Mainsoft Corporation, a provider of Microsoft SharePoint-Java EE interoperability software, announced a preview of Mainsoft SharePoint Integrator for Lotus Notes version 2.5. The software brings the SharePoint 2010-based professional network into the Lotus Notes email client, with support for SharePoint User Profiles and My Sites, aimed at Lotus Notes users to search for and connect with people they work with. Mainsoft is also previewing SharePoint integration with Microsoft Outlook. Available the first half of 2010, the production release will deliver the same document collaboration experience for Lotus Notes and Outlook users, aiming to minimize user training requirements for Lotus Notes companies migrating users to Outlook and Exchange. http://www.mainsoft.com
Month: January 2010 (Page 4 of 7)
Ephox announced the latest version of the company’s rich text editor, EditLive! V7. Integrated with IBM Lotus Web Content Management and IBM Lotus Quickr software, EditLive! allows business users to create content in a desktop word processing environment. With new features to increase user productivity, team collaboration and web site quality, EditLive! V7 is designed to help non-technical users keep company web sites, blogs and wikis up-to-date with relevant online content. EditLive! V7 supports Autosave to preserve content, even if the web browser crashes, or the server session times out. V7 also includes templating functionality, giving content administrators the ability to create reusable content templates for consistent web site styles and standards that can be employed by business users. The HTML editor also improves collaboration for online documents with new context-based commenting capabilities, in which users can comment directly on any text or object in a document and track conversations related to specific comments. For increased quality of content in web sites and wikis, EditLive! adds broken hyperlink reporting. The new version of EditLive! includes enhanced integration with IBM Lotus Web Content Management and now deploys as an application in the portal environment. In addition, performance improvements have been achieved through a series of optimizations to caching, configuration and compression mechanisms. In addition to new functionality in EditLive!, the OEM version now includes several features that were previously only available in the Enterprise Edition. These capabilities include Auto-Correct for automatically correcting spelling errors, the ability to import Word documents, and Thesaurus. EditLive! 7 is available immediately in OEM, Professional and Enterprise Editions. http://www.ephox.com/
SDL plc announces the acquisition of Fredhopper, experts in targeting and marketing software for eCommerce. This acquisition is part of SDL’s strategy and commitment to delivering solutions for enterprises with complex, multi-lingual sales and marketing and customer support requirements. SDL has seen a growing demand for solutions that manage and optimise high value customer engagements to drive online revenue and improve customer satisfaction across multiple channels. The deal will allow Fredhopper, which counts Clarks, Toys R Us, B&Q, Waitrose and Otto Group – the world’s second biggest eCommerce company behind Amazon.com – among its stable of over 100 large international retail customers, to embark on a global rollout of its product suite and expand operations into the US and Asia. The company currently operates in four European countries – the UK, Germany, France and the Netherlands. Fredhopper will become an independent division of SDL that will be named ‘SDL eCommerce Technologies.’ The division will be led by Fredhopper’s current management team, and be focused on providing targeting and marketing software for online retailers. Fredhopper brings technology for effective targeting and personalisation, intelligent search, merchandising and measurement. In addition, Fredhopper brings R&D and Professional Services teams into the larger SDL group. The acquisition will also enable Fredhopper to launch its online targeting technology into new verticals – namely financial services, insurance, and manufacturing, through SDL’s existing Web Content Management solutions. http://www.fredhopper.com/, http://www.sdltridion.com
IBM has unveiled IBM Project Vulcan, which they claim will be the blueprint for the future of collaboration. Building on a company’s existing investments, IBM Project Vulcan enables approaches to reduce personal information overload and improve business agility. IBM Project Vulcan is designed to exploit the convergence of Cloud and on-premise systems; Collaborative Services business applications and social networks; and Desktops, netbooks and mobile devices. Social analytics, by IBM Research, will provide recommendations to locate expertise, relevant content, and critical business events. Designed as a loosely coupled architecture, it is meant to provide flexibility and responsiveness to rapidly changing business requirements and personal preferences. IBM Project Vulcan is designed to allow developers to create new generations of applications powered by collaboration. The capabilities of IBM Project Vulcan will be delivered in future releases of products such as LotusLive, Lotus Notes and Domino, Lotus Connections, Quickr and WebSphere Portal. IBM plans to deliver a beta of a development environment in the second half of 2010 on LotusLive Labs. http://www.ibm.com
Given that we’re halfway through January, I figure it’s high time I get around to writing my predictions for the Web Content Management industry in 2010. Let me correct that: these are my hopes for the WCM industry in 2010. I believe there’s enough evidence to support the notion that my desires have a shot at coming to fruition, but I’ve come to grips with the fact that Nostradamus I am not.
