Curated for content, computing, and digital experience professionals

Month: January 2007 (Page 8 of 11)

One Consulant’s Predictions for CM in 2007

This is the time of year when the experts come out with predictions, so how about for content management?

Here are 3 of my top predictions:

  1. Web 2.0 will continue to be big, but by the end of the year won’t be called that anymore, and much of the hoopla will be over.
  2. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (with it’s unfortunate nickname MOSS) will be much more widely implemented than expected, but not always for the right reasons.
  3. The era of “Customer-Centric Content Management’ as introduced by The Rockley Group will start to gain significant momentum. (As I’ve felt it should have a while ago, as alluded to in my Gilbane blog entry from Aug ’06 about CMS and CRM.)

What are your predictions? Love to see your comments!

WebMethods Introduces webMethods BPMS

WebMethods introduced version 7.0 of the webMethods Fabric product suite as well as a new component, webMethods BPMS. The company reports that these releases deliver a fully-unified environment for process development, automation, and monitoring. WebMethods Fabric 7.0 highlights technologies for service-oriented architecture (SOA) governance, while the new BPMS suite concentrates on business user features as well as integrated process monitoring and and enhanced real-time business analytics. Additional webMethods BPMS features include an Eclipse-based process modeling environment for ‘codeless’ development, extensive support for both human-to-human and system-to-system task flow, business rules management and a new semantic metadata library.

Gilbane Group Launches Globalization Practice & Blog

The Gilbane Group announced today that they have launched a new research and consulting practice covering content globalization technologies and applications. The new practice is led by Lead Analyst Leonor Ciarlone & Senior Analyst Mary Laplante, with contributions from guest blogger Kaija Poysti. The new practice complements existing Gilbane Group consulting services that cover a broad range of content technologies, as well as the Gilbane Group’s Publishing Technology and Strategy consulting practice, and our Enterprise Search practice. The Globalization practice is supported by a new blog devoted to the topic as well as content at our Gilbane conferences in cooperation with the LISA (Language Industry Standards Association) Forum. The Globalization blog goes live on January 10 with an introductory entry by Lead Analyst Leonor Ciarlone.

Inxight Partners with Iknow LLC for Knowledge Management Solutions

Inxight Software, Inc. announced that that it has established a strategic business relationship with Iknow LLC to jointly develop and market advanced informatics solutions. Inxight’s federated search, extraction and visualization products enable enterprise, government and OEM customers to turn unstructured and structured text into actionable information. Inxight solutions allow its users to access, extract and be alerted to relevant information contained in the open Web, deep Web (patent databases, SEC filings), subscription sites, and internal data sources. Powered by Inxight’s ThingFinder entity extraction, search results are automatically clustered on the fly, enabling users to filter their search results by the people, companies, places, concepts and other information contained within them. This reduces time to information and enables users to locate hidden information and make better decisions. The companies will initially focus on three industry sectors: pharmaceuticals, legal and government. The companies anticipate announcing several joint solutions in 2007. http://www.inxight.com, http://www.iknow.us.com

The Globalization Mandate

Welcome to the Globalization Practice blog. Our goal is to build an online forum for a lively, shared discussion on this topic and hopefully, create an interactive community that encourages readers to ask questions, post opinions, and share best practices. Along with my colleague Mary Laplante, guest blogger Kaija Poysti, and other experts we might invite along the way, we’ll be providing food for thought in areas such as:

  • Why globalization as a strategic business practice should be “standard operating procedure” for organizations with multinational revenue goals
  • How globalization extends into customer experience and brand management strategies, inevitably impacting far more than content localization processes
  • Why a consolidating market forces Language Service Providers to redefine their value proposition
  • How translation and content management technologies are closing the gap between fragmented, manual localization processes
  • Why globalization compels organizations to rethink traditional content creation methods
  • Which standards are helping to integrate globalization processes and meet emerging international requirements

In June 2006, Newsweek editor Fareed Zakaria wondered, “How Long Will America Lead the World?” The piece included a familiar discussion of the many technology-driven factors that are driving an “open world economy.” Our globalization practice blog will discuss these factors and their impact on people and process management so that you have knowledge and insight on how to successfully meet the challenges of multi-lingual business communication.

Feel free to post a comment or send me an email with globalization topics that are important to your organization.

JustSystems Unveils New Xelerate Partner Program

JustSystems, Inc. announced its new Xelerate Partner Program. The 4-tier program, whose categories include Strategic Partner, Premier Certified, Certified and Associate designations, has been created to reflect its focus on partners that will add value to its XMetaL Content Lifecycle Solutions. Whether partners offer content conversion, management, publishing, or localization software complementary to XMetaL, the program reaffirms JustSystems’ commitment to work in partnership with vendors to provide complete content lifecycle solutions and services to customers. The company also welcomes the first three partners to the program. XyEnterprise Inc., a developer of XML and content management and publishing software solutions, joins as a Premier Certified Solutions Partner; Ovidius GmbH, a provider of XML software for creating, managing, and publishing of technical information, joins as a Premier Certified Services Partner; Commandtext, Inc., a systems integrator specializing in structured content solutions, joins as a Certified Services Partner. XyEnterprise and Ovidius have also been designated as Strategic Partners based on their commitment to standards-based solutions and contribution to the XMetaL business. http://www.xmetal.com

The Small Web, or Web 1.0

Since a year ago at The Gilbane Conference on Content Management in San Francisco I named the big-screen iPod as the “next big thing in Content Management,” I feel empowered to comment on Tuesday’s news from Apple.

