Year: 2008 (Page 13 of 36)

Webinar Series: Structured Content Throughout the Enterprise

August 22, 2008 / Mary Laplante / 0 Comments

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 Announces Zoho Share

August 21, 2008 / NewsShark

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

Gilbane Group Releases New Report on Multilingual Communications

August 20, 2008 / Mary Laplante / 0 Comments

For Immediate Release

Pioneering research combines content and localization/translation management market perspectives to present unique insight into current state of content globalization

Cambridge MA, August 20. Gilbane Group, Inc., the analyst and consulting firm focused on content technologies and their application to high-value business solutions, today announced the publication of its latest research report, Multilingual Communications as a Business Imperative: Why Companies Need to Optimize the Global Content Value Chain.

The study is backed by in-depth qualitative research on how global businesses are creating, managing, and publishing multilingual content. Given that many companies expect growth from multinational revenues, 92% of respondents are concerned about the risks of not improving content globalization processes. The research identifies key challenges, including a gap between strategic business goals and investments in multilingual communications, difficulties in balancing centralized and regional operations, and the lack of integration and interoperability across authoring, content management, localization/translation management, and publishing components. Moreover, the study reveals how industry leaders are addressing these challenges, and provides Gilbane’s recommendations on best practices.

“Global businesses recognize the need to address localization and translation in tandem with content creation and management, but they are often stymied, even overwhelmed, by how to achieve this,” commented Leonor Ciarlone, Senior Analyst, Gilbane Group, and study director for Multilingual Communications. “Our research points to the emergence of what we define as the Global Content Value Chain, a strategy for meeting these challenges. Organizations embracing this strategy are leading the development of much-needed best practices, as we describe in the report.”

Gilbane’s study methodology included in-depth interviews with 40 content and localization/translation management practitioners in multinational organizations. The result is a unified perspective on the full spectrum of multilingual content processes, previously viewed as isolated activities. “Gilbane’s study will educate both language professionals as well as content management professionals,” said Donna Parrish, editor, MultiLingual magazine. “The report should be required reading for any company needing to integrate, automate, and streamline domain-specific processes that are often self-contained today.”

Availability
Multilingual Communications as a Business Imperative: Why Companies Need to Optimize the Global Content Value Chain is available as a free download from the Gilbane Group website. The report is also available from study sponsors Jahia; Jonckers; RedDot, the Open Text Web Solutions Group; Sajan, Inc.; SDL Tridion; Sitecore; and Systran.

About Gilbane Group, Inc.
Gilbane Group, Inc., is an analyst and consulting firm that has been writing and consulting about the strategic use of content and information technologies since 1987. Clients include organizations of all sizes from a wide variety of industries and governments. Gilbane works with the entire community of stakeholders including investors, enterprise buyers of IT, technology suppliers, and other consultant and analyst firms. The firm has organized over 50 educational conferences in North America and Europe. Its widely read newsletter, reports, white papers, case studies and analyst blogs are available at https://gilbane.com.

For More Information
Leonor Ciarlone, Senior Analyst
+1.617.497.9443

Welcome Fred Dalrymple

August 15, 2008 / Frank Gilbane / 0 Comments

Fred is our newest contributor, and has already posted his first blog entry. Fred pokes at the challenging tension in search between intent and context, especially over time as context (or intent) changes. Lynda has also posted about intent, and the subject also came up in discussions of search quality around Udi Manber’s talk at our conference in this past June.

Fred brings the welcome perspective of a serious software developer, and will be blogging on a few different topics, so he may be posting here on on one of our other blogs. Welcome Fred!

Researching Search with Intent Firmly in Control

August 14, 2008 / Lynda Moulton / 1 Comment

I have hit on intent before and our latest member of the Gilbane blog team, Fred Dalrymple has joined the theme with his entry this week. Welcome Fred! You have given me an opening for an already planned topic, how to conduct research for enterprise search tools, those that go beyond the search box. Actually, this guidance is appropriate for the selection of any technology applications.

Getting intent solidly defined is important for so many reasons, many of them relating to solving a business problem and the expected outcomes. Knowing what these are will give you the framework for isolating likely candidates, efficiently. A second critical reason for having strong intent is to stave off project scope creep. As a former vendor, and now consultant, I see this play out repeatedly as product research ensues. Weak backbones in selection team members or flimsiness of their business case leaves openings for vendors to promote additional features, which often distracts from what is really needed.

So, armed with the right skeleton, a strong framework, a core scaffolding you are ready to approach your research systematically. Four paths are open to a study team; I recommend using all of them, in overlapping passes. Discovery about products, product performance in real-world scenarios, vendor business relationships with their clients, and the user community you will be joining are all targets that need to be exploited.

