Month: October 2008 (Page 2 of 3)

Who are the best speakers on content technology? (cont. from San Francisco)

October 16, 2008 / Clea Durrell

We are honored to to be able to bring you the largest collection of leading practitioners, analysts, and technologists available this year at our San Francisco and Boston conferences. The powerful combination of content technology experts can only be found at Gilbane events. Our faculty at Gilbane Boston 2008, December 2-4th, includes:

Erik Aeyelts Averink, President, SDL Tridion
Nate Aune, President and Founder, Jazkarta
Joseph Bachana, President/Founder, DPCI
Nora Barnes, Professor & Director, Center for Marketing Research, University of MA, Dartmouth
Jay Batson, CEO, Acquia
Geoff Bock, Lead Analyst, Gilbane Group
Noah Broadwater, VP, Information Services, Sesame Workshop
John Carione, Senior Product Marketing Manager for LiveCycle Security Solutions, Adobe
David Carter, Founder & CTO, Awareness Networks
Win Carus, President and Founder, Information Extraction Systems
Jeff Catlin, CEO, Lexalytics Client
Dr. Kyugon Cho, CEO, Fasoo.com
Leonor Ciarlone, Lead Analyst, Gilbane Group
Reid Conrad, CEO, Near-Time
Jeff Cram, Managing Director, ISITE Design
Guy Creese, VP and Research Director, Collaboration and Content Strategies, Burton Group
Andrew Draheim, Principal, Kidd and Draheim Inc.
Patricia Eagan, Senior Manager, Web Communications, The Jackson Laboratory
Michael Edson, Director, Web and New Media Strategy, Smithsonian Institution, Office of the CIO
James Ellis, Web Director, Wisconsin Alumni Association
Ben Elowitz, CEO, Wetpaint
Angela Foster, IT Manager, FedEx.com Development, FedEx
Elizabeth Foughty, Intelligent Data Understanding Research Group, NASA Ames
Aaron R. Fulkerson, CEO and Founder, Mindtouch
Dan Galvez, Senior Vice President, Strategic Alliances, Hedgehog Development
Brad Gandee, VP, Product Marketing and Management, GigaTrust
Chip Gettinger, VP, XML Solutions, SDL Tridion
Frank Gilbane, CEO, Gilbane Group
Paul Gillin, Author and Consultant, New Media Technologies
John Girard, CEO, Clickability
Seth Gottlieb, Principal, Content Here
Yogesh Gupta, President and CEO, FatWire
Heather Hedden, Information Taxonomist, Hedden Information Management
Ulrich Henes, President, Localization Institute
Fred Hollowood, Director Language R&D, Shared Engineering Services, Symantec Corporation
Sophie Hurst, Senior Product Marketing Manager, SDL
Rob Joachim, Info Systems Engineer Lead, MITRE Corp
Karl Kadie, Lead Analyst, Gilbane Group
Ajay Kapur, VP, Product Development, Apps Associates
Ben Kiker, SVP and Chief Marketing Officer, Interwoven
John Kreisa, Director of Product Marketing, Mark Logic Corporation
Mary Laplante, VP Consulting Services, Gilbane Group
David Lee, eBusiness Manager, 3M Company
David Lipsey, Managing Director, Global Practice, Media & Entertainment, FTI Consulting
Glen McInnis, Practice Lead for Enterprise Content Management Solutions, Nonlinear
Curt Monash, Monash Research
Lynda Moulton, Lead Analyst, Gilbane Group
Gary Muddyman, Managing Director and CEO, Conversis
John Newton, CTO and Chairman, Alfresco
Leslie Owens, Analyst, Forrester Research
Natasja H.M. Paulsen, Partner, Ordina Consulting
Steve Paxhia, Lead Analyst, Gilbane Group
Stephen Powers, Senior Analyst, Forrester Research
Sid Probstein, CTO, Attivio
Prabhakar Raghavan, Head of Research, Yahoo
Kathleen Reidy, Senior Analyst, The 451 Group
Bill Rosenblatt, Lead Analyst, Gilbane Group
Shannon Ryan, Co-Founder, President, and CEO, Nonlinear
Andrew Savikas, GM Tools of Change, O’ Reilly Media
Thomas Schaefer, Systems Analyst and Consultant, U.S. General Services Administration
Eric Severson, CTO, Flatirons Solutions
Shawn Shell, Principal, Consejo
Dennis Shirokov, Marketing Manager, FedEx Digital Access Marketing, FedEx
Jerry Silver, Lead Product Manager, EMC/Documentum
Nitish Singh, Assistant Professor of International Business, Boeing Institute of Int. Business, St. Louis University
Marc Solomon, Knowledge Planner, PRTM
Aaron Strout, Vice President of Social Media, mZinga
Dmitri Tcherevik, CTO, Fatwire
Bill Trippe, Lead Analyst, Gilbane Group
Brian Vandeventer, IT Manager, The Hartford
Melissa Webster, Program Vice President, Content & Digital Media Technologies, IDC
Michael Wechner, President, Wyona
Jeff Whatcott, Vice President of Marketing, Acquia
Tony White, Lead Analyst, Gilbane Group
Rob Wiesenberg, President and Founder, Contegra Systems
Aaron Williams, VP, Enterprise Services Community & Co-Innovation Engineering Americas, SAP AG
Nathan Williams, Interactive Director, New Orleans Tourism Marketing Corp