It’s no surprise to me that Al Gore and Steve Jobs are buddies, (though it’s hard to know what “buddy” means in that particular class). Both have an uncanny knack for getting people excited about ideas (easy computing, global warming, the Internet, digital music, etc.) that are not particularly unique, and seem almost inevitable once presented on bigger-than-life rear-projection screens. I kept thinking of all the Rocket eBooks, Palm Pilots, brick cell-phones, and tablet-PC devices littering the road to Macworld Expo in San Francisco. Apple’s own Newton is there, as well.

It was in either 1997 or 1998 that I went to a Scitex event in Dayton Ohio and watched a video of the “Scitex of the future.” All I remember is some guy climbing on the side of a mountain with a hand-held device in his hand. He was simultaneously doing all these cool things like talking to someone on a picture phone, analyzing scientific data, calling up a topographical map and sending his location to the helicopter pilot hovering above. And believe me, if Scitex “got it” then it was pretty obvious. Of course we want one device to do everything. And of course we want it to be small, easy-to-use and cool—qualities a company like Scitex could surely not deliver. But Apple will.

Unchained Melodies and Spreadsheets
The traditional business community will look at the iPhone the way it always looks at Apple products. “Not enough security.” “Won’t work with my (fill-in-the-blank).” “Too expensive.” “A consumer product.” But of course we all know it’s the beginning of a massive change in computing. There are millions of people chained to desks that should be out in the world, talking to customers, interacting with employees and smelling the roses. And doing email, and reviewing inventories, and working out who’s going to work the night shift. They don’t really need a big computer, and it would be a hell of a lot more productive not to give them one. And yes, those solutions exist now, but there’s something about Apple that makes the concept seem realistic.

So doesn’t true mobile computing change how we present information? It certainly should. I fear the easy internet capabilities of this next-generation hand-held device will give everyone a cop-out for not doing the work. The Web for a large desktop screen and the Web for an iPhone are considerably different. Only the transmission of the Web has become mobile, not the content, which is currently designed for people sitting in chairs, completely dedicated to the information at hand.

So while the digiterati are all talking about Web 2.0 or the Semantic Web, I say what about the Small Web? What does it mean to make your network available and fully functional to people with 3.5-inch screens as the window? You think it’s tiresome waiting for a Flash animation to load now? See what it feels like while you’re standing in line at the Airport.

Small is Beautiful
We need less information. Everybody knows that. We save too much, we have access to too many things, we over-protect and over-value meaningless drivel that was once thrown out at the end of most days or certainly most years. We carry around Gigabytes of “stuff” like we may need it at any moment. It will be refreshing to see companies struggle with down-sizing information the way they have down-sized everything else. But down-size they must! (Maybe we should issue “word credits” the way they issue “carbon credits”—spew out too many words and you have to trade with a bunch of Buddhist monks so it evens out.)

This is good news for the creative community, where less-is-more has always been the thing. And good news for those designers who have strong print aesthetics–mobile design has more in common with print than with the Web. You don’t approach designing a 3 x 5 postcard the same way you do a letter-size brochure.

Now is the time to start lobbying for more staff, pitching to clients and start working on new self-promo pieces. The eBook has finally arrived, only it sings and dances, too. What a great new format. It requires new design techniques, of course, but most exciting, it requires editing. There will be focus groups and usability studies, but they will only confirm the obvious—people on the move want billboards, not encyclopedias.

Oh oh. Didn’t we fire most of the editors a few years ago? Time to ride through all the brew-pubs and Starbucks in the land shouting “Come back. We need you! You matter again!”

No Time to Waste
I would fight for my company or my clients to have an iPhone-specific Web site up by June, and to have all PDF downloads available in a special iPhone-optimized format at the same time. Don’t take a “wait and see” attitude. Take a chance—it’s not even a very big one. Start re-designing your information and it’s architecture for this format. It’s different and it matters.
Oh yeah. And hire a couple of kids right away. Any will do.

Quark Releases QuarkXPress 7.1

Quark Inc. announced the release of QuarkXPress 7.1, the new Universal upgrade to the desktop design software. The latest upgrade adds performance enhancements, making the design software more responsive. Quark made performance improvements in several areas — including text selection, clipped images, and flattening features. Each feature has received a performance boost, resulting in faster production times. In addition, the Universal upgrade has provided performance improvements throughout the application. A fully functional 30-day evaluation version of QuarkXPress 7, including the new Universal release for Intel-based Macs, is available. To purchase or upgrade to QuarkXPress 7.1, visit the Quark Web site at http://www.quark.com/71update

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