Oracle announced enhancements to Oracle Beehive. Oracle Beehive delivers a range of collaboration tools including email, calendar, team workspaces, conferencing, and instant messaging on a single platform. With the enhancements, organizations using Oracle Beehive can establish more efficient communication channels to enable easier collaboration and improve individual and team productivity. Updates to the latest release of Oracle Beehive include‚ Web-based Team Collaboration – team workspace software that builds on an enterprise-specific security and compliance framework offers an environment for teams to manage activities and information; it includes wikis, team calendaring, RSS support, contextual search, and advanced file sharing and can be centrally provisioned or set up by the team with no portal requirement; Enhanced Web and Voice Conferencing – enables organizations to apply security and content management policies to conferencing; expanded feature set includes on-demand conference recording and retrieval; Expanded Integration with Desktop Productivity Tools – helps eliminate training costs and user adoption challenges by allowing users to take advantage of familiar software. Oracle Beehive can be deployed on premise or through Oracle On Demand. www.oracle.com
Year: 2009 (Page 22 of 39)
Content Circles, provider of distributed content management and collaboration solutions, announced the availability of the Content Circles Xerox DocuShare Connector. The Connector allows individuals across geographies to collaborate on projects with DocuShare users securely and in real-time, working online or offline, regardless of firewall restrictions. With the Content Circles Connector, organizations can also collaborate with customers, partners and outside agencies without granting network access to the internal DocuShare system. The Content Circles DocuShare Connector is applied by downloading the software to a computer. A licensed user of DocuShare creates a ‘Circle’ (workgroup) for collaboration, and invites others via email to join. This individual then pulls selected documents from the DocuShare repository and places them into the Circle, which will appear on the desktop of all Circle members’ computers for immediate access. Content Circles tracks which documents have been edited and who has accessed them, creating a secure audit trail for users who are off-line or outside the company, as well as DocuShare users. Content Circles recognizes documents that were originated in DocuShare and enables users to synchronize the changes back to DocuShare for others to see. Content Circle members utilizing the DocuShare Connector can also collaborate on content stored in Microsoft SharePoint, Google Docs, FTP servers, and network drives. The creation and management of Circles requires a paid subscription to Content Circles. Those invited to a Circle can join for free. The Content Circles DocuShare Connector is available immediately and for a limited time at no additional charge. http://www.contentcircles.com, http://www.docushare.com
Content Data Solutions, developers of publishing software, systems integration and pre-press solutions, announced the release of their Web Publishing Solution (WPS) as Software as a Service (SaaS). WPS, developed for the needs of news, journal and book publishers, is a comprehensive application for the creation, enrichment, management and delivery of content to the Web as well as other publishing channels such as print, CD-Rom or E-Reader. WPS’ standard editing controls are similar to Microsoft Word. WPS SaaS’s built in automated publishing process allows companies to publish information quickly with features such as future scheduling and expiration capabilities. WPS’ browser based solution has a built in workflow feature allowing Authors, Editors and Content Managers the ability to revise, approve and release documents in a collaborative environment. Content DSI’s WPS SaaS is priced starting at $500 per month for up to 3 users, 10GB of storage and up to 10MB of monthly internet usage. http://www.contentdsi.com/
Your best expert resource for discovering products and tools for your enterprise is the network you trust most and communicate with the most comfortably. It is well established that a great trait to bring into any professional situation is the ability to listen. Sometimes it is hard to remember that when you are being asked a lot of questions. So, the best way to get a jump start on listening is to come to professional meetings with a list of questions you want to get answered before the meeting wraps up.
One of my own discoveries is that whether I am conducting a meeting, moderating or just attending, seeking out people who might have experiences that could be educational for me is both a way to get into a nice business relationship but it also helps break the ice. It can be awkward going to meetings where we know nobody in advance. Having an agenda that involves meeting people is the ultimate networking model. You might notice that a lot of social networking sites, like LinkedIn, have included a function for asking questions. This has proven popular and I know several people who have leveraged it in beneficial ways.
I have just come from two days at the Infonortics Search Engine meeting and many of you will soon be attending the Enterprise Search Summit in New York, The Gilbane Group conference in San Francisco or SemTech 2009 in San Jose. Here are a few suggestions on how to go shopping for great insight on search tools while establishing a relationship could nurture both you and those you engage for many years to come. Any one of these can start the conversation but think ahead about what you want to ask next once you have your initial answer:
Q: Hi, are you at this conference because you are just beginning to look for a search engine or to find answers about one you are already using? Depending on the answer you will want to find out what they have used, looked at, tested or are researching and what they have learned in the process.
Q: Hi, I see you are from ABC Corporation. How are you involved with search technology there? The answer will give you an idea what line of questioning you might pursue based on the person’s presumed experience and knowledge. IT people, developers, content managers or expert searchers will each have a different view of the technologies they have or would like to use. Any role offers a unique perspective for you to draw out and understand for your own institution. Knowing how different professionals view search in other organizations can give you insight into the people you may have to team with in your own organization.
