It is good to see that MS is plugging away at this and now providing a way to really take a look at it. I am not qualified to comment on its technical merits, but the idea is important (to content management but more to computing in general) and something we have been watching for a long time. Dan Farber’s entry on this release has some useful links, and Wikipedia has an accessible intro to WinFS
Author: Frank Gilbane (Page 71 of 74)
Although not officially announced, a number of trade publications have reported on Oracle’s acquisition of Content Media, and Tony Byrne succinctly captures what is of immediate interest to followers of the content management market.
What we started calling EII (Enterprise Information Integration) a few years ago, and what many vendors called ECI (Enterprise Content Integration) remains one of the biggest challenges organizations face – too big to be served by a small niche market, as evidenced by Oracle’s move, as well as by the earlier IBM and EMC acquisitions. For a more in-depth look at the problem, players and the market see our article on What is Enterprise Information Integration (EII)?
Lot’s of merger and acquisition news this week!
- Hummingbird & RedDot
- Trados & SDL
- Infodata & McDonald Bradley
- Stellent & e-Onehundred Group
- and also a consortium merger: Compliance Consortium & OCEG.
Microsoft announced that XML will be the default file format for Office 12. I’ll look more at the details and what this means to OpenOffice etc. when I get a chance, but this is certainly great news and another major step forward for XML in general and Microsoft’s support for it. It looks like Microsoft has addressed (full Microsoft press release) the main concerns that critics exposed during the OpenOffice debate we have been covering here and in our conferences. Tim is impressed!
Update: Dan Farber has some additional info from Microsoft.
Update 2: Dan points to info from Rick Schaut on Office 12 Mac XML support.
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.
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.
