XyEnterprise announced that its XML Professional Publisher (XPP) publishing software now integrates with Design Science’s MathFlow Editor. XPP is an XML-based publishing system used to produce scientific, technical and medical journals, as well as many other types of print and electronic publications. Combined with MathFlow’s graphical interface, which supports the creation of complex mathematical expressions, publishers of complex mathematical information now have a user-friendly publishing tool that supports the MathML standard. http://www.dessci.com,
Year: 2005 (Page 69 of 95)
Just found this CEO Blogger’s Club group blog. It looks like it is managed by a PR firm, but it has some good stuff on enterprise blogging. For example, the entry on Ten Ideas for Corporate RSS Feeds.
The non-profit Content Management Professionals organization, an international community of practice, is holding their Spring Summit in San Francisco on April 11. The Summit is being held at the Palace Hotel in downtown San Francisco in conjunction with our Gilbane Conference on Content Management Technologies.
Activities at the Summit include small-group, roundtable discussions focusing on the strategy and practice of content management and the role of those who are engaged in this discipline. CM Pros members leading roundtables include:
- Erik Hartman (Netherlands) on the enterprise content management poster and CMSML (CMS markup language)
- Hilary Marsh (Chicago) on the content in content management
- Ann Rockley (Toronto) on making the content management business case
- Mira Wooten (Mountain View, CA) on content management networking
- Rahel Bailie (Vancouver) on the human factor in content management
- Seth Earley (Boston) on doing successful taxonomy projects
- Shuli Goodman (San Francisco) on effective governance models to support enterprise content strategies
- David Warwick (Australia) on organizational compliance and the role of CM systems.
Update: Full Summit Program and schedule.
Register for the Summit or find out more about it.
(Discloure: I’m on the board.)
I’ve been thinking a lot about the best models for enterprise search lately because I work with clients who are mostly unhappy with the way their current enterprise search technology doesn’t result in meaningful content results, or because they are trying to find better ways of categorizing the content for easier access. One technique that I use to elicit feedback on possible approaches is to find examples on the Web of search interfaces that I believe are worth consideration. While I work with corporations with a heavy amount of R&D related content, I use examples as diverse as UN sites, catalogs, health care organizations, and so on, to get everyone’s imaginations working on the possible ways we could present content search options.
In some cases I am working to achieve a browsable construct for a taxonomy (that doesn’t necessarily look like a conventional taxonomy) and in other cases I may be trying to expose the searcher to “advanced” search features without getting into explanations of Boolean options, while still supporting them.
I have recently found a mental digression by thinking more about the reactions I get when I forward links to my clients for “design consideration and feedback.” The reactions seem to be quite visceral and, I’ll admit, mine are, too. I am beginning to segregate likes and dislikes into highly textual interfaces with very sparse graphics vs. interfaces that offer (or attempt to offer) a highly graphical layout of the window. Personally, I have no problem with graphics when they fit or mesh with the text but I realize that I ignore most pictorial graphics. Even when I attempt to use symbolic icons in a graphical interface I encounter for the first time, the struggle to connect meaning to the picture is not worth my effort.
The most confounding interfaces are those with a lot of text and a lot of pictures all mixed in, especially without a cohesive and minimalist color palette. I remember a strange disconnect several months into using Google. A significant holiday day came when they jazzed up their Google imprint. I was certain that it reflected a change in product design and “I didn’t like it.” When someone assured me that it was just a little “Google” fun, I accepted it but I still don’t like having them mess with the pure interface. When they moved the “directories” tab from the main page, it annoyed me and I don’t use it nearly as much any more, first because it is on a new page and second because it has a little picture attached that doesn’t mean “directories” to me.
Guess I’m still mired in the IBM “KISS” mode but I do like my text clean and simple. Take a look at Siderean’s demo – just the way I like it, no frills. No pictures are worth a thousand words to me.
We open our conference in San Francisco in a little over a week with a panel of analysts who focus on content management. These were very popular and fun sessions at our Boston and LA events. We will have plenty of questions for them as usual, and we hope to see many of you there to ask questions in person. But for those of you that can’t make it, you can still send us your questions and we’ll provide some kind of synopsis on our blog. These are smart, opinionated people, so don’t be afraid to ask the tough questions. You can comment on this post so the panelists can all see, or send me an email.
Dan Farber raises the issue of Longhorn adoption and quotes a Jupiter analyst who claims the challenge is that XP is “good enough”. There is actually a more fundamental reason the question of adoption is interesting. What is that and what does it have to do with content technology?
I’ll start the answer with a little history. In 1994 at our first Documation conference, I moderated a debate between Tony Williams, Chief Architect of COM at Microsoft, and Larry Tesler, Chief Scientist at Apple. The Microsoft COM and OFS/Cairo and Apple OpenDoc efforts both recognized the need for operating systems to provide more support for the richness of unstructured information than is possible with the primitive file systems we had then.
Before the debate I preferred the OpenDoc approach because it seemed more consistent with my view that new operating systems needed to be able to manage arbitrary information objects and structures that could be described with a markup language (like SGML at the time). However, Tony convinced me that OpenDoc was too radical a change for both users and developers at the time. Tony agreed with the ultimate need to make such a radical change to file systems to support the growing need for applications to manage more complex content, but he said that Microsoft had decided the world was not ready for such a shock to the system yet, and defended their strategy as the more realistic.
Eleven years later and we are still stuck with the same old-fashioned file system in spite of the fact that every modern business application needs to understand and process multiple types of information inside files. This means that database platforms and applications need to do a lot more work than they should to work with content. I am no expert on Longhorn, but the file system that will be part of it (although maybe not initially), WinFS, is supposed to go a long way towards fixing this problem. Is the world ready for it yet? I hope so, but it will still be a big change, and Tony’s concerns of 1994 are still relevant.
Thomas Technology Solutions, Inc. (ThomasTech), a software and systems integrator, has entered into a partnership agreement with Houston-based Riversand Technologies, Inc., a provider of Product Information Management (PIM) solutions. ThomasTech is a provider of content management and publishing solutions for industrial manufacturers, commercial publishers and other industries. Riversand PIM product suite will be integrated into ThomasTech’s content management solutions for developing electronic catalogs. ,
Leading Edge Design & Systems (LEDS) announces the newest addition to its Media Archive System (MAS) product suite. The MAS RSS Module gives companies the ability to search, organize and publish their managed content for worldwide syndication. Content that is selected is published to an RSS feed that allows an existing service to distribute the desired content to subscribing Web sites and news services. MAS’s security model allows users to configure which data elements will be syndicated as well as restrict other chosen content and metadata from syndication. MAS RSS will also support Media RSS. MAS RSS’ dynamic infrastructure allows a user to publish an asset to any number of RSS feeds, while also allowing multiple users the ability to distribute content simultaneously to a single channel. http://www.media-archive.com/
