Jive has announced Jive Market Engagement, a new solution that combines the power of social media monitoring with Social Business Software. Jive’s Market Engagement Solution aims to help organizations implement a unified social media strategy to interact with customers. The solution helps to socialize observations from Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and other online sources to move faster in the moment of pain or the moment of opportunity. While a small percentage of organizations use monitoring tools, most companies rely on a patchwork of alerts, people, and email to stay on top of conversations. While these approaches may help organizations listen in on the river of conversations occurring across the social web, they certainly don’t allow companies to measure, share and engage with insights in a productive and timely way. Organizations should be able to listen, measure, engage and share insights using Jive Market Engagement to identify real-time issues, collaborate with a set of colleagues internally and ultimately more and engage in active dialogues with customers and influencers. The Jive Market Engagement Solution is designed to help organizations proactively monitor brand or product issues and competitive threats; enable quick collaboration on appropriate responses or interventions; and elevate and broaden the social conversations with a company. The “war room” environment allows for rapid decision- making from the right people within the organization. These observations are then consolidated into market summary reports, what Jive calls “Viewpoints.” Viewpoints can be shared within an organization to foster collaboration and to develop and implement appropriate responses. Jive Market Engagement also provides the ability to analyze the effectiveness of those responses. www.jivesoftware.com/
Day: September 15, 2009
Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) and Omniture, Inc. (Nasdaq:OMTR) announced the two companies have entered into a definitive agreement for Adobe to acquire Omniture in a transaction valued at approximately $1.8 billion on a fully diluted equity-value basis. Under the terms of the agreement, Adobe will commence a tender offer to acquire all of the outstanding common stock of Omniture for $21.50 per share in cash. By combining Adobe’s content creation tools and clients with Omniture’s Web analytics, measurement and optimization technologies Adobe will deliver solutions intended to enhance engaging experiences and e-commerce across all digital content, platforms and devices. For designers, developers and online marketers, an integrated workflow, with optimization capabilities embedded in the creation tools, will streamline the creation and delivery of relevant content and applications. This optimization will help advertisers and advertising agencies, publishers, and e-tailers to realize greater ROI from their digital media investments and improve their end users’ experiences. http://www.adobe.com http://www.omniture.com
OpenLogic, Inc. and Nuxeo have announced they are partnering to provide top to bottom support on an ECM stack, which includes Nuxeo’s Enterprise Platform, the JBoss application server and the PostgreSQL database. By supporting a specific stack of technologies, Nuxeo and OpenLogic are offering support to businesses of all sizes for a large open source ECM alternative that rivals the depth of functionality provided by proprietary vendors. OpenLogic is adding Nuxeo to the OpenLogic Certified Library, which contains a wide range of open source applications and infrastructure. Both OpenLogic and Nuxeo will sell and provide front line support for the fully integrated Nuxeoenterprise content management Stack, which includes JBoss and PostgreSQL. Support is available at a variety of service levels. http://www.openlogic.com / http://www.nuxeo.com
O’Reilly’s Gov 2.0 events took place last week. We’ve had some time to think about what the current wave of activity means to buyers and adopters of content technologies.
Both the Expo and Summit programs delivered a deluge of examples of exciting new approaches to connecting consumers of government services with the agencies and organizations that provide them.
- At the Expo on Sept 8, 25 speakers from organizations like NASA, TSA, US EPA, City of Santa Cruz, Utah Department of Public Safety, and the US Coast Guard provided five-minute overviews of their 2.0 applications in a sometimes dizzying fast-paced format.
- Sunlight Labs sponsored an Apps for America challenge that featured finalists who combined federal content available on Data.gov and open source software in some intriguing applications, including DataMasher, which enables you to mash up sources such as stats on numbers of high school graduates and guns per household.
- The Summit on Sept 9 and 10 featured more applications plus star-status speakers including Aneesh Chopra, the US’s first CTO operating under the Federal Office of Science and Technology Policy; Vinton Cerf, currently VP and evangelist at Google; and Mitch Kapor.
