Publishing
technology has influenced computing in general, and information technology
in particular, since the first word processor. While progress was
excruciatingly slow for years, today's business applications owe a large
debt to markup languages and formatting technology. Our expectations about
what content we can view, how it is presented, and what we can do with it
have been irrevocably changed by publishing technology. Business models
associated with publishing, such as syndication, are also reshaping IT
strategies.
E-books
have been getting a lot of attention from the publishing community lately.
The number of e-book conferences in the past 2 months, the attention our
friends at Seybold have devoted to e-books, and Microsoft's e-book activity,
all suggest the technology and market interest are converging. Since we are
always on the lookout for technology that can be applied to corporate
content applications, we thought it was time to see whether e-book
technology had something to offer corporate IT strategists. An important
part of the answer depends on whether there is in fact a market for e-books
at all, and if so, when the market will be large enough to support
continued investment in development. This month Bill and David take a
provocative look at these issues. Let us know what you think!
E-books:
Technology for Enterprise Content Applications?
What
Do E-Books Do and What Should They Do?
Smart
Content Versus Dumb E-Books
Conclusion:
What Enterprises Need
Industry
News
Enterprise
Content Management 2001
Letters
Publishing
schedule reminder
Look
out. Oprah
has stepped into the fray. The e-book business may have received its best
publicity infusion yet when Oprah included a commercial e-book reader in her
annual list of “Oprah’s Favorite Things” featured on her November 17
show, her O Magazine, and on her website. Oprah is a good friend of the
publishing industry. Every book included in her Book Club is a guaranteed best
seller, and many authors consider a guest spot on her show to be the brass
ring of the book-selling circuit. An executive from e-bookRCA, whose Gemstar
REB1100 was showcased by Oprah, called it, “An incredible piece of luck.”
While
it may be a great piece of luck for that company, it speaks volumes about why
the e-book business may well fail. The anecdote addresses directly the
historical problem of the trade publishing industry, where the business plan
is to keep making a whole bunch of things in the usually vain hope that one of
them strikes gold.
From
that perspective, what ends up happening with e-books might be nothing more
than a footnote for the publishing industry as a whole and for the allied
software and hardware vendors in particular. One speaker at the recent e-Book
World Expo in New York cited a figure of fewer than 30,000 e-book readers
shipped or downloaded to date, compared to over 165
million copies of Acrobat in its various forms.
Will
the e-book then go the way of the 8-track tape, videotext, and any number of
other clever but short-lived technical innovations? If it does, it will be
because the people shaping the industry fell victim to praying for a lightning
strike. The emerging e-book industry—along with those big trade publishers
that are to one degree or another, often grudgingly, climbing aboard the
e-book bandwagon—has simply made up its mind that if e-book readers are
built, people will buy them, regardless of whether these devices are
ultimately useful or necessary.
We
take a look at what is taking place in the e-book world, and do some wondering
about what this bodes for enterprise content. After all, e-books are the
latest “new thing” with digital content, right? There’s no reason to
think that the advances with e-book readers shouldn’t play some role in the
efforts of today’s information-heavy companies (and who isn’t?), with all
that digital content that needs to be disseminated to the right audiences,
whether employees, partners, or customers. On the face of it—the electronic
book face, that is—the promise of e-book readers is the promise of a new
alternative for accessing and using digital content that doesn’t require
PCs. It is easy to name many situations where the alternative to PC use would
be welcome, including training and field sales and maintenance.
Whether
or not e-books succeed in the commercial publishing world may be less
significant than what happens—or fails to happen, more than likely—in the
larger industries of content management, educational technology, and
information technology. We don't see a whole new platform that accesses,
displays, and manages content in ways that creates new markets and expands
current markets.
The
argument about e-books and the IT world rests on the question of what e-books
do. Today, the answer is, not much. The big problem is that e-books are,
ironically, presented as the digital analog of print books. The e-book
companies have set out to mimic the experience of reading from the page, and
yet the electronic page, while improving, still doesn’t match the clarity
and crispness of the printed page. And while the e-book companies have added
some functionality not found in print books (search for example), e-books
still fail to live up to their print counterparts, never mind surpass them.
