The Gilbane Advisor

Curated for content, computing, and digital experience professionals

Year: 2020 (Page 9 of 44)

InVision’s digital whiteboard, Freehand, adds templates for collaboration

November 12, 2020 /

InVision, the digital product design platform, announced its latest update for its online whiteboard, Freehand. Freehand, which is integrated into the broader InVision platform, now includes more than a dozen templates from global enterprise organizations including American Express, Asana, Atlassian, AWS, IBM, Xbox. These templates invite customers to incorporate collaborative workflow practices developed by some of the world’s top teams to accelerate their own product development and digital transformation, all from within the InVision platform. The new templates include:

  • Brainstorming by Xbox, to engage design and product stakeholders in a simple, inviting ideation exercise focused on giving everyone a voice
  • Architecture Brainstorm Map used by Amazon Web Services (AWS) Solution Architects, to keep customer and business requirements in sight while building an architecture diagram
  • Marketing Project Plan by Asana, to kick off a campaign with thoughtful brainstorming for better results
  • Customer Journey Map by American Express, to unify business partners on the opportunities within a customer’s journey
  • Product Launch by LaunchDarkly, to align a product delivery team and strategize on a successful product launch
  • Sprint Planning by Atlassian, to run effective sprint planning meetings with product and engineering teams while remote
  • Affinity Diagram by UserTesting, to better synthesize UX research with a thorough understanding of data

InVision Enterprise customers can also now create custom templates for their team’s internal use.

https://www.invisionapp.com

Elastic updates multiple products

November 11, 2020 /

Elastic announced new capabilities and updates across its Elastic Enterprise Search, Observability, and Security solutions that deliver new features to reduce storage costs, proactively monitor and manage digital web experiences, and easily visualize data.

With the beta launch of searchable snapshots, a new capability that provides a tiered approach to searching across data that is saved in different classes of storage, Elastic customers get a simple, integrated approach to managing data storage tiers. Customers can store and search more data and reduce costs with low-cost object stores such as Amazon S3, Azure Storage, and Google Cloud Storage.

New expanded Elastic Observability features, including user experience monitoring and synthetics, give developers new tools to test, measure, and optimize end-user website experiences. The launch of a new dedicated User Experience app in Kibana provides Elastic customers with an enhanced view and understanding of how end users experience their websites.

In addition, Elastic customers can use the new user experience monitoring feature to review Core Web Vitals, helping website developers interpret digital experience signals. Elastic users can also leverage a dev preview release of synthetic monitoring in Elastic Uptime to simulate complex user flows, measure performance, and optimize new interaction paths without impact to a website’s end users.

https://www.elastic.co

Gilbane Advisor 11-11-20 — web fix, ad bubble, dev exp, cloud myths

November 11, 2020 /

Thank you veterans! Have a great Veteran’s Day.

A new era of innovation and trust in data​

Says Tim Berners-Lee in his announcement of “the first enterprise-ready version of a Solid Server, Inrupt’s ESS”. Solid (Socialized Linked Data). Solid is a standards based open source project Berners-Lee and others from MIT started around 2015, and Inrupt is a company created to build a commercial ecosystem for decentralized Solid applications that allow for personal control of online data access and use. The question since then has been whether his vision of the future of the web, which was certainly appealing,  would work commercially.  What’s important about this announcement are working implementations of Solid at media, financial, and government organizations, and its availability for any organization.

Solid Project and Inrupt logos

To learn more about the Solid Server…

Read More

Ad Tech could be the next internet bubble

That ad tech and microtargeting are a mess is probably not news to you, and you (advertiser, publisher, and consumer) may be looking forward to a reckoning, especially for the smiling ad salespeople, faceless middlemen, fraudsters taking cuts, and ad-filled tracking websites. But it is worth paying attention to the various repercussions, including worst case scenarios. Gilad Edelman mentions one such outcome in the title of his post and points to the same cause in his subtitle, “The scariest thing about microtargeted ads is that they just don’t work.”

Read More

The developer experience gap​

Stephen O’Grady’s (1,827 word) piece is an excellent read for anybody interested in developer productivity, as well as for developers.

