IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced that it is bringing Google Gadgets – or consumer-style web utilities – into commercial portal software. Available at no cost to WebSphere Portal and WebSphere Portal Express Version 6.0 customers, IBM now lets users create, customize and use rich Internet applications with Google Gadgets directly from within WebSphere Portal so they appear as ready-to-use services. Users can choose from nearly 4,000 Google Gadgets such as language translators, package delivery tracking, Podcast searches, Wikipedia information, YouTube postings and more. These features can be offered through a company’s portal with a click of a button. IBM is also announcing its search sitemap utility, based on a new sitemap protocol, agreed on by Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, that will make it possible to optimize publication of portal content for improved search by public search engines. This feature also includes the ability to notify search engines of the update frequency, last modification date, and relative priority of the content that is being published. The end result is an improved content relationship with external search engines so that all of the public content in a portal can be found and crawled efficiently. The IBM Portlet for Google Gadgets will be available in April via IBM WebSphere Portal catalog. WebSphere Portal Version 6.0 customers, including those using WebSphere Portal Express to deploy solutions for Small and Medium Sized businesses and WebSphere Portal Server Version 6.0 are entitled to use Google Gadget at no cost. Enablement for the Sitemap 0.90 protocol will be delivered for WebSphere Portal as a sitemap utility that customers can download from the WebSphere Portal catalog later in 2007. http://catalog.lotus.com/wps/portal/portal, http://www.sitemaps.org/
Year: 2007 (Page 31 of 45)
Atlassian announced the release of Confluence Hosted, a new hosted service to make wiki-based collaboration more accessible for small, mid, or large organisations or groups with limited IT resources. Confluence Hosted is based on the Atlassian Confluence enterprise wiki. Features include: Immediate accessibility with no installation required, Unlimited pages and unlimited spaces, WYSIWYG interface, Ability to store and search across all types of files (PPT, Word, PDF, GIF, etc), Enterprise-grade security and permissioning, and Email and RSS integration and support. Confluence Hosted customers can remain on Hosted indefinitely or they can bring the wiki on-premise at any time. Contegix, a provider of managed hosting applications, was selected to provide hosting services. A free, fully functional 30-day evaluation of Confluence Hosted is available. Its tiered pricing model starts at US$49 per month. http://www.atlassian.com
A tough truth about complex and integrated software applications is the lack of expertise and professional depth available to implement and maintain them. This explains a lot about why small business units and project teams often find and deploy their own software tools to get work done.
I am particularly concerned at the lack of will by organizations to fund implementation of applications like enterprise search to aggregate at the retrieval-end the content stored within disparate applications. No rational business planning can justify having workers sift through multiple repositories, each with a separate sign-on, search interface, and search engine protocols just to find a single document. True, organizations need highly competent professionals to meaningfully implement, tune, and administer enterprise search engines. They require the expertise of search analysts, taxonomists, librarians, IT specialists with security, platform, and software development training. However, developing a team of six to twelve “search engineers” to give workers in a thousand person company quick access to relevant content is an ROI no brainer when we know workers waste significant (5 – 15%) amounts of working hours hunting for stuff.
This week’s Information Week article by Nicholas Hoover on Web 2.0 contained a comment about Wells Fargo “…on another Enterprise 2.0 front, integrated search, the company has limited employees’ ability to search across data repositories because of the complex authorization schemes needed to keep people from accessing information they shouldn’t.”
Today’s (Feb. 27th) New York Times headlined with a story about Microsoft buying “a specialized search engine tailored to deliver useful medical information to consumers,” Medstory, Inc. The story goes on to cite comments by Esther Dyson who refers to the technology as “an ontology engine.” This underscores another truth about quality semantic (natural language) search; it depends on the existence of meaningful, topic specific vocabulary and concept maps to work well, a complexity in narrower markets.
Finally, we have seen the recent shift of companies like FAST moving from a strategy of selling solutions directly to enterprises for the purpose of aggregating content through a unified search portal to focusing on niche markets and highly tailored search architectures.