Herein
lies the real issue. The e-book market sees itself as competing against its
print counterpart, but in the meantime the world of content has decidedly
changed. Books are just one of many kinds of content, and perhaps, in many
applications, an uninteresting one at that. Admittedly, annotation and
bookmarking are common features in e-book readers today, although notes are
difficult to share, even while writing them is a clumsy process. While the
clarity of the display text has improved (in some of the e-book readers, at
least), the often cited advantages in readability through changing type font
size is largely offset by the small page form factors found among e-book
readers.
How far content technology
has come
Not
only does digital content include executables, audio, video, or simulation
animations, in addition to text, but digital content has also become
intertwined with e-commerce. The obvious forms are content in web catalogs,
but less obvious forms abound—marketing materials, contests, and e-mail
campaigns, all the way down to content that is increasingly integrated within
the business processes of companies, such as inventory, maintenance, and
supply chain undertakings formerly known as ERP.
And
finally, not only is digital content integrated content, but it is also
content that is meaningful to the user. The well-run organization is tying
content to business processes, and automating more and more of those processes
along the supply chain (see our recent coverage on syndication and the letter
to the editor in this issue). In such an organization, content is available to
support both machine-based and human decision-making. Over the next couple of
years, businesses will invest significantly in precisely these kinds of
improvements.
Given
the current thinking—and devices—populating the e-book reader marketplace,
over the next couple of years the investment in digital content systems
isn’t likely to turn to e-books.
Content
is many things, and digital content is far from monolithic. Such “content”
includes structured databases, as well as unstructured content such as
business documents, from email to marketing reports and business plans, and
fine-grained digital assets such as the pieces of catalogs.
Together,
these content types represent the range of material with which an enterprise
may be dealing, and even individually, any of these content types can present
a myriad of practical challenges dealing with storage, extraction,
presentation, and metadata handling, just to name a few. E-book advocates,
with their eyes too focused on their print cousins, are ignoring or bypassing
larger issues. When questions about other media types came up at e-Book World
Expo in New York, more than one speaker reflexively answered, in effect,
“CD-ROMs tried that and it didn’t work.” And, as if to congratulate
themselves on their great judgment, hastened to distance themselves from that
history.
In
two days of forced analogies though, perhaps the worst was to suggest that
CD-ROMs failed because people didn’t want other media, which is a curious
conclusion at best. Anyone paying attention to the early days of electronic
publishing—say, ten or fifteen years ago—will easily remember the first
wave of ROI extracted from publishing on CD-ROM was in the enterprise arena.
This was especially true in situations where complex technical document sets
such as repair manuals that mixed text and images and just-in-time training
changed the whole economics of handling content for many companies. And then,
of course, there were—and still are—the huge data collections such as STM
bibliographic databases, catalogs of all sorts, financial information about
companies previously available to relatively few, and law libraries on disc
that all helped prove the financial case for electronic publishing. To suggest
that there are no real success stories of multimedia is also an odd
re-thinking of recent history, not to mention an impressive denial of the rows
upon rows of the many types of software today available at CompUSA and BestBuy,
or the type of content available at a click of the mouse button through the
Web.
We
don’t mean to be cruel, but the general insistence coming from the e-book
world that digital content should be merely thought of as monolithic—as
print text, basically—is a type of denial that suggests the need for
therapy. Or, more than likely, this denial reflects the current limitations of
the e-book reader and market and helps keep disappointment (and fear of
business failure) at bay.
Content, commerce, and system
integration
As
Frank Gilbane wrote in the previous issue’s main article, “What is
Content Management?” because of e-commerce, “personalization,
syndication, digital rights management, catalog searching, product
configuration, and other applications are being increasingly tied to content
management. … Also, because of e-commerce, content management is being
integrated with ERP, data analysis, and other back-end enterprise and business
partner systems.”
With
the mechanism of personalization alone, the promise of delivering targeted
digital content to individuals can make the organization and use of
information far more manageable. Tie in Digital Rights Management (DRM), with
its specific content-related access and usage management, and companies can
provide even smarter information dissemination, and solve license compliance
issues and security challenges. For companies that structure content,
especially through the use of XML strategies, digitally serving content that
can be dynamically personalized and controlled is now a reality, albeit,
hardly an easy or inexpensive goal to reach.
