behind with 59%. The study also reveals:

65% of employees surveyed say that social networking sites have made them and/or their colleagues more efficient
63% say they have enabled them and their colleagues to achieve things that would not otherwise have been possible
46% say they have sparked ideas and creativity for them personally

The Top 5 social networking tools being used as part of everyday working life are:

Companies' own collaboration sites on intranets (39%)
Internal forums within the company (20%)
Company-produced video material shared on intranets (16%)
Online social networks, such as LinkedIn and Facebook (15%)
External collaboration sites on the web and internal blogging sites (both 11%)

New survey on authoring tools

2008-11-12T21:29:17Z

Not to repeat... See Bill's post on the XML blog.

What kind of LinkedIn user are you?

2008-11-07T17:20:01Z

I don't remember when I joined LInkedIn, but I still have items in my inbox from 2004 so it has been awhile. Up until last year sometime I never actually used it except to accept invitations from people I knew (and a handful I didn't because it was easier than thinking about it). At some point last year I thought to use LinkedIn to find a colleague's updated contact information, and for the first time thought of LinkedIn as really useful. Recently I've reached a new level of appreciation for its use when I saw that the LinkedIn CM Pros group had over 7000 members, and that application support was added, for example Blog Link.

While there is no doubt that social networking technologies will be widely deployed specifically for enterprise use. It is too early to know what the tool landscape will look like. The basic technology is clever but not rocket science, and is available from many sources. It is also too early to know how, or if, internally and externally-focused tools will be integrated into a cohesive user experience. In any case, LinkedIn is not to be ignored.

But I digress. The real reason for this post was to point to some interesting market research by Anderson Analytics (who I had not heard of before), where they use text mining of LinkedIn to come up with four user profiles. This is interesting as market research, for market research, and in its use of text mining. From their announcement:

"Savvy Networkers" (9 million) are likely to have started using social networking earlier than others, are more tech savvy, and more likely to be active on other SNS sites like Facebook. Savvy Networkers have the most connections (61 on average) and are more likely to use LinkedIn for almost every purpose other than job searching. Savvy Networkers have the second highest personal income ($93,500) and usually have "Consultant" in their job description.

"Senior Executives" (8.4 million) are somewhat less tech savvy and are using LinkedIn to connect to their existing corporate networks. They have power jobs which they are quite content with, and are likely to have been invited by a colleague, then realized how many key contacts were on the site and started building connections (32 on average). Senior Executives have the highest average personal income ($104,000) and have titles such as Owner, Partner, Executive or Associate.

"Late Adopters" (6.6 million) are likely to have received numerous requests from friends and co-workers before deciding to join. They are somewhat less tech savvy and are careful in how they use LinkedIn, tending to connect only to close friends and colleagues and have the fewest number of connections (23 on average). Late Adopters have the lowest average personal income ($88,000) and have titles such as Teacher, Medical Professional, Lawyer, or the word "Account" or "Assistant" in their job description.

"Exploring Options" (6.1 million) may be working, but are open and looking for other job options often on Careerbuilder.com, perhaps in part because they have the lowest personal income ($87,500). They are fairly tech savvy, and use SNS for both corporate and personal interests.
... To find out which type you are most like, you may use the predictive tool available at Anderson Analytics: http://www.andersonanalytics.com/litype

I have to say the tool didn't get my profile right!

An international event in Boston

2008-11-02T22:15:23Z

We have always had pretty good international participation at our conferences, and with a month until Gilbane Boston, it is clear this year will be no different. so far we have attendees from 20 countries outside the U.S., which is pretty typical for us. But what is striking is the 15 17 18 international exhibitors that will be at the show, which is about 50% more than usual. Some of it is due to the growth of our coverage of multilingual content applications, but that only accounts for part of the increase. You can see most of the exhibitors at http://gilbaneboston.com/exhibitors_sponsors.html.

BTW, the "early-bird" discount is available through November ~~4th~~ 7th at:
http://gilbaneboston.com/registration_information.html.

CM Pros: Forum, Summit, and Board Nominations

2008-10-31T14:09:06Z

CM Pros (the Content Management Professionals Association) has replaced their listserv with a new forum and even non-members will be able to view much of the content - members can contribute.

They also announced that the early registration discounts for the Summit ends November 4th, as it does for our conference.