Discovering a user community on-line that might have expressed a potential problem with a vendor or product, should drive you back to do more research to discover potential limitations or why a user might be having a problem that they brought on through inappropriate implementation. Iteration in research for technology requires perseverance and patience. A comment on each path to research might be helpful:

Online research – This requires creativity and the most persistence to verify and validate what you find. I am amazed at how superficially many people read any content. We may be taught that good business writing requires a clear statement in the first paragraph of what follows with a solid summary at the end, but most content does not follow “good” business writing practices. You need to read between the lines, think about what is not being said and ask yourself why, follow every link on the sites of vendors under serious consideration. Look at vendor news notes and press releases to see how much activity is going on with product advances or new installations, and read descriptions of customer implementations to see how closely those deployments match your business need. Finally, search those customer names on the Internet in conjunction with the product name. This may retrieve public content that sheds more light on user experiences.
Professional groups – Professional organizations in which you participate are fertile ground for asking about what others in similar situations to yours are using. As you get closer to a final choice, go back to others you know personally or professionally to get answers to the direct question, “have you had any problems with this product or vendor?” and “what is the benefit of this product for you?”
Societies and academic institutions – These organizations publish content that may have a cost associated. When you consider thousands your organization spends on a selection process (in people time), contracting, licensing, implementation and deployment, it is wise to have a budget of several hundred dollars for reports that give detailed product evaluations. Get recommendations of librarians and peers as to publications’ authoritativeness.
User and analyst blogs and industry publications – The same guidance holds for industry publications as for societies and academic publishers but you will also want to pursue blogs of users and analysts. Users are a great source of discovering tidbits about products and vendors but continue beyond what you discover to see if the comments are isolated or follow a pattern.

This is a longer commentary than I intended but the core of my intent needed flesh, so there it is.

On Crowdsourcing and Social Media: An Interview with Plaxo’s Regina Bustamante

August 12, 2008 / Karl Kadie / 0 Comments

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Regina Bustamante, Director of Globalization with Plaxo, to discuss the company’s content globalization strategy and how Plaxo users are integral to its success. Plaxo offers a suite of online solutions for social networking. Top services are the address book and calendar applications in addition to Pulse, a sharing and networking tool.

KK: How has the growth of global web access affected the adoption and development of your social networking solutions?
RB: Plaxo’s user base continues to grow steadily since we reached the 15 million user mark back in October 2006. As a result, our product release cycles have accelerated from two or three months to just one week. At the same time, Plaxo’s non-English base of users and users with international connections is growing rapidly. Shorter product cycles coupled with user demand for multilingual products made it necessary for us to explore new ways to release products to major markets in local languages.

KK: What model did Plaxo use for its initial localization/translation efforts?
RB: We localized our address book and calendar tools into French, German, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish and Simplified Chinese over a year ago, using LSPs for the initial translations. We then provided early release versions to specific “power users” in each international market who reviewed everything, including the UI and suitability to local cultures.

KK: So Plaxo users provided quality assurance in this effort?
RB: Yes, users were even willing to test and report on features such as sorting, name and address formatting, etc. When Pulse was released with localizations into the same languages, non-English users continued to send suggestions, comments, and to act as informal quality control agents. The involvement of the user community improved the quality of local versions of our software.

KK: The Dutch version, released in July, increased the role of longtime power users, correct?
RB: Absolutely. The Netherlands has quickly become one of the largest markets for Pulse and we expanded the involvement of the user community, relying on a group of long-time Plaxo members for the development of the Dutch glossary.

KK: What’s in store for the future of Plaxo’s localization/translation efforts?
RB: For future product releases, we will move to a crowdsourcing model based on a translation portal we are developing that will enable any Plaxo community user to submit and comment on translations. To ensure high levels of quality, this portal includes separate roles for a language moderator and project manager.

KK: What will be the key to success for this model?
RB: Plaxo’s position as a provider of no-charge consumer software helps us to engage users for localization/translation assistance. The key is to only ask users to help with things that directly benefit them. Our crowdsourcing model is not intended to entirely replace LSPs. For example, we have no plans to use crowdsourcing to translate the corporate website or documents such as the Terms of Service or Privacy Policy.

Citigroup is Bullish on the Kindle

August 12, 2008 / Bill Trippe / 0 Comments

We’ve all wondered about how many Kindle units have sold. One Wall Street analyst is willing to make an estimate:

And Kindle could sell 380,000 units in 2008, more than double what a Citigroup Global Markets research analyst had expected, he wrote yesterday in a research report.
“In its first year, that’s exactly how many iPods were sold,” analyst Mark Mahaney wrote. “Turns out the Kindle is becoming the iPod of the book world.”

Speaking of Quark