Author: Frank Gilbane (Page 69 of 75)

David Berlind ACT Interview on the Massachusetts ODF Decision Video

January 9, 2006 / Frank Gilbane / 0 Comments

Bob Doyle at CMSReview has once again generously devoted his time and resources to record and produce one of the events at our recent Boston conference. David Berlind from ZDNet, who has tracked the controversial Massachusetts decision to standardize on OASIS‘s ODF on Between the Lines (a blog you should subscribe to) in more detail than anyone, interviewed lobbyist Morgan Reed from the Association for Competitive Technology (ACT) before a live audience at Gilbane Boston. ACT, who lobbies for small businesses, but also Microsoft, is against the Massachusetts decision – Morgan was gracious enough to submit to David’s penetrating skepticism. Bob Doyle says he keeps this interview on his video iPod! Bob says you should use the QuickTime player. Here is the full interview, or you can choose chapters below:

Frank Gilbane – the Background
The Debaters – Morgan Reed and David Berlind
Lobbyist for Microsoft (MS) and Small ISVs
How Much Money Spent Lobbying Open Formats?
MS to Mass: Do you respect IP?
MS Press Release: Mass ODF Plan has failed!
By 2007 only ODF-compliant applications?
Does Massachusetts have any leverage with OASIS?
What if MS OpenOffice was chosen as standard?
Do MS and Internet Explorer encourage non-standard HTML?

Calling all CM Pros to vote

January 4, 2006 / Frank Gilbane / 0 Comments

Voting is open for 2 seats on the board, as well as 2 management committee positions of the Content Management Professionals Association. Voting is open until January 11, 2006, so head to the site and cast your ballot. If you are not yet a member, join.

As a member-driven organization, the CM Pros Board of Directors and Management Committee are nominated in an open election process by the members of the organization. For the 2006-07 term — just the second CM Pros election — we are thrilled to have seven outstanding candidates for two Board of Directors positions, and three superlative candidates for two Management Committee positions.

Podcast from XBRL Session at Gilbane Boston

January 3, 2006 / Frank Gilbane / 1 Comment

Vince Wicker & Mike Wayne of The XBRL Show recorded our session on XBRL – Current State of the Art at the Gilbane Boston conference, and created a very useful 20-minute-or-so podcast. Thanks Vince & Mike!

CMS Idol Video from Gilbane Boston Now Available

December 23, 2005 / Frank Gilbane / 0 Comments

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!

Structured Blogging – Enterprise Only?

December 17, 2005 / Frank Gilbane / 2 Comments

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,

Call for Papers – Gilbane San Francisco 2006

December 15, 2005 / Frank Gilbane / 0 Comments

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.

Nominate Someone for the CM Pros board!

December 15, 2005 / Frank Gilbane / 0 Comments

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.

Microsoft Offers Office Document Formats to ECMA for Standardization

November 22, 2005 / Frank Gilbane / 0 Comments

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.