These are just three cases of a shift among search companies to leverage their search technology IP in more lucrative offerings. The losers will be organizations that really do need to deliver content more holistically to workers through a single search engine. Yes, security is a concern, and skilled search technologists must be hired and dedicated to delivering search options that tie directly to business operations.These efforts are not one-off projects but need to be sustained as permanent infrastructure. If you are in a position to influence search procurement solutions make your case for the most suitable software that will really help deliver the best retrieval option company-wide. Be realistic about funding and staffing; then go for it. If Enterprise Search is what you need, make sure that is what you get and deploy.
The new Content Management Professionals board of directors has chosen their officers for 2007. Congratulations to all – especially our very own Mary Laplante, who will be the President. The full lineup is:
- Mary Laplante, President
- Linda Burman, Vice President
- Emma Hamer, Treasurer
- Joan Lasselle, Secretary
- Travis Wissink, Director at large
For more information, see the CM Pros site at http://www.cmpros.org/, and join CM Pros for their Spring Summit meeting in San Francisco in April.
Carnegie Mellon University, one of the top-ranked institutions producing technology talent, recently announced that it will offer a new Masters of Science program in software management at its Carnegie Mellon West campus in Mountain View, CA. The driving force is our increasingly global economy.
The school recognizes that going forward, developing good, useful software won’t be sufficient for managers who want to excel. The curriculum combines software engineering, one of CMU’s sweet spots, with business and organizational coursework. The goal is to prepare graduates for the reality of the software business in the 21st century. James Morris, dean of Carnegie Mellon West, says that the program’s “… cross-training gives our students the perspective and contextual understanding they need to see and seize opportunities in the global market.”
The deadline for applications is June 1. See the program description in the Carnegie Mellon West brochure for details.
The Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) self-refers as the “Gold Standard in Media Audits” and is the place to go if you want to find out current U.S. newspaper circulation figures. Unfortunately, you have to be a member — they’re not giving this sensitive information away — and so it’s difficult to get up-to-the-minute data. You can find out the “Top 200 Newspapers by Largest Reported Circulation” ), but not what those circulation figures actually are, and how they’re trending.
But the ongoing decline in newspaper circulation in North America is not a well-kept secret, and if the ABC won’t spill the beans, others will.
According to a February article in Media Life Magazine, “in the U.S., the circulation of paid-for papers dropped 4 percent from 2001 to 2005, hitting 53.3 million. It also dropped 2.3 percent in 2005 compared to the year earlier.”
A May 2005 article in The Washington Post reported that “circulation at 814 of the nation’s largest daily newspapers declined 1.9 percent over the six months ended March 31 compared with the same period last year…The decline continued a 20-year trend in the newspaper industry as people increasingly turn to other media such as the Internet and 24-hour cable news networks for information.”
In the midst of this gloom, the February 17th issue of The Economist reported that in India there are some 3000 big newspapers, and they experienced a 12.9% increase in circulation last year. Competition is fierce, and profits substantial.
The article also made reference to a key factor that may explain this bright news: Internet access is available to only 1.2% of Indians over the age of 12.
I remember years ago at a DRUPA trade show in Germany (DRUPA focuses on the printing business) meeting Naresh Khanna, the editor of Indian Printer & Publisher magazine. That year everyone was speculating about the possible impact of the Internet, but Naresh said to me: “Oh, we don’t care very much about the Internet in India. We’re just excited that we’ll soon have color pictures in our newspapers.”
Welcome to the Web Content Management blog at the Gilbane Group. I’m Tony White, the moderator of this blog and Lead Analyst for Web Content Management at the Gilbane Group. The WCM blog will serve as a forum for a wide range of business and technical users, enterprises, software vendors, system integrators, consultants, and not-otherwise-specified domain experts/novices to discuss a wide range of topics – from product-specific questions to industry trends, tried-and-true use cases to bleeding-edge technologies, caveats to best practices. A good deal of the conversation will focus on subjects such as Web 2.0, rich internet applications, usability and the user experience, vendor claims, product evaluations, application integration, user training, implementation times, industry-specific practices, regulatory compliance, localization and globalization, digital assets, Web services, content syndication, cost of ownership and return on investment, open source products and strategies, and hosted versus licensed applications – just to name a few. We will undoubtedly discuss products and technologies from vendors such as CrownPeak, Day, EMC/Documentum, IBM, Interwoven, Microsoft, RedDot, Percussion, Stellent, and Vignette, but feel free to make comments about (or from) others as well.
