Year: 2009 (Page 14 of 39)

SharePoint: Without the Headaches – A Discussion of What is Available in the Cloud

July 25, 2009 / Marcel Meth / 0 Comments

There are few people who have not heard of SharePoint, but understanding what SharePoint has to offer is another story. The best way to understand SharePoint is to use it. This series of posts will provide an overview of the product, and explains how a non techie can get started.

SharePoint is currently in its third incarnation (SharePoint 2007) and within 9 months Microsoft will be deploying the fourth version, “SharePoint 2010.” There are three distinct SKUs:

WSS (Windows SharePoint Server)
– Comes with the Windows Server and is free.
MOSS (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server) Standard Edition
– An extension of WSS, and is licensed per server as well as per user.
MOSS (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server) Enterprise Edition
– An extension of the Standard Edition, and is licensed per server as well as per user.

It is also possible to buy a “Public Connector” for MOSS, which is a license that allows SharePoint to be used as a publicly facing site with no limit on the number of users .

Although Microsoft is trying to showcase SharePoint as an excellent platform to build publicly facing sites, there is general agreement that SharePoint is best used in a closed community where users must login. Microsoft touts SharePoint as a product that supports six pillars: (These pillars are about to be rebranded in SharePoint 2010, see SharePoint 2010 has new pillars.) The six pillars are:

Collaboration
– Allowing members of a closed community to share documents, tasks, calendars, contacts, etc
Portal
– Providing a single web site that is the gateway to an organization’s web based functions.
Enterprise Search
– Competing with Google for the enterprise,
Web & Enterprise Content Management
– A publishing platform that allows for simple workflows among authors and editors.
Forms Driven Business Process
– Allows for easy development of electronic forms and associated automated workflows.
Business Intelligence
– Allows organization to build dashboards summarizing data that reside in disparate electronic repositories.

The original intent behind SharePoint was to empower business users to control their own destiny without being dependent on IT and Development staff. In the author’s experience, SharePoint often requires much more planning and maintenance than business users can provide. Thus one often finds that specially trained SharePoint IT and developer personnel are required to stand-up and support in-house SharePoint deployments.

Although still quite limited, it is now possible to lease robust versions of SharePoint that reside in the cloud and truly are managed without any hidden costs. This series of articles will summarize three services that were tried by the author:

SharePoint Online – Part of the Microsoft Business Online Productivity Suite.
Apps4rent – A robust SharePoint and Exchange online implementation.
WebHost4Life – Similar to Apps4Rent’s SharePoint implementation with a non-Exchange email system.

The discussion will focus only on SharePoint. In all cases, the environments are WSS (Not MOSS) and are hosted in a joint tenancy model, meaning that you are sharing computing resources with other SharePoint sites. Although people will tell you there could be a number of reasons why this may be problematic, the author never experienced any issues due to joint tenancy. Microsoft does offer an expensive service in a dedicated environment. This service requires that a minimum of 5,000 user licenses are being leased.

Both Apps4rent and WebHost4Life have a simple model that is easy for an end user to understand. In contrast, the Microsoft environment is quite confusing with poor documentation. Both Apps4Rent and WebHost4Life offer immediate support with chat sessions, and the customer service staff was knowledgeable and helpful. Again, in contrast to this, Microsoft’s support was poor. Microsoft communicated via a secure email channel, responses took 4 to 6 hours, and the support personnel did not understand the product well…

Personalized Search in the Enterprise

July 23, 2009 / Lynda Moulton / 0 Comments

This is an interesting topic for two reasons: there is enormous diversity in the ways we all think and go about finding content; personalizing a search interface without being intrusive is extremely difficult. Any technology that requires us to do activities according to someone else’s design, which bends our natural inclination, is by definition not going to be personal.

This topic comes to mind because of two unrelated pieces of content I read in the past 24 hours. The first was an email asking me about personal information management and automated tagging, and the second was an interview I read with Mike Moran, a thought leader in search and speaker at one of our Gilbane Conferences. In the interview, Mike talks about personalized search. Then Information Week referenced search personalization in an article about a patent suit against Google.

