Alfresco Software and VDEL GmbH, an IT services distribution company, announced a partnership under which VDEL has become a Master Distributor of Alfresco solutions in the territories of Eastern Europe, Russia, and CIS. Under the terms of the agreement, VDEL will offer Alfresco products, associated support, and training to its customers. The open source model allows Alfresco to use open source technologies and contributions from the open source community. In 2009, Alfresco obtained U.S. Department of Defence 5015.02 records management certification. VDEL is known in Eastern Europe, Russia, and CIS for; marketing, distributing and supporting network and security solutions. Because of their network of local partners VDEL is able to provide native language translation, localization and education. http://www.alfresco.com/ http://www.vdel.com/
Year: 2010 (Page 15 of 23)
Firespring, a marketing agency focusing on small and mid-sized organizations, introduced a new website solution for nonprofits. The new Firespring nonprofit website solution offers designs and online tools that are built with nonprofit organizations in mind, as well as segment-specific designs and content packages created for arts, advocacy and human service organizations. Website tools available include online donations, calendars, event registration, e-mail marketing, shopping carts, private member-only areas and automatic weekly updates on supporting nonprofits are built into the Firespring nonprofit website solution to help organizations engage their volunteers and their community. The websites all come with a content management system (CMS) allowing the nonprofit to update their own content, events and photos without a programmer. This solution will allow the nonprofit to add, remove or rename pages giving them the ability to customize their website without a technical specialist. http://www.firespring.com/
Last year as we pursued our research for the Multilingual Product Content study we saw an opportunity for further study of the role of machine translation (MT) as an element in the global content value chain (GCVC). To this end, Gilbane Group is now conducting an online survey on MT adoption and buyer / user expectations. The survey covers domains using MT, target applications, integration, benefits and business drivers, as well as obstacles to adoption.
Adoption of MT in some form or another is gaining acceptance and use (we anticipate) will soon be prevalent, especially as a strategy for managing user-generated content in multiple languages. We are seeking input from IT, content, and language professionals within global enterprises as well as service providers. Current adoption of MT is not a requirement for taking the survey.
The survey is online and will take less than 10 minutes to complete. In exchange for participation, respondents will receive aggregated survey results and the executive summary of the analysis. Take the survey now. Contact us if you have any questions about the research.
I just published a new white paper, Social Publishing with Drupal, sponsored by Acquia and also available here. We forget that publishing and blogging (including this post) are stove-piped operations. But what would happen if we could intelligently keep track of all these disparate threads, combining the authoritative content from trusted sources with insights from friends and colleagues, organized contextually around the ways we think about things and make decisions? Social publishing is a new lens for delivering business value.
Here’s the executive summary for the white paper. Click the link above if you’d like to learn more. What’s the future of social publishing? Let’s start a debate. /geoff
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Social publishing combines groomed and authoritative content, produced by an organization and emphasizing its core messages, with user-generated content that customers contribute via blogs, wikis, and social media tools. Drupal is an example of a social publishing platform, developed and maintained as an open source project, and delivered at an affordable cost.
Drupal is now deployed in major media companies, high technology firms, universities, magazine publishers, government agencies (including the White House), research groups, and non-profit organizations. Whether it is in a commercial, non-profit, or government setting, organizations rely on Drupal to project their presence over the web and to channel the interactive experiences that foster communities of contributors.
By leveraging Drupal’s capabilities as a social publishing platform, organizations are able to reinforce their branded experiences and deliver relevant content to their customers and stakeholders. By exploiting Drupal as an open source project, developers supporting these organizations can easily enhance and extend Drupal’s capabilities, and introduce innovative modes of interactivity that meet specific business requirements.
Drupal is an attractive investment with substantial business benefits. Organization can keep their license and support costs modest by building on an open source project. Organizations can leverage the collective expertise of Drupal developers to solve immediate publishing problems. By relying on Drupal, organizations can stay abreast of the rapid technology changes when building competitive solutions for the digital age.
