Autonomy Corporation plc (LSE: AU.) announced a new solution that allows businesses to automatically record and archive dynamic website content. Designed to address the complex regulatory requirements for businesses presenting dynamic content on the web, the solution combines Autonomy Digital Safe with Interwoven TeamSite to form an offering for including web content in a comprehensive compliance policy. Autonomy leverages the capabilities of its Digital Safe Archive and TeamSite web content management solution to provide an automated, secure, and scalable solution that helps businesses meet the compliance requirements of the modern web. For example, an insurance company can now produce a record of the exact premiums it offered online to a particular segment of customers during a marketing campaign conducted several months ago. Digital Safe is a hosted archive service that enables customers to outsource the storage and management of email messages, rich-media files, audio files, instant messages, and all forms of web content. TeamSite’s web versioning capabilities enable businesses to capture snapshots of content delivered to customers at exact points in time, including rolling back to content delivered several months or years ago. This information can now be ingested and indexed by Digital Safe to help organizations meet strict eDiscovery and audit compliance requirements, including COBS 11.8 (Conduct of Business), SEC/FINRA regulations, and the Gramm-Leach Bliley Act. This solution is available now. http://www.interwoven.com/, http://www.autonomy.com
Year: 2009 (Page 24 of 39)
Every now and then the question of critical mass pops up when discussing the uses of social media in companies and organizations. “How many users should we have before social media is useful?” IMHO there is no absolute answer to the question, as it depends entirely on what you use social media for. A wiki can be very useful for a project team of 4 people to produce project documentation – especially if they happen to reside in different countries. A board of directors consisting of 6 people can save time by having agendas and and meeting minutes stored in a shared workspace and edited by all members.
Social media is inherently social, so instead of defining critical mass one could say that the minimum mass for social media is 2 people. If writing a blog saves you a couple of emails, that is already good. Now, I am not against email per se (although my inbox is a disaster, and I never remember which folder I stored that email containg a really good link). It is just that email was never intended to be either a teamwork or an information management tool, although it is often used as such.
Tomorrow I will be talking about business opportunities in multilingual social media here in Helsinki. It should be an interesting event – more about it tomorrow. As for now, I want to conclude this entry by referring to the fact that lack of time is often mentioned as one of the main obstacles to using social media. This can well be a generational issue. The younger generation uses IM and Facebook and is almost constantly online. I still seem to spend a lot of time in meetings, or writing and preparing materials, or reading and evaluating a lot of stuff. And despite of coming from the land of mobile phones I prefer calling people to sending SMS or Twitter messages. A good friend of mine has done a lot of research on learning, and has pointed out that learning requires long enough quiet time to absorb and understand new topics and ideas. In an environment with constant instant messaging, where do we find that quiet time for learning?
Vasont Systems announced the release of the next major version of their content management system, Vasont 12, that enables users to store multilingual content once for maximum reuse and delivery to multiple channels. Vasont 12 includes: Collaborative Review package provides effective virtual collaboration with colleagues. Internal and external reviewers markup content with changes and comments while seeing other reviewers’ feedback simultaneously. Accepted changes automatically update in Vasont, minimizing manual updates; Project Management tracks projects to meet publishing deadlines. The Project Management window provides overall statuses of workflow projects across multiple departments and highlights overdue projects. When needed, users can inquire for specific status information. Gantt charts provide a graphical view of project timelines; Translation package consolidates translation project information in one window. Vasont’s Translation Projects window provides tracking and status for each multi-language translation project. Translation coordinators submit projects to multiple vendors for quote or translation. Integrations with translation vendors automate content delivery and status information to/from Vasont; Preview feature provides a styled view of XML content. Vasont’s Preview displays content in a styled view to speed up editorial time by making content easy to read; Content Ownership increases content security. Specific pieces of content within a collection are restricted to alterations by its Content Owners while other users can only view it. Associate Administrators role provides flexibility to coordinate administrative responsibilities across multiple groups, and more. This release is available on May 1, 2009 for both the client/server and hosted (SaaS) models. http://www.vasont.com
