Author: Bill Trippe (Page 12 of 23)

SharePoint for ECM?

November 5, 2007 / Bill Trippe / 0 Comments

Microsoft SharePoint is a force in the content management market. For the year ending June 2007, Microsoft reported $800 million in revenue for SharePoint, a figure that dwarfs most stand-alone ECM vendors and is nearly twice as large as Filenet’s annual revenue before it was acquired by IBM. Consider also that the other ECM vendor revenue includes substantial support dollars, and the SharePoint revenue is for licensing only. Even more impressive is the number of licenses–more than 17,000 companies have purchased 85 million licenses. That is one impressive foothold. Are all 17,000 companies using SharePoint for ECM? Of course not. Many are likely using SharePoint for basic document management and many for Web content management, and a significant number of the licenses are likely dormant or very lightly used.

Indeed, at different times in SharePoint’s product life, Microsoft has had to work hard to establish the value proposition for SharePoint to ensure enough reason for customers to renew their volume licenses. But each version of SharePoint has become more functional and has enjoyed deeper penetration into large organizations. SharePoint 2007 is now a significant ECM platform with a great deal of functionality and well established partnerships with key complementary vendors.

But the exact ways that people are using SharePoint today are not as important as the foothold it already has, and the determination organizations seem to have for making SharePoint work as a platform for myriad applications. Our discussions with users point to exactly this kind of thinking on the part of many organizations–they may have licensed SharePoint for a specific application, such as document sharing, or for a general need, but they are now looking at how the platform can support any number of other applications. This includes ECM applications, including ones with demanding scan and capture requirements.

View our recent webinar on how SharePoint is impacting the ECM market. The webinar is sponsored by KnowledgeLake.

Medtronic, DITA, Single-Sourcing, and Multi-Channel Communications

June 5, 2007 / Bill Trippe / 0 Comments

On Wednesday, June 13 at 1:00 Eastern Time, we will be doing a Webinar with Medtronic and the XMetal folks at JustSystems.
While documentation is a necessary deliverable for all companies, its value and contribution to bottom-line business results is often underestimated and overlooked. For Medtronic, one of the world’s most innovative medical device manufacturers, documentation is much more than a checkbox on a product release timeline—it is a direct link to customer satisfaction and patient well-being. Medtronic’s Rob Kimm will discuss Medtronic’s approach to delivering a better customer experience while also ensuring compliance with regulations that impact technical documentation.
Prior to using DITA, Medtronic had a decentralized, heterogeneous environment that slowed production and resulted in redundant workflows. Seven project deliverables were developed in 5 different tools, and the mutually-exclusive tools allowed for little to no ability to achieve true reuse of common content. They now can reuse common content across deliverable types, which has led to great efficiency, accuracy, and consistency.
To register for the Webinar, please visit here.

Oracle Webinar

May 6, 2007 / Bill Trippe / 1 Comment

Mary and I did the Webinar with Oracle this week. You can see the recorded version and download the associated white paper over at the Oracle site. The focus was on the challenges of multisite management.
Web content management is a staple technology for thousands of enterprises–and for good reason. Every enterprise needs a basic web presence, and organizations of even modest size and complexity have multiple websites. These multiple sites likely span a range of purposes and needs, including supplier and distributor extranets, customer support websites, and corporate and departmental intranets. Every enterprise’s needs will vary of course, but the larger the organization, the likelihood that the organization will have multiple websites, spanning a range of internal and external needs.
The abundance of websites results from sound business needs. These needs begin with the obvious requirement to have a web presence, but extend to many other areas. Consider the need to work closely with suppliers, and how that requirement can be met by a content-rich and functional extranet. Human Resources is another likely arena, where the organization might want to provide benefit information through an interactive website. The examples abound, and the recent explosion of blogs and wikis has amplified the need.
A key element in multiple website management is understanding who does what when it comes to website design, content creation, and the day-to-day efforts to keep the site or sites going. Can these users be productive and efficient? The matter of scale is another central question: Are there only one or two sites, or is your enterprise in the position of having dozens or even hundreds of sites, and serving content to intranets, extranets, and portals, with new websites regularly demanded by the needs of the business?
Multiple websites present challenges in many different typical workflows and processes. These include identifying and empowering the IT personnel who need to take the lead in web architecture to the line of business manager who must decide on the content and organization of the site and keep it up to date. Perhaps most significant are the needs of the content contributors. At the end of the day, they need easy-to-use tools that allow them to create content within the policies of the overall enterprise and the specific line of business.
Given the strong demand for multiple websites and the potential costs and inefficiencies of building these out separately, there is a natural need for the right technology. At minimum, organizations need web content management technology that supports centralized strategy and governance and that uses IT resources efficiently; at the same time, the technology must give site managers and contributors the means to create and manage the content quickly and easily.