I have a long list of both predictions and desires, but I’m focusing on my top 4 since they are all tied to a single theme, are the most likely to come to fruition, and are all driven by what we at Gilbane believe will be one of the four global, cross-industry Megatrends for 2010: Customer Experience. We believe that customer experience has been and will continue to be a significant basis for competitive advantage for all companies, as it defines their relationships with their customers. Experiences are personal, and thus, they must be tailored to the individual. Companies, now more than ever, need to identify (and prioritize!) their customer segments in order to individualize their experiences, and they must consider both stated and latent customer feedback as essential metrics. ALL interactions with customers then, whether in-person or via the web, must be 1) grounded in an understanding of the customer, and 2) empowered to adapt based on recent feedback. This valuation of customer experience is [finally] starting to raise the bar for the WCM industry…gone are the days when we can get away with merely providing a means of doing more with less. CIOs and CMOs alike are now recalling those long-promised ROI calculations which included increased sales, and they are holding the WCM vendors accountable. If they’re not doing so already, I sure hope they start because the technology has finally caught up to the hype. So, with that said, here goes…
Hope #1: Audience Engagement Frameworks [The almost forgotten promise of WCM]
If you haven’t heard of an Audience Engagement Framework, it’s because I just coined the phrase last week. Hopefully it’s at least partly self-explanatory. AEFs, in my opinion, are the future of marketing on the web. They will enable WCM to realize its full potential. AEFs include traditional WCM combined with web analytics, marketing automation, audience segmentation and dynamic content delivery. Analysts and thought leaders have been discussing the notion of Persuasive Content for a while — the idea that content is tailored to suit the consumer / visitor. The only bit I would add to this is that in order to be persuasive, one must also be perceptive. Perceptive Content, another phrase I’m laying claim to, is that which is informed by visitor behavior via analytics (preferably in real-time), search, user-generated content, etc. AEFs includes both the perceptive and persuasive aspects of content, and a handful of innovative vendors have already released varying degrees of the framework in their products. I fully expect this trend to continue in 2010. And, while some vendors will implement it more wholistically than others, at least we’re not talking about WYSIWYG editors being the biggest leap forward anymore. Or, at least, I’m not.
Hope #2: Search [Tightly integrated and much improved]
In 2009, we saw a mutual interest between the Search and WCM industries as Autonomy purchased Interwoven, Squiz bought Funnelback, and a number of WCM vendors such as Drupal and eZ Systems took major steps to integrate advanced search engines into their products. Many of the newly integrated products include features such as faceted search, auto-complete/suggest, content spotlighting, relevance ranking, and more. As I see it, this was more than just an attempt to improve the usability of their resulting websites in response to an ever-increasing shift towards search as the primary form of navigation. I believe, er, I hope, this trend is an intentional step towards improving a site’s perceptive capabilities. Our ability to understand our audience’s desires will most certainly be enhanced by attending to their searches, and our ability to manipulate the search results based on the visitor’s (and her associated segment’s) interaction with the website should only improve her [customer] experience which I’ve deemed so imperative above. If my guess is right, today’s notion of search within a website will get a serious upgrade in the year(s) to come.
Hope #3: User-Generated Content [WCM gets even more social!]
User-Generated Content such as micro-blogs, social networking, tagging, commenting, etc. is everywhere. Many WCM Vendors have offered various UGC features in their products for a while now, but most have not implemented ways for companies to capitalize on the resulting content. As the industry continues to brainstorm ways to monetize the “social” trend, a handful of vendors such as Alterian and Sitecore have begun leveraging this content to improve audience engagement, thus again following suit with my theme from Hope #1. It won’t take long for others to follow.
Hope #4: Globalization [Multi-lingual gets localized in the mainstream]
In the days of old, multi-lingual content capabilities were only promised by specialized vendors. However, as more and more companies are concerned with improving the experiences of their international customer base, a number of mainstream WCM vendors have begun to include these features in their products. With a few exceptions, the capabilities of most are relatively immature at this point, but 2010 should see an improved understanding of localization by mainstream vendors. The continued enhancement of such features should help to avoid what my colleagues have termed the Language Afterthought Syndrome, and the engaged conversation will be allowed to thrive worldwide.
