Author: Frank Gilbane (Page 64 of 74)

Government 2.0

June 20, 2006 / Frank Gilbane / 0 Comments

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.

WinFS and Project Orange at Tech-Ed in Boston

June 10, 2006 / Frank Gilbane / 0 Comments

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.

IBM Announces Release of Viper – DB2 9

June 10, 2006 / Frank Gilbane / 0 Comments

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.

Enterprise Wiki Spreadsheet more interesting than Google Spreadsheets

June 9, 2006 / Frank Gilbane / 0 Comments

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.

Podcast: Lisa Welchman, Tony Byrne & Frank

June 6, 2006 / Frank Gilbane / 0 Comments

Listen to Lisa Welchman’s interview with Frank Gilbane and Tony Byrne about the upcoming Gilbane Government content management technology conference in this podcast.

Adobe & Microsoft headed for battle over PDF

June 2, 2006 / Frank Gilbane / 0 Comments

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.

Late breaking conference news – The White House web site & refreshments

June 1, 2006 / Frank Gilbane / 0 Comments

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.

Enterprise Search Market Health

June 1, 2006 / Frank Gilbane / 0 Comments

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.