Kentico Software, the Web content management system vendor, releases a beta version of Kentico CMS 6 and adds a new product line – Kentico Enterprise Marketing Solution (EMS), for Customer Experience Management. Out of the box, Kentico CMS 6 includes E-mail Marketing, Marketing Dashboards, A/B and Multivariate Testing, Campaign and Conversion Management, Integration Bus and improved Web Analytics. On top of this, Kentico EMS adds On-line Marketing features such as Content Personalization, Contact Management, Lead Scoring and Segmentation. Kentico EMS is also enriched with some additional Enterprise features as Health Monitoring, support of Multiple SMTP Servers and Scheduler Windows Services. The beta version of Kentico CMS 6 is available for download exclusively to Kentico partners via Kentico Partner Portal. Kentico CMS 6 will be generally available in late September 2011. http://www.kentico.com/
Month: August 2008 (Page 1 of 3)
Recently, we had an opportunity to catch up with Emmanuel Garcin, Vice President at Jahia, a Swiss-based vendor of open source solutions for web content and portal management. Jahia is a sponsor of Multilingual Communications as a Business Imperative,” a report released by Gilbane’s Globalization practice in July.
KK: What have been the biggest roadblocks to companies in demonstrating value for multilingual communications initiatives?
EG: We’ve found that web content management systems often need to be customized – in a big way – before they can be integrated with authoring tools, translation management systems, and other enterprise applications. This can result in big-ticket licensing and implementation costs as well as IT departments that become concerned with “overloading computing platforms. Open source technologies can help with these obstacles, but companies are often challenged to adopt and rollout new business models that go hand in hand with the open source context.
KK: What is the “tipping point” that compels companies to move forward with your solution as part of the infrastructure for multilingual communications
EG: The key business driver is a burning need to broadcast both local and global messages for brand management. We also have customers that must address language-based government regulations. Since there are three official languages in Switzerland, Jahia’s Swiss origins naturally focused us on the implementation of adequate business logic to provide flexible language management tools to accommodate this need. Other customers have a need to mix languages when they publish a particular country or regional site. One example is a large international institution that publishes in over a hundred languages who found that Jahia provided the vitamins (enterprise & portal capabilities) and the painkiller (globalization capabilities) needed to implement its content globalization strategy.
KK: What do you do to educate, prepare, and enable customers to be successful?
EG: There’s a lot of back and forth. Companies often want to shape new solutions around existing business rules, but they also need to plan intelligently about how they’re going to communicate globally, and determine which processes should continue to evolve. We educate and train organizations on how to get the best results and can help with planning, installation, and configuration. At the end of the day, it’s all about technical details. Companies want to manage content in any language, decide for themselves which languages are mandatory and which are optional, and even publish web sites that mix languages on the same screen. In addition, they want to give their customers the ability to select a new language through a simple, easy-to-use interface.
We spend a lot of time communicating a vision of successful web communication. We talk about how content repositories are the new databases, that all content should be dynamic, and how successful enterprise applications need to be function and feature-rich. We make sure companies are fully aware of industry trends that affect global communication practices and common standards, such as JSR-170/283.
KK: What have been your customers’ best practices in building a global content value chain?
EG: You can’t overlook the significance of having a globalization strategy in the first place! Examples of success that I’m familiar with include a large international agency, a GPS vendor, and a global glass manufacturer. The most successful companies are equally concerned about which solutions for multilingual communications they choose, and how they roll them out; about a single source of content, along with information that is customized or added to meet regional needs. They have a globalization strategy that strikes the right balance between centralized and regional content management.
What is most important, however, is to define how that strategy relates to business needs. A good example of this is a pan-European government agency that we work with. A particular document may be mandatory for certain countries and languages but irrelevant for others. To address this challenge, they prepare source content in a single language, deliver translations up to 25 languages, and publish local language sites with different, additional or custom content for a variety of regions and countries.
While you may be wrapping up your summer vacation or preparing for a ramp up to a busy fourth quarter of business, the Gilbane team is securing the speakers for an exciting conference Dec. 2 – 4 in Boston. Evaluations of past sessions always give high marks to case studies delivered by users. We have several for the search track but would like a few more. If one of your targets for search is documents stored in SharePoint repositories, your experiences are sure to draw interest.
SharePoint is the most popular new collaboration tool for organizations with a large Microsoft application footprint but it usually resides with multiple other repositories that also need to be searched. So, what search products are being used to retrieve SharePoint content plus other content? A majority of search applications provide a connector to index SharePoint documents and they would not be making that available without a demand. We would like to hear what SharePoint adopters are actively using for search. What are you experiencing? If you would like to participate in the Gilbane Conference, and have experiences you to share, I hope you will get in touch and check out the full program.
