Unlike the rest of our content, our white papers are sponsored. However, we are careful to only publish white papers we believe provide substantial educational value beyond any sponsor's message or strategy, and that are relevant to content management or information technology. Most white papers do not require any kind of registration, but a few do and are identified as such. Potential sponsors can learn more here.

Smart Approaches to Managing Mobile Learning Content

by Mary Laplante

There is no doubt that mobile devices are changing the landscape of corporate computing in general, and of corporate learning and performance support in particular. Mobility has ushered in a new generation of learningon the go, on demand, always connected, highly interactive, and social. Tablet devices, led by enthusiastic adoption of the Apple iPad, are having major impact on enterprise learning, with form factors like larger screens and touch navigation that are conducive to effective consumption of learning content and interactive multimedia that delivers compelling experiences.

State-of-the-art devices and software are only parts of the business mobility equation, however; without content, a tablet or smartphone is simply a portable communication device. The challenge for most companies is that learning content and the processes and practices that surround it have not caught up with new-generation learning. As a result, many organizations find themselves with a significant gap between their existing content processes and the demands of todays learners and knowledge workers. It is becoming critical to close the gapor risk being left behind as leading companies create competitive advantage with mobile learning. This paper targets learning, business, and IT managers who are responsible for or involved in their organizations strategies for delivering content on mobile devices. We consider the rapid evolution of mobile learning in the enterprise and the implications for learning content creation, management, and publishing. We look at the gap between current processes and new-generation learning requirements. We show readers how an XML approach based on reusable content components can deliver operational benefits, such as cost efficiencies and rapid time to mobile deployment, as well as compelling learning experiences. Our goal is to help managers understand that a content strategy rather than a project mentality is the only way to take full advantage of the business performance benefits and productivity gains that are possible with mobile learning.

Sponsored by Xyleme.
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Sponsored by Xyleme

Magazines at a Digital Crossroads: eCommerce and New Models for the Future

by Bill Trippe and Mary Laplante, with contributions from David Lipsey

With print revenues declining, periodical publishers have turned to digital products to restore revenues and develop new channels. None of these products are proving to be a panacea, however, as the landscape for digital products and the underlying business models remain in a state of constant flux. Given these profound and large-scale changes, how are publishers responding? While the new landscape is still emerging, publishers have not stood still. Many have tried new models, including free, paid, advertiser-based, freemium, and more. Some have made small bets (e.g., adding a digital edition to complement print editions), while others have made big bets on new portal and paid models. Results have, famously and infamously, been mixed. But the interest is keen, the need is absolute, and the openness to creating this future is essential.

The more well-known experiments are truly just a slice of what publishers have tried and can still try. Mobile apps are ushering in intriguing hybrids of paid (the app), free (supplemental content available to both the app buyer and others), and advertising-supported. Various digital channels are opening numerous new ways of interacting with consumers. These channels also provide publishers with a chance to build a more complete profile of consumer behaviours and needswhat kind of content do they access and when, what kind of premium content attracts them, and what paths take them to the premium content? This new analytical information could prove to be a boon to publishers. Although models and approaches are still nascent, new opportunities are at hand as tablet devices and smart phones flood the market.

It is clear that publishers must work quicklyand intentionallyto develop new products, try new models, and quickly measure the results and refine their offerings. To support these efforts, they need business systems that will enable them to efficiently deploy new offerings at reasonable cost, measure the success of these offerings, and then just as quickly and efficiently revise and re-launch the offerings to meet the evolving demands of consumers and the larger marketplace. This paper briefly highlights some of the emerging models that show promise. It provides examples of where forward-looking publishers are investinghow they are learning about new customer requirements and needs, and how they are turning these needs into attractive new products. Finally, it makes the case for the growing need for contemporary eCommerce platforms to support publishers as they experiment, win, iterate, and drive their businesses into the future.

Sponsored by SAP.
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Sponsored by SAP

Understanding Best Practices for Profiling, Personalizing, and Targeting Next Generation Engagement

by Scott Liewehr and Mary Laplante

Relevance means pertinence to the matter at hand, and today it is the linchpin of engagement. The definition implies a need for context: understanding who and what is involved in the matter at hand. It also implies that relevance is immediate and dynamic. What is relevant in one situation may not be in another. Ideally, marketers deliver one experience to a prospect searching for information about a new product on a smartphone, and another to a long-time customer who is ready to buy the latest version at a local retail outlet. If relevance is the engine that drives engagement, that engine is powered by profiling, personalizing, and targeting. But wait. In many cases, the mention of personalizing or personalization brings conversations with CMOs and digital marketing managers to a halt, usually for one of two reasons: · Bad memories. Some marketers have previous but negative experiences with first-generation personalization. Personalization was one of the failed promises of first-generation web engagement in the late 1990s. It was hard to get it right. · Limited awareness or understanding. Many marketers believe that they have a general understanding of personalization, or they have no prior experience with it at all. They take personalization at face value but have a rather one-dimensional viewit is enough to know the customers name, for example. They are unaware of the potential business impact of deploying the full range of engagement capabilities. Today a new generation of practices and technologies defines contemporary personalization. The fundamentals remain the same as with first-generation personalization. Digital marketers still profile prospects and customers, personalize interactions with them, and target communications to elicit specific responses. Audiences still expect a personally appealing experience. The goal is still to take one step towards engagement with each interaction. What has changed is the ability to execute effective personalization. The business benefits are real and achievableno longer just a promise. The time is right for global companies to take a fresh look at personalization. In this paper, we aim to help digital marketers, managers, and executives develop a new appreciation for the power and value of contemporary personalization, and gain an understanding of how to realize its benefits within their organizations.

