It is excellent news that OASIS has approved OpenDocument as a standard. Hopefully it will also become an ISO standard. However, neither of these mean that it is necessarily the right approach for you. A single schema, no matter how well-designed, will not work for everyone. James Governor is quoted in the release: “One key to success will be the royalty free status of the spec; there are no financial penalties associated with developing to it.” Very true, but Microsoft’s schema is also royalty and cost free, and I believe they have committed (contractually even I think…?) e.g., to the EU, to keep it that way. See more on this here and here.
Author: Frank Gilbane (Page 68 of 71)
A complimentary breakfast seminar and discussion:
“Technology Directions: Driving DITA Adoption in Europe”, has been added to next week’s conference in Amsterdam on Friday, May 27, 8 – 10:00 a.m. IBM, Idiom and Nokia will present on DITA and its practical applications, while leading an open discussion focused specifically on the adoption of DITA-based publishing initiatives in Europe through establishing regular meetings, networking opportunities and education events. Panelists from Thursday’s presentation will be on hand, with the addition of Indi Leipa, senior information architect, Nokia.
Two quick reminders:
- The Gilbane Content Management Conference in Amsterdam (co-located with XTech 2005) is only a week and a half away. See the conference program.
- The call for papers deadline for Gilbane Boston is Monday May 16th. Proposal guidelines are here.
We have published the results of our informal survey on enterprise use of blog, wiki and RSS technologies. We’ll keep the survey going for awhile and will update the results every so often. To date there are 58 respondents.
A few interesting tidbits:
- Although most respondents are using one of the technologies, only half of them have official IT support.
- knowledge management, internal information dissemination (portals!?), and project collaboration are all closely grouped as the leading applications.
- Shockingly, only a third use RSS!
- Almost a third are using one or more of these for content management. We’ll be sure to explore what this means in our upcoming Amsterdam keynote debate.
Our opening keynote panel at our Amsterdam conference on 25 May, The Future of Content Management will be looking at strategic technology issues businesses, governments and NGOs need to be thinking about. Our panel is made up of technology executives who are responsible for a huge number of installed tools, and for strategic technology development at their respective firms. There will certainly be strong differences of opinion, but where this panel agrees on something, it will be worth knowing.
Some of the questions (with a few links to some of our views) we expect to ask the panel are:
- There is a lot of debate about ECM (enterprise content management) suites vs. individual content applications. What is an “ECM suite”, and which approach makes the most sense, and why?
- The proliferation of content applications and repositories has created a huge integration challenge. How will this get resolved? And when?
- How will blog, wiki, and RSS technology affect content management applications?
- Will taxonomies or “folksonomy” tagging technologies have a major impact on future CMS applications?
- What is a content platform? Is it a repository? an index? a database, a file system? Does the concept of a content platform even even make sense? Will Longhorn’s WinFS change the game?
- Are Portals dead for good? If so, what will take their place?
- How will compliance requirements affect content technology, or digital/enterprise rights management products?
- How will open source content management related software affect future content management implementations? How should it?
- Are some open source software technologies more appropriate for enterprise content applications than others? If so, which ones and why?
- Where in the software stack is the best place to provide basic content management functionality, e.g., management of content elements with attributes and metadata?
- What percentage of enterprise content do you estimate is currently stored in XML? How do you see this changing in the next 12 -18 months? How will this affect technology development?
- How will enterprise search and content management technology be integrated in the next 12 – 18 months?
- What will be the most exciting content technology in the next 12 – 18 months?
If you have a question you would like to see us address, comment on this post, or send me an email.
Reminder: The deadline for submitting speaking proposals for our Boston conference on November 29 – December 1, is May 15. In fact, it helps to send proposals even sooner since we are already outlining the program. We’ll be covering our usual range of content management technologies, but will have a special focus on new technologies, and which ones are ready for prime time and what business applications they are appropriate for. Enterprise blog, wiki and RSS technologies will certainly be one major focus. There is some early guidance on this year’s topics here. If you are new to our events, you can see our typical content coverage and conference structure at last year’s Boston program, or this month’s San Francisco program.
Bill Trippe wrote a white paper recently that has been attracting a lot of readers. He’ll be talking about the content in a Webinar with X-Hive’s Jeroen van Rotterdam. Registration for the webinar, “Meeting the Demands of Complex Content Applications” on Wednesday April 27 1:00 PM EST, is here.
Also check out Dale Waldt’s popular white paper on “Using XML in Databases“.
I’m way behind in planned blog entries from last week’s conference, but this has jumped to the top of the queue. Rather than repeat points made by others I’ll point you to Thad’s post, and a couple of other postings and focus on a point I haven’t seen made yet. Brice and others made the clear point that application redundancy means death for certain products. I also share Tim’s skepticism of Flash. But while every analyst under the Sun will talk about what this means to Microsoft, there is an aspect of this that needs more attention.
Whatever the combined suite of Adobe and Macromedia apps ends up looking like, it will be a mammoth suite with a combination of document and web capabilities that will compete with Microsoft Office, which will also have a combination of document and web capabilities. The real competition won’t be immediate because the difference between creative and knowledge worker tools is still pretty wide, and it won’t be complete because there will always be a need for a difference. However, over time the differences will be managed more by configuration of functions than by buying separate applications.
Thinking about a future dominated by these huge suites you can’t help but think “What’s the alternative?”. Many of us author less and less in big powerful applications, and more with simple editing tools (email, blogs, HTML forms, Notepad etc.). There are two reasons for this. One is that “fast and easy” is critical for efficient communication and we naturally gravitate to it. Second, none of the authoring tools available today have succeeded in allowing us to easily author once for both documents and web pages. The big feature-heavy suites are good to have around, but we also need new authoring tools that are light, flexible and create content that is marked-up just enough to easily share with applications, whether office or web suites, or enterprise applications.