Now,
take a look at what e-books do with this sort of integration, and anyone with
any interest in using e-book platforms to further business goals is going to
be disappointed. While every e-book reader has some connectivity—how else
would one download books—the current thinking around e-books as digital
print books means designs don't allow for capturing many of the advantages for
digital content.
Smart
Content Versus Dumb E-Books
Smart
content is integrated content, but integrated in ways that make the content
meaningful to the user. While there is still a long way to go, the content
management business has been making great strides in bringing digital content
into smart, dynamic, and "actionable" or "transactive"
environments. Business processes still tend toward their distinct information
silos, but even today, companies can get different types of enterprise content
from different parts of the business process to work with other types of
content from other parts of the business process.
Web publishing tools are working with content enrichment tools to, for
example, apply taxonomy, categorization, personalization, and various
analytical tools to make the content delivered to individuals relevant,
particular, and on-target to the individual’s needs. Content creation tools
are working with content distribution platforms to capture the value of
digital content early, and impose systems such as syndication and digital
rights management to extract the content’s fullest value.
The
well-run organization is tying content to business processes, and automating
more and more of those processes along the supply chain (see our recent
coverage on syndication in Volume 8, Number 7). In such an
organization, content is available to support both machine-based and human
decision-making. Over the next couple of years, businesses will continue to
invest significantly in precisely these kinds of improvements.
For
the content consumer, though, content must be tied to the individual’s
interests, and, more specifically, how the individual views those interests.
Library scientists and information specialists like to talk about
“reader-centered” or “user-facing” organizational schemes. In plain
English, people like to organize things in their own way. There may be a
canonical Dewey Decimal System out there, but we also have our own personal
Dewey System we operate on. For the Web to reach its true usefulness for us,
we need to be able to organize it as we wish.
This
is the impetus for “My Yahoo,” “MyMP3,” and various other
well-intentioned but ultimately limited approaches. User interface experts
such as Jared Spool suggest that personalization is a far more complex
undertaking than the technology currently available to support it. What’s
needed is an effort to create something that is indeed useful and necessary, a
platform supporting, for lack of a better term, “knowledge management and
discovery” for everyone from students to professionals.
While the e-book industry may be
satisfied with unit sales of titles, there is a bigger dragon to slay out
there, and the shocking reality of the current state of e-book readers is that
while much of the rest of the digital content industry is busy uncovering the
intrinsic value of the digital domain, e-book companies are merely trying to
harness the power of print, digitally.
Today’s e-books are too simple
When
you look at what the current crop of e-book devices provide the reader,
you’re more likely to think back to the early days of shovelware, and you
may just find yourself wondering if any of the e-book reader companies have
tuned into the digital content efforts over the last 15 years. The systems
being marketed are, by and large, simple page-at-a-time display engines with
functionality similar to Acrobat—page turning, simple search, bookmarks and
annotations. And while they all allow reasonable storage and at least a
dedicated means of downloading additional material, they are curiously
disconnected from the larger Web. Several of them are challenged by
surmountable problems, like searching across titles or searching both an
individual title and Web space. Moreover, the notion of dedicated devices with
fixed communication protocols is a loser. Companies such as Gemstar claim the
appeal is for the publisher concerned with piracy, but that is a non-starter
for the consumer and is curiously indifferent to advances in encryption and
DRM. These would only be attractive at such low costs as to be throw-aways—the
reading equivalent of the disposable camera.
And
then, of course, there is the experience that e-book readers for themselves:
reading text. The best reader device, from a readability perspective, is
probably the Gemstar REB 1200, which is based on their SoftBook acquisition.
The screen is 8.2-inches on the diagonal, with 480 x 640 resolution (VGA) with
32,768 colors, at 97.3 dpi, and the text looks good. In terms of connectivity,
this reader leads too, with both 56K modem and Ethernet connection ports
built-in. But the high-end Gemstar e-book reader doesn’t connect with
anything but E-Book Stores (from Gemstar, and various partners, including
Barnes and Noble).
Unlike
the Rocket e-Book-based REB 1100, there is no USB connection to PCs or laptops
for the REB 1200. There is a Gemstar feature called “Personal Bookshelf”
which manages one’s book and magazine purchases and storage off-line,
available through direct download. The price for the REB 1200, by the way, is
$700. Other functionality? Gemstar’s own website (www.softbook.com)
answers this through an FAQ that includes “Can I receive e-mail on my
REB1100 or REB1200?” and “Can I download my address book or calendar 1100
or 1200?,” and the answer to each question: “No.”