Here is my take on the many personalized search themes that have recently emerged. From dashboards to customizing results, options to focus on particular topics or types of content, socialized search to support interacting with and sharing results, to retrieving content we personally created or received (email), content we used or were named in, all might be referred to as search personalization. Getting each to work well will enhance enterprise search but….

Knowing how transient and transformative our thoughts and behaviors really are, we should focus realistically on the complexity of producing software tools and services that satisfy and enhance personal findability. We are ambiguous beings, seeking structured equilibrium in many of our activities to create efficiency and reduce anxiety, while desiring new, better, quicker and smarter devices to excite and engage us. Once we achieve a level of comfort with a method or mechanism, whether quickly or over time, we evolve and seek change. But, when change is imposed on an unprepared mind, our emotions probably override any real benefit that might be gained in productivity. Then we tend to self-sabotage the potential for operational usefulness when an uncomfortable process intrudes. Mental lack of preparedness undermines our work when a new design demands a behavioral shift that lacks connection to our current state or past experiences. How often are we just not in a frame of mind to take on something totally alien, especially with deadlines looming?

Look at the single most successful aspect of Google, minimalism in its interface. One did not need to wade through massively dense graphics scrambled with text in disordered layouts to figure out what to do when Google first appeared. The focus was immediately obvious.

I am presenting this challenge to vendors; there is a need to satisfy a huge array of personal preferences while introducing a minimal amount of change in any one release. Easy adoption requires that new products be simple. Usefulness must be quickly obvious to multiple audiences.

I am presenting this challenge to technology users; focus your appetite. Decide before shopping or adopting new tools what would bring the most immediate productivity gain and personal adoptability for maximum efficiency. Think about how defeated you feel when approaching a new release of an upgraded product that has added so many new “bells and whistles” that you are consumed with trying to rediscover all the old functions and features that gave your workflow a comfortable structure. Think carefully about how much learning and re-adjusting will be needed if you decide on technology that promises to do everything, with unlimited personalization. It may be possible, but does it really feel personally acceptable.

New Content Globalization Case Study: Philips

July 20, 2009 / Leonor Ciarlone / 0 Comments

All businesses are facing serious disruptions from shifting global economies, technical advancements, and the need for strong, consistently branded online multinational presence. Royal Philips Electronics of the Netherlands has found a way to respond to these challenges without jeopardizing its ongoing business.

A world leader in the consumer lifestyle, healthcare, and lighting industries, Philips integrates technologies and design into people-centric solutions, based on fundamental customer insights and the brand promise of “sense and simplicity.” With 50,000 products, 1,800 logos, a website present in 57 countries and translated in 35+ target languages, and 500 consumer marketing managers in the Consumer Lifestyle sector, Philips’ global brand management strategy requires an adaptive system of people, process, and technology to provide a unifying influence.

This case study tells the story of how Philips has met and is keeping pace with changing and often disruptive business environments by evolving operations and communications touchpoints in a just-in-time approach that maximizes global opportunity based on consumer need.

Download the Philips story here:

Borderless Brand Management: The Philips Strategy for Global Expansion

Give Financial Statements an MRI with XBRL

July 17, 2009 / Neal Hannon / 0 Comments

Recent news item: CLEVELAND (AP) — Indians outfielder Grady Sizemore is feeling better and will have an MRI on his strained left elbow on Monday.

It has become very commonplace for doctors to order an MRI for patients experiencing pain. According to Radiology Info.com, Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a noninvasive medical test that helps physicians diagnose and treat medical conditions. The website goes on to say, “MR imaging uses a powerful magnetic field, radio frequency pulses and a computer to produce detailed pictures of organs, soft tissues, bone and virtually all other internal body structures. The images can then be examined on a computer monitor, printed or copied to CD.” (see http://www.radiologyinfo.org/en/info.cfm?pg=bodymr)

In a similar fashion, XBRL puts a company’s financial statements under a transformation that exposes detailed pictures of the underlying accounting backing every line item. This information can then be analyzed and compared by computer software to help determine a company’s financial health.

