Month: May 2009 (Page 1 of 4)

Gilbane Boston call for papers

May 28, 2009 / Frank Gilbane / 0 Comments

Gilbane San Francisco is next week, and soon after we’ll be switching our energies to our annual Boston conference. The 2009 dates are December 1-3, and we are returning to the Westin Copley hotel for our 6th year. The first important date is the call for papers deadline, which is June 15th. Instructions for submitting speaking proposals can be found at: https://gilbane.com/speaker_guidelines.html.

The track structure this year will be similar to what we are doing in San Francisco. We are still fiddling with the exact names and descriptions, but currently the tracks are:

Web & Business Engagement
Managing Collaboration with Colleagues and Customers
Integrating, Searching & Publishing Enterprise Content
Content Infrastructure Strategies

We’ll be continuing our focus on enterprise use of social software and how it integrates into various business applications. We’ll also be adding more coverage of mobile content strategies and technologies. The mobile channel is no longer just for pure consumer applications, but has a critical role to play in mainstream business applications, for collaborating and content delivery, and much more. "Smartphone" platforms are rapidly becoming at least as important as desktops, notebooks and netbooks. Some specific technology areas at the Boston conference will be:

Web Content Management
Enterprise Social Software
Enterprise Mobile Content
Authoring & Publishing
Content Globalization
XML & XBRL
Enterprise & Site Search
Semantic Technologies
Enterprise Content Management

The preliminary Gilbane Boston 2009 site is live at http://gilbaneboston.com/. If you have questions about speaking proposals email us at speaking@gilbane.com.

UPDATE: ~~We have just created a Twitter account for the conference:~~ ~~http://twitter.com/gilbaneboston, and we’ll use #gilbaneboston for the hashtag.~~ We are going to use our main twitter account for Boston at http://twitter.com/gilbane .

If a Vendor Spends Enough on Full-page Ads: Ink will Follow

May 27, 2009 / Lynda Moulton / 1 Comment

Earlier comments in this blog referred to Autonomy ads in Information Week. They have continued throughout early 2009 with just the latest proclaiming “Autonomy Dominates Enterprise Search” in bold red and black, two of my favorite, eye-catching colors. Having read the publication for over ten years, I notice things that are different. Seeing a search company repeatedly showing up keeps me noticing because they are the first to spend on major advertising like this in an IT publication.

This week the predictable happened, it was an article by Information Week‘s Sr. VP focusing on Autonomy’s terrific business run in a tough economy. Fair enough – it happens all the time for big spenders.

I just want to remind readers that if you are a small unit in a large organization or a small or medium business, there are dozens of enterprise search solutions that will serve you extremely well, with much lower cost of ownership and startup effort than Autonomy. You do not need the biggest or fastest growing company’s products to get good or even excellent solutions. Furthermore, the chances of getting superior customer support and services from a more modest company, which is focused exclusively on search excellence, are much better.

Be sure to check out the offerings at the Gilbane Conference in San Francisco next week. A lot more guidance and good case studies will give you an earful of what else to consider. The search headliners at the conference with Hadley Reynolds moderating are:

E8. Search Survival Guide: Delivering Great Results
Speakers: Randy Woods, Co-founder & Executive VP, non-linear creations, Best Practices for Tuning Enterprise Search and Miles Kehoe, President, New Idea Engineering

E9/I5. The Next Big Thing: Tomorrow’s Search Revealed
Speakers: Stephen Arnold, ArnoldIT, What You Need to Know About Google Dataspaces and Jeff Fried, Senior Product Manager, Microsoft

E10/I6. Bringing it All Together: Perils and Pitfalls of Search Federation
Speakers: Helen Mitchell Curtis, Senior Program Director of Enterprise Solutions, MacFadden, Federated Search in a Disparate Environment, Larry Donahue, Chief Operating Officer & Corporate Counsel, Deep Web Technologies, Federated Search: True Enterprise Search and Jeff Fried, Senior Product Manager, Microsoft

E11/I7. The Special Case of Categories – and Where To Find Them
Speakers: Joseph Busch, Founder, Taxonomy Strategies, Taxonomy Validation, and Arje Cahn, CTO, Hippo, Find What You Need in Unstructured Content with the Help of Others (and your CMS): Demo of Wikipedia with Faceted Search

E12/I8. It’s Easier with Structure: Leveraging Markup for Better Search
Speakers: Dianne Burley, Industry Specialist, Nstein Technologies, Semantic Search and J. Brooke Aker, CEO, Expert System, A 3-Step Walk Through ECM Using Semantics

E13/I9. Improving SharePoint Search & Navigation with a Taxonomy and Metadata

Have a question for our analyst panel?

