A user wrote the following question to the CMPros list, but didn’t get much response, so I offer it here, with some initial thoughts. I would love to hear more ideas about this kind of thing, as I get queries like this at least a couple of times a year.
I write and manage content for a small non-profit (80+ employees). We’re just now implementing a CMS that’s basically a set of templates with no functionality for managing and scheduling content to ‘go into’ the templates.
I’d appreciate any recommendations for software that (1) manages content development (sign-off by editors & reviewers) & (2) schedules content development from start to publication. I’m seeing the management aspect as some kind of checklist; the scheduling functionality as some kind of Gantt chart, with different development stages visually differentiated and/or indicated by milestones (like Msoft Project, but with far less need for Project’s bells and whistles). Maybe I’m dreamin’…
I’ve tried doing all that with Outlook and Sharepoint, and they kinda work, but I’m hoping there’s something a lot better out there.
I suggested the server version of Microsoft Project. The Project server can interact with Outlook clients via Exchange Server, and it can also generate Web clients. For example, you could have a server version of Project running a very high level schedule, which could then provide prompts to the user community. These prompts could be emails, they could be emails with URLs, or they could be tasks sent to the user’s email account which then appear as either tasks or calendar events in the user’s outlook. I did this for a Web development team a couple of years ago, and another client has implemented something like this recently.
Of course, this doesn’t address interaction of the Project server with the CMS, which in this case happens to be Enginuity from Pandora Systems.
Other thoughts and ideas? Feel free to email me as well as posting your comments here.
Month: November 2005 (Page 3 of 10)
Translations.com and Percussion Software announced a strategic partnership under which the companies have integrated their product offerings to enhance the creation and management of global web content. The integration of Translations.com’s GlobalLink Globalization Management System as a multilingual module for Percussion’s flagship Rhythmyx 5.7 Content Management System (CMS) solution allows content managers to produce and update global content in as many as 100 languages. The combination of GlobalLink translation technology and the Rhythmyx Content Management System creates a one-stop-shopping solution for organizations that want to roll out a scalable multi-site Web presence. http://www.translations.com, http://www.percussion.com
RedDot Solutions, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hummingbird Ltd. (NASDAQ: HUMC, TSX: HUM), announced the new RedDot Content Integrator – a solution based on IBM’s Information Integrator Content Edition, formerly known as Venetica’s Venice Bridge. With the new Content Integrator from RedDot, users can access and connect the content repositories of most ECM providers through Web sites, intranets, extranets and portals powered by RedDot’s CMS and LiveServer Content Management and Content Delivery Software. The new RedDot Content Integrator will aggregate content from many other ECM solutions into one system and make it securely accessible via the intranet, extranet, Web sites and portals, through a single sign-on. RedDot’s new content integration software enables organizations to access information such as business documents, still images, digital media and Web pages, and integrate the content into RedDot’s CMS and LiveServer. The RedDot Content Integrator provides complete access to most major ECM solutions, and will be available in Q1 2006. , http://www.hummingbird.com
EContent Magazine has selected Content Management Professionals (CM Pros), the international content management community of practice, for inclusion in the EContent 100, the list of the 100 organizations that matter most in the digital content industry. Opening today in Boston, the Fall 2005 CM Pros Summit an exclusive members-only event co-located with the Gilbane Conference on Content Management Technologies will offer more than seven intensive sessions on content personalization and customization. Founded in 2004, CM Proswhich has grown from a founding group of 30 content management experts to more than 600 membersprovides information, expertise and support to content management professionals and the organizations they serve. Through peer-to-peer interchange, the collaborative development of best practices, a series of educational events and definitive knowledge resources such as a content management glossary and resource library, the organization fosters a better public understanding of this critically important discipline. Join CM Pros on the Web at http://www.cmprofessionals.org,
Vamosa has chosen the 2005 Gilbane Conference on Content Management Technologies – Boston to announce their new product – Vamosa Content X-Change (VCX). For enterprises with an investment in Enterprise Content Management Systems such as Interwoven, Stellent and Documentum, integrating these systems, especially if the organisation has multiple CMS applications, into the IBM Websphere Portal can be difficult. Typically, integration involves the development of custom portlets. VCX is an infrastructure solution which allows enterprises to maintain their authoring and workflow investment in their ECM platform, while seamlessly integrating that ECM platform into the IBM Websphere Portal platform for personalisation, content rendering and content caching. The product is being developed co-operatively with several Vamosa partners and customers. Further product announcements will be made in early January 2006. http://www.vamosa.com
I spent some time yesterday updating my eForms resources page, and I was pleasantly surprised to find a number of new resources out there. I had been thinking the interest had slowed down a bit, but clearly it hasn’t. And Happy Thanksgiving to our readers here in the states!