The rules for participation in this blog are roughly the same as those for Frank Gilbane’s CTO blog, which are listed in his July 23, 2006 entry – the exceptions being that you don’t need to be a CTO to make comments and that, while we welcome entries by guest authors, this blog will be authored, assembled, and edited primarily by me. If you would like to begin contributing to the blog, click here to submit a comment or entry.
Cheers!
I received an unsolicited email from jetBlue yesterday, one of many that I routinely receive from various travel providers. This one was different. I was not one of the thousands stranded by them last week and I have only traveled on jetBlue for one trip. They could have omitted this mea culpa letter to me in hopes that I had not already noticed all the media hype around their operational breakdowns and plans to recover from a faulty infrastructure. However, by calling attention to their lapses in such public ways this week, they have insured that I will include them in future travel planning.
Years ago as the President of a software company, I received a truly disturbing email lashing from a client sent after 6 PM on a Friday. The accusations about my company’s service were vitriolic and uncharacteristic of client reactions. I stayed at the office late gathering all the information I could find from the customer support database to learn what might have precipitated the outburst because I wanted to send a thoughtful, accurate and timely response. Without attacking the client I sent a chronology of inquiries and responses with a copy of a remedy sent to them weeks earlier. Then I went home with hopes that Monday would bring a more constructive dialog between the client and my company. The issues were amicably resolved, the client remained a good client, gave us high marks in referrals, and the matter was never mentioned again.
Unfortunately, personalization of client vendor relationships is missing in too many business relationships. A great amount of marketing copy appears describing how software tools and search interfaces support “personalization.” We know that SaS (software as service) or ASP (application service provider) models have come into their own. We also see the major search software vendors posting record growth and grand projections for even more. What this all adds up to is the convergence of a perfect storm of client disappointment as we experience a total disconnect between what vendors mean by “personalization” and “service,” and what customers want. Customers want software that is intuitively simple to personalize, and service that places the responsibility for software problems squarely with the vendor.
Based on my recent experiences with vendors, I see huge industry problems ahead. These are being exposed at all levels: discussions with sales representatives, exchanges with search company executives, deployment of software issues, documentation and training quality, and exchanges with customer support personnel.
Here is my list of vendor weaknesses:
- Lack of understanding by company representative how their software works
- Failure to really understand prospect needs, environments, and requirements
- Poorly written documentation and training giving no context for how the software might be deployed
- Technically sophisticated features delivered with no coherent path to deployment
- Inability to communicate honestly with clients
- Lack of clarity on what industry standards and terminology mean to clients
- Failure to use their own products by all employees in vendor organizations
- Inattention to building quality support infrastructures to service clients
I am not calling for a “customer bill of rights” for the enterprise search software industry. Instead, I am calling for you who procure software to take control of your own experience by doing a lot more than looking under the hood for technical specifications, features and functionality. You need to:
- Look inside the vendor’s organization to see what kind of personnel it has, what the turnover is, how many people are supporting service functions compared to developers, etc.
- Listen to what you are being told; do serious validating research, on your own, to discover customers using the software. Talk to as many as you find; look at blogs and chat rooms to discover where the pain points and good experiences lie.
- Read documentation to understand how much time, effort, and expertise the deployment and maintenance will really require.
- Test drive products with your own data.
Every search company can’t grow 100% year-over-year for years on end. You will be suffering mightily for a long time if you make a big investment in one of those who ignore the customer experience. There is also a good chance they’ll be sold off to the lowest bidder once they realize their inability to service their clients and remain profitable. Take your destiny in your own hands; take enterprise search on in slow and measured increments so you will know what you are getting into.