X1 Technologies, Inc. announced the availability of two product releases. The first is the 6.2.4 release of the X1 Professional Client which is available for immediate download. This release of the X1 Professional Client focuses on IBM Lotus Notes and Mozilla Thunderbird improvements along with general maintenance. The 1.3.1 release of the X1 Content Connector for Symantec Enterprise Vault delivers query search results that are twice as fast as the previous release when searching for email, email attachments and files that are archived within Symantec Enterprise Vault. Additional Unicode support has also been added to the 1.3.1 release. X1 delivers a combination of products that allow knowledge workers to search, preview and act upon data anywhere in the enterprise from a single, interface. With X1, individuals and businesses can search “virtually everything” that exists on the PC and server in nearly 500 file types and applications, including email solutions such as Microsoft Exchange and Outlook, Microsoft SharePoint, Symantec Enterprise Vault and IBM Lotus Notes and Domino. http://www.x1.com
Having been mired for several weeks in a technological misalignment of the stars, I have to question how social tools (the technological kind) might have saved me boatloads of aggravation and time. Consider having all of these happen in one month:
- Wireless router that couldn’t support wireless (waiting for second replacement)
- IBM ThinkPad power adapter not usable with Lenovo ThinkPad
- Cable service not able to get a signal from street down my 1,000 ft. driveway
- Two cable modem failures and replacements
- ISP spam blocker blocking good stuff but does not retain it as suspect mail for review
- 10 hours of downtime from my web hosting/e-mail service provider
As one who guides and advises companies on enterprise search selection, implementation and deployment, and various aspects of knowledge asset management, it is a little ironic that I have my own challenges finding quality answers and knowledge to support my home office. I have used these tools in my search for answers:
- Phone – vendor customer service
- Chat – vendor website customer service
- Email – vendor customer service, and to some colleagues for advice
- Web searching – vendor site search, Internet general search engines
- Twitter – comments about troubles; search for similar comments by others
So far, phone discussions have been the only pathway to resolutions, and in one case a technician’s house call was required. Most of the issues are still open, however emails and automated phone calls solicit feedback about my satisfaction with support services daily.
What does this have to do with search? I am searching to solve very specific problems, not an uncommon reason to search within the enterprise. As an independent consultant, my “enterprise” is my professional network, the support services I pay for and the WWW. When I fail to garner information I need from electronic sources, I reach out directly to experts in my personal network for answers. Even then, I find electronic dialog mechanisms that require typing a back-and-forth Q & A session to be pretty painful. Usually, one of us resorts to the phone or an in-person session to “see” what is really going on.
What have I learned?
- When a resolution is needed quickly and efficiently, talking to someone who is really an expert is the best path.
- When I can’t find the answer on-line, I need to find an expert.
- When I can’t find an answer or an expert, I flounder and waste huge amounts of time.
Conclusion:
Social tools (public platforms, social search, email, and even phone) require substantive work or communication skill by participants to establish a benefit from communication interchanges. Contextual hooks are needed to improve the results of information exchanges. Socializing is critical to expanding our networks of experts in a way that builds relationships in which we can freely reach out and expect a productive dialogue when we have a need to know. This is something to work at and consider when we embrace social technologies. It isn’t the technology tool that makes us social, it is the surrounding sharing and communicating (aka socializing) that breeds the trusting and trusted relationships that will improve our search for answers. Social networks and platforms may give us the tools to search for and share content. But it is the socializing that adds rich context to make it more likely that the expert we want and the answers we seek are the most beneficial.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group updated the Candidate Recommendation of “Cascading Style Sheets Level 2 Revision 1 (CSS 2.1) Specification.” CSS 2.1 is a style sheet language that allows authors and users to attach style (e.g., fonts and spacing) to structured documents (e.g., HTML documents and XML applications). CSS 2.1 corrects a few errors in CSS2 (the most important being a new definition of the height/width of absolutely positioned elements, more influence for HTML’s “style” attribute and a new calculation of the ‘clip’ property), and adds a few highly requested features which have already been widely implemented. But most of all CSS 2.1 represents a “snapshot” of CSS usage: it consists of all CSS features that are implemented interoperably. This draft incorporates errata resulting from implementation experience since the previous publication. http://www.w3.org/Style/
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) HTML Working Group has published a Working Draft of “HTML 5.” HTML 5 adds to the language of the Web features to help Web application authors, new elements based on research into prevailing authoring practices, and clear conformance criteria for user agents in an effort to improve interoperability. This particular draft specifies how authors can embed SVG in non-XML text/html content, and how browsers and other UAs should handle such embedded SVG content. See also the news about moving some parts of HTML 5 to individual drafts. The ” full list of changes” since the previous draft are listed in the updated companion document “HTML 5 differences from HTML 4.” http://www.w3.org/html/wg/
More on this later, but the title of the keynote by Microsoft’s Tricia Bush, “The Web Platform of The Future”, should suggest Microsoft’s presence will be interesting.
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