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.
Author: Frank Gilbane (Page 70 of 74)
We hope to see you at our upcoming Boston conference. But whether you join us or not, you can contribute to the keynote discussion by including questions in a comment on this blog entry. Below is the session description with links to the participant’s bios and their blogs. Let us know what technologies you think we should be discussing. Comments and trackbacks are on.
Keynote Panel: New Technologies You Need to Consider for Content Management Strategies
The pace of information technology development continues to increase as organizations develop experience in implementing content applications, and as software vendors vie to incorporate their customer’s feedback into product technologies ahead of the competition. As most enterprise applications become more content-oriented, content technology developments are coming from a broader base of suppliers and developers. This session will look at a couple of technologies relevant to content-oriented applications you may not be aware of, or may not think of in the context of content management strategies. Complementing this session are the analyst panel, and the keynote debate on Enterprise use of Blog and Wiki technology.
Moderator: Frank Gilbane, Conference Chair, Editor & Publisher, The Gilbane Report — Blog
Jon Udell, Lead Analyst, InfoWorld — Blog
Coach K. Wei, Founder and CTO, Nexaweb — Blog
Jean-Philippe Gauthier, General Manager, Sympatico / MSN
Bob Wyman, CTO and Co-founder, PubSub — Blog
We are getting ready for our upcoming Boston conference and hope to see you there. But whether you join us or not, you can contribute to the debate by commenting on this blog entry. Below is the session description with links to the participant’s bios and their blogs. Comments and trackbacks are on.
Keynote Debate: Blog, Wiki, and RSS Technology – Are they Enterprise Ready? Applicable? Or a Passing Tempest in a Teacup?
Most of you have probably not seriously considered using these technologies in enterprise applications. Yet there are companies using these technologies for collaboration, knowledge management, and publishing applications in corporate environments, and there are vendors marketing products based on these to businesses like yours. Do these companies only represent the experimental fringe, or are they early adopters of technologies that will soon be part of every IT department’s bag of tricks? In this session we’ll take a look at the suitability of these for corporate use and hear from both skeptics and proponents of, for example enterprise or group blogs. You will come away from this session able to discuss these issues with your colleagues back in the office.
Moderator: Frank Gilbane, Conference Chair — Blog
David Berlind, Executive Editor, ZDNet — Blog
Ross Mayfield, CEO, Socialtext, Inc. — Blog
Bill Zoellick Senior Analyst, The Gilbane Report — Blog
Charlie Wood, Principal, Spanning Partners, LLC — Blog
Two of the topics in the title are things we normally don’t touch in this blog. However, the tempest over Massachusetts’s OpenDocumentFormat decision is inflaming passions almost as much as religious and political issues do. In fact, I am writing about it because I woke up irritated at how ill-informed and irrelevant so much of the discussion about the state’s decision is. (Not a good way to start a blog entry!) I promised myself not to go on for more than the length of a reasonable blog-entry, so rather than dig into all the weeds, here is a short history lesson to bring out the big picture, and hopefully keep the debate focused on the real issue for Massachusetts’s and others contemplating similar decisions.
When we (in the standards community) debated open document standards 20 years ago, there was a religious and political fervor fueling the arguments of both sides. Our side (the SGML side, which included Tim Bray and Jean Paoli, now the chief XML people at Sun and Microsoft respectively), argued that nobody’s content should be held hostage by being stuck in a vendor’s proprietary format, and that the solution was a standard set of rules for describing whatever kind format was necessary that vendors were free to implement. The other side (the ODA “Office Document Architecture” side) agreed with that, however they thought the solution was for a bunch of vendors to get together and agree on a format that, instead of being proprietary to a single vendor, was proprietary to a self-defined group of vendors. This solution was even worse than the status quo for lots of reasons (lowest common denominator functionality, enhancements by slow international committee, unhealthy cabal-like motivations, …). At the time I thought of ODA as the soviet approach, and the SGML approach as the democratic approach. Fortunately, the SGML approach won, and that set in motion the developments that have given us XML today.
You can tell where I am going with this. But there is one more relevant aspect of this history to mention. One of the main arguments behind ODA was that the SGML approach was just too difficult to implement. They had a point, you have to pay for the freedom of flexibility. Their mistake was thinking there was an alternative that could anticipate all reasonable requirements. It can cost even more when you just can’t implement what you need to.
