As we reported yesterday, IBM announced the release of DB2 9, which is the official release name for Viper, their effort to incorporate XML content into a relational database. Microsoft and Oracle have their own strategies for doing this, and once all their work settles down and starts to get seriously deployed, building enterprise applications will never be the same. It has been 20 years since the early demand for databases that could handle marked-up content (SGML back then), and there have been many products developed to manage SGML/XML repositories since then – Astoria, Berkley DB XML, Ipedo, Ixiasoft, Mark Logic, Software AG, Vasont, X-Hive, and XyEnterprise are some currrent examples.
There has been lots of debate over the years about the best approach to managing marked-up content, and it is safe to say that there is not a single answer. This means that you need to understand what the differences are between them – and it won’t be easy for those of you new to the unstructured data world – this is much trickier than the relational data world. In spite of the huge benefits of the major DB players providing serious XML support, the wide variety of content application requirements will ensure a long-term need for quite a few specialty vendors, whether they are targeting vertical applications or horizontal components. The good news is that even with many different XML application schemas, it continues to get easier to integrate all kinds of XML data.
Bill points to an article in eWeek here. Also see Dave Kellog’s comments and links to other articles.
Author: Frank Gilbane (Page 61 of 71)
Ross Mayfield reports that Socialtext has hooked-up with Dan Bricklin “…(inventor of VisiCalc) to exclusively distribute, redistribute and co-develop wikiCalc“. The wikiCalc beta has been released as an Open Source GPL distribution, and Socialtext will be releasing wikiCalc “under a more liberal and commercial friendly distribution”.
This is potentially very interesting as many existing enterprise wiki users are collaborating on projects where an integrated spreadsheet could add significantly to the utility of the application. We’ll be watching to see how enterprises pick-up and use this combo.
Listen to Lisa Welchman’s interview with Frank Gilbane and Tony Byrne about the upcoming Gilbane Government content management technology conference in this podcast.
The Wall Street Journal reported today that talks between Adobe and Microsoft over the inclusion of PDF creation in the upcoming release of Office have broken down, and they speculate that Adobe will file an antitrust suit as a result. The issue is that MS was planning to include PDF creation for free, which is obviously a direct hit at Adobe’s Acrobat revenue. If you have been following Microsoft’s XPS (XML Paper Specification) development as we reported here, you won’t be too surprised.
It is too early to know exactly how this will play out, but anyone with applications or workflows that depend on heavy use of both Office and PDF needs to keep this on their radar!
UPDATE: Mary Jo Foley has more info on this.
We have added a new session to our Washington DC conference the week after next. David Almacy, Internet and E-Communications Director at The White House will provide a brief overview of the White House web site and discuss how technology is being used to assist in communicating the President’s message to a growing online audience.
Also, EMC is now going to host a reception at the conference (which is at the Reagan Building) on June 14th, 4:30 – 6:00pm.
Our friends over at CMS Watch have released an updated version of their Enterprise Search Report. The report suggests a healthy enterprise market and covers 28 vendors. There is a free excerpt available. A few of the findings (taken from the press release) are:
– IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft continue to struggle to rationalize multiple search technologies and strategies. Oracle’s “Secure Enterprise Search 10g” product may be the most straightforward offering of the three, but it has not yet seen extensive customer testing.
– Smaller search vendors continue to exploit Microsoft’s inability to develop effective search solutions atop SharePoint. Mondosoft, Coveo, dtSearch, and others are likely to continue offering value-added capabilities after the release of Microsoft’s new search services in SharePoint 2007.
– Google’s search appliance has disrupted the market, but customer testing still often finds the appliance lacking in “tune-ability” and integration capabilities.
– Faceted or “guided” navigation capabilities originally associated with enterprise search vendor Endeca have gone from product differentiator to widespread feature. Customers can obtain faceted navigation capabilities from several low-cost search vendors. Now, the key differentiator is the extent to which a search system can successfully autogenerate a useful set of metadata “facets” with minimal customer intervention.
Steve Arnold, the main author of the report, will be leading a couple of sessions on Enterprise Search at our upcoming conference with CMS Watch in Washington DC June 13 -15. Join us there and get more details from Steve.
Well of course there are lots of obvious reasons it matters. But what is under-appreciated by many of us in the private sector is how often the government leads the way in developing, fostering and exploiting technology. This is especially true with information technology. The reason is simple: they have a bigger information management problem than anyone else combined with more resources than anyone else. For example, the US (as well as other governments) were building sophisticated markup-based content management, and electronic publishing applications a decade before the Web and browsers existed. While many of those SGML and electronic technical manual applications may seem primitive today, they were very forward-thinking and advanced then, and provided valuable lessons for today’s HTML and XML applications. Also, it is arguable that the entire (non-Google) search technology industry has been kept on life support for the last 20 years because of government investment.
So paying attention to government information technology initiatives is something all IT strategists should be doing. For our June 13-15 conference on government technologies in Washington, Conference Chair Tony Byrne is gathering a broad range of government speakers and experts who have, and are, building powerful content applications. It is a great place to get up-to-speed.
Speakers include:
GAO, FAA, NASA, FirstGov, Navy, Forest Service, EPA, OMB, World Bank,
PostNewsweek Tech Media, NPR, Government Computer News, White House,
GPO, International Trade Commission, Department of Energy, Social
Security Administration, DOT, and many more.
Topics include:
Content management, enterprise search, XML, business cases, content
modeling, open source CMS, best practices, records management, content
security, publishing, text mining, and new technologies being used for
government applications including blogs, wikis, RSS and Podcasting.
The full program is at:
As this news item reminded us today, vendors are gearing up for the launch of Vista and Office 12. We are already seeing vendors announcing support for both in various ways, but this will continue to build to a deluge of announcements over the next 6 months. XPS (XML Paper Specification) is one of the new pieces of Vista and Office 12 that bears paying attention to. While it is not likely to displace Adobe’s PDF (certainly not in the near term at least), it will certainly be used instead of PDF for certain applications. What those applications will be is something worth thinking about. There is more info on XPS from Microsoft here, including links to the specification, developer blogs etc.