A while back Frank Gilbane and I were talking. One of the outcomes of our chat was that he graciously asked me to be a Guest Author for the Gilbane Report Blog. This is my first foray for Frank’s blogosphere, and I’m grateful for the opportunity. With that….
Recently closing on Oracle’s acquisition of the company I founded (www.contextmedia.com), and having lived in what we considered the “unstructured” data market for ECI/EII for over six years, presents a chance to look back, and perhaps, at what lies ahead.
Where we’ve been- Sowing the seeds for ECI
The gestation for Context Media as a concept and idea began with my tenure at Netscape. The first company I founded, InSoft, was acquired by Netscape in late ’95 and provided a multimedia and realtime collaborative footing for the company with products and standards (LiveMedia, LiveAudio, LiveVideo, Media Server, Conference), 1st Shared Whiteboard, H.323, and RTSP for streaming). Those years, now ten short years ago, saw the exponential growth of “content.” Information heretofore inaccessible became as simple to access as clicking on an URL and experiencing instantaneous gratification. It is no wonder that Netscape set the bar and the table for the years to come.
Remember “information wants to be free ?” And even with the mis-guided notion that copyrighted material should all be free and readily accessible, it is critical to remember what is was like to be able to search and find information immediately, particularly knowledge that was domain specific to you and your job ? This “high value” content was previously locked in its own proprietary silo.
What was that ? Well, considering that even the Document Management sector was not yet a big market, it typically meant that the silo was a file server somewhere in your company. Web serving and HTTP made it relatively simple to “HTML-ize” this kind of data and make it available. Old geeks like myself who were used to authoring in nroff/troff and interconnecting file systems with NFS mounts began to see the light with HTML. In house file servers with NFS mounts interconnecting them were the norm. That was considered early stage collaboration. This state of sharing which at the time felt cool and leading edge was rendered obsolete almost overnite by the web. The web became the new lingua franca. Hacking the UNIX /etc/hosts became a thing of the past. The web server opened the world of content.
It was cool, and then, what happened ? It was just like any wild great party or event. Often times, the best party you ever attended was secret, it was in the woods, or on an island in the Caribbean (now everyone knows about Foxy’s for New Years on Jost van Dyke…), etc. Then, everyone found out about it, and, POW, chaos. The thing about this kind of chaos was that it didn’t go away. There was so much pent up demand for “ease of access” that it continued to drive more and more chaos in the enterprise. But… business is not a party (although it felt like it at Netscape from ’95-’97). Further, chaos is really not appropriate for creating and sustaining shareholder value.
That’s what happened to the web. So, (at least in my view, and the now archived view of Context Media), this chaos in the enterprise demanded “order.” Thus, the setting of the table for the massive growth in content management, and it’s upscale big brother, enterprise content management. These players brought order back to the chaos. Early document management players, i.e., Documentum, morphed into what we now call ECM. The pendulum swung back and put us right where we were pre-web. You could now get access, you just had to pay the licensing toll to get at your data. Of course, workflow was the raison d’etre for ECM positioning. My experience in every large organization I’ve worked at was that real users hated workflow. People like to define their processes, not the other way around. Nevertheless, the over-correction in ECM “order re-establishment” did the job. You may not have liked it, it may have cost too much, but at the end of the day, businesses want order. They got it !
This was exactly Context Media’s reason for being. Our DNA, having gestated at Netscape really didn’t place “order” ahead of access. We wanted open access and the rush of instantaneous gratification. Yet, in being the FIRST web-based enterprise software company, we knew that introducing enterprise webservers into a business with a derivative unforeseen by-product of “chaos” was not going to win the day. You needed to have order WITH access. Perhaps that would keep the buzz going. With that, we woodshedded and ultimately launched Context Media. We thought that ECI would keep the goodness of ECM (order) and bring back the lovefest of the web (access). That was our mission.
The six years of Context Media introduced the “Unified View,” something we rolled out and demoed to key analysts such as Frank Gilbane, Connie Moore, Sue Feldman, and many other analysts in mid 2001. Our vision, using web services as a loosely coupled asyncronous construct (later coined an SOA by tech pundits), ultimately provided what we called “pipelines” that interfaced to other ECM systems, proprietary systems and databases. The architecture of these pipelines was fundamentally different from other “connector-based” approaches. Ours were plug and play, off-the-shelf WSDL based services that interconnected radically different systems. The “Unified View” brought back the use of the browser as your core navigator, again allowing you to peer into all content, even if you didn’t hold the secret handshake card to use the high cost per seat ECM system. We coined it “InterShare.” Our vision was realized. Technically, at least…
Where we are- circa 2005-2006
For Context Media, the culmination of our vision, engineering and market development efforts ultimately resulted in Oracle’s acquistion of our company.