For example, let’s look at a sample line item from the Marathon Oil SEC filing covering the quarter ending September 30, 2008. The form 10-Q has a line on financial statement that reads:

Loss on early extinguishment of debt 120 (nine months ending September 30, 2007, in millions)

When you give that line item the XBRL MRI treatment, computers can extract the XBRL label:

us-gaap:GainsLossesOnExtinguishmentOfDebt

the definition of the item:

Amount represents the difference between the fair value of the payments made and the carrying amount of the debt at the time of its extinguishment.
And the authoritative literature that backs up the accounting decisions:

the reference:

Presentation Reference

Name                  Accounting Principles Board Opinion (APB)
Number               26
Paragraph          20, 21
Publisher           AICPA

Inquiring minds will take a close look at APB 26 for more detail. This examination should yield a much clearer understanding of the basis for reporting the number and therefore yield a better understanding of the financial statement.

Note: Mr. Sizemore returned to full duty with the Cleveland Indians shortly after his MRI.

When is a Book Not a Book?

July 16, 2009 / dwaldt

I recently wrote a short Gilbane Spotlight article for the EMC XML community site about the state of Iowa going paperless (article can be found here) in regards to its Administrative Code publication. It got me to thinking, “When is a book no longer a book?”

Originally the admin code was produced as a 10,000 page loose-leaf publication service containing all the regulations of the state. For the last 10 years it has also appeared on the Web as PDFs of pages, and more recently, independent data chunks in HTML. And now they have discontinued the commercial printing of the loose-leaf version and only rely on the electronic versions to inform the public. They still produce PDF pages that resemble the printed volumes that are intended for local printing of select sections by public users of the information. But the electronic HTML version is being enhanced to improve reusability of the content, present it in alternative forms and integrated with related materials, etc. Think mashups and improved search capabilities. The content is managed in an XML-based Single Source Publishing system that produces all output forms.

I have migrated many, many printed publications to XML SSP platforms. Most follow the same evolutionary path regarding how the information is delivered to consumers. First they are printed. Then a second electronic copy is produced simultaneously with the print using separate production processes. Then the data is organized in a single database and reformatted to allow editing that can produce both print and electronic. Eventually the data gets enhanced and possibly broken into chunks to better enable reusing the content, but the print is still a viable output format. Later, the print is discontinued as the subscription list falls and the print product is no longer feasible. Or the electronic version is so much better, that people stop buying the print version.
So back to the original question, is it no longer a book? Is it when you stop printing pages? Or when you stop producing the content in page-oriented PDFs? Or does it have to do with how you manage and store the information?

Other changes take place in how the information is edited, formatted, and stored that might influence the answer to the question. For instance, if the content is still managed as a series of flat files, like chapters, and assembled for print, it seems to me that it is still a book, especially if it still contains content that is very book oriented, like tables of contents and other front matter, indexes, and even page numbers. Eventually, the content may be reorganized as logical chunks stored in a database, extracted for one or more output formats and organized appropriately for each delivery version, as in SSP systems. Print artifacts like TOCs may be completely generated and not stored as persistent objects, or they can be created and managed as build lists or maps (like with DITA). As long as one version is still book-like, IMHO it is still a book.

I would posit that once the printed versions are discontinued, and all electronic versions no longer contain print-specific artifacts, then maybe this is no longer a book, but simply content.

Random House: Creating a 21st Century Publishing Framework

July 15, 2009 / Bill Trippe / 0 Comments

As part of our new report, Digital Platforms and Technologies for Publishers: Implementations Beyond “eBook,” we researched and wrote a number of case studies about how major publishing companies are moving to digital publishing. The following is case study of Random House and its use of Digital Asset Management (DAM) technology from OpenText to create a much more dynamic and agile publishing process.

Background

Random House, Inc. is the world’s largest English-language general trade book publisher. It is a division of Bertelsmann AG, one of the foremost media companies in the world.

