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:
Author: Frank Gilbane (Page 65 of 74)
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.
The “early bird” discount for our conference in Washington DC, June 13-15 has been extended until May 19th. See the conference program, tutorial descriptions, and registration info.
Looks like Microsoft is adding blog posting support to Word 2007 in a way that not only does not screw up your HTML, but attempts to take advantage of Word features bloggers care about without other features getting in the way. This is more appealing than it may sound at first, and may be useful when building enterprise blog applications where Office is entrenched and familiar. It will be in Office 2007 Beta 2. Learn more from the developers.
Here are some comments on our conference in San Francisco 2 weeks ago. This is a partial list, but it is already long enough that my plan of introducing and commenting on the comments is history. So, I’ve decided to just list them to get them out since some of them are very useful. They are bunched by author. The Podcasts at the bottom were all produced by Rahel Bailie. Thanks Rahel!
/item.php?id=646
/item.php?id=643
/item.php?id=642
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.com/2006/04/web_office_gets _real_innovator.html
http://ykm.typepad.com/yerfdogs_knowledge_manage/2006/04/gilbane_confere.html
http://ykm.typepad.com/yerfdogs_knowledge_manage/2006/04/cm_pros_summit__3.html
http://www.drmwatch.com/enterprise/article.php/3601771
http://creese.typepad.com/pattern_finder/2006/04/gilbane_confere_1.html
http://creese.typepad.com/pattern_finder/2006/04/gilbane_confere.html
http://bill.cava.us/index.php/2006/04/28/a-monolog-a-dialog-a-catalog/
Podcasts:
http://www.intentionaldesign.ca/index.php/weblog/blogcentre/frank_gilbane_on_content_management_trends/
http://www.intentionaldesign.ca/index.php/weblog/blogcentre/tony_byrne_on_cms_trends/
http://www.intentionaldesign.ca/index.php/weblog/blogcentre/kay_ethier_simplifies_xml_for_content_authors/
http://www.intentionaldesign.ca/index.php/weblog/blogcentre/theresa_regli_talks_taxonomies/
http://www.intentionaldesign.ca/index.php/weblog/blogcentre/janus_boye_takes_a_hard_look_at_content_management/
I couldn’t resist buying an Intel iMac and installing Windows on it. It really was incredibly simple to add Windows. I’m not sure how I will actually use both OSs yet, but it occurred to me that in the often heavily mixed Mac and PC creative and publishing environments, a few Macs running both operating systems could be very useful for smoothing out some workflows in potentially non-disruptive ways. I’ll let others figure out if this is the case, but one issue they will need to think through is whether to format their Windows partition with NTFS (more secure and reliable) or FAT (more compatible).
David Berlind continues his excellent coverage of the less-exciting-than-it-used-to-be controversy over the now ISO standard OASIS ODF vs the soon-to-be-ECMA-and-then-ISO Microsoft Open XML standard. David also reports on a suspicously timed appearance of a reverse engineered plug-in for Microsoft Office that converts Office files to ODF.
I know we just finished San Francisco, and we have our government conference in June, but since many of you miss the speaking proposal deadlines regularly, keep in mind that the deadline for proposals for Gilbane Boston in November is May 15 – a little over a week away! Here are instructions and guidelines. Here is a list of our events.