What’s it mean for them ? Context Media’s technology now forms the basis for Oracle’s Enterprise Content Integration (ECI) strategy, and is a foundational element embedded across multiple product lines: the Oracle Collaboration Suite, and Oracle Fusion Middleware. This newly acquired ECI technology from Context Media will also manfiest itself in other key Oracle apps and strategies, e.g., Oracle Enterprise search, and Oracle Data Hubs.
We weren’t the only ECI players to be rolled into a gorilla’s M&A strategy. It’s interesting that the two then-acknowledged leaders in ECI were both acquired by leading database players. Context Media —> Oracle, and, Venetica — >IBM. Another observation is that these acquisitions were perhaps the right fit(s) for both Oracle and IBM. Context Media’s roots were in hardcore software tools and applications development. We were acquired by a company that stresses engineering and products as key differentiators versus a heavy services-laden approach. Venetica, a company that had been around for years building experience as an IT professional services vendor building “connectors” between banking systems in Charlotte, went to IBM, where the 5X to 7X services revenue model is increasingly important, e.g., recent IBM financials show that services drive approx. 60% of revenue. Thus, a case can be made that in the realm of technical DNA matching, these outcomes were reasonable.
But now….Where’s it going ?
Why didn’t this technology ultimately become OEM’ed and/or acquired by a leading, or combination of leading traditional leading ECM players ? Both Context Media and Venetica had OEM traction, but no player had a key lead. Is the ECM market’s ultimate competition the database gorillas ? Is it that the established ECM base needs to entrench and protect their hill from the DB players approaching from the sea ? Is ECM really just a subset of the database wars ? A mere “feature” in the gargantuan stack ? Will we all ultimately wind up playing not necessarily on a web-based platform, but one that has been underlaid and hijacked by database kingpins- IBM, Oracle, MSFT ?
Next, is this a grand opportunity for guerilla warfare from startups wielding XML, RDF, atom, and open source EWMD (Enterprise weapons of mass destruction) ? Has the CLOB become the BLOB, weighted down by multi terabyte databases that are just too costly to run ? Is there a reason that, arguably, the world’s largest “database,” the Google File System (GFS) is not based on leading gorillas database technology ?
In a broader sense- Is the consolidation in the software industry killing innovation ? Are all innovative enterprise software startups destined for either (a) flameout, or (b) acquisition by monoliths like Oracle/IBM/Microsoft ? Did ECI technology, that which was invented to connect, interlink and provide a more universal access layer for end users actually hasten the advance of the database players dominance of all things data ? In the end, even large(r) public ECM companies look for the investor exit. Perhaps the consolidation of our industry’s enterprise software sector is well underway. The signs are everywhere.
Finally, what’s it mean for the people that matter, the customers ? Do they really believe that they’ll get more/better/faster when buying from any of the remaining 3-4 players left standing ? Is there a way to do M&A that keeps what Tracy Kidder called “The Soul of the Machine” in the enterprise software machine ? Or, is the enterprise software machine, like the carbon fuel-based automobile, destined to be replaced by something new and better ? Perhaps that’s the topic for another blog….
Dan Harple
dan@harple.com
Software AG, Inc. announced the worldwide availability of Tamino XML Server 4.4, which has implemented WebDAV support directly in the kernel. Through WebDAV support and automatic document versioning, Tamino 4.4 provides data management facilities to unstructured data currently residing in local file systems. These facilities include extended search functions for content and metadata, authorization and security, and data integrity. In addition, Tamino 4.4 provides the high availability (hot standby), replication mechanisms, enhanced scalability and security required in mission-critical IT environments. For the user, the tight WebDAV integration means that Tamino appears as a normal directory or directory tree, and acts as a transparent and flexible Internet file system that also provides versioning capabilities. Users can store, share, search and retrieve XML documents with ‘drag and drop’ as well as using XQuery. Furthermore, binary data, such as Microsoft Word, OpenOffice, PDF, ZIP or other Office files can be stored and indexed for XQuery-based searches. In addition to the access via HTTP and a wide range of available APIs, external systems and applications can access Tamino via the integrated WebDAV interface, an extended HTTP standard Internet protocol. Tamino XML Server also now incorporates SOAP and UDDI. Tamino 4.4 is available for the Microsoft Windows Server and XP, Sun Solaris, HP-UX (64-bit), and Linux for Intel platforms. Additional platforms including AIX, HP-UX (Itanium), and z/Linux are scheduled to follow in December.