They also announced nominations for CM Pros Board of Directors:

CM Pros seeks enthusiastic candidates to run for three open seats on the Board of Directors. To qualify as a candidate, you must be a CM Pros member in good standing. Nominations open soon and voting is scheduled for December. Consider nominating yourself or someone else you believe would make a great candidate. If you are passionate about content management this is your opportunity to contribute to and gain from the continued growth of the profession and the organization.

http://www.cmprofessionals.org/

Multi-Channel Publishing: Can anyone do it?

2008-10-29T11:47:44Z

By David Lipsey, Managing Director, Entertainment & Media, FTI

Can anyone deliver customized content to its customers - in print, on the Web in rich applications, in social networking or to wireless media? To make matters more challenging, what if your customers are two-to-five year olds? Well, Sesame Workshop recently had to address this test to keep its brand relevant to precocious preschoolers. In fact, this non-profit organization behind Sesame Street took the bold view that multi-channel publishing is the future of the Workshop, and recognized that online will become its primary channel of distribution down the line. At the upcoming Gilbane Boston Conference (link to information on session), I will moderate a panel of multi-channel publishing experts, including the VP charged with Sesame Workshop's internet initiative. We will provide you with the latest in content delivery, opportunities to serve more users and more applications, and insights to show that yes, almost anyone can do it. Please join me, Joe Bachana from DPCI (an industry leader in his own right) and the ever-innovative O'Reilly Press for a didactic and enlightening discussion that will get you mulling over ideas for enhancing your brand experience for customers.

Multilingualism and Information Technology

2008-10-19T07:57:03Z

This is the title of the presentation I was asked to give at the Kites Symposium of Multilingual Communication and Content Management in Finland this week. The main point I will be making is that multilingual content will only become easily and widely available when multilingual technology is deeply integrated in information technologies. I doubt that this will be considered controversial by anyone, but both the market demand and the technology has reached a point where companies are looking for slow steady growth to be accelerated. Although this demand is naturally higher in Europe, the potential for reaching new, or deeper into existing, markets ensure that even small to mid-size U.S. companies will be looking to incorporate multilingual technologies as soon as the cost and ease of doing so allows for it (abstract appended below). For more on how companies are thinking about this, see the recent report by our Content Globalization practice Multilingual Communications as a Business Imperative: Why Organizations Need to Optimize the Global Content Value Chain.

As Leonor says, machine translation, which has been around for years, is going to play a large role in multilingual applications in spite of its limited capabilities. For example, you may have noticed the Google translate feature at the top of this page and a couple of our other blogs. This was free, took no more than 5 minutes to install, and is very useful - try it out.

Here is the abstract for my presentation:

Language technologies are becoming integral to content and information technologies. This is a slow process, but inevitable. There is no question of the requirement for multilingual functionality. Those who might have thought or hoped that we would be a monolingual world in the foreseeable future must re-adjust their view when looking at the behavior (good and bad) across the globe today. Even in the U.S., where most of the population has always had a narrow view of language, organizations are awakening to the need for multilingual capability. This awakening is sure to continue because of global commercial opportunities. And because of the inexpensive global access provided by the Web, multilingual requirements are increasingly important for even very small businesses. Meeting the full market demand for multilingual requirements at the scale necessary won't be possible without multilingual technologies becoming an integral component of mainstream information technologies.

While language technologies are not new and processes for managing translation and localization are well established, there is still much to learn about how to integrate language and other information technologies. First, the number of organizations, and people within organizations, with deep experience in translation processes and technologies is still relatively small. Second, there is fragmentation in the supplier market, within customer organizations, and along the "Global Content Value Chain", that together contribute to slower growth. Third, development of all information technologies continues to accelerate, challenging even forward thinking organizations with large IT budgets.

Because of the central importance of multilingualism, all organizations need to understand as much as possible, what and how language technologies are being used today, how they are, or are not, integrated with other technologies and applications, and how and when emerging language and information technologies will affect commercial and information dissemination strategies.

The information technologies most immediately relevant to multilingual applications are content management technologies, including authoring, editing, publishing, search, and content management. Recent research on the use of language and content technologies by organizations with deep experience using both kinds of technologies, reveals that there is insufficient integration and interoperability across authoring, content management, localization/translation, and publishing. Much can be learned from analyzing how some organizations have successfully dealt with this constraint.

Language and semantic technologies continue to improve, both organically because of a renewed interest in their possibilities, and because of increases in readily available computing power. In addition to small expert niche companies, very large developer organizations such as Google and Microsoft are investing heavily in language technologies. Machine translation is one example, and one that is increasingly seen as having a serious role to play in many, if not all, translation applications. However, to fully achieve pervasive multilingual capability technology integration needs to progress from the integration of individual software applications, to the incorporation into large mainstream enterprise applications, widely deployed client tools, and software infrastructures.