Updated March 3, 2010
Government agencies produce a lot of information. Making it accessible to the public, which essentially paid for it, can be quite challenging. The volume is high. The formats are varied. Much of it remains locked in information silos.
Support is growing to take steps to make as much government information available to the public as possible. President Obama issued a directive describing the official policy for Transparency and Open Government that mandates an unprecedented level of accessibility to government information. At the same time, technical advances have improved the feasibility of increasing access to the data.
I recently completed a Gilbane paper on this topic and how some agencies are improving access to public data. It is now available for free on our Web site at https://gilbane.com/beacons.html. The paper’s sponsor, Mark Logic, has provided interesting case studies that illustrate the challenges and approaches to overcoming them. I also explore some of the major hurdles that need to be crossed to achieve this goal, including:
- Extremely high volumes of content and data
- Highly diverse, heterogeneous data formats and data models
- Complex content integration and delivery requirements
- Time-sensitivity of content
- Changing information environments
The approaches described have enabled that users of this technology to implement high-volume, disparate-data applications that not only overcome old technical barriers but also deliver new value to their organizations. This is, after all, the essence of open data – be it for open government, open publishing, or open enterprise.
I encourage you to read this paper to get a better understanding of what works to make government data more open.
Update: the Beacon is also available from Mark Logic.
FlashMoto.com, a start up that specializes in Flash website creation and provides a Flash CMS, launched an updated version of their Flash content management system with multiple language support. FlashMoto’s control panel has been translated into 12 languages, among which are: Spanish, Bulgarian, Japanese, Romanian, Italian, Russian, Chinese, Hungarian, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Serbian, and Czech. The interface language can be changed once a user logs into the admin panel. Users may edit their Flash CMS website content, add new pages, edit and delete the existing pages, manage the website menu, galleries, contact forms, upload videos and music, etc. Other features include SEO support, ability to upload your own fonts and integrate external modules and widgets. All the data is stored in XML files instead of a database. FlashMoto flash content management system features a basic navigation interface and WYSIWYG editor. In its next version, expected to be launched towards the end of March, FlashMoto will add 4 more languages: German, French, Turkish and Polish. http://www.flashmoto.com/
We’re featuring multlingual content strategies, practices, and technologies in four sessions on the San Franciso program:
- Reaching Global Audiences: Case Studies in Multilingual Multisite Web Content Management
- Breaking Out of the Silo: Improving Global Content Value Chains by Collaborating Across Departments
- Content Metrics: Tools for Measuring ROI in Global Content Infrastructures
- Eliminating the Multilingual Multiplier: Addressing the Cost of Producing Formatted Content in Multiple Languages
These topics are among the hot spots on Gilbane’s 2010 Content Globalization Heat Map, which identifies a set of key investments that companies can make today to advance their content globalization practices and overcome language afterthought syndrome. (See this presentation for more information on these concepts.)
We’re in the process of populating the sessions with top-notch speakers. Check the Gilbane San Francisco conference site for updates. Twitter is #gilbanesf.
We’re featuring multlingual content strategies, practices, and technologies in four sessions on the San Franciso program:
- Reaching Global Audiences: Case Studies in Multilingual Multisite Web Content Management
- Breaking Out of the Silo: Improving Global Content Value Chains by Collaborating Across Departments
- Content Metrics: Tools for Measuring ROI in Global Content Infrastructures
- Eliminating the Multilingual Multiplier: Addressing the Cost of Producing Formatted Content in Multiple Languages
These topics are among the hot spots on Gilbane’s 2010 Content Globalization Heat Map, which identifies a set of key investments that companies can make today to advance their content globalization practices and overcome language afterthought syndrome. (See this presentation for more information on these concepts.)
We’re in the process of populating the sessions with top-notch speakers. Check the Gilbane San Francisco conference site for updates. Twitter is #gilbanesf.