Conference program

Webinar: Component Content Management in Action

October 15, 2008 / Mary Laplante / 0 Comments

November 3, 1:00 pm ET
XML and structured content, by themselves, don’t solve business problems. Their true value lies in what’s possible once content is structured. The right standards frameworks (such as DITA and S1000D), processes, and technologies can advance XML-based business solutions that enable companies to realize value. Component content management (CCM) is proving to be fundamental in scenarios for success.
This webinar is an online panel discussion of “threes”:

three companies in
three industries using CCM for
three different high-value content applications from
three perspectives: customer, technology supplier, and industry analyst.

You’ll hear about business drivers behind CCM, how CCM is deployed, benefits, and lessons learned. Featured speakers are Mark Tiegs, Team Lead, Documentation Systems and Support, Research in Motion; Karen Moser, Manager, Documentation and Localization Services, Research in Motion; Kevin Duffy, XyEnterprise President and CEO; and Bill Trippe from Gilbane.

Register and attend the webinar, and you’ll be among the first to read the new white paper on Component Content Management: How True CCM Technology Drives the Most Compelling Content Initiatives. Moderated by Gilbane Group. Hosted by XyEnterprise.

RSuite User Conference

October 14, 2008 / Bill Trippe / 0 Comments

I’m at the RSuite User Conference. Day 1 is a fairly technical walkthrough of the product where different Really Strategies consultants and technical product folks will be doing a “CMS in a Day.” After an architectural overview, they are walking through content ingestion, workflow and action handlers, editing options, customization options, and content delivery. By the end of the day, the idea is to show an end-to-end publishing solution.

Eliot Kimber is demonstrating the workflow engine now. Later today, Norm Walsh will give a keynote. And Lisa Bos, Really Strategies’ CTO, is master of ceremonies for the day. That’s a lot of XML brain power in one day.

Tomorrow morning, I interview Gary Cosimini from Adobe in a kind of “fireside chat” format where we will delve into the evolution of Adobe’s creative tools and how they handle XML as well as some broader questions of how XML best fits into publishing workflows. With the upcoming release of CS4, this will be a great opportunity for the audience to hear straight from the horse’s mouth about Adobe’s direction. It will also help put in context Really Strategies’ recent announcement about their Creative Suite Connector for RSuite.

What Determines a Leader in the Enterprise Search Market?

October 9, 2008 / Lynda Moulton / 5 Comments

Let’s agree that most if not all “enterprise search” is really about point solutions within large corporations. As I have written elsewhere, the “enterprise” is almost always a federation of constituencies, each with their own solutions for content applications and that includes search. If there is any place that we find truly enterprise-wide application of search, it is in small and medium organizations (SMBs). This would include professional service firms (consultancies and law firms), NGOs, many non-profits, and young R&D companies. There are plenty of niche solutions for SMBs and they are growing.

I bring this up because the latest Gartner “magic quadrant” lists Microsoft (MS) as the “leader” in enterprise search; this is the same place Gartner has positioned Fast Search & Transfer in the past. Whether this is because Fast’s assets are now owned by MS or because Gartner really believes that Microsoft is the leader, I still beg to strongly differ.

I have been perplexed by the Microsoft/Fast deal since it was announced earlier this year because, although Fast has always offered a lot of search technology, I never found it to be a compelling solutions for any of my clients. Putting aside the huge upfront capital cost for licenses, the staggering amount of development work, and time to deployment there were other concerns. I sensed a questionable commitment to an on-going, sustainable, unified and consistent product vision with supporting services. I felt that any client of mine would need very deep pockets indeed to really make a solid value case for Fast. Most of my clients are already burned out on really big enterprise deployments of applications in the ERP and CRM space, and understand the wisdom of beginning with smaller value-achievable, short-term projects on which they can build.

