Publishing: November 2006 Archives

WIth Carl's recent post on SaaS, and John Newton's "Content Management 2.0" discussion, I thought I'd throw this into the mix... recently there has also been a flurry of activity around a concept called "Office 2.0" - another offshoot of the term "Web 2.0" - in which all traditional office applications can be replaced by online services accessible through a generic web browser.

What's making this possible is a set of new technologies including AJAX, RSS and web services, a set of actual applications such as Google's gmail and ZOHO's "online" word processor, and a great deal of unbridled enthusiasm.

Since Office 2.0 is particularly aimed at applications that affect business and larger enterprises, I'd like to take a quick look at how well it fits the needs of such enterprises, and then suggest how it might be extended to better meet these needs.

But first, I'd like to point out that it's easy to get caught up in the details of technologies like AJAX and RSS, and miss the bigger picture. I would propose that the real excitement is in the vision enabled by the technology, as opposed to the technology itself. To not see this leads to the inevitable "religious wars" around specific tools, which we of course want to avoid...

To put this in perspective, Office 2.0 reminds me of what happened with CD-ROM twenty years ago. I still vividly recall a colleague of mine proudly announcing that he was going to the world's first international CD-ROM conference, which he described as the "Woodstock" of the computer industry. He simply couldn't contain his excitement about this pivotal event. But then, I remember him suddenly changing his facial expression, looking at me wryly and saying, "well of course, CD-ROM is actually only a storage medium...can you imagine me being excited about going to a floppy disk conference?"

Twenty years later, we might well ask the same thing. CD-ROM has become about as mundane as floppy disks were then. But at the time, CD-ROM represented much more than a new storage medium. Instead, it symbolized the sudden freedom to access and search information - right from your own desktop - that would otherwise be virtually inaccessible. It was in fact, the first glimpse of the kind of mass interconnectivity that the World Wide Web would later provide.

Office 2.0 is much like that - it represents freedom from the tyranny of desktop applications and proprietary data locked up on individual computers. It heralds a new age of unfettered collaboration and information sharing within enterprises.

So what are the key things that are exciting about Office 2.0, and do its maxims and rules actually fit larger enterprises? I think the answer is a tentative "yes" - at least at a conceptual level. And at least so long as the Office 2.0 folks are willing to make a few compromises and entertain some crucial extensions.

To explore this further, let's go through the official Office 2.0 rules one by one...

#1 - No client application other than a web browser. Actually, this the holy grail of nearly all corporate IT departments, because one of the biggest headaches in IT is trying to keep all the client applications up to-date on individual computers. In practice, we'd have to accommodate situations where a high-speed Internet connection is not available, but I would grant that this is increasingly the exception.

#2 - No files on your personal computer. In principle, this is the entire thrust of enterprise content management initiatives, taking information that's buried on people's "C:" drives and getting into a managed and accessible central repository. So far, so good.

#3 - No dependence on any particular vendor.This is another mantra of corporate IT, expressing itself in the current fervor over Software as a Service and Service-Oriented Architectures, ideally with plug-and-play vendor apps encapsulated in generic web services interfaces.

#4 - Collaboration through document sharing and publishing. Again, this a winner with big enterprises. In fact, this is most of what my company, Flatirons Solutions, does for a living. And from the overall perspective of Web 2.0, I might add that wikis and blogs are an increasingly popular way to share ideas and knowledge within larger organizations, supplementing the sharing and publishing of documents.

#5 - Syndication in addition to peer-to-peer collaboration. This is another focus of enterprise content management, allowing people to subscribe to documents or content that has changed or is newly-published. And RSS syndication is increasingly one of the key channels to which we find ourselves publishing content.

#6 - Seamless data import/export across services. This is a fundamental objective of all enterprise content management initiatives, but now comes the rub. The current Office 2.0 vision thinks of sharing in terms of "interchangeable" formats like .DOC, HTML and PDF. But .DOC is a common but still proprietary vendor format, and HTML and PDF are really only sharable at the visible level. In other words, HTML and PDF let you display and print each other's information, but not actually interchange the underlying source data and information in a way a computer can process and transform.

Proprietary word processing seems less proprietary when it's on the Web, but if you really want interchangeability between services, you need to be using a vendor, format and media-neutral standard like XML. XML does not assume a particular vendor, nor does it assume web or print as the output medium. Instead, it encodes the information itself in a completely neutral form, from which media-specific formats like HTML and PDF can be derived.

In the work we do with large enterprises, XML also provides the key to sharing information at a much deeper level than "documents." When we look at the set of documents that people need to share and publish, we see that there is often a tremendous amount of redundancy. If this overlapping information is authored and maintained independently, there are huge problems with inconsistency, and a lot of unnecessary time and cost maintaining and reconciling the multiple versions.

XML allows source information to be "chunked up" into the underlying building blocks, and from there flexibly mixed-and-matched to create the full array of print and Web-based documents. Individuals can collaborate on the source building blocks - without needing to assume a particular assembled document or output medium - and then combine the building blocks of interest into the documents they produce. Furthermore, if these reusable building blocks are structured as standalone "topics", they can be directly published and syndicated outside the context of a higher-level document or web page. We call this "single source" publishing - because underlying content is maintained once, and then reused many times.

So, is Office 2.0 the right idea for larger enterprises? Perhaps, in principle...but to make it really work we need to merge its vision with the significant work already going on in single-source XML-based publishing. Then we'd have the potential for a real winner.

I'm not at the conference this week (we do have several people from our shop there), but to answer a question posed by Frank Gilbane:

What is the future of software as a service, and is it appropriate for enterprise content applications like content management, authoring, etc.?

The SaaS model seems to have been proven to the point where it's hard to imagine that it won't keep growing. We recently posted a whitepaper on SaaS myths, which debunks most of the common arguments against SaaS. In addition to that discussion, I'd offer the following four points:

1) SaaS is a proven technology. It arguably extends to the early days of the web with software ASPs. I guess you could even argue the lineage goes all the way back to mainframe apps! :-) Certainly, though, the existing SaaS companies have been working successfully with this business model for more than six years now.

2) Web technologies have reached a point where SaaS is an out of the box solution. You can now count on fast network connections for users both in the office and home. Security systems are complete from SSL with web browsers up through terminal services like Citrix which allow even HIPAA compliance. For web apps, browser technologies like IFRAMES and AJAX allow apps to be easily integrated on a page (mashups).

3) SaaS provides much more robust server management and security, especially for small and medium sized businesses. As web applications grow more complex, SaaS allows much more convenient, rigorous and cost-effective control over hosting. By centralizing and focusing, the best resources can be brought to bear on fewer hosting environments.

4) This one is a bit of a prediction, and is specific to web sites. Currently, you have a couple options when adding components like blogs, rss, ecommerce, polls, surveys, and search to web sites. You can install apps for those services, which allows you to control ad placement and design. The alternative is to use free hosted apps where the ad revenue goes to the SaaS company. So, the logical next step is for high quality hosted apps where the ad revenue is shared with the web site. This is already appearing with sites like MetaCafe. For an advanced CMS, though, I am not sure this will happen since the CMS tends to be the hub for all the other web apps, but it is certainly possible for a basic CMS.

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.