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The term Cloud Content Management has begun to appear with increasing frequency in the last few months. But what does it mean? And how is it different from Enterprise Content Management (ECM)?

Gilbane Group answers these questions in our latest Beacon, which it titled Cloud Content Management: Facilitating Controlled Sharing of Active Content. Here is how we briefly define Cloud Content Management and contrast it to ECM:

"Cloud Content Management is an emerging set of content sharing and management
practices and a supporting category of software built on an open, secure, cloud-based
platform. It is rapidly deployed and easily used to manage content, in any format, that is
actively shared among collaborators working both inside and across firewalls. Cloud
Content Management is complementary to Enterprise Content Management, which is more
focused on controlling access to static, unstructured content in TIFF, PDF, and office
productivity document formats as it is electronically captured, stored, distributed,
archived, and disposed."

The Gilbane Beacon explores the various facets of this definition and goes into much more detail as to how Cloud Content Management differs from, and complements, ECM. We urge you to download the Beacon (free registration required), read it, then return here to share comments.

By Ted Treanor, Senior Publishing Consultant

Publishing predictions for 2010 abound. As a digital publishing pioneer and visionary, Ted Treanor has been well positioned ahead of the curve, with a unique vantage point to see what's in store for the industry. At this tipping point, publishing convergence of print and digital has collided with mainstream. Let us know what you think of these predictions.

Let’s see if 13 predictions will be lucky for publishing.

1. New eReading devices will proliferate. The market is responding like the California gold rush.  Not only will there be new companies launching in 2010, but big electronics firms will have their products. CES will be a haven for digital reading, which will astound everyone.
2. Pricing experimentation will take center stage.
3. Digital sales channels both retail and distribution will grow rapidly.
4. The ePub standard (IDPF.org) will strengthen as an international industry standard. ePub will compete with PDF for the top format for commercial content.
5. The big surprise this year will be the number of large recognized companies that will strategically target the digital publishing eReading and content space. At least one major communications infrastructure company (possibly wireless) will stake a claim through a publishing partnership. Other prime segments will be computer manufacturers and printer manufactures.
6. Trade associations will scramble to stay relevant in their attempt to lead members through this time of convergence of print and digital.
7. Content workflow using XML technologies will become standard for single source production to multiple print and digital editions.
8. Publishers will attempt to build direct relationships with their reader customers…not very successfully in 2010.
9. Technology and services companies will further enable authors for self-publishing and in their sales goals. At least one big name author will experiment in self-publishing in 2010.
10. eCatalogs will become a standard tool in selling content to booksellers, librarians, etc..
11. Digital galleys will gain in popularity.
12. E-content will be grafted into print in innovative ways.
13. New ebook data reports and ebook directories will become ‘must-have’ resources. Gilbane Group has a series of three publishing transformation reports planned in 2010.

Follow me on Twitter @ ePubDr

My friend Sameer Patel wrote and published a very good blog post last week that examined the relationship of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and enterprise social software. His analysis was astute (as usual) and noted that there was a role for both types of software, because they offer different value propositions. ECM enables controlled, repeatable content publication processes, whereas social software empowers rapid, collaborative creation and sharing of content. There is a place for both in large enterprises. Sameer's suggestion was that social software be used for authoring, sharing, and collecting feedback on draft documents or content chunks before they are formally published and widely distributed. ECM systems may then be used to publish the final, vetted content and manage it throughout the content lifecycle.

The relationship between ECM and enterprise social software is just one example of an important, higher level interconnection -- the nexus of defined business processes and ad hoc collaboration. This is the sweet spot at which organizations will balance employees' requirements for speed and flexibility with the corporation's need for control. The following (hypothetical, but typical) scenario in a large company demonstrates this intersection.

A customer account manager receives a phone call from a client asking why an issue with their service has not been resolved and when it will be. The account manager can query a workflow-supported issue management system and learn that the issue has been assigned to a specific employee and that it has been assigned an "in-progress" status. However, that system does not tell the account manager what she really needs to know! She must turn to a communication system to ask the other employee what is the hold up and the current estimate of time to issue resolution. She emails, IM's, phones, or maybe even tweets the employee to whom the issue has been assigned to get an answer she can give the customer.

