I am happy to announce that long time colleague Dale Waldt has joined us officially as a Senior Consultant. Dale has worked with us on a few projects over the years, and I have known him since the early days of SGML when he was at the IRS (who were early supporters of SGML). Dale also spent many years as VP Product Technology at RIA, the tax publishing business unit of the Thomson Corporation designing SGML and XML applications, and has spent the last few years helping organizations understand the business benefits of, and implement, XML strategies. We’ll post Dale’s bio shortly, but Dale will be at Gilbane Boston next week, along with most of us, where someone at out booth can help you track him down to meet him.
Dale is obviously steeped in XML expertise, and he is also a great communicator. Dale will be joining our XML practice, but will also be helping out in other areas where he has expertise including content management, digital asset management, and social media.
Dale’s email address is: dale@gilbane.com and his phone extension is 155.
Welcome Dale!
Year: 2008 (Page 4 of 36)
We’re looking forward to a great conference, and especially excited for the globalization track. Although our state-side audience is gearing up for turkey dinners, there’s still time get a great education at Gilbane Boston next week!
Register here for the full conference or for free – yes, I said free – access to the Technology Showcase, keynotes, and sponsor reception.
Gilbane Boston Content Globalization Track
Special Keynote 2: Foundations for Global Content Value Chain Strategies
Moderator: Mary Laplante, Vice President, Consulting, Gilbane Group
Speakers:
David Lee, Manager eBusiness, 3M Company
Nicholas McMahon, VP & General Manager, Jonckers
Leonor Ciarlone, Lead Analyst, Gilbane Group
GCM-1: Optimizing the Global Content Value Chain: Focus on Product Content
Moderator: Leonor Ciarlone, Lead Analyst, Gilbane Group
Speakers:
Fred Hollowood, Director Language R&D, Shared Engineering Services, Symantec Corporation
Natasja H.M. Paulsen, Partner, Ordina Consulting
Sophie Hurst, Senior Product Marketing Manager, SDL
GCM-2: Optimizing the Global Content Value Chain: Focus on Brand Content
Moderator: Karl Kadie, Senior Analyst, Gilbane Group
Speakers:
Gary Muddyman, Managing Director and CEO, Conversis
Anne Casson, Principal Consultant, Content Management Practice, Molecular
GCM-3: Designing Culturally Customized Web Sites: The Next Localization Frontier
Moderator: Ulrich Henes, President, Localization Institute
Speaker:
Nitish Singh, Assistant Professor of International Business at Boeing Institute of Int. Business, St. Louis University
I always took footnotes for granted. You need them as you’re writing, you insert an indicator at the right place and it points the reader to an amplification, a citation, an off-hand comment, or something — but it’s out of the way, a distraction to the point you’re trying to make.
Some documents don’t need them, but some require them (e.g., scholarly documents, legal documents). In those documents, the footnotes contain such important information that, as Barry Bealer suggests in When footnotes are the content, “the meat [is] in the footnotes.”
The web doesn’t make it easy to represent footnotes. Footnotes on the Web argues that HTML is barely up to the task of presenting footnotes in any effective form.
But if you were to recreate the whole thing from scratch, without static paper as a model, how would you model footnotes?
In a document, a footnote is composed of two pieces of related information. One is the point that you’re trying to make, typically a new point. The other is some pre-existing reference material that presumably supports your point. If it is always the new material that points at the existing, supporting material, then we’re building an information taxonomy bottom up — with the unfortunate property that entering at higher levels will prevent us from seeing lower levels through explicitly-stated links.
To be fair, there are good reasons for connections to be bidirectional. Unidirectional links are forgivable for the paper model, with its inherently temporal life. But the WWW is more malleable, and bidirectional links don’t have to be published at the same time as the first end of the link. In this sense, HTML’s linking mechanism, the ‘<a href=”over_there”>’ construct is fundamentally broken. Google’s founders exploited just this characteristic of the web to build their company on a solution to a problem that needn’t have been.
And people who have lived through the markup revolution from the days of SGML and HyTime know that it shouldn’t have been.
But footnotes still only point bottom up. Fifteen to twenty years on, many of the deeper concepts of the markup revolution are still waiting to flower.