On a related note, I was surprised, during my recent research, to discover few identifiable user-groups or support communities for search products. Many young companies launch and sponsor “user-group meetings” to share product information, offer training, and facilitate peer-to-peer networking among their customers. It is a sign of confidence when they do help customers communicate with each other. It signals a willingness to open communication paths the might lead to collective product critiques which, if well organized, can benefit users and vendors. It is also a sign of maturity when companies reach out to encourage customers to connect with each other. May-be some are operating in stealth mode but more should be accessible to interested parties in the marketplace.
Organizing functions are difficult to manage by users on their own professional time, so, having a vendor willing to be the facilitator and host for communication mechanisms is valuable. However, they sometimes need to have customers giving them a nudge to open the prospect of such a group. If you would value participating in a network of others using your selected product, I suggest taking the initiative by approaching your customer account representative.
Communities for sharing tips about any technology are important but so is mutual guidance to help others become more successful with any product’s process management and governance issues. User groups can give valuable feedback to their vendors and spur product usage creativity and efficiency. Finally, as an analyst I would much rather hear straight talk about product experiences from those who are active users, than a filtered version from a company representative. So, please, reach out to your peers and share your story at any opportunity you can. Volunteer to speak at conferences and participate in user groups. The benefits are numerous, the most important being the formation of a strong collective voice.
Over at Government Computer News, Shawn McCarthy offers some thoughts and suggestions.
Marisa Peacock gives our Multilingual Communications report a nice thumbs-up review over on CMS Wire. Marisa writes: “Gilbane has released a report that any organization catering to the global community needs to have a look at.”
You can download the study from our site, or visit our sponsors: Jahia, Jonckers, RedDot, Sajan, Sitecore, SDL Tridion, and Systran.
Day Software (SWX: DAYN) (OTC:DYIHY) announced it has entered into an Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) agreement with Exstream Software, a subsidiary of Hewlett Packard. Under the terms of the agreement, Exstream will bundle Day’s technology – CRX Repository, Communiqué (CQ) Workflow, and CQ User Interface – with its Dialogue and Dialogue Live products, helping customers to build content-centric interactive applications regardless of location, format, or language. Day has also launched a corporate blog and portal designed to encourage communication among those who share ideas and interests around content-related topics. Geared toward software developers, the new resource features news and commentary surrounding JSR 170, the Java Content Repository (JCR) application programming interface (API) for stored content; representational state transfer (REST), open source and other related topics and technologies. http://www.exstream.com, http://www.day.com
Updated September 18
JustSystems has launched a comprehensive educational campaign intended to help technical communicators, LOB managers, and information managers extend the value of structured content outside of its established beachhead in techdoc applications. The campaign, titled “Developing a Strategic Roadmap for Structured Content,” comprises webinars, white papers, and an ROI Blueprint, a tool for identifying the business benefits of structured content throughout the enterprise. Gilbane Group is supporting the campaign with research, content, and webinar participation.
The three webinars look at how companies are leveraging structured content today, or planning to do so in the future. The first event is scheduled for September 11 and focuses on current practice and benchmarking your adoption against leading organizations. Guest speaker is Eric Severson, co-founder and CTO of Flatirons Solutions, the well-regarded professional services firm with deep expertise in content management and XML strategies and applications. Jake Sorofman from JustSystems rounds out the panel.
Register for one or all of the webinars in the series. Attendees will have access to the ROI Blueprint for Structured Content and will receive a Gilbane-authored state-of-the-market commentary after each event.
Update: The recording is now available.
Zoho announced Zoho Share, a central repository that aggregates and lists all business and personal user content published in Zoho Show presentations, Zoho Sheet spreadsheets, and Zoho Writer documents and PDFs. Zoho Writer, Zoho Sheet, and Zoho Show give users several options to share and publish their content, including sharing it with select users, embedding it in a blog or making it public and accessible to anyone online. Published content, however, remains in the individual Zoho applications, with no single point of access to all published content, regardless of type or author. Zoho Share gathers all the Zoho users’ content published in the individual Zoho applications and makes it available from a central interface. When Zoho Business moves out of private beta, Zoho Share will serve as the dashboard for all published content within an organization. When users first arrive at Zoho Share they will find the following tabs across the top of the homepage: Content – displays all presentations, documents, spreadsheets, and PDF files published by Zoho users. Each content type can be sorted by criteria that include featured, recent, popular, top rated, and license based; People – shows all Zoho users who have published content. These content authors can be sorted by top contributors, recent users, and all users. Clicking on an author’s name reveals all content published by that author; My Area – displays all of the individual user’s files, both private and public. Users can also edit their files and publish content that was previously private; Upload – lets users publish desktop files directly to Zoho Share. Users can define the license type for their uploaded content. From the Upload page, users can select from “all rights reserved,” “public domain,” and six variations of “attribution.” Users do not need a Zoho account to view published content on Zoho Share. Publishing content, however, requires a Zoho account as does posting messages and adding comments. http://www.zoho.com, http://www.adventnet.com