The employee to whom the issue was assigned most likely cannot use the issue management system to actually resolve the problem either. He uses a collaboration system to find documented information and individuals possessing knowledge that can help him deal with the issue. Once the problem is solved, the employee submits the solution to the issue management system, which feeds it to a someone who can make the necessary changes for the customer and inform the customer account manager that the issue is resolved. Case closed.

The above scenario illustrates the need for both process and people-centric systems. Without the cludgy, structured issue management system, the customer account manager would not have known to whom the issue had been assigned and, thus, been unable to contact a specific individual to get better information about its status. Furthermore, middle managers would not have been able to assign the case in a systematic way or see the big picture of all cases being worked on for customers without the workflow and reporting capabilities of the issue management system. On the other hand, ad hoc communication and collaboration systems were the tools that drove actual results. The account manager and the employee to whom the issue was assigned would not have been able to do their work if the issue management system was their only support tool. They needed less structured tools that allowed them to communicate and collaborate quickly to actually resolve the issue.

We should not expect that organizations striving to become more people-centric will abandon their ECM, ERP, or other systems that guide or enforce key business processes. There is a need for both legacy management and Enterprise 2.0 philosophies and systems in large enterprises operating in matrixed organizational structures. Each approach can provide value; one quantifiable in hard currency and the other in terms of softer, but important, business metrics (more on this in a future post.) The enterprises that identify, and operate at, the intersection of structured process and ad hoc communication/collaboration will gain short-term competitive advantage.

There are few people who have not heard of SharePoint, but understanding what SharePoint has to offer is another story.  The best way to understand SharePoint is to use it.  This series of posts will provide an overview of the product, and explains how a non techie can get started.

SharePoint is currently in its third incarnation (SharePoint 2007) and within 9 months Microsoft will be deploying the fourth version, "SharePoint 2010."  There are three distinct SKUs:

1. WSS (Windows SharePoint Server)
   - Comes with the Windows Server and is free.
2. MOSS (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server) Standard Edition
   - An extension of WSS, and is licensed per server as well as per user. 
3. MOSS (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server) Enterprise Edition
   - An extension of the Standard Edition, and is licensed per server as well as per user. 

It is also possible to buy a "Public Connector" for MOSS, which is a license  that allows SharePoint to be used as a publicly facing site with no limit on the number of users .

Although Microsoft is trying to showcase SharePoint as an excellent platform to build publicly facing sites, there is general agreement that SharePoint is best used in a closed community where users must login.  Microsoft touts SharePoint as a product that supports six pillars: (These pillars are about to be rebranded in SharePoint 2010, see SharePoint 2010 has new pillars.)  The six pillars are:

1. Collaboration
   - Allowing members of a closed community to share documents, tasks, calendars, contacts, etc
2. Portal
   - Providing a single web site that is the gateway to an organization's web based functions.
3. Enterprise Search
   - Competing with Google for the enterprise, 
4. Web & Enterprise Content Management
   - A publishing platform that allows for simple workflows among authors and editors.
5. Forms Driven Business Process
   - Allows for easy development of electronic forms and associated automated workflows.
6. Business Intelligence
   - Allows organization to build dashboards summarizing data that reside in disparate electronic repositories.

The original intent behind SharePoint was to empower business users to control their own destiny without being dependent on IT and Development staff.  In the author's experience, SharePoint often requires much more planning and maintenance than business users can provide.  Thus one often finds that specially trained SharePoint IT and developer personnel are required to stand-up and support in-house SharePoint deployments. 

Although still quite limited, it is now possible to lease robust versions of SharePoint that reside in the cloud and truly are managed without any hidden costs.  This series of articles will summarize three services that were tried by the author:

1. SharePoint Online - Part of the Microsoft Business Online Productivity Suite.
2. Apps4rent - A robust SharePoint and Exchange online implementation.
3. WebHost4Life - Similar to  Apps4Rent's SharePoint implementation with a non-Exchange email system.