May 26, 2009 / Frank Gilbane / 0 Comments

Looking forward to seeing many of you next week at Gilbane San Francisco. Whether you will be there or not, you can suggest questions to ask our analyst panel. Each of the panelists have specific areas of expertise covering web content management, web governance, enterprise social software and social media, collaboration, and enterprise search. The panel is a keynote session after the two keynote presentations from Microsoft and Adobe, so we’ll also be covering reactions to those. You can submit your questions directly to me via a comment, email, or twitter (DM or post using the hashtag #gilbanesf).

Registration for the conference is still open and will be available on-site. If you register in advance you can still get a $200. discount using GILBANE as the discount code. There is no charge for the keynotes or the technology demonstrations or product labs.

K2. Keynote Analyst Panel
We invite industry analysts from many different firms to speak at all our events to make sure our conference attendees hear differing opinions from a wide variety of expert sources. A second, third, fourth or fifth opinion will ensure you don’t make ill-informed decisions about critical content and information technologies or strategies. This session will be a lively, interactive debate guaranteed to be both informative and fun.
Moderator: Frank Gilbane
Panelists:
Jeremiah Owyang, Senior Analyst, Social Computing, Forrester
Hadley Reynolds, Research Director, Search & Digital Marketplace Technologies, IDC
Larry Hawes, Lead Analyst, Collaboration and Enterprise Social Software, Gilbane Group
Lisa Welchman, Founding Partner, WelchmanPierpoint

Webinar: Multilingual Product Content at FICO

May 25, 2009 / Mary Laplante / 0 Comments

June 17, 11:00 am ET

The challenges facing FICO, a leading supplier of decision management analytics, applications and tools, will sound familiar to global organizations: the need to streamline product and content development lifecycles, support global expansion with accurate and timely localization and translation processes, and satisfy customers worldwide with consistent, quality experience. What makes FICO’s story unique is its strategic and proactive approach to addressing them.

With a successful business case based on reuse as a “first principle,” FICO is building an enterprise content infrastructure that includes XML and DITA, component content management, translation memory and terminology management, and automated publishing. Learn how FICO is aligning global content practices with the company’s business goals and objectives. If you need to spark that “aha!” moment within your organization, you won’t want to miss this webinar event. Topics:

Reuse as the tipping point: the synergies of component approaches to product and content development
Implementing an end-to-end global information strategy
The value of content agility in FICO’s global business strategy

Speakers:

Leonor Ciarlone, Senior Analyst, Gilbane Group
Carroll Rotkel, Director, Product Documentation, FICO
Howard Schwartz, Ph.D., VP Content Management, SDL Trisoft

Registration is open. Sponsored by SDL.

Will The SEC Be Ready For Its Own XBRL Mandate?

May 24, 2009 / Neal Hannon / 0 Comments

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is getting a bit behind on XBRL. Since publishing the final rule in the federal register (http://www.sec.gov/rules/final/2009/33-9002.pdf) on February 10, 2009, the SEC has been preparing for the first official filing.

gs in XBRL. According to the guidelines, large accelerated filers with a world-wide capital float greater than $5 billion USD as of June 30, 2008 are required to begin filing XBRL with the first quarterly filing for periods ending after June 15, 2009.

In preparation for the new filings, XBRL US released the 2009 version of the US GAAP XBRL taxonomy. The new taxonomy contains guidance on the latest FASB pronouncements (FAS 160, 161, 163, 141 for example) that are required for most filers after December 15, 2008. FASB’s timetable requires companies to adopt the new Financial Accounting Standards and have their SEC filing for 2009 reflect the changes.