Products that impress me as having much more “out-of-the-box” at a more reasonable cost are clearly leaders in their unique domains. They have important clients achieving a good deal of benefit at a reasonable cost, in a short period of time. They have products that can be installed, implemented and maintained internally without a large staff of administrators, and they have good reputations among their clients for responsiveness and a cohesive series of roll-outs. Several have as many or more clients than Fast ever had (if we ever know the real number). Coveo, Exalead, ISYS, Recommind, Vivisimo, and X1 are a few of a select group that are marking a mark in their respective niches, as products ready for action with a short implementation cycle (weeks or months not years).

Autonomy and Endeca continue to bring value to very large projects in large companies but are not plug-and-play solutions, by any means. Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft offer search solutions of a very different type with a heavy vendor or third-party service requirement. Google Search Appliance has a much larger installed base than any of these but needs serious tuning and customization to make it suitable to enterprise needs. Take the “leadership” designation with a big grain of salt because what leads on the charts may be exactly what bogs you down. There are no generic, one-suit-fits-all enterprise search solutions including those in the “leaders” quadrant.

Webinar: Structured Content for Innovation: Organize Today to Exploit Tomorrow’s Promises

October 9, 2008 / Mary Laplante / 0 Comments

Thursday, October 23, 2:00 pm ET
Third in a series of webinars on developing a strategic roadmap for structured content
Featured speakers from the first two webinars on the ROI Blueprint discuss how structured content can bring real innovation to business applications throughout the enterprise.
Participants are:

Geoff Bock, Gilbane Group
Eric Severson, Flatirons Solutions
Bruce Sharpe, JustSystems
Dale Waldt, aXtive Minds

Registration is open. Recordings of previous webinars are available if you want to get up to speed on the larger discussion of enterprise value of structured content. Moderated by Gilbane Group.

Sponsored by JustSystems.

Here and There

October 9, 2008 / Bill Trippe / 1 Comment

So a number of client projects recently have me looking for certain info and tools. If you have some thoughts about any of these, please do get in touch or post a comment here.
In no particular order:

Does anyone have experience with the XSL-FO stylesheets that have been created for previewing content encoded with the NLM article DTD? In addition, has anyone extended the stylesheets to work with the book tag set?
In a related note, has anyone tried the Word 2007 add-in for the NLM DTD? Experiences? Good, bad, or indifferent? I also wonder if anyone has tried extending it to reflect customizations to the DTD/schema?
Finally, I am looking to talk to users who have created DITA content with Microsoft Word, either one of the commercial add-ins like Content Mapper or a custom add-in.

Publishers v. Google (Updated)

October 9, 2008 / Bill Trippe / 0 Comments

Publisher’s Weekly is reporting that a settlement might be at hand.

Nearly three years after publishers filed a lawsuit against Google over its controversial program to scan books from library shelves, a settlement could be near. Although rumors of a settlement have flared up and died down intermittently over the years, sources this week confirmed for Library Journal and Publishers Weekly that talk of a final agreement has indeed heated up, and one publishing insider with knowledge of the talks confirmed that a settlement announcement was “imminent.” Asked if the broad strokes of a final settlement with Google had indeed been reached, Association of American Publishers spokesperson Judith Platt suggested that the rumor mill was once again starting its run up to Frankfurt, which begins October 15. A Google spokesperson said the company does not comment on speculation.

If Google does stay in the scanning business, I wish someone would teach them how to scan physical copies of books to anything approach industry standard quality.

UPDATE (10/28/08): Wired News has a brief report on the settlement. The notion of a Book Rights Registry caught my eye. The Google Books website has a brief explanation of the settlement.

The World is Curved

October 8, 2008 / Leonor Ciarlone / 0 Comments

The announcement of this new book caught my attention for a number of reasons, many obviously due to the state of the financial markets. More attuned to the Globalization practice is that we noted in our Multilingual Communications as a Business Imperative report that:

A common observation made during industry discussion of Internet-driven opportunities is that the proliferation of the worldwide web has made the business world “flat.” In other words, companies of all sizes can compete on a level playing field wherein everyone has the same access to technology and information. While our study respondents acknowledge the “flattening world” as Thomas Friedman has described it, they also recognize that different geographies and cultures have varying and distinct expectations. Thus, generalized information access does not equate to generalized information delivery. From this perspective, a flattening world requires far deeper levels of content relevancy, localization, and personalization than ever before. From this perspective, “one size fits all” is hardly the recipe for success in the global economy.

Risking the wrath of Friedman’ites, we contend that as far as multilingual communications are concerned, the world is most definitely not flat. Giving Friedman his due, David Smick contends that as far as global financial markets are concerned, the world is most definitely curved, where one “can’t see over the horizon and sight lines are limited.” Describing globalization as the great paradox of our time, this review quickly convinced me to put it on the “must read” list.