The discussion will focus only on SharePoint.  In all cases, the environments are WSS (Not MOSS) and are hosted in a joint tenancy model, meaning that you are sharing computing resources with other SharePoint sites. Although people will tell you there could be a number of reasons why this may be problematic, the author never experienced any issues due to joint tenancy.  Microsoft does offer an expensive service in a dedicated environment.  This service requires that a minimum of 5,000 user licenses are being leased.

Both Apps4rent and WebHost4Life have a simple model that is easy for an end user to understand. In contrast, the Microsoft environment is quite confusing with poor documentation.  Both Apps4Rent and WebHost4Life offer immediate support with chat sessions, and the customer service staff was knowledgeable and helpful.  Again, in contrast to this, Microsoft's support was poor.  Microsoft communicated via a secure email channel, responses took 4 to 6 hours, and the support personnel did not understand the product well...

As part of the review I was doing of the eBookWise-1150, I played some with their publishing tools. The device maker, eBook Technologies, Inc. (ETI), has some tools for publishers, and I tried both a batch processing tool and an interactive one. I say "played" with them because I only tried a few things, and there were many features, especially to the interactive tool. The tools looked very solid. I have also played around some with the Kindle Digital Text Platform. I do this to learn the tools, but also to keep myself honest. We advise clients on these devices and also the workflow surrounding eBook creation. Our clients don't expect us to know every bell and whistle, but they do expect us to understand what is possible and not possible.

The more eBooks become attractive options for publishers, the more issues of publishing to multiple formats and platforms become important for publishers. Our experience so far has been that the most typical requirement for publishers is the need to produce eBooks in many different formats and not just one (this despite sensible solutions like IDPF's EPUB format). And they need to do this efficiently. This is a practical reality of the marketplace today as no one eBook format has won the format war, no one channel is dominating sales, and indeed no one channel is typically worth doing on its own. The revenues simply are not there yet. (Indeed, even if you decide that you will only do, say, PDF-based eBooks, the similarities from one channel to the next end with the PDF extension, necessitating technologies like codeMantra's Universal PDF).

Adobe is one of the vendors supporting EPUB, and their Digital Editions developer site has some good resources. They just added an EPUB Best Practices Guide (in, not surprisingly, EPUB format, so you can download Digital Editions if you want to get right to reading it).

Much is being made today of Adobe Systems announcement that “it intends to release the full Portable Document Format (PDF) 1.7 specification to AIIM, the Enterprise Content Management Association, for the purpose of publication by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).”

The main hubbub surrounds the contention of several bloggers that this represents another attack by Adobe on Microsoft and its recently-released XPS format, “the PDF killer.” Quite probably so. It’s a subject worth examining, although not superficially.

For today I’d like to consider what it means to become an ISO standard. I think of this as the equivalent of getting a lifetime achievement award from The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (The Oscars). It means you were pretty good, but you’re now almost dead.

As of December 31, 2005, there were 15,649 published ISO standards, with 1,240 released in that year alone. Under the heading of electronics, information technology and telecommunications, there were 2,447 published standards. How many does your organization conform to? If this impresses you, remember to celebrate World Standards Day on October 14! And for even more fun, there’s the new isomemory game (http://www.iso.org/iso/en/commcentre/isomemory/startpage.html#). I hear it’s fun for the whole family!

You can’t read the published standards on the ISO site without giving them a chunk of cash first. That says something in itself; I’m just not sure what. But you can see listings of the bodies buried in the ISO graveyard. For example ISO 12639:2004 is the TIFF/IT standard, once used widely in the prepress industry, but no longer a player. You can however download it for 176 Swiss francs, 8700 Yugoslav dinars, or about $140 Yankee dollars.

ISO 6804:1991 covers “rubber hoses and hose assemblies for washing-machines and dishwashers -- Specification for inlet hoses.” It’s yours for 48 Swiss francs!

I could go on (and am tempted to do so).

At the same time, there are certain relevant standards that have crept into ISO…as Adobe mentions in its press release, all of the PDF sibling are now ISO standards (PDF/X, PDF-X1, etc.). The OpenDocument Format is a standard. And so on.

So what is the significance of becoming an ISO standard when your standard is one that people actually use? Historically, none; more recently, some.

