We are wrapping up our project with JustSystems. In total, we created three papers, three companion webinars, and the the interactive ROI blueprint. I will also be producing a podcast shortly with Bruce Sharpe, JustSystem’s Founding Technologist. You can download the papers and view the recorded webinars here (registration required).
A tip of the hat to Gilbane colleagues Geoffrey Bock, Mary Laplante, and Dale Waldt who did most of the work. It was a big project!
Author: Bill Trippe (Page 5 of 23)
We had a great discussion last week in our session, Using DITA for Enterprise Publishing. One of the themes was about using DITA for business documents; two of the speakers, Michael Boses of Quark/In.Vision and Eric Severson of Flatirons Solutions, are on the DITA Enterprise Business Documents Subcommittee. We didn’t get to talking much about blogs, but then this announcement caught my eye today: DITA for WordPress.
A few days ago I released the DITA-OT and the WordPress plugins that enable me to publish part of the (almost inexistant) DITA-OP documentation on this blog. I am talking about the About, Download and Getting Started pages that appear in the menu up here. The DITA-OT plugin transforms a map into a single file, suitable for publication, and automatically call the xmlrpc API of the blog to publish it. The DITA WordPress plugin adds a css (a slightly modified version of the DITA-OT commonltr.css) to your WordPress theme to properly render the standard domains. You can download both plugins here, they are released under the GPL license.
Here at Gilbane Boston, we just heard from Michael Edson, Director, Web and New Media Strategy, Office of the CIO, Smithsonian Institution. His talk described the Smithsonian Institution’s current Web and New Media strategy process and the cultural, technical, and organizational implications of the vision of a Smithsonian Commons–a critical-mass of content, services, and tools designed to fuel innovation and stimulate engagement with the world’s scientific and cultural knowledge.
Many of the efforts are nascent, but this project on Flickr gives you a nice idea idea of the potential for this kind of effort.
We have a new white paper posted, Component Content Management – How True CCM Technology Drives the Most Compelling Content Initiatives. You can download it here.
But I am trying, maybe, sort of, to wean myself from Microsoft Office. It isn’t so much that I dislike Office–it is fine–but I find myself going through notebook computers faster than my friends used to go through muscle cars back in the 70s–which is, well, fast. When I go to rebuild that machine, or move myself onto a new one, I find that even a few days of lost data is a big deal. I suppose I could go with an online backup service like Carbonite, but my real goal is to live more in the cloud and also to live sort of free.
So I’ve downloaded and begun working with Open Office, though not exclusively, and have also started to work with Thunderbird. I also spent some time setting up a sync between the Thunderbird Lightning calendar helper and Google Calendar. There are some glitches to Thunderbird, though. It does not recognize Vcards, of all things (though I found a workaround). And it also doesn’t let me click on and accept meeting invitations (nor does Google Calendar). I have to do this awkward step of saving the calendar file to disk, then import it into Google Calendar, then wait for Google Calendar and Thunderbird/Lightning to sync.
These seem like really simple, really easy things for Thunderbird folks to fix. The file formats for the calendar file and Vcard could not be simpler. I would venture that they will get to these.
But now I have a new problem. Frank, generous guy that he is, offered me the use of a Treo he no longer uses. I used to use Palm devices religiously, but I was even harder on them than I am on notebooks, so my wife stopped letting me buy them at some point. (Not only would I break them but I would leave them behind–in cabs, on planes, in trains, in rental cars–you get the picture.) I am going to give this a go again, but it looks like I will have an issue syncing with Thunderbird. The open source tool for syncing has some problems (“Some Thunderbird fields do not sync, eg. second e-mail address, mailing address, mobile phone.” Huh? Mobile phone?), and as near as I can tell, there are no other tools for syncing.
So I guess I go back to Outlook at least, or do people know of some options out there that I have missed?
To participate in the study, please follow this link:
As part of the Gilbane Group’s continuous market research efforts, we are conducting a survey to learn which tools are being used most predominantly for structured authoring. The survey should only take 5 minutes of your time, and will help us to continue provide you with insight on how content technology is being used.
To participate in the study, please follow this link:
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We look forward to seeing you at the Gilbane Boston 2008 conference, December 2 – 4! As always, the program includes results from research studies from Gilbane as well as other analysts.
I’m at the RSuite User Conference. Day 1 is a fairly technical walkthrough of the product where different Really Strategies consultants and technical product folks will be doing a “CMS in a Day.” After an architectural overview, they are walking through content ingestion, workflow and action handlers, editing options, customization options, and content delivery. By the end of the day, the idea is to show an end-to-end publishing solution.
Eliot Kimber is demonstrating the workflow engine now. Later today, Norm Walsh will give a keynote. And Lisa Bos, Really Strategies’ CTO, is master of ceremonies for the day. That’s a lot of XML brain power in one day.
Tomorrow morning, I interview Gary Cosimini from Adobe in a kind of “fireside chat” format where we will delve into the evolution of Adobe’s creative tools and how they handle XML as well as some broader questions of how XML best fits into publishing workflows. With the upcoming release of CS4, this will be a great opportunity for the audience to hear straight from the horse’s mouth about Adobe’s direction. It will also help put in context Really Strategies’ recent announcement about their Creative Suite Connector for RSuite.
