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.
Author: Frank Gilbane (Page 72 of 74)
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.
We’ve posted our results in time for the conference session on Blogs, Wikis, and RSS as Enterprise Content Applications tomorrow morning. Keep in mind this is an informal survey and only has 43 responses so far. We will keep the survey going and update the results.
Our survey on enterprise blogs, wiki and RSS use was out of commission for a few days because the vendor of the survey service upgraded their software and broke a few things. The short survey is back online now. We’ll be posting the results next week during our conference in time for our session on the same topic. BTW, we are going to open this session (Wednesday morning 8:30 -10:00am) to anyone who is there, even if their badge is only for the technology demonstrations on Monday and Tuesday. So come by and blog it!
It wasn’t too long ago that all document formats were proprietary, and vendors that sold authoring and publishing software had a really unfair advantage over their customers because it was so difficult and costly for organizations to convert their content from one proprietary system to another. It was the granddaddy of descriptive markup, SGML, that led the way to the infinitely improved situation we have today with seemingly universal support for XML, and tools like XSL, XQuery etc. So, if most major software applications support reading/writing of XML, including the 800 pound gorilla of office documents Microsoft Office, hasn’t the issue of proprietary formats gone away?
If you are in charge of protecting your organizations content/document assets, you better not be thinking your problems are over. If you are involved in sharing content with other organizations or among applications, you already know how difficult it is to share information without loss — if it is that difficult to share, how easy will it be to migrate to future applications?
Our keynote debate in San Francisco next week is all about helping you understand how to best protect and share your content. While there are some differences between the Microsoft and Sun positions represented by Jean Paoli and Tim Bray, I think they agree more than they disagree on the critical issues you need to consider. We’ll be looking at different aspects of the issue including technology, licensing, cost, and complexity vs. flexibility. For some background see Jon Udell’s posts here and here, and the Cover Pages here. Both contain links to additional info.
I almost forgot… What does this have to do with my earlier posts on the future of content management and Longhorn? Well, Office applications, like all content applications, should benefit from an operating system that can manage content elements and attributes that could be described in XML. Would this make document interchange easier? I don’t know, but it might be fun to explore this question in the session.
If you have a specific question you would like us to cover on the panel, send me an email or add a comment to this post and we’ll summarize what happens.
UPDATE: Jon says he is in Jean’s camp on custom schemas and Tim’s on XHTML. At our Boston panel I think all of us agreed – of course neither Tim nor Jean were there. Jon is tagging his posts on the conference with gilbaneSF2005.
We are using the category and (more wordy) tag Gilbane Conference San Francisco 2005 for all our SF conference postings.
In an earlier post on Longhorn adoption, I talked about the need for an operating system that provided support that went beyond simple file management to include services that content applications could leverage. Will Longhorn’s WinFS do this? Will other operating systems?
One of the questions we’ll be asking our panel on the Future of Content Management at our conference next week, will be “Where in the software stack is the best place to provide basic content management functionality, e.g., content elements with attributes and metadata?” With senior strategists from Oracle, Interwoven, FatWire and Mark Logic on the panel we ought to get some interesting discussion going. If you have a question you would like to see us address, comment on this post or send me an email.
In my next post I’ll look at how this question relates to one of the fundamental issues underlying the keynote debate on XML Strategy and Open Information.
Just found this CEO Blogger’s Club group blog. It looks like it is managed by a PR firm, but it has some good stuff on enterprise blogging. For example, the entry on Ten Ideas for Corporate RSS Feeds.