Topics include:
• How personalization practices have evolved to become vastly more effective in the areas of data (what marketers can capture and use), processes (how they execute), and applications (how they leverage content for engagement).
• The capabilities offered by the current generation of technologies and practices for profiling, personalizing, and targeting.
• The engagement potential they can unlock, using an example based on real experience of a leading practitioner. · Guidance for marketers who see the business value of profiling, personalizing, and targeting as part of their relevance strategies. Click here to register. Or login here.
  

  Sponsored by SDL
  

Global Digital Engagement - Leveraging Opportunities to Increase Impact and Reduce Complexity

by Scott Liewehr, Mary Laplante

Business leaders across an organizationnot just those in marketingno longer question the fundamental value of organized, methodical approaches to using digital content and technologies to develop and maintain relationships with customers. Todays conversations are about the how of digital engagement, not the why. How do organizations design, develop, and execute global digital strategies? How do they align those strategies with larger business goals and objectives, such as growing revenues, taking products to market faster, and controlling costs? How do they deliver experiences that are relevant and consistent? How do they turn transactions into relationships? Most importantly, how do they get started?

A significant but common obstacle is the sheer complexity of digital engagement. Each transaction with each individual has dozenseven hundredsof factors that influence the ability to make a connection that clicks. Global audiences demand appropriate language and cultural context. New channels emerge before marketers have evaluatedlet alone masteredthe current ones. Technology platforms for a dizzying array of mobile devices (including smartphones, tablet computers, and eReaders) are evolving, and today require hand-crafted content experiences. Attention spans are so short that they literally open the window of engagement opportunity for mere seconds. It is no wonder that for many marketing executives and managers, engagement success is akin to solving Rubiks Cube. There are billions of ways to arrange the tiny pieces, but only a handful of configurations solve the puzzle.

The myriad of engagement variables and the multiple options for each create complexity that can stymie even the savviest of global digital marketers. How do companies begin to address that complexity and make meaningful progress towards solving the engagement puzzle in ways that are sustainable, scalable, and affordable? We believe that great strides towards taming complexity can be made by understanding and leveraging the core premise of engagement: it is a relationship that develops as the result of a series of interactions, each of which builds on the last and delivers value and satisfaction. By focusing on and improving the dynamics of each interaction, managers take a bottom-up approach to engagement, instead of a top-down approach that often provides no clear vision of how to actually do engagement successfully.

This paper is designed to remove the mystery and anxiety of delivering high-value interactions that lead to engagement. We show readers how to bring stability to the variables that create complexity, and at the same time support business goals that include time to market, efficiency, consistency, and relevancy. After reading this paper, executives and managers will understand how to address the challenges of global digital engagement by focusing on opportunities to remove complexity, enhance their content processes with sophisticated web content management capabilities, and deliver a compelling experience in every interaction.

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Sponsored by SDL

Content, Context, and Conversation - The Three Kings Of Consumer Engagement

by Scott Liewehr and Ian Truscott

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Sponsored by Alterian

Social Publishing with Drupal: Building Social Businesses on the Web with a Framework for Content and Community

by Geoffrey Bock

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Sponsored by Acquia

Justifying Web Content Management: The Business Case and ROI

by Tony White

Sponsored by SDL Tridion

Component Content Management - How True CCM Technology Drives the Most Compelling Content Initiatives

by Bill Trippe

Sponsored by XyEnterprise

Engage Me! Web Experience Management as the New Business Imperative

by Mary Laplante

Sponsored by FatWire

Using XML and Databases - W3C Standards in Practice

by Bill Trippe and Dale Waldt

Sponsored by EMC

Component Content Management in Practice - Meeting the Demands of the Most Complex Content Applications

by Bill Trippe

Sponsored by EMC

Using Social Search to Drive Innovation through Collaboration

Search Becomes Strategic Technology

by Lynda Moulton

Sponsored by Vivisimo

Leveraging SharePoint in ECM

MOSS 2007, Paired with the Right Imaging Technology, Brings ECM to a Wide Range of Applications

by Bill Trippe

Sponsored by Knowledge Lake

Web Content Managememt, Portal, Collaboration: Three Names, One Sollution

by Tony White

Sponsored by Vignette

Quality In, Quality Out: The Value of Technology in the Global Content Lifecycle

by Leonor Ciarlone and Mary Laplante

Sponsored by Sajan

The Multi-Website Challenge in Enterprise Content Management: Balancing Central Control and Distributed Content Creation

