Author: Frank Gilbane (Page 73 of 74)

Content Management Professionals’ Spring Summit

April 3, 2005 / Frank Gilbane / 0 Comments

The non-profit Content Management Professionals organization, an international community of practice, is holding their Spring Summit in San Francisco on April 11. The Summit is being held at the Palace Hotel in downtown San Francisco in conjunction with our Gilbane Conference on Content Management Technologies.
Activities at the Summit include small-group, roundtable discussions focusing on the strategy and practice of content management and the role of those who are engaged in this discipline. CM Pros members leading roundtables include:

Erik Hartman (Netherlands) on the enterprise content management poster and CMSML (CMS markup language)
Hilary Marsh (Chicago) on the content in content management
Ann Rockley (Toronto) on making the content management business case
Mira Wooten (Mountain View, CA) on content management networking
Rahel Bailie (Vancouver) on the human factor in content management
Seth Earley (Boston) on doing successful taxonomy projects
Shuli Goodman (San Francisco) on effective governance models to support enterprise content strategies
David Warwick (Australia) on organizational compliance and the role of CM systems.

Update: Full Summit Program and schedule.
Register for the Summit or find out more about it.

(Discloure: I’m on the board.)

Ask the Content Management Analysts

April 2, 2005 / Frank Gilbane / 2 Comments

We open our conference in San Francisco in a little over a week with a panel of analysts who focus on content management. These were very popular and fun sessions at our Boston and LA events. We will have plenty of questions for them as usual, and we hope to see many of you there to ask questions in person. But for those of you that can’t make it, you can still send us your questions and we’ll provide some kind of synopsis on our blog. These are smart, opinionated people, so don’t be afraid to ask the tough questions. You can comment on this post so the panelists can all see, or send me an email.

Longhorn adoption, file systems & content technology

April 1, 2005 / Frank Gilbane / 0 Comments

Dan Farber raises the issue of Longhorn adoption and quotes a Jupiter analyst who claims the challenge is that XP is “good enough”. There is actually a more fundamental reason the question of adoption is interesting. What is that and what does it have to do with content technology?

I’ll start the answer with a little history. In 1994 at our first Documation conference, I moderated a debate between Tony Williams, Chief Architect of COM at Microsoft, and Larry Tesler, Chief Scientist at Apple. The Microsoft COM and OFS/Cairo and Apple OpenDoc efforts both recognized the need for operating systems to provide more support for the richness of unstructured information than is possible with the primitive file systems we had then.

Before the debate I preferred the OpenDoc approach because it seemed more consistent with my view that new operating systems needed to be able to manage arbitrary information objects and structures that could be described with a markup language (like SGML at the time). However, Tony convinced me that OpenDoc was too radical a change for both users and developers at the time. Tony agreed with the ultimate need to make such a radical change to file systems to support the growing need for applications to manage more complex content, but he said that Microsoft had decided the world was not ready for such a shock to the system yet, and defended their strategy as the more realistic.

Eleven years later and we are still stuck with the same old-fashioned file system in spite of the fact that every modern business application needs to understand and process multiple types of information inside files. This means that database platforms and applications need to do a lot more work than they should to work with content. I am no expert on Longhorn, but the file system that will be part of it (although maybe not initially), WinFS, is supposed to go a long way towards fixing this problem. Is the world ready for it yet? I hope so, but it will still be a big change, and Tony’s concerns of 1994 are still relevant.

Socialtext adds appeal for enterprises

March 21, 2005 / Frank Gilbane / 0 Comments

As we reported in our news pages today, Socialtext has added functionality and repackaged their product line to appeal to a range of small to large enterprises. One of the things we are collecting in our survey on enterprise blog and wiki use is size of enterprises using them. We don’t have nearly enough data to say anything meaningful yet, but so far it is a fairly even spread based on company size. We’ll be keeping the survey open for awhile, and it is very short (5 multiple choice questions), so tell us what your organization is doing or planning with blog, wiki, and RSS technology.

Enterprise blog & wiki limitations; new enterprise RSS blog

March 17, 2005 / Frank Gilbane / 0 Comments

There is some additional detail on what blogs and wikis don’t do for you from somone who is using them in an enterprise environment that Lauren interviewed for her report at Corporate Blogs and Wikis: Benefits and Limits.

It is to early to tell anything from our ongoing survey on the use of enterprise blogs, wikis and RSS, but so far it is surprising how low the use of RSS is. Speaking of RSS, there is a fairly new blog focused on enterprise RSS that looks worth tracking.

Both are good background reading for our upcoming conference session in San Francisco.

Enterprise software & the long tail

March 13, 2005 / Frank Gilbane / 1 Comment

Joe Kraus has a post that applies the now famous long tail argument to software. He admits that the argument applies to software like his own company’s JotSpot, and plugs it in. But if he is right, his argument applies to other products including JotSpot’s competitors.

It is easy to agree with the premises:

the vast majority of business applications require customization
most enterprise solutions focus on a few large semi-well-defined application areas because the economics don’t reward small (long tail) opportunity harvesting, and
there is opportunity here for software entrepreneurs.

Joe argues that a combination of Excel and email are being used to fill the long tail gap, but that they are inadequate. This may be true, but it is a bit of a leap to an implied conclusion that one piece of “blockbuster” software could better meet the needs of the long tail of business requirements in all their diversity.

This is not to say that there won’t be more blockbuster successes that help with long tail business needs — Excel, email, and web browsers are all examples of such a wild horizontal success — and Groove of one that didn’t catch fire (see Bill Trippe’s comment on the Microsoft acquisition), but will some combination of enterprise blog and wiki software be equally successful? Well… maybe. In any case, Joe’s post is thought provoking and his analogy might be richer than he, or any of his commenters to date, realize.

Survey on enterprise use of blogs and wikis

March 8, 2005 / Frank Gilbane / 0 Comments

Lauren’s report on enterprise blog and wiki use has been getting phenomenal attention. We have decided to probe a little more into actual corporate use of blog and wiki technology with a survey. We’ll pull the complete results together for our conference in San Francisco in April, but will also publish some of it on our site as it comes in. Take the survey!

Content Management Professionals Executive Director Position Open

March 5, 2005 / Frank Gilbane / 0 Comments

The Content Management Professionals organization (CM Pros) is looking for an Executive Director.
The role of the Executive Director is key to the success of Content Management Professionals. This position has been held by Bob Doyle, who has put a tremendous amount of work into the organization. He will be stepping down from this role to participate in CM Pros in other ways so we are looking for a new Executive Director.
The position Executive Director is appointed by the Board of Directors and is largely a volunteer position, but an honorarium will be provided. It is expected to require 10-20 hours of work per week. The ideal candidate will be a proven leader and seasoned professional manager who will take overall responsibility for building and expanding the organization.
For more information see the job description.
Please provide your response to board@cmprofessionals.org by March 18. (disclosure: I’m on the board)