Is it me, or does this interview make EMC CEO Joe Tucci seem completely uninterested in Documentum?
Author: Bill Trippe (Page 14 of 23)
Ed Dodds points us to a short but useful management-level writeup of OpenDocument vs. Office Open XML in Baseline magazine. By the way, if you don’t know Ed’s blog, Conmergence and you are interested in the broad application of XML to IT infrastucture, it is well worth bookmarking or adding to your RSS reader.
Sarah O’Keefe from Scriptorium noted and commented on a great discussion of DITA and DocBook by Norm Walsh, the guru of DocBook. Norm was a featured speaker at last week’s DITA 2006 conference. Norm’s discussion is readable and lucid, and if you have been wondering about this question for a while, Norm’s post is required reading.
Via Scott Abel, we learned about the formation of the OpenDocument Format Alliance. I went straight to the “about” page, which provides the current list of members. The right concentration of UnMicrosoft vendors are there–Sun, Novell, IBM, Corel, and RedHat. But there are a few interesting members, including the American Library Association and the Massachusetts High Technology Council (and yes, if you go to their Web page, that is indeed the unlikely romantic pairing of Ted Kennedy and Mitt Romney chuckling in the picture on the upper left). The Mass High Tech Council caught my eye because they are a famously pro-growth organization that might not always get behind this kind of initiative. Perhaps they have suddenly realized that standards are good for growth? Or perhaps there are enough Massachusetts High Tech companies with an interest in ODF? Novell’s headquarters is in Massachusetts now, but they are not a member of the Council. But Sun has a big campus here, and they are a member. So that might explain it.
Scott’s article has a good roundup of related news coverage.
As Frank reported in our news, Documentum has acquired DRM vendor Authentica (more detail here). Bill Rosenblatt, who is chairing the Enterprise DRM Conference that is part of Gilbane San Francisco, says it is a watershed event for the industry. I agree. As Gilbane colleagues Glen Secor and David Guenette have pointed out (here and here, respectively), DRM is a piece of a broader network infrastructure that needs to be in place for more comprehensive document and content security. In truth, none of the ECM vendors has taken this very seriously so far, but the Authentica acquisition suggests Documentum may finally be doing so.
Onfolio, a company and tool I have used and liked, is being acquired by Microsoft. Onfolio is led by J. J. Allaire, one of the incredibly bright and hands-on entrepeneurial Allaire brothers who developed Cold Fusion. According to the Boston Globe, the entire six-person Onfolio team is moving from Massachusetts to Redmond. This is much like the case of Ray Ozzie’s Groove, where Microsoft is acquiring Allaire as much as they are acquiring Onfolio.
Also according to the Boston Globe, the Onfolio tool, which came in three retail versions ranging in price from $30 to $149, will be available for free, starting today, as part of the Windows Live Toolbar. However, I checked the Windows Live Ideas site quickly and couldn’t find it.
UPDATE: The Toolbar Beta is there now.
I wanted to add some additional thoughts to the recent post on actionable content. That post reflected on the general idea of actionable content, differentiated it (maybe, maybe not) from transactional content, and pointed to an example of the amazing depth of content that is now available on some Web sites. The particular example was an industrial marketing Web site, Oriental Motors, but the requirement for actionable content spans many kinds of businesses and many kinds of non-business organizations. Think of a massive retail catalog like Amazon.com or a smaller, specialized one like sheetmusicplus.com. Both need to provide their users with detailed content–and often many kinds of content–that the user can consume, analyze, download, and even manipulate and share in the course of deciding whether to buy and precisely what to buy.
Nor is actionable content limited to eCommerce applications per se. Think of a government Web site that provides necessary forms for businesses and individuals, school systems and colleges that provide Web-based learning applications, and an employee human resources portal that provides benefits information. (And my favorite example of all, a large fantasy sports site such as Yahoo Fantasy Sports that provides a staggering array of content, statistics and analytical tools to keep users busy full-time and around the clock.)
What is common among all of these sites is the content of course, and content that is available when users need it to further the process they are engaged in. As Mary and Bill Z helpfully told us, transactional/actionable content, “is the content that flows through the commerce chain, initiating and automating processes such as procurement, order management, supply chain planning, and product support.” In other words, it is the content that is available when the person needs it, in the forms the person needs it, to further the business process they are involved in.