Q: Have you heard any talks at this meeting that have been particularly helpful for you? What have you learned that you didn’t know about before? Follow up, and if you sense that some expertise you have might be interesting, sharing it can begin to build a trusted exchange that might prove helpful to you both.
Q: What are a couple of mandatory requirements for a search engine in your organization? Have you been using anything recently that you feel is serving you well or are you having problems? Any time you get a response from another attendee that indicates they are experienced and engaged with specific products, learn everything you can about their: selection process, implementation, deployment and user experiences. Talk to them about what their objectives were and whether and how those were met.
Going to meetings, chatting up attendees, asking questions, and sharing what you know are great ways to build a community of practice outside your internal communities. This brings fresh insights and gives you a valuable networking resource. Don’t leave without contact information so you can continue the dialogue. Continue it with online exchanges based on their preference for communication.
Finally, the expense of going to meetings is increasingly hard to justify. But the benefit of finding key vendors and others with a common purpose in one place where you can quickly coalesce around the topic of search (or any other topic) gives you an easy sociability that can then be sustained. To solidify what you have learned and from whom, write a trip report; broadly disseminate it to all those in your enterprise network or team, as well as your boss. This sharing will be appreciated and should underscore the value you know how to accrue from technical meetings. Learning is an essential part of job growth and letting others know that you do it well is important.
Nstein Technologies Inc. (TSX-V:EIN) announced the launch of WCM 4.1, an upgrade to its content management system (CMS). Most notable among the additions is WCM MojoTM, a portable, mobile back-office version of WCM designed to help smart-phone equipped writers, journalists and editors to create, edit and publish content in the field. WCM 4.1 features an extensible drag-and-drop-enabled customizable dashboard that allows users to develop their own layouts from a pre-configured widget library. Other features in WCM 4.1 include: support for WordPress and other blogs, support for Forums using the vBulletin plugin, a crawling sitemap generator, and a Google keyword helper for editors. WCM 4.1 has adopted the RESTful architectural style. Nstein’s new mobile content management tool, WCM Mojo, is an optional, lightweight add-on client that connects seamlessly to WCM via newer smart phone browsers, allowing writers, journalists and editors to create and edit stories, slideshows, manage contributions and follow editorial and behavioral statistics in real-time. It also allows editors to execute repetitive editorial tasks such as content approvals and content bundling while in transit. http://www.nstein.com
On May 19, I will be giving a keynote address on the Web Content Management market landscape at the CMS2009 Conference in Nijmegen, Holland (http://www.cmscongres.nl/). In the presentation, I will discuss recent trends in client demands for WCM products as well as strategic directions that vendors will take over the next year. On May 20, I will also lead an interactive two-hour workshop on estimating the total cost of ownership of WCM products over a five-year period (see “Workshop Tony White” in the sidebar of http://www.cmscongres.nl/). And for you English speakers, don’t worry about the language. Even though the CMS2009 website is in Dutch, the presentations will be in English.
CrownPeak announced the launch of a new social media framework designed specifically for digital agencies and online marketers: The CrownPeak Social Media Publishing Console. The new content publishing platform offers marketers a simple way to manage and publish content both to their Web site and the myriad of social networks to which they may also be contributing. An addition to CrownPeak’s Online Marketing Suite, the new social solution enables digital marketers to manage, track and change content for both their social networking presence, as well as campaign landing pages. Offered within the core CrownPeak Content Marketing Suite, the Social Media Publishing Console enables marketers to add the console interface into any template, be it a press release, article or other type of online content, and update to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or other networks right then and there. The content will instantly go through the required workflow process before it is automatically published to the appropriate sites. www.crownpeak.com
Microsoft announced the availability of Service Pack 2 (SP2) for the 2007 Microsoft Office system. The service pack includes major performance enhancements for Office applications, most notably Microsoft Office Outlook, as well as Microsoft Office SharePoint Server. With SP2, Office 2007 now has built-in support for Open XML, ODF and PDF, along with the dozen or so other formats that were already supported in Office 2007. In addition to the support for additional file formats, SP2 also includes the Open XML Format External File Converter. This allows developers to make any third-party document format a first-class citizen in Office. This means Office will support most government-preferred formats, and can easily be made to support any others that come along. This release offers enhanced stability for Outlook, calendaring reliability, and more improvements to applications that run on both PCs and servers. Users should notice the improved performance and stability of Outlook, better charting functionality in Excel, and more control over the appearance of SmartArt graphics. On the server side, IT professionals will notice several enhancements to the security and performance of SharePoint Server 2007, including support for read-only content databases, improvements to forms-based authentication, and an STSADM command-line utility that enables administrators to scan sites that use the variations feature for errors. SharePoint Server will also feature better support for newer versions of the Firefox browser. Customers can download SP2 right away. In addition, Microsoft will release SP2 via Microsoft Update’s automatic update mechanism no sooner than three months from now, and with at least 30 days notice. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/968170