The situation today is a little different, but the need for organizations to be able to do whatever they want with their own content is exactly the same. The imposition of any single schema/format on all documents in any organization simply won’t work. Anybody who has been involved in helping organizations build IT applications knows that exceptions are the rule, and you can’t legislate them out of existence even in authoritarian corporate environments. A good decision for the state would be to simply require all documents to conform to one of a number of publicly documented and freely available XML Schemas – who cares what software did or did not create the content or did or did not design the schema? Certainly there are some complex details to work out, but there is no mystery.
We have had debates on this topic at our Boston conference last year and in San Francisco in the Spring, where there was more agreement than disagreement between Microsoft (Jean) and Sun (Tim) and the issues raised were refreshingly free from politics. It’s too bad we didn’t record it.
There is plenty of coverage on this topic. We have more comments and pointers, but also see Jon Udell and David Berlind.
We updated our survey on enterprise use of blog, wiki and RSS technology for our presentation on the same subject to a group of documentation and training managers yesterday. With 91 respondents the results are a little more respectable. The only obvious differences from our earlier results were an increase the use or planned use of RSS, and the amount of support provided by IT for blogs, wikis, and RSS. We are not sure if there is real “hockey stick” growth going on here – our results don’t show it – but there just might be. Chris Shipley thinks their numbers show it. Perhaps they do, but we need to know more about the demographics. Our own demographics are very broad and include a sizable non-technical component, which could explain the difference. There was certainly strong interest among the doc and training folks yesterday, but deployment was almost non-existent. The only other sort of relevant survey we are aware of is Technorati’s, but that was aimed at bloggers so is a very different animal.
Based on all the evidence, my inclination is to believe the growth is hockey-stick-like. We’ll try and come to some more concrete conclusions on this in time for our keynote debate on this in Boston next month.
Almost forgot to mention the new Yahoo! White Paper on RSS (pdf). If you thought most internet users knew what RSS was you had better read this.
Addendum: Here is more info on the demographics and methodolgy we were looking for re the Guidewire/Edelman survey mentioned by Chris Shipley we referenced above.
We updated our survey on enterprise use of blog, wiki and RSS technology for our presentation on the same subject to a group of documentation and training managers yesterday. With 91 respondents the results are a little more respectable. The only obvious differences from our earlier results were an increase the use or planned use of RSS, and the amount of support provided by IT for blogs, wikis, and RSS. We are not sure if there is real “hockey stick” growth going on here – our results don’t show it – but there just might be. Chris Shipley thinks their numbers show it. Perhaps they do, but we need to know more about the demographics. Our own demographics are very broad and include a sizable non-technical component, which could explain the difference. There was certainly strong interest among the doc and training folks yesterday, but deployment was almost non-existent. The only other sort of relevant survey we are aware of is Technorati’s, but that was aimed at bloggers so is a very different animal.
Based on all the evidence, my inclination is to believe the growth is hockey-stick-like. We’ll try and come to some more concrete conclusions on this in time for our keynote debate on this in Boston next month.
Almost forgot to mention the new Yahoo! White Paper on RSS (pdf). If you thought most internet users knew what RSS was you had better read this.
Addendum: Here is more info on the demographics and methodolgy we were looking for re the Guidewire/Edelman survey mentioned by Chris Shipley we referenced above.
The question is from Charlie Wood’s entry where he references a couple of reports by James Governor on Traction beating Lotus out at a European pharmaceutical organization, and Movable Type beating Lotus out at Alcatel. There is a free case study written by Suw Charman for the former on her blog.
Socialtext also has some increasingly interesting enterprise apps at e.g., Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein and Nokia, and has recent investment and a new board member from SAP.
We’ll be looking at some more detail on exactly what organizations like these are doing with blog and wiki tools in a follow-on report to Lauren’s earlier article, so let us know of any interesting case studies.
In answer to Charlie’s question, I would say ‘yes’ to collaboration and ‘partially’ to content management.
The brochure for our Fall conference is at the printer, but there is a PDF available and the site with the program schedule, session descriptions, exhibitors-to-date, registration, etc., has been live for a few weeks.
Note that the CM Pros Fall Summit is once again co-located with our event, so it will be a jam-paked few days.