Random House, Inc. assumed its current form with its acquisition by Bertelsmann in 1998, which brought together the imprints of the former Random House, Inc. with those of the former Bantam Doubleday Dell. Random House, Inc.’s publishing groups include the Bantam Dell Publishing Group, the Crown Publishing Group, the Doubleday Broadway Publishing Group, the Knopf Publishing Group, the Random House Audio Publishing Group, the Random House Publishing Group, and Random House Ventures.

Together, these groups and their imprints publish fiction and nonfiction, both original and reprints, by some of the foremost and most popular writers of our time. They appear in a full range of formats—including hardcover, trade paperback, mass market paperback, audio, electronic, and digital, for the widest possible readership from adults to young adults and children.

The reach of Random House, Inc. is global, with subsidiaries and affiliated companies in Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. Through Random House International, the books published by the imprints of Random House, Inc. are sold in virtually every country in the world.

Random House has long been committed to publishing the best literature by writers both in the United States and abroad. In addition to the company’s commercial success, books published by Random House, Inc. have won more major awards than those published by any other company—including the Nobel Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer founded the company in 1925, after purchasing The Modern Library—reprints of classic works of literature—from publisher Horace Liveright. Two years later, in 1927, they decided to broaden the company’s publishing activities, and the Random House colophon made its debut.

Random House first made international news by successfully defending in court the U.S. publication of James Joyce’s masterpiece, Ulysses, setting a major legal precedent for freedom of speech. Beginning in the 1930s, the company moved into publishing for children, and over the years has become a leader in the field. Random House entered reference publishing in 1947 with the highly successful American College Dictionary, which was followed in 1966 by the equally successful unabridged Random House Dictionary of the English Language. It continues to publish numerous reference works, including the Random House Webster’s College Dictionary.

In 1960, Random House acquired the distinguished American publishing house of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., and, a year later, Pantheon Books, which had been established in New York by European editors to publish works from abroad. Both were assured complete editorial independence—a policy which continues in all parts of the company to this day.

The Open Text Digital Media Group, formerly Artesia, is a leader in enterprise and hosted digital asset management (DAM) solutions, bringing a depth of experience around rich media workflows and capabilities. Open Text media management is the choice of leading companies such as Time, General Motors, Discovery Communications, Paramount, HBO and many more.

When clients work with the Open Text Digital Media Group, they tap into a wealth of experience and the immeasurable value of:

A decade of designing, delivering, and implementing award-winning rich media solutions
A global client base of marquee customer installations
An experienced professional services staff with hundreds of successful implementations
A proven DAM implementation methodology
Endorsements by leading technology and implementation partners
Domain expertise and knowledge across a variety of industries and sectors
The global presence and financial strength of Open Text, a leading provider of Enterprise Content Management solutions with a track record of financial growth and stability

Semantic Search has Its Best Chance for Successes in the Enterprise

July 15, 2009 / Lynda Moulton / 2 Comments

I am expecting significant growth in the semantic search market over the next five years with most of it focused on enterprise search. The reasons are pretty straightforward:

Semantic search is very hard and to scale it to the Web compounds the complexity.
Because the semantic Web is so elusive and results have been spotty with not much traction, it will be some time before it can be easily monetized.
Like many things that are highly complex, a good model will be to break the challenge of semantic search into smaller targeted business problems where focus is on a particular audience seeking content from a narrower domain.

I base this predication on my observation of the on-going struggle for organizations to get a strong framework in place to manage content effectively. By effectively I mean, establishing solid metadata, governance and publishing protocols that ensure that the best information knowledge workers produce is placed in range for indexing and retrieval. Sustained discipline and the people to exercise it just aren’t being employed in many enterprises to make this happen in a cohesive and comprehensive fashion. I have been discouraged by the number of well-intentioned projects I have seen flounder because organizations just can’t commit long-term or permanent human resources to the activity of content governance. Sometimes it is just on-again-off-again. What enterprises need are people with deep knowledge about the organization and how its content fits together in a logical framework for all types of knowledge workers. Instead, organizations tend to assign this job to external consultants or low-level staffers who are not well-grounded in the work of the particular enterprise. The results are predictably disappointing.