On
the other hand, Franklin Electronic Publishers represents more functionality,
with their eBookMan, perhaps the most functional of the Palm-based e-book
readers out today. Through a USB port, the eBookMan can synchronize with
Microsoft Outlook, and carries scheduling, contacts, and other productivity
applications, along with an audio book player (some other PDA-type e-book
readers include MP3 playback). While the eBookMan makes a big deal out of
having a bigger screen for reading than many (older, especially) models of
PDAs, even reading one simple page of text is painful, and never mind graphics
in the mix. But it is a PDA after all.
There
are, already, more e-book formats and platforms than one can easily track.
Microsoft has the .lit file format, which will have dedicated e-book devices
at some point soon, but which currently is available for PCs, and admittedly,
the ClearType looks good. Similarly, Glassbook (now part of Adobe) has PDF as
the e-book file format, and that type can look quite good, both on PC and
dedicated e-book devices supporting Glassbook. It is all like the dancing dog,
however. Sure, the book text looks good, but only compared to the text on a
PDA-based e-book reader. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that e-book
readers are novelty acts, and not serious platforms for the use and management
of information.
And
that’s not taking into consideration the current pricing problems, not only
for the e-book devices themselves, but also for the e-books themselves;
Gemstar, for example, is trying to convince publishers to pre-release their
print titles exclusively for the Gemstar devices, and charge the same price as
the pending hard cover. Anyone trying to figure out the prognosis for the
current e-book market as applied to the trade book publishing business need
only look to readability, pricing, and functionality limitations to grow
pessimistic. Anyone trying to figure out if the e-book reader concept holds
much hope for use in the enterprise—at least as e-books are currently
imagined by the dozen and a half companies trying to build the market—has
only to look at what the enterprise needs to do with digital content to forget
about e-books readers for now and get back to business.
This
isn’t to conclude that the e-book marketplace doesn’t offer some
interesting ideas for the enterprise information manager. A different tact
being taken by the likes of ebrary (www.ebrary.com)
and netLibrary (www.netlibrary.com),
and newcomers Questia (www.questia.com)
and Rovia (www.rovia.com) offer variations
on the theme of content environments, where digital content is served in
protected fashion. Especially with Questia and Rovia, the tools for
collaborative information work and information management tools such as
searching and data analysis tools have clearly applicable uses within
enterprises. The bad news for such enterprises is that both of these new
companies are seeking to address the academic and research environments, not
the business markets. Still, both Questia and Rovia are offering concepts of
value for businesses that go light-years beyond the already tired
print-books-in-digital-form e-book concept.
Conclusion:
What Enterprises Need
The
enterprise user needs broad, unfettered access to “content in context”
and, as we said above, context as defined by the individual user; certainly
the enterprise user needs this much more than secure but limited access to
discrete titles. As many observers have been saying, the next phase of the Web
will be a semantic one, where users will be able to quickly connect to
information that is most meaningful to them.
Such
a web will depend on, at least for the foreseeable future, highly structured
content, embedded with XML and specifically tagged with metadata to help tie
it to subject matter and audience. The web is being built out at least with
XML in mind, and schemas for metadata are gaining traction.
Users
will be most productive on the Web, and will indeed develop a facility for
knowledge discovery and management, when their primary interface with content
provides them the following:
-
A
means of ready and simple access to a variety of materials representing
their interests. For a person in an enterprise, this would include both
internal and external materials, and both free and for-pay materials. This
assumes a means of easily purchasing content, including establishing
subscription relationships in a secure and auditable fashion.
-
A
means of easily creating and maintaining a visual metaphor for organizing
their interests. It should be easy to subscribe and unsubscribe to
resources, to “store” frequently used resources, and to have ready
access to valued resources.
-
A
means of dealing with limited time and personal resources, including
“attention bandwidth,” which is one of the benefits of personalization
well applied.
-
A
means of dealing with all manner of structured, semi-structured and
unstructured text.