Open Publication Structure 2.0 Elevated to IDPF Member & Public Review

April 16, 2007 / Bill Trippe / 0 Comments

Nick Bogarty from the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) writes that the Open Publication Structure (OPS) 2.0 has been elevated for IDPF Member and Public Review. The review period will begin today and extend for 30 days ending on Wednesday, May 16th, 2007. The IDPF strongly encourages feedback from potential users, developers and others, whether IDPF members or not, for the sake of improving the interoperability and quality of IDPF work.
You can view the draft document here. Feedback on the draft specifications should be made by posting a reply to the forum topic, and sample OPS 2.0 files can be found for download here.

DITA, DocBook, and ODF Interoperability?

April 11, 2007 / Bill Trippe / 0 Comments

As our readers know, we are long-time advocates of open-document formats. Over the past couple of years, we have written a great deal about DITA and formats like ODF, but we also have a lot of experience and interest in DocBook and vertical DTDs such as J2008 for the automotive industry and the various DOD standards. We are clearly reaching a point where interoperability among these standards has become an issue. Organizations are more diverse, more likely to be sharing content between operating groups and with other organizations, and more likely to be sourcing content from a variety of partners, customers, and suppliers. Needless to say, not all of these sources of content will be using the same XML vocabulary; indeed, even two organizations using DITA, for example, will likely have specialized DITA differently.

With this need for interoperability in mind, OASIS has announced a new discussion list, regarding a possible new OASIS Document Standards Interoperability Technical Committee (TC). Details on the list, including how to subscribe, can be found here.

Adobe Analyst Meetings

March 30, 2007 / Bill Trippe / 1 Comment

Frank, Mary, Tony, and I attended the Adobe analyst meetings in New York this week. To say that Adobe had a lot to share would be an understatement, but this was my first time attending this kind of event, so I have nothing to compare it to. Having said that, I have to say that I was impressed with the progress Adobe has made in several key areas–bringing Macromedia and its products into the fold; building out a much more compelling offering and clearer message with LiveCycle; and further solidifying its commanding presence in the creative tools space.

Along with the major focus on Creative Suite 3 (which was announced on Monday) and LiveCycle, Adobe executives also spent a fair bit of time on Software as a Service, discussing offerings like Adobe Document Center, which I have been playing around with since yesterday morning, and Acrobat Connect, nee Breeze, their web conferencing software. (And without having evaluated Acrobat Connect in detail, I have to say as someone who is on Webinars all the time that Connect is by far the easiest product I have ever used. It also seems to load like any other URL, but perhaps that is because I already have Acrobat professional on my system–not sure.)

A few other things that caught my eye:

Kuler is, well, cool. It is a collaborative online application that allows users to discover and upload color themes that can be used with Creative Suite tools. Ryan Stewart has a nice writeup over at ZDNet.
Apollo is impressive. We saw a number of demos, including the eBay one that has been written about (see here, and you can see a video of a demo here. The coolest Apollo demo, by far, is the one you can’t currently see, the Buzzword word processor from Virtual Ubiquity; their Website will tell you they have gone back underground after the alpha release. Again, Ryan Stewart has a nice overview and screen shots over at ZDNet. And there seems to be uptake for Apollo in the broad developer community. According to CTO Kevin Lynch, as of Wednesday the 28th, 30,000 people had downloaded the client since it was posted on March 19.
There’s a new Beta of Acrobat 3D available for download. I have looked at the manufacturing space a fair bit over the last couple of years, and few areas seem to have more areas of meaningful technical interchange than do manufacturers, their suppliers, and their customers. PDF files are everywhere in these applications, so a more functional 3D Acrobat makes all the sense in the world.
Adobe’s efforts to be more active in the standards world with PDF are clearly paying off. While we were there, they announced a win with the mortgage industry’s MISMO standards.