Enter semantic search technologies where there are multiple algorithmic tools available to index and retrieve content for complex and multi-faceted queries. Specialized semantic technologies are often well suited to shorter term projects for which domain specific vocabularies can be built more quickly with good results. Maintaining targeted vocabulary ontologies for a focused topic can be done with fewer human resources and a carefully bounded ontology can become an intelligent feed to a semantic search engine, helping it index with better precision and relevance.

This scenario is proposed with one caveat; enterprises must commit to having very smart people with enterprise expertise to build the ontology. Having a consultant coach the subject matter expert in method, process and maintenance guidelines for doing so is not a bad idea but the consultant has to prepare the enterprise for sustainability after exiting the scene.

The wager here is that enterprises can ramp up semantic search with a series of short, targeted projects, each of which establishes a goal of solving one business problem at a time and committing to efficient and accurate content retrieval as part of the solution. By learning what works well in each situation, intranet web retrieval will improve systematically and thoughtfully. The ramp to a better semantic Web will be paved with these interlocking pieces.

Keep an eye on these companies to provide technologies for point solutions in business critical applications: Basis Technology, Cognition Technology, Connotate, Expert Systems, Lexalytics, Linguamatics, Metatomix, Semantra, Sinequa and Temis.

Digital Publishing Visionary Profile: Lulu’s Bob Young

July 9, 2009 / Bill Trippe / 0 Comments

As part of our new report, Digital Platforms and Technologies for Publishers: Implementations Beyond “eBook,” we interviewed a number of industry visionaries. The following is a summary of a discussion between Lulu’s Bob Young and Gilbane’s Steve Paxhia.

Bob Young: Lulu—Next Steps

Bob Young is the founder and CEO of Lulu.com, a premier international marketplace for new digital content on the Internet, with more than 1.1 million recently published titles and more than 15,000 new creators from 80 different countries joining each week. Founded in 2002, Lulu.com is Young’s most recent endeavor. The success of this company has earned Young notable recognition; he was named one of the “Top 50 Agenda-Setters in the Technology Industry in 2006” and was ranked as the fourth “Top Entrepreneur for 2006,” both by Silicon.com. In 1993, Young co-founded Red Hat, the open source software company that gives hardware and software vendors a standard platform on which to certify their technology. Red Hat has evolved into a Fortune 500 company and chief rival to Microsoft and Sun. His success at Red Hat won him industry accolades, including nomination as one of Business Week’s “Top Entrepreneurs” in 1999. Before founding Red Hat, Young spent 20 years at the helm of two computer leasing companies that he founded. His experiences as a high-tech entrepreneur combined with his innate marketing savvy led to Red Hat’s success. His book, “Under the Radar,” chronicles how Red Hat’s open-source strategy successfully won industry wide acceptance in a market previously dominated by proprietary binary-only systems. Young has also imparted the lessons learned from his entrepreneurial experiences through his contributions to the books “You’ve GOT to Read This Book!” and “Chicken Soup for the Entrepreneur’s Soul.

For many years, authors who were unsuccessful in getting their books published by a commercial publishing company could underwrite the costs of publishing their books and sell them through “vanity presses.” It was rare that books published in this manner ever recouped the author’s investment and earned a profit.

Bob Young admits that when he was in college that he never fully appreciated the writings of philosopher Jean Paul Sartre. However, one of Sartre’s teachings—“We see the world the way that we expect to see it”—stuck with him. This passage helps explain how established practices and entities become so entrenched. Yet in 2002, Bob Young had an idea that would attack the established policies and practices of the book publishing industry. The industry had consolidated tremendously in the previous decade, and the distribution and retail networks changed dramatically. These changes have had a profound impact on potential authors. The reduction in the number of publishing entities has resulted in it becoming more difficult for authors to get their works published. The publishing company may already have a similar title or be unwilling to take a chance on an unpublished author. Sometimes, a book is written by a prominent author but the market niche is too small for traditional publishers to serve. These phenomena leave a significant number of high quality books without a publisher.