Well, that’s it. I’d love to know your thoughts. We’ll be discussing many concepts related to the Audience Engagement Framework in the Customers & Engagement track at the upcoming Gilbane Conference in San Francisco, so mark your calendars for May 18-20! I also intend to write more on the subject and am just getting underway with some related research, so please stay tuned!
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Kaltura, Inc. announced it has released a Kaltura-based video extension for Joomla! The Kaltura extension allows Joomla site-builders to handle every aspect of video and rich-media, including content management, syndication, monetization, transcoding, uploading, importing, editing and remixing. The extension is simple to install, customize, and use. The Joomla extension is available in two flavors: a free community-supported, video platform extension that is self-hosted by the publisher, and a video extension based on Kaltura’s SaaS platform, which includes a 10GB free trial, including Kaltura support and additional paid services such as tier-1 hosting and streaming, transcoding, syndication, advertising, security and more. http://www.kaltura.com
Alfresco Software, Inc. announced the availability of Alfresco Content Services for Lotus social collaboration products, an integration between the Alfresco open source enterprise content management (ECM) system and IBM Lotus Quickr, Lotus Notes, Lotus Connections and WebSphere Portal. This integration brings together a combination of the Lotus social collaboration capabilities and Alfresco’s enterprise content management. Alfresco Content Services for Lotus allows access for programmers to extend the integration from Lotus Notes, Domino, XPage and Portal applications using a wide choice of languages, APIs, protocols and services, including Java, JavaScript, JSP, PHP, CMIS, JSR 168k CIFS, IMAP, JCR, WebDAV, FTP, NFS, SMTP, XForms, SOAP, and .net. Alfresco Content Services for Lotus includes an implementation of the SharePoint protocol. This provides users with access from Microsoft Office, while giving companies the freedom of choice in their IT architecture. Alfresco Content Services for Lotus will be available in the spring of 2010, and will be available to download from January 17. http://www.alfresco.com/ibm
Just in from Information Week is this article (Exclusive: IBM Reorganizes Software Group ) that prompted me to launch 2010 with some thoughts on where we are heading with enterprise search this year. When IBM does something dramatic it impacts the industry because it makes others react.
I don’t make forecasts or try to guess whether strategic changes will succeed or fail but a couple of years ago, I blogged on IBM’s introduction of Yahoo OmniFind, a free offering and then followed up with these comments just a few months ago. IBM makes their competitors change, try to outsmart, outguess, or copy, just as Microsoft or Google changes cause ripples in the industry.
Meanwhile, OpenText, another large software company with search offerings, is not going to offer search outside of its other product suites. [More is likely to come out after the scheduled analyst meetings today but I’m not there and can’t brief you on deeper intent.] We have recently seen an announcement about FAST being delivered with new SharePoint offerings, the first major release of FAST announced since Microsoft acquired them almost two years ago. While FAST is still available as a standalone product from MS, it and other search engines may be steadily moving into being embedded in suites by their acquirers.
Certainly IBM has a lot of search components that they have acquired, so continuing to bind with other content offerings is a probable strategy. Oracle and Autonomy may soon come up with similar suite offerings embedding search once again. Oracle SES (Secure Enterprise Search) does not appear to have a lot of traction and it’s possible that supporting pure search offerings may be a burden for Autonomy with its stable of many acquired content products.
All of this leads me to think that, since enterprise search has gotten such a bad reputation as a failed technology, the big software houses are going to bury it in point solutions. Personally, I believe that enterprise search is a failed strategy and SMBs can still find search engines that will serve the majority of their enterprise needs for several years to come. The same holds true for divisions or groups within large corporations.
Guidance: select and adopt one or more search solutions that fit your budget for small scale needs, point solutions and enterprise content that everyone in the organization needs to access on a regular basis. Learn how these products work, what they can and cannot deliver, making incremental adjustments as needs change and evolve. Do not install and think you are done because you will never be done. Cultivate a few search experts to stick with the evolving landscape and give them the means to keep up with changes in the search landscape. It is going to keep morphing for a long time to come.