As the publishing industry has evolved into an ever-more-complex microsystem, more and more organizations (and indeed states, countries, etc.) are choosing to endorse standards that have been accepted and published by ISO.

Will more organizations use PDF if it’s an ISO standard? Probably not. That is, unless Microsoft gains real traction with XPS. There are some very high-stakes games being played against the Microsoft/Windows juggernaut, and standards have become a key weapon in the game. Adobe has played a major trump card. Microsoft: your move.

We marvelled when we saw the prestigious Encyclopedia Britannica usurped by Microsoft's Encarta. It was a tribute to the clever utilization of multimedia and excellent marketing that leveraged Microsoft's position in the software world. Given Microsoft's incredible resources and market clout, it was assumed that the Encarta franchise would build and thrive to become the most heavily utilized fact resource. Therefore, it was even more shocking when Wikipedia burst onto the scene in 2001. And it's continued evolution demonstrates that this project is no fluke. There are over 1.5 million articles and there are over 100 international versions. How is this possible? Is it simply because it is a free reference resource? I do not think so. Average consumers seem to have voted for breadth and currency over authority. More importantly, a large group of contributors and reviewers seem to feel a pride of ownership in the work of their collaboration. This phenomena has interesting implications for publishing firms.

Wikimedia now has a number of related projects including Wikibooks and Wikiversity. Wikibooks has generated 23,476 content modules for over 1000 topics in less than three years. Wikiversity is in its formative stages but plans to offer free course materials and may provide a platform for developing research topics into wikimongraphs.

It is sometimes difficult to get past the fact that all Wikimedia content is free to focus upon the powerful authoring metaphor that they have created and proliferated. These very same techniques could be used by commercial and corporate publishers. All School, College, and Professional publishers could use these techniques to refine and improve the quality of their publications. These techniques could enable publishers to keep their intellectual property much more current than is possible with today's authoring approach. And the collaboration aspect could help learners and professionals grow by exchanging and debating ideas. In the corporate world, we need look no further than the communities established around Microsoft Sharepoint to see how valuable information can be rapidly developed and disseminated. These communities have relieved Microsoft of a tremendous support burden.

The Wiki modules are quite similar to open source code modules... More on this in a subsequent post.... Your comments are encouraged!!

One of the most important trends in technology over the past two years has been the emergence of Wikis. Like many newish technologies there is a lot of controversy and confusion about Wikis. To many people the word Wiki is linked primarily to the Wikipedia and to the other projects of Wikimedia. To others, Wiki technology is open source collaboration technology. And more recently, Wiki technology has been developed to provide easily installed, high value solutions to a number of enterprise level workflow problems. Over the next week or so, I'll be writing entries on a number of key questions concerning Wikis and their role in the strategy for forward looking publishing organizations.

One of the themes that we'll be stressing on this blog is cross-media publishing strategies and we'll als be offering several sessions on this topic at the SanFrancisco Gilbane Conference in April. We'd like to hear your nominations for examples of products that started life in a traditional print format but have now evolved to successful product offerings with multiple media options. We'll also like to know about successful new product offerings that were created in a media-neutral approach. To respond, please e-mail me Steve Paxhia at steve@gilbane.com.

Dick Harrington is the CEO of Thomson. During a December investor's conference presentation, he clearly described Thomson's future strategy. Their vision is to be the leading provider of workflow solutions to business and professional customers. Their goal is to develop "must-have" products with high utilization and renewal rates. I would assume that a recurring revenue model is also preferred. As they create technology to leverage their content, they find that they achieve greater leverage and higher margins. This is a very sound strategy.

His decision to divest Thomson Learning aside, it would seem that there are excellent opportunities awaiting College and Educational publishers who employ similar strategies. Students, professors, teachers, and parents could all benefit from tighter integration of enabling technology and multimedia including simulations with more traditional text based materials. Many publishers are already finding success with next generation products that offer customers their choice of media options combined with technology that helps this group of professionals do their jobs better. The key is to focus on customer needs and creating innovative new products rather than creating new media versions of existing products. These new products also have the potential to be licensed for specific terms and usages rather than be sold outright. This model would likely accelerate revenue growth and yield better margins.

We'll strive to provide examples of successful ventures in later posts......