This
kind of mechanism is suggestive of an intellectual device from the Renaissance
known as the “Commonplace Book,” a bound volume in which aristocratic
readers would copy out their favorite poems from manuscript. E-books, at first
blush, suggest a digital version, and one quite that would apply quite
broadly, not just to today’s executives, but to those of the front lines of
technical support or maintenance, and not just for poetry, either, but for all
kinds of content that supports a particular person’s responsibilities within
a company.
But
when one gets clear of the current marketing hoopla for e-books, the
applicability of e-book readers within the enterprise doesn’t survive. Yes,
everyone is interested in getting away from the problems of complex
devices—read, PCs—for information access, but today’s thinking about
e-books is far too simple, stuck as it is on replicating print books. Given
the inherent absurdity of using dynamic digital content to represent the
static print form, we have to wonder whether the latest versions of e-books
will even survive for long on Oprah’s Favorite Things list.
Today,
about the best information management solution among the e-book readers is a
form of online personal library, but in the barest sense of the thing, as a
simple bookshelf designed to stack up e-book purchases tied to a restricted
access reader. Microsoft Bookshelf, one of the first big titles among
the much-maligned CD-ROM standard bearers, and first published in 1985
bringing ten desk references with hyperlinks (including Bartlett’s
Quotations, Roget’s Thesaurus, and The American Heritage
Dictionary) to the desktop, makes for a much better e-book than what’s
being shown these days.
Some
e-book people point to the Open E-Book (OEB) standard, which is an XML-based
language for marking up books that can be used to publish e-books in the
variety of formats. While XML is playing an increasingly dominant role in the
Internet, and while client devices will need to accommodate a widening variety
of XML, the current OEB specification is anemic and does little to strengthen
the utility of e-books within the enterprise.
Technology
moves fast, and there’s little doubt that there is a good market for less
expensive portable content access devices, but it isn’t going to be the
single-function e-book readers we see today. Bill Gates went on to show COMDEX
crowds the TabletPC just a week after Microsoft’s e-book guy, Dick Brass,
talked it up at e-Book World, and there’s something that remains compelling
about a multipurpose device that both handles and manages all kinds of content
while remaining connected to the ever-growing information universe made up of
the Web, enterprise portals, and published works. Something will have to be
done about correcting the complexity of what is, essentially, a notebook
computer even with its “tablet” form factor, and something will have to be
done about the price. But the TabletPC is a far smarter imagining of what
e-book devices can be then the REB 1100 or 1200.
The
truth is that the focus on devices is almost always a misdirection. The work
that enterprises face today isn’t figuring out which or whether e-books are
in their future. The work remains the difficult task of increasing the value
and utility of the information to the enterprise, by applying intelligent
tagging schemes to content and applying database processes and e-commerce
technologies like personalization to the serving of content. The work remains
providing the means for easily creating and maintaining a visual metaphor for
organizing the participants’ interests, to make it easy to subscribe and
unsubscribe to resources, to “store” frequently used resources, and to
have ready access to valued resources. The work remains to increase the access
to and managing of that information by the enterprise’s own employees and
partners, by getting content management to work with content distribution
systems to deliver the right content in the right context.
Get
your head out of that e-book. The work of the enterprise goes far beyond the
turning pages, digital or otherwise.
Bill
Trippe and David Guenette
Enterprise
Content Management 2001
The Gilbane Report is happy to announce we
will be co-producing a new conference series focusing on all of the important
topics we cover in our report. The conferences will be a great opportunity for
contributing to and observing dialog and debate among the movers and shakers in
the industry, and a forum for learning what content technologies are suitable
for enterprise applications, what strategies make sense, and what kinds of
implementations work.
Below is a copy of the press release.
New
"Enterprise Content Management" Conference Series to be Launched by
AIIM, GCA, and Bluebill Advisors in 2001
New
series to focus on spectrum of content technologies for e-business including:
XML, content management, e-catalogs, syndication, portals, and metadata
strategies.
December 5, 2000, Cambridge, MA, Silver Spring MD, and Alexandria, VA.
Bluebill Advisors, Inc., publishers of the Gilbane Report, AIIM International,
the largest association of document and content management professionals, and
the Graphic Communications Association, producers of the largest and most
successful XML events worldwide, today announced "Enterprise Content
Management 2001" (ECM 2001), a new conference series covering all the
technologies and trends related to integrating content and data into enterprise
e-business applications. The three organizations will jointly produce the new
events. The first 3-day conference will be held October 2-5, 2001 at the Westin
Century Plaza in Los Angeles, CA.