Lots to digest, but I came away impressed.

Good Books, 5 Ways

March 19, 2007 / Bill Trippe / 0 Comments

Is the Caravan Project the right new distribution model for trade publishers? The basic offering is compelling–providing simultaneous access to print, print-on-demand, eBook, chapter eBook, and digital audio versions of titles. The Caravan Project’s publishers include university presses like Yale University Press and nonprofit publishers like Beacon Press.

The Washington Post has a very good and comprehensive article about the project and its executive director, Peter Osnos.

Osnos, a fast-talking, silver-haired man of 63, has been in publishing almost precisely as long as as Politics and Prose has been in business. He left The Washington Post, where he’d been a reporter and editor, for Random House in 1984. Ten years ago he founded Public Affairs, which specializes in the kind of serious nonfiction titles that don’t require six-figure advances to acquire.

Over the years, he became all too familiar with the chief bane of a moderate-size publisher’s existence: the difficulty of getting the right number of books into bookstores at the right time. The advent of digital books, along with greatly improved print-on-demand technology, seemed to offer new ways to address this distribution problem, so a couple of years ago, after stepping down as head honcho at Public Affairs, he began to wrestle with it independently.

The nonprofit Caravan Project — which is supported by the MacArthur, Carnegie and Century foundations — is the result.

To start the experiment, Osnos recruited seven nonprofit publishers, among them academic presses such as Yale and the University of California and independents such as the Washington-based Island Press. Each was to designate titles on its spring 2007 list that would be published in a number of formats simultaneously.

The intriguing idea, to me, of the Caravan Project, is that it is directed at bookstores, with a goal of providing a common platform for them to sell the various formats. The marriage of print distribution with POD is a natural one of course–and Ingram, which is the backbone of the Caravan Project has exactly the infrastructure for that. But adding the eBooks and digital audio is distinctly different, and it gives booksellers the opportunity to be the human conduit for this kind of buying. The potential here is to give booksellers an enormous inventory of product where potentially nothing is truly out of stock.

Of course, the Caravan Project is a finite effort, with seven publishers providing a subset of their current catalogs, but the goal of the project is to try the new model, and see how it impacts the business. According to the Post, Borders sees the potential. “This could be a pilot for what all publishers end up doing eventually,” agrees Tom Dwyer, director of merchandising at Borders. Right now, Dwyer adds, bigger publishers are mainly focused on ‘digitizing all their content.’ But when it comes to distribution, he says, he’s sure they’re “planning something in this direction.”

I think they are too. I blogged about the eBook widget wars recently over at my own blog. The real story there is not the widgets themselves, but the mechanisms for digitization, access, and distribution behind those widgets. Project Caravan is an interesting effort, and one that publishers should watch closely.

Publishing Giant IDG Declares Print Dead

February 10, 2007 / Bill Trippe / 0 Comments

Well, if not dead, at least dying. Via Paid Content: IDG No Longer A Print Company; Online 35 Percent Of U.S. Publishing Revenues

IDG is no longer a print media company, declares Colin Crawford, the SVP of Online at the company, in a rather revealing post on his own blog. The trade behemoth is a private company, so this insight is a helpful one.
— The absolute dollar growth of our online revenues now exceeds the decline in our print revenues. This occurred in the US in 2006 and in Europe during the last quarter.
— In the US, our online revenue now accounts for over 35% of our total US publishing revenues. Next year, for many brands online revenues will be greater than print revenues, if fact they already are at some of our key brand and by 2009 – about 50% of IDG’s US revenues will come from online.
— “Going forward IDG Communications will define itself as a web centric information company complemented by expos, events and print publications.”

The metrics are compelling, don’t you think?