Fragmentation makes it impossible for vendors to natively supply the requisite components for a fully integrated toolchain. That does not change the reality, however, that developers are forced to borrow time from writing code and redirect it towards managing the issues associated with highly complex, multi-factor developer toolchains held together in places by duct tape and baling wire. This, then, is the developer experience gap. The same market that offers developers any infrastructure primitive they could possibly want is simultaneously telling them that piecing them together is a developer’s problem. The technology landscape today is a Scrooge McDuck-level embarrassment of riches.

Read More

Debunking seven common myths about cloud​

McKinsey…

Many of today’s beliefs about cloud are based on misconceptions fed by stories of adoptions gone wrong or fears of significant change. These beliefs get in the way of deeply understanding the positive business, operational, and economic impacts of cloud and must be addressed to enable organizations to capture cloud’s full value.

Read More

Also…

The Gilbane Advisor is curated by Frank Gilbane for content technology, computing, and digital experience professionals. The focus is on strategic technologies. We publish more or less twice a month except for August and December. We do not sell or share personal data.

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BigCommerce joins MACH Alliance

November 10, 2020 /

BigCommerce, a SaaS ecommerce platform announced it has joined the MACH Alliance, a newly-formed group of independent tech companies dedicated to advocating for an open technology ecosystem for enterprise ecommerce solutions. As part of this group, BigCommerce will work in collaboration with members to enhance education, development and adoption of composable infrastructures through microservices-based, API-first, cloud-native SaaS and headless technology and digital experiences. BigCommerce has been enabling merchants to build scalable, content- and experience-driven digital commerce experiences through headless deployments. APIs allow for full access to the data and business logic of the BigCommerce platform, so merchants can connect third-party integrations, mobile applications or a front-end CMS or DXP to create a headless storefront. Participation in the MACH Alliance will create additional opportunities for BigCommerce to advance MACH principles as the modern standard.

https://www.bigcommerce.com, https://machalliance.org

Adobe to acquire Workfront

November 9, 2020 /

Adobe announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Workfront, a work management platform for marketers, for $1.5 billion, subject to customary purchase price adjustments. With more than 3,000 customers and one million users, Workfront is a solution marketers use to manage content, plan and track marketing campaigns, and execute complex workflows across teams.

The combination of Adobe Experience Cloud and Workfront will help bring efficiency, collaboration, and productivity gains to marketing teams and  operations managers currently challenged with siloed work management solutions. Workfront has deep experience in orchestrating marketing workflows and has APIs that enable a seamless connection to Adobe Creative Cloud and Adobe Experience Cloud. Workfront’s platform is architected for the enterprise, with integration capabilities that can be configured to meet the varied needs of companies of all sizes. Adobe and Workfront are already partners with over 1,000 shared customers.

Workfront CEO Alex Shootman will continue to lead the Workfront team, reporting to Anil Chakravarthy, executive vice president and general manager, Digital Experience Business and Worldwide Field Operations. The transaction is expected to close during the first quarter of Adobe’s 2021 fiscal year. Until the transaction closes, each company will continue to operate independently.

https://www.workfront.com, https://blog.adobe.com/en/2020/11/09/adobe-to-acquire-workfront.html#gs.l1p5o6

Inrupt releases enterprise version of Solid Server

November 9, 2020 /

Tim Berners-Lee’s (unedited) announcement…

Today marks a huge milestone in Inrupt’s journey to deliver on my vision for a vibrant web of shared benefit and opportunity. I’m thrilled that the first enterprise-ready version of a Solid Server, Inrupt’s ESS, is now available for businesses and organizations. It’s the fruit of two years of work by our outstanding team. These technologies will fundamentally change how organizations connect people with their data and create value together. It’s going to drive groundbreaking new opportunities that not only restore trust in data but also enhance our lives.

We’ve reached this milestone alongside a trusted cohort of early adopters including the BBC, NatWest Bank, the UK’s National Health Service, and the Flanders Government. They’re each proving what’s possible for their users by changing the way they think about, share, and use data. You can read more about these important pilots in this blog post from Inrupt CEO, John Bruce.

The web was always meant to be a platform for creativity, collaboration, and free invention – but that’s not what we are seeing today. Today, business transformation is hampered by different parts of one’s life being managed by different silos, each of which looks after one vertical slice of life, but where the users and teams can’t get the insight from connecting that data. Meanwhile, that data is exploited by the silo in question, leading to increasing, very reasonable, public skepticism about how personal data is being misused. That in turn has led to increasingly complex data regulations.