Today, businesses have to be able to publish
content via multiple channels, including web, wireless, kiosk, and print, but
publishing is only a small part of how enterprises must manage content. Content
also has to be shared with suppliers, customers, channel partners, and
employees, for a wide variety of enterprise applications. ECM 2001 is the only
educational event dedicated to all the application and infrastructure
technologies for managing content across and between enterprises.
"E-business technology requirements for
content management range from commerce-oriented applications such as e-catalogs
to more content-oriented applications like corporate research or HR
portals…", said Frank Gilbane, President of Bluebill Advisors and
conference chair, "…companies need to consider both the unique needs of
individual business applications and enterprise requirements for application and
information integration. At ECM 2001 we will focus on technologies and
strategies across this spectrum and help companies navigate the confusing
landscape of "content management".
"ECM 2001 brings together the leading
analysts, enterprise implementers, and vendors involved in enterprise content
management technologies, …" said John Mancini, President, AIIM
International, "… IT and e-business strategists as well as business and
project managers need a forum that analyzes content management, corporate
portals, XML, digital rights management, digital assets, rich content,
syndication, content aggregation and categorization, e-catalogs, and enterprise
meta and metadata integration strategies. ECM 2001 provides an objective,
unbiased, educational forum for learning how all these technologies fit together
and for discussion and debate among pundits, IT and business managers, and
vendors."
"XML is critical to enterprise content
applications especially because of the need to integrate structured data and
applications with both web and traditional content, …" said Marion
Elledge, VP of Information Technology at the GCA, "… Information
integration is every bit as important as application integration, and needs to
be part of enterprise strategies. ECM 2001 will help companies understand how
these complementary needs can be implemented".
ECM 2001 is an educational, vendor-neutral
event designed specifically for e-business and IT managers responsible for
developing strategies involving content management, and for project managers in
charge of implementing solutions.
For additional information, or to inquire
about the Advisory Board, speaking opportunities, exhibiting or sponsorship
opportunities, see www.ecmseries.com,
send e-mail to info@ecmseries.com, or
call +301.587.8202 (AIIM), +703.519.8160 (GCA), or +617.497.9443 (Bluebill
Advisors).
Letters
Last
month (Volume 8, Number 7, ed.), the Gilbane Report ran an informative
piece on Syndication and Actionable Content. This article provides a good
overview of one aspect of a technology area that we believe will be critical
for achieving B2B success. But we think it sells your readers short by
presenting an overly-simplistic picture of what’s really required to support
cross-organizational business processes and increase their efficiency and
effectiveness.
First, a brief aside. Enigma is among the
groups that prefers the label Transactive Content over Actionable
Content. While labels aren’t the most important issue, we do feel that
Transactive Content does a better job of describing the integration of content
and transactional data crucial to delivering the benefits of this technology.
And, it avoids the amusing and potentially misleading implication of legal
involvement. We certainly want our content to drive business processes, rather
than result in legal actions.
The recent piece focused on Syndication
technology as an enabler for Transactive Content. Enigma certainly agrees that
content exchange technologies such as syndication are important pieces of
Transactive Content, but our experience over the last 5 years with some of
world’s largest organizations has taught us that it is just one of the pieces
required to succeed.
Just as transactions flow between business
partners, content also flows between partners. Content exchange tools provide an
ability to manage this flow of content.
Transactive content is about integrating
content and transactional data, using the content to provide a rich context for
performing cross-organizational processes such as aftermarket support and
operation, procurement of replacement parts for repair and maintenance, and
product selection and sourcing. By applying transactive content technologies,
companies are able to drastically reduce operation costs, increase equipment
uptime, and increase aftermarket revenues.
However transactive content technologies must
provide more than just content exchange and syndication support. In addition to
exchanging content in a manageable way, applications need support for:
-
Access to enterprise
systems and data –
Enterprise information is pulled into the transactive content application
where it forms part of the context delivered to users. As users take part in
the processes informed by this context, they push new data such as purchase
orders and repair approvals into enterprise systems. Transactive content
applications integrate content collections with enterprise systems and
transform transactional data as it moves in and out of the application.
