The conference schedule for our Fall Content Management Technologies event, November 28-30 at the Westin Copley in Boston, is available at: . Topics to be covered in-depth include:
* Web Content Management (WCM)
* Enterprise Content Management (ECM)
* Collaboration, Enterprise Wikis & Blogs
* Enterprise Search & Search-based Applications
* Enterprise Digital Rights Management (eDRM)
* Automated Publishing
* Enterprise User Case Studies
Conference track descriptions are available at:
Speakers and complete session descriptions coming soon.
Author: Frank Gilbane (Page 60 of 71)
I could have sworn they already announced this, but in any case it was inevitable. The whole controversy is now simply not all that interesting. IT organizations need to understand the translation issues, but choosing one format over another is just not that big a deal. Many organizations have more complex issues to deal with, like integrating XML content from custom applications or other enterprise apps that don’t map to either ODF or Open XML directly. We have lots more background on this.
Forrester has published one of their “Wave Evaluations” on blogging platforms. Charlene Li has a summary of the report along with the associated Wave graphic on her blog. The full report is available for sale at Forrester. Note that this report does not cover Wikis, although some of the platforms covered also have Wiki functionality. As we have suggested before, in the enterprise space, the line between blog and wiki platforms blurs in many cases. This is of course truer for collaboration and intranet-oriented deployments than for outward facing, e.g., PR-oriented communication.
As Tim Bray says “Wow”. Here is the announcement post with a huge number of comments. This is discouraging. As I have argued before, we need the kinds of capabilities WinFS was striving for to make the next leap in managing information. I remain skeptical that database platforms are a sufficient solution for effective object management – they may be the necessary next step, but they are certainly not the ultimate answer.
There are no doubt many easier, shorter-term ways to get return on software development than a radically different operating system, but hopefully at some point there will be sufficient recognition by all the software infrastructure vendors that working together to build a modern OS would be worth it. On the other hand, perhaps what has happened to WinFS is really a sign that the days of huge operating systems are numbered. The problems are really bigger than any one platform. What kind of cross-platform infrastructure is feasible to accomplish the fluid, granular and meaningful interchange of content and behavior we know we need? This is a more interesting question than whether WinFS itself is dead.
UPDATE: There is a lot of commentary out there, but as usual Jon Udell has a view worth reading.
Nora Barnes has released the results of research into blogging from the Center for Marketing Research at UMass Dartmouth, where she is the Director and a Professor. This is a welcome addition to the sparse collection of research that has been conducted to date. The published report is free and is available (as a 1.3mb PDF) here, or from the Center, where there is also a link to a podcast of an interview with Nora, and links to comments from others on the study.
CIO’s, Collaboration and Search
I spent a little time at two conferences this week: Collaborative Technologies, and the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium. Both were good events with interesting content. There were multiple discussions where I wrote entire articles in my head, but of course I have no time to write them down. Of the few sessions at each event that I was able to go to there was a fair amount of overlap, which is interesting in itself. Here are some quick notes:
Collaboration was popular at both events.
The Google Enterprise Group keynoted both events. (Matthew Glotzbach, and Dave Girouard).
“Design for the end user”, “keep it simple” were heard often at both events – and not just from Google.
Both events had at least one major rant about the productivity-destroying power of meetings. (37Signals’ Jason Fried, and MIT’s Michael Schrage).
An interesting presentation about today’s actual organizational relationships: a combination of networked nodes, pyramid and diamond shaped, i.e., complex (NetAge’s Jessica Lipnack and Jeffrey Stamps).
Evidence that IT does contribute to productivity from MIT’s Eric Brynjolfsson. Had a million questions about the research, which involved something like 1000 case studies, might follow-up.
CIO’s from Commonwealth of MA, BT Retail, Monster, and Orange all said IT budgets are going up, although Orange said it will cycle back down in 3-5 years. There is no more room to cut and IT is now seen as business enable/driver not only back room. I think it was the MA CIO who said that now “IT is Operations”.
CIO’s from Dunkin Donuts, TAC, and especially State Street, and CHEP said there was a long way to go before IT and business were truly working together, although it sounded like it was better than average in their own organizatons.
Discussion about Google-like search vs searching tagged and organized text. One questioner said the DoD had given up on XML tagging years ago. Which is of course wrong – what they did was to back-off forcing a single DTD and tag set on everyone, but the approach of tagging was been steadily growing. In fact at our own conference last week in DC we heard from senior officials at many agencies (for example CTO at the GPO and the Deputy CIO at NASA) who are enthusiastic (and realistic) about tagging.
“The Semantic Web is doomed” was heard more than once and this was at MIT! Of course they are right that the whole idea is flawed, but it was a bit surprising to here it here. (MIT’s Schrage was one the naysayers as was Fast’s Bjorn Olstad, and maybe MIT’s Tom Malone). This came up in Tom Malone’s panel on “Liberation Technologies” (e.g., blogs , wikis, RSS, collaborative tools, and user-driven content. Will content become open source in the same way that (some) code is? The CIO audience voted by a slight margin that technologies were more controlling than liberating. However, many voted both ways. There was a funny but long argument between the ever-vocal Schrage and Howard Dresner on whether email was a collaborative technology.
Just kidding!
But it was fascinating how much interest there was in blog, wiki and RSS technology at our conference in Washington last week. Just as in the private sector, there is both more use of these technologies than most people realize, and strong interest once people hear about what other organizations are doing with them. See conference chair Tony Byrne’s comments on this in his article for Intelligent Enterprise magazine about the conference.
XML, and search were two other areas of intense interest.
This was a very gratifying event: the conference attendees were 90% government, and they were deeply engaged in the use of content technologies.
Since we have our conference on Content Technologies for Government in Washington this week I probably will not get to Tech-Ed which is at our new convention center here in Boston, even though it is less than 2 blocks away. But if I had the time, I would be there scouting out the new WinFS beta and the intriguing Project Orange, (which may be relevant to the previous post on Viper). Mary Jo Foley has a list of the top 10 things to watch for there. She and others have pointed to this post for some clues on Project Orange.
