Writing for SearchDomino.com, Peter Bochner puts IBM’s acquisition of XML hardware vendor DataPower in perspective. For Bochner and Zapthink’s Ron Schmelzer, the goal is to bolster WebSphere performance. But I think there is a broader story here, and the article itself points out that both Intel and Cisco have gotten into the XML hardware game.
Author: Bill Trippe (Page 17 of 23)
Information Week has published some research on Enterprise Content Management (ECM) spending, and the numbers are impressive indeed. 186 business-technology professionals were asked to comment on spending trends in ECM, and 45% said ECM-related spending will increase over 2004 and 24% said it would be equal to 2004. Only 16% said spending would be lower than 2004, with the remaining 15% saying they did not know.
Moreover, nearly one-third of surveyed companies said they will spend more than $500,000 on content management technology and services this year.
Not surprisingly, compliance seems to be the driving factor.
More than half (52%) of respondents say that the Sarbanes-Oxley Act has led them to adopt enterprise content management. The law, which requires companies to document and test internal controls over financial reporting, has challenged companies to move beyond spreadsheets toward building dedicated repositories for collecting information on internal processes… Electronic-records-retention laws also were cited by 52% of respondents as driving adoption of enterprise-content-management systems, followed by intellectual-property and copyright protection (48%), customer privacy (36%), and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (32%).
While we don’t do market research, these numbers certainly reflect what we have been hearing and seeing in the marketplace. Organizations are actively looking at and buying ECM solutions, and the focus is often on document management, records management, and compliance. At the same time, we see a lot of activity outside of compliance-driven applications, such as in product support applications where globalization and enhanced customer experiences seem to be driving the work.
When people think of piracy protection, they usually think about music and movies, occasionally about other media such as e-books. But I have always been interested in how Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology can help any company with intellectual property protect these assets. Think of examples like a chipmaker’s CAD drawing for its newest design, a drug company’s formulation of a new medicine, or the draft agreement that gets shared during a corporate merger. Any one of these things is highly valuable, and easily distributable in digital form.
Enter BASCAP, Business Action to Stop Counterfeiting and Piracy. Bill Rosenblatt has an interesting take over at DRM Watch.
CM Professionals founding director and all-around great guy Bob Doyle has a cute take on DITA in the current EContent Magazine newsletter. Bob makes a lot of very good points, and also offers perhaps the best plain-English explanation of DITA’s value to implementers I have read:
While it is doubtful that out of the box DITA will find widespread use without customization (called specialization in DITA speak), the ready-made generic topic, and three “information-typed” specializations called concept, task, and reference, will get documentation teams producing very quickly. These documents will also be easily exchangeable with others. Because specializations inherit (thus the Darwinian name) properties from the general topics, their default behaviors–like printing, conversion to PDF, or XHTML Web pages–will produce decent results when transformed by default DITA XSLT style sheets.
One detail deserves mention though in Bob’s writeup. He refers to a “rumor” that Adobe recently used DITA to produce documentation. We know this rumor to be true, and have written about how Adobe used DITA to produce localized documentation for the recent release of Creative Suite 2. And, to all of Bob’s positive points we can add this one–at least two major companies (Adobe and Autodesk) have already used DITA to produce major documentation releases. Interestlingly, both Adobe and Autodesk used the same core technology to work with DITA–FrameMaker on the authoring side and Idiom World Server for content management and localization.
If you have been hearing about Ajax technology and are curious, you might want to check out this pretty cool dictionary site. The developer offers a helpful explanation of how it works, including some potential risks and tradeoffs. Up until now, Google Suggest has been kind of the canonical example of Ajax for this kind of application, but I think I like this one better. Some of the bloggers over at ZDNet have been doing a nice job of explaining Ajax and other such technologies and how they will impact traditional applications such as Microsoft Office. I think there are all kinds of implications for content management, with authoring and search interfaces only the beginning.
I am continuing to look into DITA, and will be speaking with some folks at Autodesk next week who have implemented DITA. In the meantime, you can look at a presentation the implementation team gave at STC this past May.
My thanks to the reader (in the comment below) who caught the bad link. I fixed it. Click here for the Powerpoint or here for Google’s HTML-ized version of the Powerpoint.
FrameMaker 7.2 was announced this week (see our news here and Adobe’s home page for the product here). Our news story touches on many of the new product features, but a few things are worth highlighting. Overall, the release is a significant step forward for FrameMaker, and should be seen as very welcome news for organizations that rely on the product for technical publishing.
- The new release adds XML schema support. While Karl Matthews, Adobe’s Group Product Manager for FrameMaker, was careful to point out to me that the schema support does not extend to data typing, I think this is sufficient for the kinds of publishing applications FrameMaker users would develop.
- The product now includes XSLT support. XSLT transformations can be invoked at the time a structured FrameMaker document is opened or saved. This will enable, for example, a “save as” function that could invoke an XSLT transformation on an XML document to create other content sets, metadata extractions, and so on. This is a clever addition to the product, and gets FrameMaker developers away from being reliant on the FrameMaker SDK.
- The product comes with a starter application for DITA. This is also welcome news, as there is a groundswell of support for DITA, and an independent group had been working on a separate FrameMaker application for DITA. This gives FrameMaker users a DITA application supported by Adobe. Moreover, the FrameMaker DITA application reflects a great deal of work Adobe had done in-house using FrameMaker to produce the documentation set for Adobe Creative Suite 2. (For Adobe’s own case study of how they used FrameMaker for this project, you can download this pdf. A related case study at Idiom’s web site describes how FrameMaker was used with Idiom’s WorldServer technology to manage the localization of the documentation into many languages.)
- The new version also adds some additional features and functionality for migrating unstructured FrameMaker content to XML. They have a pretty useful Migration Guide here (pdf).
On the whole, I was impressed with what I learned about the new release. It has some important new structural features (schema, XSLT), and the DITA application is timely and useful to a growing number of potential users. The strength of this release should quiet some of the feelings among users that Adobe is not fully committed to FrameMaker. Moreover, at a list price of $699, FrameMaker continues to provide a great deal of value for its user community by combining XML editing, high-quality print publishing, well integrated support for Adobe PDF, and support for multichannel publishing.
We keep seeing lots of interest in DITA, the Darwin Information Typing Architecture. One sign of growth is the emergence of several regional user groups. Mark Nazimova invites people in the New York City area to a kickoff meeting of NYDUG (the New York DITA Users’ Group).
The first meeting is on Tuesday, September 13, beginning at 6:30 p.m., at Information Builders’ headquarters at 2 Penn Plaza in Manhattan. The location is directly above Penn Station in midtown Manhattan (24th floor). It’s convenient to most subway lines, LIRR, New Jersey Transit, just down the avenue from the Port Authority Bus Terminal, just down the street from PATH, and two subway stops from Metro North.
Mark asks that you RSVP. If you are coming, he will need to give your name to building security; if you are not coming, he would like to hear from you if you are interested in DITA and in the tri-state area.
We have written about Information Builders and its use of DITA in a white paper, Topic-Oriented Information Development and Its Role in Globalization.