Balancing Central Control and Distributed Content Creation

by David Guenette and Bill Trippe

Sponsored by Oracle

Strategic eMarketing: Converting Leads into Profits

Utilizing Web Content Management as an eMarketing platform

by Leonor Ciarlone

Sponsored by Hot Banana Software

Eliminating the Fear Factor: Creating a Culture of Compliance

Making compliance everyones business through simplified, ubiquitous and transparent adoption

by Leonor Ciarlone

Compliance regulations challenge organizations across multiple industries to reengineer business processes. While the focus has been primarily on electronic business processes and communications, corporate and compliance mandates are extending to paper-based processes. It is not uncommon for compliance officers and corporate legal departments to struggle with transforming strategy into reality. Despite efforts, many organizations experience costly, disruptive, and fragmented program implementations that often go underutilized. This paper discusses how creating a culture of compliance demystifies and distributes program adoption by integrating, managing, and monitoring compliance practices at the process owner-level. Proactively making compliance everyones business is essential to maintaining leadership and protecting global brand while balancing the pressures of current and future compliance regulations.

Sponsored by omtool

Success in Standards-Based Content Creation and Delivery at Global Companies

Understanding the Rapid Adoption of the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA)

by Bill Trippe

Sponsored by Idiom Technologies

The Agile Business and Its Digital Media Supply Chain

An Effective Flow of Digital Media Depends on the Right Management Architecture

by Bill Trippe & David Guenette

Sponsored by ClearStory Systems

Component Content Management in Practice

Meeting the Demands of the Most Complex Content Applications

by Bill Trippe

X-hive is now part of EMC. Click here for updated version of the paper

Sponsored by EMC (X-Hive, Inc.)

Using XML and Databases

W3C Standards in Practice

by Dale Waldt

X-hive is now part of EMC. Click here for updated version of the paper

Sponsored by EMC ( X-Hive, Inc.)

Topic-Oriented Information Development and Its Role in Globalization

The Case for the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA)

by Bill Trippe

Sponsored by Idiom, Inc.

Architectural Considerations in Digital Asset Management

Making the Case for Leveraging Content-Management Middleware in Digital Asset Management

by Mark Walter

What is the proper foundation for an enterprise-scale Digital Asset Management (DAM) system? How much of that system should be part of an organizations shared infrastructure and how much should be tailor-made to a specific application? There is no single answer to these questions, but changes in the technology industry are forcing everyonevendors and customers aliketo change their assumptions about how DAM systems will be built. This paper explains how the content-management infrastructure is changing, why that matters to DAM, and what benefits can be derived from leveraging a content infrastructure for DAM. Examples from an enterprise implementation at the University of Michigan illustrate the types of architectural issues and requirements that affect platform choices when selecting a digital asset management system.

Sponsored by Stellent, IBM

On-Demand Access to Rich Media Assets

Making the Decision to Use a Service Model Approach for Digital Media Management

by Bill Zoellick

The maturation of digital asset management technology and products has enabled on-demand DAM services to emerge as an attractive alternative to on-premises installation. Organizations facing a variety of problems and constraints, such as speed to market and scalability, are finding software services models to be the most cost effective approach to digital asset management. This paper identifies the four key factors in making the decision between a services model and on-premises installation. It also argues that the decision should be analyzed in terms of discounted cash flows and presents examples of such calculations.

Sponsored by IBM

XML Repositories: An Idea Whose Time has Finally Come

by Sebastian Holst

This white paper discusses the role of an XML repository into today’s enterprise infrastructure. Virtually every database and repository provide some degree of XML support; however, there are important distinctions between support for XML as a data type and the role of a repository whose architecture and operations are optimized to support the broad family of XML recommendations and standards. Specifically, this white paper will explore: The nature and extent of XML use across the enterprise, cost and quality of service implications of an infrastructure with, and without, an XML repository, the evolution of XML repositories from both a technology and a market segment perspective, criteria to determine when an XML repository would add significant value to an existing infrastructure, and capability and packaging recommendations for XML repository functionality that can be used to evaluate specific offerings.

Sponsored by Software AG

Total Cost of Adoption: A Framework for Evaluating Content Management Solutions

Total Cost of Adoption is the missing link to forecasting and maximizing ROI

by Sebastian Holst

Sponsored by Merant

Delivering Content That Makes a Difference

Local control facilitates informed decision-making by giving users access to highly relevant and timely information

by Bill Trippe

Sponsored by Inmagic

Bridging the Real Silos in Content Management with Flexible Content Objects

Leveraging the Right Content Management Technologies to Bring Content and Process Together

by Bill Trippe

Sponsored by Vignette

An Integrated Infrastructure for Content Services

The Sun ONE Content Services Platform & Partner Integrations

by Sebastian Holst

Sponsored by Sun Microsytems

Making Content Management Work in the Enterprise

The Importance of Unification, Usability, and Adaptability in the Deployment of Enterprise Content Management Technology

by Bill Trippe

Sponsored by Context Media

XrML and Emerging Models of Content Development and Distribution

Rights management and the new infrastructure for truly dynamic product development for publishers of all kinds

by Bill Trippe

Sponsored by ContentGuard

For information about our premium Strategic White Paper Program & sponsorship, contact Mary Laplante at mary@gilbane.com.