We’ll be covering a chunk of the search landscape at the Gilbane Conference next week. While there are nominally over 100 search solutions that target some aspect of enterprise search, there will be plenty to learn from the dozen or so case studies and tool options described. Commentary and examples include: Attivio, Coveo, Exalead, Google Search Appliance (GSA), IntelliSearch, Lexalytics, Lucene, Oracle Secure Enterprise Search, Thunderstone and references to others. Our speakers will cue us into the current state of the search as it is being implemented. Several exhibitors are also on site to demonstrate their capabilities and they represent some of the best. Check out the program lineup below and try to make it to Boston to hear those with hands-on experience.
EST-1: Plug-and Play: Enterprise Experiences with Search Appliances
- So you want to implement an enterprise search solution? Speaker: Angela A. Foster, FedEx Services, FedEx.com Development, and Dennis Shirokov, Marketing Manager, FedEx Digital Access Marketing.
- The Make or Buy Decision at the U.S. General Services Admin. Speaker: Thomas Schaefer, Systems Analyst and Consultant, U.S. General Services Administration
- Process and Architecture for Implementing GSA at MITRE. Robert Joachim, Info Systems Engr, Lead, The MITRE Corporation.
EST-2: Search in the Enterprise When SharePoint is in the Mix
- Enterprise Report Management: Bringing High Value Content into the Flow of Business Action. Speaker: Ajay Kapur, VP of Product Development, Apps Associates
- Content Supply? Meet Knowledge Demand: Coveo SharePoint integration. Speaker: Marc Solomon, Knowledge Planner, PRTM.
- In Search of the Perfect Search: Google Search on the Intranet. Speaker: June Nugent, Director of Corporate Knowledge Resources, NetScout Systems,
EST-3: Open Source Search Applied in the Enterprise
- Context for Open Source Implementations. Speaker: Leslie Owen, Analyst, Forrester Research
- Intelligent Integration: Combining Search and BI Capabilities for Unified Information Access. Speaker: Sid Probstien, CTO, Attivio
EST-4: Search Systems: Care and Feeding for Optimal Results
- Getting Off to a Strong Start with Your Search Taxonomy. Speaker: Heather Hedden, Principal Hedden Information Management
- Getting the Puzzle Pieces to Fit; Finding the Right Search Solution(s) Patricia Eagan, Sr. Mgr, Web Communications, The Jackson Laboratory.
- How Organizations Need to Think About Search. Speaker: Rob Wiesenberg, President & Founder, Contegra Systems
EST-5: Text Analytics/Semantic Search: Parsing the Language
- Overview and Differentiators: Text Analytics, Text Mining and Semantic Technologies. Jeff Catlin, CEO, Lexalytics
- Reality and Hype in the Text Retrieval Market. Curt Monash, President, Monash Research.
- Two Linguistic Approaches to Search: Natural Language Processing and Concept Extraction. Speaker: Win Carus, President and Founder, Information Extraction Systems
Exhibitors with a Search Focus:
Across Systems, a provider of corporate translation management systems and an independent linguistic supply chain technology, is exhibiting at the 5th annual Gilbane Boston Conference. Across will demonstrate its recently released Language Portal Solution, as well as an integrated solution for website localization. The enterprise-level Language Portal enables implementation of corporate intranet Web portals for all language-related issues for large-scale organizations and multinational corporations in a single environment. In addition, Across has cooperated on an integration of the Across Language Server with the Straker ShadoCMS v8.5 Web content management system, which will also be demonstrated. The CMS integration provides an automated process for Website localization that includes content creation, translation management, publishing and handling of dynamic multilingual Web content. Across offers an independent technology without translation and localization services. Enterprise customers and language service providers interested in meeting with Across to discuss translation management needs are invited to make an appointment through the form on the company’s website.
In tough economic times it is tempting to over-emphasize cost savings. A better approach is to consider cost savings if necessary, but to develop a strategy to grow your revenues first if you can. This may mean some re-deploying rather than cutting. One important path to growth is to ensure your products are available and appealing to a broader, international market. Below is a sample of what we are covering in our track on managing global content next week at Gilbane Boston to help you learn how, or how to do it better.