The new standards were published long after the present official XBRL 2008 US GAAP taxonomy. In other words, the new 2009 US GAAP taxonomy, which does incorporate all filing requirements for US GAAP as of December 31, 2009, is required for the filing of correct XBRL. XBRL US has released the 2009 taxonomy and they are now available on their web site but they are not available on the SEC’s website.

As of May 24, 2009, the taxonomies listed on the SEC website as official (see http://www.sec.gov/info/edgar/edgartaxonomies.shtml ) are dated March 31, 2008. This means that any filing entity subject to the new FASB regulations will not have an official taxonomy with which to file. In fact, a few companies have already submitted XBRL to the SEC using the new 2009 taxonomy only to receive a swift rejection. The EDGAR system is not yet ready to accept the 2009 taxonomy and will not be until it is announced and listed on the SEC’s website. The XBRL viewer will also not accept the 2009 US GAAP taxonomy leaving filers with no means to validate their XBRL.

Will the SEC correct this problem? Of course they will. In the meantime, individual filers and filing agents are without any official means of determining the correctness of filings. Companies that are subject to the new FAS pronouncements are encouraged to prepare their filings with the new 2009 taxonomy and wait for SEC notification. Let’s hope that day arrives very soon.

Amazon Updates Kindle for iPhone

May 20, 2009 / NewsShark

Amazon.com announced the latest version of their Kindle for iPhone application. The updated application is now available for download from the iTunes App Store. Kindle for iPhone 1.1 includes landscape support, tap to turn a page, alternate background and text color selections to improve reading comfort in low light conditions, and image zoom capability. The Amazon Kindle for iPhone app allows customers access to more than 280,000 Kindle books wirelessly on their iPhones, the ability to access their entire library of previously purchased Kindle books stored on Amazon’s servers, and adjust the text size of books. http://amazon.com, http://www.apple.com/iphone/

Multilingual Communities: Engagement Through Language and Localization

May 19, 2009 / Mary Laplante

Join us next month for:

S8. Multilingual Communities: Engagement Through Language and Localization

Where: Gilbane San Francisco Conference, Westin Market St.
When: Thursday, June 4, 2009, 8:30am – 9:30am

Lack of human and financial resources to address demand for localized content are common barriers to successful global business expansion. This session focuses on approaches to tapping into the multilingual resources available within communities of dedicated users to overcome these obstacles. Case study presentations show you how social networks are leveraged to create multilingual content that drives global revenues and user growth in two community-based businesses, iStockphoto and Second Life, a virtual world created by its participants.

Moderator: Mary Laplante, VP Client Services & Senior Analyst, Gilbane Group
Speakers:
Michael Smith, Language Specialist, Localization Team, iStockphoto
Localizing for the Crowd: Growing Internationally Through Crowdsourcing
Danica Brinton, Director, International Strategies and Localization, Linden Lab

Complete conference program: http://gilbanesf.com/conference_program.html
Pre-conference workshop descriptions: http://gilbanesf.com/workshops.html

Is Washington Serious about XBRL?

May 17, 2009 / Neal Hannon / 0 Comments

The Government Information Transparency Act (H.R. 2392), introduced May 14 by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), would standardize the collection of business information throughout agencies. It would require agencies to use a single data standard known as eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) and require that collected information be made readily available for public access.

Of course, this begs the question of what data will be collected. Once decided, a taxonomy can be easily assembled that would collect the data in a uniform way. Software companies in the XBRL space have developed web-based html driven fill in the blank data collection devices that convert cell entries into XBRL unseen by the end user. This requires a mind shift from a report-based approach to a data-based approach to receiving feedback on TARP projects. It also requires government agencies to centralize their data requests rather than each agency develop their own required paper-based reports.

The key again is to formulate the taxonomy, collect the data, then develop reports using a common data repository. To see how this approach can work, take a look the Dutch Taxonomy Project ) or the Bank of Japan project detailed here http://www.xbrl.org/CaseStudies/BoJ_XBRL_06.pdf