There had to be a better way. The Solid architecture provides that better way.

I founded Inrupt to trigger an inevitable shift in how the web operates, to mobilize resources and set a long-term direction in motion. Today that shift takes a significant step.

The technologies we’re releasing today are a component of a much-needed course correction for the web. It’s exciting to see organizations using Solid to improve the lives of everyday people – through better healthcare, more efficient government services and much more.

These first major deployments of the technology will kick off the network effect necessary to ensure the benefits of Solid will be appreciated on a massive scale. Once users have a Solid Pod, the data there can be extended, linked, and repurposed in valuable new ways. And Solid’s growing community of developers can be rest assured that their apps will benefit from the widespread adoption of reliable Solid Pods, already populated with valuable data that users are empowered to share.

Ultimately, this new foundation of trust and cooperation will lead to entirely new business models that actually benefit users as well.

Starting today, more organizations worldwide can take the first step towards building a trusted web where innovation flourishes, and everyone – businesses, developers, and web users – share the benefits. We hope you’ll join us on this exciting journey.

https://inrupt.com/innovation-trust-data

Microsoft adds Hindi to Text Analytics service to strengthen Sentiment Analysis

November 5, 2020 /

Microsoft announced the addition of Hindi as the latest language under its Text Analytics service to support businesses and organizations with customer Sentiment Analysis. Text Analytics is part of the Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services. Using this service, organizations can find out what people think of their brand or topic as this enables analyzing Hindi text for clues about positive, neutral, or negative sentiment. The Text Analytics service can be used for any textual/audio input or feedback in combination with Azure Speech-to-Text service. Microsoft’s Text Analytics service uses the latest AI models to analyze content in Hindi, using Natural Language Processing (NLP) for text mining and text analysis. The functionality provided by Text Analytics include sentiment analysis, opinion mining, key phrase extraction, language detection, named entity recognition, and PII detection. Sentiment analysis currently supports more than 20 languages including Hindi.

Microsoft Text Analytics service’s Sentiment Analysis feature evaluates text and returns confidence scores between 0 and 1 for positive, neutral, and negative sentiment for each document and sentences within a document. The service also provides sentiment labels (such as “negative”, “neutral” and “positive”) based on the highest confidence score at a sentence and document-level. It can be accessed from Azure cloud and on-prem using Containers. This helps brands in detecting positive and negative tonality in customer reviews, social media & call center conversations, and forum discussions, among other channels no matter where their data resides.

https://news.microsoft.com/en-in/microsoft-adds-hindi-to-its-text-analytics-service-to-strengthen-sentiment-analysis-support-for-businesses/

Markzware added QXPMarkz macOS to Q2ID bundle

November 4, 2020 /

Markzware, a software developer for the printing, publishing and graphic design industries, added QXPMarkz macOS, with InDesign 2021 support, to the Q2ID bundle. If you own a current, qualifying Q2ID License, you can use the License Link provided to you at the time of purchase, to access the update. QXPMarkz, part of the new “Markz” line of applications, is replacing Q2ID. The stand-alone QXPMarkz application allows you to convert and open your QuarkXPress documents in Adobe InDesign, without the need for the QuarkXPress application. QXPMarkz converts Quark files to IDML, which opens up several possibilities. Mainly, it allows you to convert Quark files to InDesign without having QuarkXPress loaded on your computer, but, it also allows you to send those IDML files to Affinity Publisher version 1.8 or higher.

QXPMarkz also has the ability to export the text out of a QXP file and save it as plain text, RTF or HTML. Another trick is you get a rough preview of the QXP file. This preview can be exported as several different bitmap formats including PNG and JPEG. And finally, you can view a file inspector panel with file details, including the number of images and fonts detected in the QXP file. System requirements for QXPMarkz include macOS 10.12 or newer, 4GB of RAM, 1024×768 display, and an Internet connection. (Note: A Windows version is in the works.) For those who would like a perpetual license of QXPMarkz, you can purchase via the QXPMarkz page on the markzware.com website and through authorized Resellers.

https://markzware.com/products/qxpmarkz/

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