As part of next week's Gilbane Boston Conference, the XML practice will be delivering a pre-conference workshop, "Managing Smart Content: How to Deploy XML Technologies across Your Organization." The instructors will be Geoff Bock, Dale Waldt, Bill Trippe, Barry Schaeffer and Neal Hannon--a group of experts that represents decades of technical and management experience on XML initiatives.
A tip of the virtual hat to Senior Analyst Geoff Bock for organizing this.
Just spent an excessive number of hours perusing the XML and related community groups on various Web community sites. There are several social community tools and sites, but even just LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com/). seems to have dozens of community groups that at least mention XML in their descriptions, and several have it prominent in their names and logos. I joined several. Let's see what happens. Stay tuned... </>
O'Reilly's Tools of Change conference in New York City this week was highly successful, both inside and outside the walls of the Marriott Marquis. The sessions were energetic, well-attended, and--on the whole--full of excellent insight and ideas about the digital trends taking a firm hold of nearly all sectors of the publishing business. Outside the walls, especially on Twitter, online communities were humming with news and commentary on the the conference. (You almost could have followed the entire conference just by following the #toc hash tag at Twitter and accessing the online copies of the presentations.)
But if you had done that, you would have missed the fun of being there. There were some superb keynotes and some excellent general sessions. Notable among the keynotes were Tim O'Reilly himself, Neelan Choksi from Lexcycle (Stanza), and Cory Doctorow. The general sessions covered a fairly broad spectrum of topics but were heavy on eBooks and community. Because of my own and my clients' interests, I spent most of my time in the eBook sessions. The session eBooks I: Business Models and Strategy was content-rich. To begin with, you heard straight from senior people at major publishers with significant eBook efforts (Kenneth Brooks from Cengage Learning, Leslie Hulse from Harper Collins Publishers, and Cynthia Cleto from Springer Science+Business Media). Along with their insight, the speakers--and moderator Michael Smith from IDPF--assembled an incredibly valuable wiki of eBook business and technical material to back up their talk. I also really enjoyed a talk from Gavin Bell of Nature, The Long Tail Needs Community, where he made a number of thoughtful points about how publishers need to think longer and harder about how reading engages and changes people and specifically how a publisher can build community around those changes and activities.
There were a few soft spotsin the schedule. Jeff Jarvis' keynote, What Would Google do with Publishing?, was more about plumping his new book (What Would Google Do?) than anything else, but was also weirdly out of date, even though the book is hot off the presses, with 20th century points like "The link changes everything" and "If you're not searchable, you won't be found." (Publishers are often, somewhat unfairly, accused of being Luddite, but they are not that Luddite.) There were also a couple of technical speakers who didn't seem to make the necessary business connections to the technical points they were making, which would have been helpful to those members of the audience who were less technical and more publishing-product and -process oriented. But these small weaknesses were easily outshone by the many high points, the terrific overall energy, and the clear enthusiasm of the attendees.
One question I have for the O'Reilly folks is to ask how they will keep the energy going. They have a nascent Tools of Change community site. Perhaps they could enlist some paid community managers to seed and moderate conversations, and also tie community activities to other O'Reilly products such as the books and other live and online events.
O'Reilly has very quickly established a very strong conference and an equally strong brand around the conference. With the publishing industry so engulfed in digital change now, I have to think this kind of conference and community can only continue to grow.
Traditionally, the idea of structured content has always been associated with product documentation, but this is beginning to change. Featuring Bill Trippe, Lead Analyst at The Gilbane Group, and Bruce Sharpe, XMetaL Founding Technologist at JustSystems, a brand new podcast on The Business Value of Structured Content takes a look into why many companies are beginning to realize that structured content is more than just a technology for product documentation - it's a means to add business value to information across the whole enterprise. From departmental assets such as marketing website content, sales training materials, or technical support documents, structured content can be used to grow revenue, reduce costs, and mitigate risks, ultimately leading to an improved customer experience. Listen to the podcast and gain important insight on how structured content canhelp organizations meet high user expectations for when and where they can access contentprove to be especially valuable in our rough economic times...and more!
We are wrapping up our project with JustSystems. In total, we created three papers, three companion webinars, and the the interactive ROI blueprint. I will also be producing a podcast shortly with Bruce Sharpe, JustSystem's Founding Technologist. You can download the papers and view the recorded webinars here (registration required).
A tip of the hat to Gilbane colleagues Geoffrey Bock, Mary Laplante, and Dale Waldt who did most of the work. It was a big project!