The publishing industry and its distribution network were becoming more digital. Another of Young’s favorite philosophers points out that when new media take prominence leaders in the previous medium often fail to succeed. Digital technologies are now used to create all types of content and the move towards digital distribution networks, as demonstrated by the popularity of Amazon.com and its peers, opening up markets for these books.

With the goal of allowing every author to have access to a professional publishing platform an extensive sales and distribution platform, Young’s idea became a company named “Lulu” and has evolved and thrived during the past six years. The company now has three main product lines:

Print—books, brochures, manuals and materials for business solutions
Photo Creations—calendars, photo books, art and images
Social Networking–marketing, commerce and exposure via weRead, the most popular social book discovery application, allowing readers to catalogue, rate and review books.

The value proposition is very simple and appealing to authors. Lulu.com presents authors with total editorial and copyright control with additional protection provided from the Lulu.com backend. They make money on their projects with an 80/20 revenue split (80% for the authors) and by Lulu.com providing a unique on-line sales and distribution system, a viable business model for the current economy and beyond.

Powerful search engines and social community applications help match willing readers with niche titles. Content on Lulu.com is easily accessible—perfect for niche communities searching for specific topics. Lulu.com is home to a new economy, a digital marketplace of buyers and sellers, where sellers are selling “intellectual property” and buyers buy the intellectual property in either a physical or digital format. Lulu.com allows for personalization and customization for individual or business needs.

During the 2009 O’Reilly TOC Conference, Jason Fried of 37signals described the book that he and his colleagues had written based on lessons learned from creating and servicing their successful project management and collaboration product named Basecamp. They published their book with Lulu.com and report sales of almost $500,000 in the last several years. This enabled them to reach number three on the Lulu best seller list at one point. Ideally, this story would have a happy ending and they would publish their next book with Lulu.com. Alas, the success of their previous book motivated a traditional publisher to offer them a significant advance for their second book. The offer was too tempting to refuse. They now have to hope that the traditional economic model with 10-20% royalties will generate more than Lulu.com’s 80-20 split. In essence, they are wagering that the traditional publisher will be able to sell at least four times the number of books that Lulu.com would have sold.

When asked about this, Young was nonplussed. He simply stated that it was his goal to publish their third book and to make them loyal authors in the future. It is his number one goal to help his authors become successful. He believes that discoverability is the key to helping his authors sell more books. Hence, he acquired weRead, the most popular community of readers. This technology helps readers find, read and rate new books on topics of interest to them no matter what the genre or how small the niche. The connection between weRead and e-tailers such as Amazon forms a powerful combination of capabilities that erode the advantages once monopolized by traditional publishers and bookstores. For many books, Lulu.com’s print on demand publishing and distribution model is faster, cheaper, and more efficient than the traditional publishing model, and is much less risky.

Lulu also offers authors publishing templates and a set of tools to create Websites, storefronts, widgets and blogs for their books. While these are self-service offerings, they further erode the service advantages provided by traditional publishers. The service has been so successful that new small publishers are using Lulu.com as a platform for their own publishing companies. Other publishing companies are using Lulu to keep books in print once the current print run has been exhausted.

Young believes that there are many books available at Lulu.com that are superior to those published by traditional publishers. The key is to help each book become discovered. He concludes “we’re not in the business of choosing the best books to be published, we give authors the technologies and services to be successful and let the market decide which books are the best.” The type of content that Lulu supports is continuing to expand. Lulu just announced the acquisition of Poetry.com and has rebranded it to Lulu Poetry.

Gilbane Conclusions

This is a very disruptive approach to publishing. The change to digital development and the increasing popularity of eBooks combined with the increasing market share enjoyed by e-tailers makes Lulu.com’s strategy very powerful. We expect to see this model gain greater acceptance as economies offered by print on demand drive up the cost threshold versus long run printing. Lulu is the established leader in this segment which, according to Sartre, bodes well for the company’s future.