Sounds easy, but of course, as in so many things, the devil is in the details. It’s one thing to say you want to provide the right content in the right format at the right time, but it is another thing to actually do it. If you start to think about it, providing this kind of actionable content in context requires the content to be available–and it requires the business logic and the technical apparatus to present the correct content at the right point in the workflow or business process.
For now, let’s put aside the issues of business logic and technical apparatus and look at the issues about the content itself. What characteristics must the content have to be actionable? In no particular order, I offer the following.
- The content must be granular. In other words, it can’t exist as one giant blob of content, but must be accessible as usable chunks of content that can be presented in a useful context–so one product image at a time, and not a thousand (that should be easy)–and the right information that should accompany that product image–its caption, its size, its format, and so on.
- The content must be available in the right format. If you think about it for a moment, this likely means that the content is potentially available in many formats, given the different needs, systems, and platforms of different users and systems. When I see a requirement for content to be available in many formats, I immediately think of a media-neutral format that can, in turn, create all the necessary required formats. In the world of text, this often leads organizations to consider using something like the eXtensible Markup Language (XML); in the world of images, this might mean storing the image files in a high-resolution, high-fidelity format that can then be used to create every other format of the drawing that might be required.
- The content must be searchable, either by itself or by virtue of closely associated metadata. If the content is text, the text should be searchable, and the more structured and fielded the text, the more it avails itself of search technology. It if is graphics or other formats, it should be in open readable formats where possible and not in opaque binary formats. If it must be in binary formats, it should always be accompanied by metadata that helps explain what the content is, what format it is in, what subject matter it deals with, and so on.
There are more requirements, to be sure, but these are the ones that come immediately to mind. It’s also important to note these are merely technical requirements for the content, and don’t go to the more fundamental questions of precisely what kind of content your users need are requesting.
We have written about the idea of content that is critical to business process before, such as the content that is intimately tied to eCommerce (see here and here). Forrester Research, as well as Gilbane colleagues Mary Laplante and Bill Zoellick like the term “transactional content,” and Bill and Mary have offered the following helpful definition in the past:
Transactional content can be defined as shared information that drives business-to-business processes. It is the content that flows through the commerce chain, initiating and automating processes such as procurement, order management, supply chain planning, and product support. Transactional content is shared in the sense that it is exchanged among partners, suppliers, customers and distributors who each can contribute to it.
Gilbane colleague David Guenette and I have grappled in the past with ‘actionable content” as a preferred term. We keep thinking that transactional is just too narrowly suggestive of the financial transaction that takes place when something is finally purchased. Instead, we argue, there are many, many steps leading up to the financial transaction where content can support a series of actions. Looking at the industrial buying process in the recent past, I see this idea of a series of actions making more and more sense. More complex buying doesn’t happen in one single transaction. A prospective buyer needs to first search for information, find it, review what he or she has found, perhaps download more detailed information, evaluate what he or she has learned, query for more information, and so on. Each ot these are actions, and content drives each one.
In industrial buying, the particular actions around content can be complex–reviewing technical specifications, downloading and using CAD drawings, and even configuring the content and CAD drawings prior to downloading them. This kind of content and this kind of parameterization of content is increasingly available on the Web. For example, look at the detailed information one motor company, Oriental Motors, provides for one of its thousands of available products. This page includes specifications, photos, dimensional images, connection diagrams, and both two-dimensional and three-dimensional CAD drawings. Users can view all of this information and then download, for example, CAD drawings in one of several formats, depending on what CAD package they are using. Once downloaded, these drawings can be more closely analyzed, and can even be inserted directly into active designs.
Has a transaction taken place yet? It could be argued both ways, I guess. Whatever the terminology, however, a great deal has happened. The engineer has learned a great deal. The company has been able to share their product information. The design of a new product has been furthered by the engineer downloading the drawing. Research tells us that a drawing inserted in this way usually results in the product being sourced when the design goes to manufacturing. Actionable or transactional? Either way, it’s good news for the company that has deployed their content to the Web in such a usable, flexible manner.
I will have some more thoughts on this in the next couple of days.