GCM-1: Optimizing the Global Content Value Chain: Focus on Product Content
Wednesday, December 3rd, 2:00pm, Westin Copley, Boston
Product content includes technical documentation as well as the content that lives with a product or service in many formats and contexts, including pre-sales, post-sales, aftermarket, training, and service. The global economy adds languages as yet another output to the traditional multichannel formula, increasing content volume due to the nuances of dialect and culture. This session discusses how to design GCVCs that integrate content and localization/translation technologies to support single-sourcing, simultaneous product shipment programs, and alignment with product lifecycle management or product data management systems. Speakers share current best practices and provide insight into what’s coming in the next wave of people, processes and technologies for multilingual product content.
Moderator: Leonor Ciarlone, Lead Analyst, Gilbane Group
Speakers:
- Fred Hollowood, Director Language R&D, Shared Engineering Services, Symantec Corporation
- Natasja H.M. Paulsen, Partner, Ordina Consulting
- Sophie Hurst, Senior Product Marketing Manager, SDL
We have always had some kind of an executive panel where senior managers from content managementvendors are questioned on their views of what is happening technology and trend-wise. This is not so much a “face-off” as it is an interactive discussion aimed at providing the audience a chance to hear the different world views of competing suppliers. Understanding the visions behind the marketing, product development, and partnership activity of vendors is at least as important as comparing a feature list and watching demos. Of course, you’ll want to see the demos of these and all the other vendors at Gilbane Boston as well.
WCM-3: Web Content “Management State of the Industry”
Thursday December 4th 11:00am, Westin Copley, Boston
This distinguished panel of technology and market experts will discuss their perspectives on the three or four most important concerns of business managers and IT professionals in planning for and executing WCM initiatives over the next year. The panelists are chosen based on their depth of knowledge within WCM and their ability to identify, analyze, and articulate what the current key concerns are for WCM customers. This interactive discussion will help attendees to identify and address potential liabilities in their own WCM strategies as well as to understand what leading practitioners and technology suppliers envision in their own project/product roadmaps.
Moderator: Tony White, Lead Analyst, WCM, Gilbane Group
Speakers:
* Erik Aeyelts Averink, President, SDL Tridion
* John Girard, CEO, Clickability
* Ben Kiker, SVP and Chief Marketing Officer, Interwoven
* John Newton, CTO & Chairman, Alfresco
* Dmitri Tcherevik, CTO, Fatwire
When you look for an e-mail you sent last week, a vendor account rep’s phone number, a PowerPoint presentation you received from a colleague in the Paris office, a URL to an article recommended for reading before the next Board meeting, or background on a company project you have been asked to manage, you are engaged in search in, about, or for your enterprise. Whether you are working inside applications that you have used for years, or simply perusing the links on a decade’s old corporate intranet, trying to find something when you are in the enterprise doing its work, you are engaging with a search interface.
Dissatisfaction comes from the numbers of these interfaces and the lack of cohesive roadmap to all there is to be found. You already know what you know and what you need to know. Sometimes you know how to find what you need to know but more often you don’t know and stumble through a variety of possibilities up to and including asking someone else how to find it. That missing roadmap is more than an annoyance; it is a major encumbrance to doing your job and top management does not get it. They simply won’t accept that one or two content roadmap experts (overhead) could be saving many people-years of company time and lost productivity.
In most cases, the simple notion of creating clear guidelines and signposts to enterprise content is a funding showstopper. It takes human intelligence to design and build that roadmap and put the technology aids in place to reveal it. Management will fund technology but not the content architects, knowledge “mappers” and ongoing gatekeepers to stay on top of organizational change, expansions, contractions, mergers, rule changes and program activities that evolve and shift perpetually. They don’t want infrastructure overhead whose primary focus, day-in and day-out, will be observing, monitoring, communicating, and thinking about how to serve up the information that other workers need to do their jobs. These people need to be in place as the “black-boxes” that keep search tools in tip-top operating form.
Last week I commented on the products that will be featured in the Search Track at Gilbane Boston, Dec. 3rd and 4th.
What you will learn about these tools is going to be couched in case studies that reveal the ways in which search technology is leveraged by people who think a lot about what needs to be found and how search needs to work in their enterprises. They will talk about what tools they use, why and what they are doing to get search to do its job. I’ve asked the speakers to tell their stories and based on my conversations with them in the past week, that is what we will hear, the reality!
