Bob Doyle of CMS Review was kind enough to film the “CMS Idol” competition at our recent Boston Conference. Tony Byrne of CMSWatch hosted and the judges were Theresa Regli, Lisa Welchman, and Erik Hartman. This was a big hit and you can now view Bob’s video, which is encoded as QuickTime suitable for Podcasting (iPod 320×240). (You should use the latest QuickTime player.) Vendors included Ektron, FatWire, Interwoven, RedDot, Stellent, and WebSideStory. All did a great job!
Author: Frank Gilbane (Page 69 of 74)
Structured blogging activity has accelerated, and has reached the important milestone where there is debate about whether it will amount to anything. If you are not familiar with structured blogging, the term itself should be enough to give you a good idea – think of structured editing, eForms, and blogging all mushed together. Structured editing has been around since the early 80s when companies like Datalogics, Texet, Arbortext, SoftQuad and others were developing SGML authoring and editing tools (I was involved in the Texet effort). The big problem then was the user interface. WYSIWYG was new, but the real issue was not that the tools were not graphical enough, it was that authors were not interested in tools that forced them A) to use a different tool, B) to use a tool that required them to do more work, and C) to use a tool that they were not convinced would provide significant benefits. Today many of us use eForm, HTML or XML tools and the interfaces are far superior, but A, B are still major hurdles to overcome. C is less of a problem, and maybe appealing applications based on ‘microformats’ will help even more. Perhaps the blogging tool plug-ins in the works will alleviate A and B, but winning the hearts of bloggers will not be easy. It will be far easier to do in the context of enterprise applications, but the difficulty should not be underestimated. I am a fan of structured blogging and authoring in general, but the concerns being raised are real. To catch-up on the pros and cons of structured blogging see posts from Bob Wyman, Charlie Wood, Paul Kedrosky,
Hard to believe if you just joined us in Boston 2 weeks ago, but we are already deep into planning Gilbane San Francisco, which will be at the Sheraton Palace again this year. The dates are April 24 – 26, 2006. We are expanding our content coverage, and in addition to our Content Management, Content Technology and CTW Case Study tracks, we are adding a track on Enterprise Search, a track on Enterprise Blog, Wiki and RSS (and Atom!) Technology, and a special track on Automated Publishing for Marketers.
We have also added a new companion conference on Enterprise Digital Rights Management, which will be chaired by expert Bill Rosenblatt, Editor of DRMWatch.
To submit a speaking proposal for either the Content Management Technologies Conference or the Enterprise Digital Rights Management Conference, see the instructions, and don’t delay – we will be completing the program in January, and even though the deadline is January 9 we will be well along by then.
Nominations are open for 2 seats on the board of the Content Management Professionals Association. Nominations are open until December 21, 2005. If you are not yet a member, join. There are also openings on the CM Pros Management Committee. For more information about the openings contact Executive Director Laura Walker.
The announcement is just out so our detailed opinion will have to wait, but this is certainly major progress. See comments from Tim Bray, and Scoble’s interview with Jean Paoli.
Update: David Berlind has been following the OpenDocument Format debate very closely. See David’s reaction.
Our blog content is now under a Creative Commons license. The version of the license we chose was pretty much what we always told people they could do anyway. There are some rights reserved which you can read about.
We have not done the same for our main site as the issues are a bit trickier given almost 14 years of content, some of it generated with custom agreements, but you can always ask us about content there, and we are fairly liberal with granting permissions.
In our informal survey of enterprise use of blogs and wikis, the most popular application that organizations are using blogs and wikis for was “knowledge management”. While our survey is a far cry from what a rigorous market research effort would be, the results are in sync with what we and others are hearing from companies. I recently heard from Rod Boothby, who is leading an effort with Ernst & Young to build an internal enterprise blogging system to support knowledge sharing, and has written an essay based on his findings while building the business case for the project. I have just read the 37 page essay, Turning Knowledge Workers into Innovation Creators, and it is a great tool for describing the benefits of enterprise blogging to senior management. Rod is publishing sections of the essay on his blog at www.innovationcreators.com.
Jon Udell wrote yesterday that we should really be getting beyond the office document format debate swirling around the Massachusetts decision, because all heavy footprint authoring applications are headed for oblivion in our increasingly net-software-as-service world. (David Berlind also weighs in on the death of fat clients apps.) Tim Bray is skeptical because “… authoring software is hard.” While my view of the ODF debate is much closer to Jon’s than Tim’s, I agree with Tim’s caution here. While my coding skills were never in the league of either of these guys I have spent a lot of time working on authoring software, and more importantly, collecting requirements from users. Admittedly this was well before the Web existed, but what hasn’t changed one bit, is the need for authoring software to meet a staggering array of complex user requirements. Authoring software has to be flexible and extendable to meet the always unanticipated user needs. Authoring software is hard, and differing formatting and integration requirements will keep it that way.
Note that extending software functionality is not unrelated to extending the encoding of the content, which reminds me that…
Ironically, the reason I agree with Tim here is exactly why I disagree with the ODF decision: extensibility should be the first requirement of a government decision on an open document standard, and ODF looks uncomfortably like a limited implementation. From a practical point of view, scope is critical, but as Jon says, “In theory, governments should mandate standards, not implementations.” Perhaps the way to think about it is that governments should mandate standards (XML) but adopt implementations (form OASIS and Microsoft and perhaps others). Realistically there will be multiple versions (implementations) of each anyway, so a single implementation will never be enough.