We had a great discussion last week in our session, Using DITA for Enterprise Publishing. One of the themes was about using DITA for business documents; two of the speakers, Michael Boses of Quark/In.Vision and Eric Severson of Flatirons Solutions, are on the DITA Enterprise Business Documents Subcommittee. We didn't get to talking much about blogs, but then this announcement caught my eye today: DITA for Wordpress.
A few days ago I released the DITA-OT and the Wordpress plugins that enable me to publish part of the (almost inexistant) DITA-OP documentation on this blog. I am talking about the About, Download and Getting Started pages that appear in the menu up here. The DITA-OT plugin transforms a map into a single file, suitable for publication, and automatically call the xmlrpc API of the blog to publish it. The DITA Wordpress plugin adds a css (a slightly modified version of the DITA-OT commonltr.css) to your Wordpress theme to properly render the standard domains. You can download both plugins here, they are released under the GPL license.
We have a new white paper posted, Component Content Management - How True CCM Technology Drives the Most Compelling Content Initiatives. You can download it here.
For some research I am doing, I would like to talk to people who are using ETL tools for transforming large volumes of content. If you have some thoughts about this, please contact me.
Some news from the W3C:
The XSL Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) Requirements Version 2.0. This document enumerates the collected requirements for a 2.0 version of XSL Formatting Objects (XSL-FO), not for XSLT. XSL-FO is widely deployed in industry and academia where multiple output forms (typically print and online) are needed from single source XML. It is used in many diverse applications and countries on a large number of implementations to create technical documentation, reports and contracts, terms and conditions, invoices and other forms processing, such as driver's licenses and postal forms. The XSL Working Group invites people to help prioritize the feature set of XSL 2.0 by completing a survey until the end of September 2008.
I talk to developers who have ideas about improving XLST. Now is your chance.
Well as the name of the blog suggests, the focus is on both technology and strategy. We have been at this long enough to come to the stunning conclusion that technology adoptions minus well-thought-out and sound business strategies are doomed to failure. (Now you know why we get paid the big bucks!) While obvious, the conclusion is also true. I have had the luxury of consulting with several clients over a long period of time. I like to think they are successful because they listen to me (and they do), but the bigger reason they are successful is that they use my input to inform well thought out business strategies. Sometimes these are operational (they want to save money, improve efficiency), but more often they are about the top line. They want to drive more revenue.
For commercial publishers this means bringing more product to market more quickly, customizing products, and developing derivative products (think of offerings like SafariU). For enterprises, this is also tied to bringing more product to market more quickly; think of a company like Autodesk using XML-based publishing and globalization to bring more products to more markets simultaneously. These are world-class projects based on XML that are bringing incredible value to their organizations, but--even more significantly--these are not the only efforts of their kind. Whereas in the early days of SGML the community could count projects of this type in perhaps the low double digits, I have long ago given up on trying to remember or catalog how many of these projects are out there backed by XML technology.
But not every project is as successful as the ones I have cited. Indeed these stand out as case studies of the best practices. Projects do fail and projects do falter, and I will reveal my bias here in saying that, especially in the recent few years, few projects fail because of the chosen technology. (All complex systems require significant customization! Who would have thunk it?) Much more often they fail because of problems with project management, lack of sufficient staffing, and shifting plans and execution when the inevitable problems arise. And these kinds of failures come right back to a failure in strategy, or at least a failure in realistically planning for a complex undertaking that is critical to organizational success.
So content strategies are indeed a critical half of this practice, but technology is the other half. Here as well a comparison to SGML is in order. Whereas in the days of SGML there were few vendors at the table, now there are literally scores. Even more importantly, none of the major vendors are missing, and one can make the argument that the major vendors are--or soon will be--the dominant players in the market. XML is central to the product and development platform strategies of Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, Sun, Adobe, and EMC. One can only speculate at the level of R&D dedicated to XML at these companies, but it is safe to say it is a lot. Just as impressive is the community of developers who work in XML daily. Most programmers working in contemporary languages like Java and C# use XML for all kinds of routine tasks, and XML data mapping and modeling tools are built into Visual Studio and many other development tools.
To be more specific, we intend to cover what we categorize as the range of XML products of most interest to business and IT professionals responsible for content management initiatives. These include:
Among other things, we will be developing an online directory of these product lines (more on that in a future post). I have been informally cataloging the companies over the recent few weeks and I already have 60 to 70 companies without trying very hard. We expect to interact with these vendors, get details of the products and product roadmaps, and also work with them when appropriate on product strategy and projects like white papers and case studies.
So that's the news so far from here. Do get in touch if you have any questions, ideas, or complaints!