Technology integration is not the only barrier to market growth. Yet, as more of these technologies are integrated, it will become easier to implement multilingual solutions, they will be less costly, easier to use, and procurement will be simplified.

The Future of Enterprise Search

2008-10-06T13:31:40Z

We've been especially focused on enterprise search this year. In addition to Lynda's blog and our normal conference coverage, we have released two extensive reports, one authored by Lynda and one by Stephen Arnold, and Udi Manber VP Engineering, Search, Google, keynoted our San Francisco conference. We are continuing this focus at our upcoming Boston conference where Prabhakar Raghavan, Head of Yahoo! Research, will provide the opening keynote.

Prabhakar's talk is titled "The Future of Search". The reason I added "enterprise" to the title of the post, is that Prabhakar's talk will be of special interest to enterprises because of its emphasis on complex data in databases and marked-up content repositories. Prabhakar's background includes stints CTO at Verity and IBM so enterprise (or, if you prefer "behind-the-firewall", or "intranet") search requirements are not new to him.

Here is the description from the conference site:

Web content continues to grow, change, diversify, and fragment. Meanwhile, users are performing increasingly sophisticated and open-ended tasks online, connecting broadly to content and services across the Web. The simple search result page of blue text links needs to evolve to address these complex tasks, and this evolution includes a more formal understanding of user's intent, and a deeper model of how particular pieces of Web content can help. Structured databases power a significant fraction of Web pages, and microformats and other forms of markup have been proposed as mechanisms to expose this structure. But uptake of these mechanisms remains limited, as content owners await the killer application for this technology. That application is search. If search engines can make deep use of structured information about content, provided through open standards, then search engines and site owners can together bring consumers a far richer experience. We are entering a period of massive change to enable search engines to handle more complex content. Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo! Research, will address the future of search: how search engines are becoming more sophisticated, what the breakthrough point will be for semantics on the Web and what this means for developers and publishers.

Join us on December 3rd at 8:30am at the Boston Westin Copley. Register.

CM Pros Summit in Boston

2008-09-26T15:33:36Z

The Content Management Professionals Association (CM Pros) will once again be holding their annual Fall Summit in conjunction with Gilbane Boston in December. There are details over on our Events blog which I won't duplicate here, or even better, go right to the source at http://summit.cmprofessionals.org/. If you are a member we hope to see you, and if you are not you can find out about joining on the CM Pros site at http://cmprofessionals.org/

Welcome Karl Kadie, Senior Analyst

2008-09-12T19:15:13Z

I am happy to announce that Karl Kadie has joined us officially as a Senior Analyst. Karl has actually been working with with Leonor and Mary in the Content Globalization Practice for 6 months as a Contributing Analyst, and was a co-author of our recently released report Multilingual Communications as a Business Imperative: Why Organizations Need to Optimize the Global Content Value Chain. Karl has been a great addition to the team, and will continue to focus on content globalization.

Karl's bio can be found at http://gilbane.com/consultant_bios.html#kkadie, and his email address is: kkadie@gilbane.com and his phone extension is
210.

Welcome Karl!

Integrating Traditional Documentation with Social Media

2008-09-08T20:51:52Z

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?

Gilbane Boston conference and workshops posted

2008-09-02T21:18:03Z

The Gilbane Boston 2008 program is now available, and registration is open. As usual we have had a tough time choosing from among all the possible panelists and presenters. Some speakers have not been notified yet, so we will not publish speaker names for another week or so.

The main conference site is http://gilbaneboston.com. Here are the most popular links:

* Conference schedule
* Conference session descriptions
* Workshop descriptions
* Early Sponsors
* Registration

You can also subscribe to our events and announcements blog to make sure you get all the conference updates.

BTW, we will be using gilbaneboston08 for tagging purposes.

Welcome Fred Dalrymple

2008-08-15T12:29:39Z

Fred is our newest contributor, and has already posted his first blog entry. Fred pokes at the challenging tension in search between intent and context, especially over time as context (or intent) changes. Lynda has also posted about intent, and the subject also came up in discussions of search quality around Udi Manber's talk at our conference in this past June.

Fred brings the welcome perspective of a serious software developer, and will be blogging on a few different topics, so he may be posting here on on one of our other blogs. Welcome Fred!