A primary program theme was “government as platform,” with speakers suggesting and debating just what that means. There was much thoughtful discussion, if not consensus. Rather than report, interested readers can search Twitter hash tags #gov20e and #gov20s for comments.
From the first speaker on, we were immediately struck by the rapid pace of change in government action and attitude about content and data sharing. Our baseline for comparison is Gilbane’s last conference on content applications within government and non-profit agencies in June 2007. In presentations and casual conversations with attendees, it was clear that most organizations were operating as silos. There was little sharing or collaboration within and among organizations. Many attendees expressed frustration that this was so. When we asked what could be done to fix the problem, we distinctly remember one person saying that connecting with other content managers just within her own agency would be a huge improvement.
Fast forward a little over two years to last week’s Gov2.0 events. Progress towards internal collaboration, inter-agency data sharing, and two-way interaction between government and citizens is truly remarkable. At least three factors have created a pefect storm of conditions: the current administration’s vision and mandate for open government, broad acceptance of social interaction tools at the personal and organizational level, and technology readiness in the form of open source software that makes it possible to experiment at low cost and risk.
Viewing the events through Gilbane’s content-centric lens, we offer three takeaways:
- Chopra indicated that the formal Open Government directives to agencies, to be released in several weeks, will include the development of “structured schedules” for making agency data available in machine-readable format. As Tim O’Reilly said while interviewing Chopra, posting “a bunch of PDFs” will not be sufficient for alignment with the directives. As a result, agencies will be accelerating the adoption of XML and the transformation of publishing practices to manage structured content. As a large buyer of content technologies and services, government agencies are market influencers. We will be watching carefully for the impact of Open Government initiatives on the broader landscape for content technologies.
- There was little mention of the role of content management as a business practice or technology infrastructure. This is not surprising, given that Gov2.0 wasn’t about content management. And while the programs comprised lots of show-and-tell examples, most were very heavy on show and very light on tell. But it does raise a question about how these applications will be managed, governed, and made sustainable and scalable. Add in the point above — that structured content will now be poised for wider adoption, creating demand for XML-aware content management solutions. Look for more discussion as agencies begin to acknowledge their content management challenges.
- We didn’t hear a single mention of language issues in the sessions we attended. Leaving us to wonder if non-native English speakers who are eligible for government services will be disenfranchised in the move to Open Government.
All in all, thought-provoking, well-executed events. For details, videos of the sessions are available on the Gov2.0 site.
First in a series of interviews with sponsors of Gilbane’s 2009 study on Multilingual Product Content: Transforming Traditional Practices into Global Content Value Chains.
Recently we had an opportunity to catch up with Suzanne Mescan, Vice President of Marketing for Vasont Systems. Vasont is a leading provider of component content management systems built upon XML standards. Suzanne spoke with us about the global content value chain (GCVC) and important findings from the research.
Gilbane: How does your company support the value chain for global product content? (i.e., what does your company do?)
Mescan: We are the “manage” phase of the GCVC, providing component content management solutions that include multiple automatic and user-defined content reuse capabilities, project management, built-in workflow, integrated collaborative review, translation management, support for any DTD, and much more.
Gilbane: Why did you choose to sponsor the Gilbane research?
Mescan: As part of the GCVC, we felt it was important for us and for those organizations looking to change and enhance their product content strategies to understand the positive trends and direction of the industry from beginning to end. Being a sponsor enabled this research to take place through The Gilbane Group, a group who has the pulse of this space in the industry.
Gilbane: What, in your opinion, is the most relevant/compelling/interesting result reported in the study?
Mescan: The most interesting result in the report was that terminology management ranked highest in the approach to standardization of content creation and that this terminology management is still a manual process based on a spreadsheet for half of the respondents. Yet “paper-based style guidelines and glossaries did little to encourage real adoption.” Being a key to global customer experience, brand management, and quality and consistency to 80% of the respondents, it is surprising that terminology management, as well as other content creation standardization practices, is still such a manual process.
For more about current terminology management practices, see “Achieving Quality at the Source” on page 28 of the Gilbane report. You can also read about how Vasont customer Mercury Marine is deploying content management as part of its global content value chain. Download the study for free.