-
Tools to enhance and add
value to transactive content – Organizations receive
content from their upstream partners, enhance that content locally, and
distribute it down the commerce chain. Through activities such as
customizing and tailoring content, including local procedures and best
practices, and integrating content with larger collections, organizations
are able to add value to the transactive content application and ensure
their position in the commerce chain.
-
User
interface support –
The transactive content application becomes the view for users into
cross-organization processes. The application’s ultimate goal is to
improve individual and organizational productivity. In order to achieve that
goal, application developers need tools to provide high value user
interfaces to the applications.
-
Management support –
finally, organizations need ways to manage the transactive content
application and its associated processes, both locally and as the
organization connects to its partners in the commerce chain.
Content exchange and syndication technologies
are an important part of the platform. However, to take complete advantage of
the interoperability at the content level that these technologies deliver, the
platform must also support the other needs of transactive content applications.
Only then can these applications become the basis for development of the next
round of B2B e-commerce.
Sincerely,
Randy Clark
VP Marketing, Enigma, Inc.
We couldn't agree more with Randy's points
about the integration requirements and complexity involved in integrating
content and commerce. For more on our view of this see Volume 7, Numbers 1,3,6
& 10, and Volume 8, Numbers 3,5 and 7.
I
am an avid reader of your report, it having been introduced to me by a
supervisor a few months ago. More importantly, as an employee of a
content management company, I was intrigued by your publication's October
article on content management and had a number of questions and comments.
First off, I appreciate your explanation of
the complexities extant in the field of content management. I agree that
the term is loosely used by vendors and users alike; this is an all too frequent
occurrence from my personal experience at trade shows and in all sorts of
various indsutry-related conversations. The so-called experts do, as you
say, reuse one another's materials and research data, casting their own
expertise in a negative light by essentially being unable to distinguish the
differences among the multiple products on the market. It's a frustrating
experience referring to these reports, only to find that they are not revealing
anything you hadn't read previously. Any suggestions for additional
industry sources would be welcome. The only one I have come across in the past
few months has been a site called "CamWorld," available at http://www.camworld.com/cms.
In your breakdown discussing the evolution of
the content management market, I was surprised to see that you neglected to
mention the "process management" side of the content management
industry. While web content, document/knowledge/content, digital assets,
code/content, and e-commerce management all are discussed, I have found that the
sub-category of process management also would deserve some exposure. I would
broadly define this sub-sector as one that encompasses business procedures,
authorization, workflow issues, accessibility, and other enterprise-related
requirements.
The category you refer to as "Code &
Content" (pages 4-5) is one I had not given serious thought to at first.
The manner in which programmers and/or developers (I don't count myself among
this group of professionals.) might use a content management system is clearly
far-reaching. Despite sitting literally under my nose, I appreciate you
bringing this to my attention.
The company I work for (VCIX) is also in this
market; you even featured one of our recent press releases in your weekly email
newsletter back in October. We have an OO-architected solution (Cortra)
that is available in a browser-based GUI for full management of a site's
content. A customer constructs his or her own business model in Visio, and
Perl code is then automatically generated. We feel that our price-point,
architecture, track record with our own experiences using the software, and
adaptable business logic model are what set us apart from the competition (which
is a hazily-defined field, in any case, as you argue). I'd be more than happy to
send you a CD with an evaluation copy of our software, and am attaching our
technical white paper for your review. We'd be glad to hear your critique
and comments and to engage you in a phone or other conversation at your
convenience.
On a duller and "fine-toothed comb"
note, I cannot hold back from mentioning the small grammatical error I located
in this lead article. On page 1, in the 3rd paragraph, the use of the word
"it's" is incorrect. "It's" refers to "it
is"; the meaning of your sentences is different from what I assume you had
intended (the possessive).
Thank you for your time and please continue
to produce an exciting newsletter!
Sincerely Yours,
Joram Borenstein
(former) Cortra Product Manager, VCIX
Thank you Joram. We were hoping nobody would
notice our grammatical error!
Publishing
schedule reminder
We
don't publish in August or December. Our next issue will be a combined
December/January issue (Volume 8, Number 10) and will be published in
January. The entire staff will be at XML 2000 and we'll be devoting the next
issue to an update on XML.
Happy
holidays to all!
|
