The Gilbane Advisor

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Publishers Press introduces New Content Management Partnerships

Publishers Press, a publication printer and content distribution provider, announced two new partnerships that will support the company’s content management and distribution initiative. Publishers Press has partnered with Mark Logic as its content repository, and Atex/Temis for content enrichment. The web content management (WCM) portion uses Polopoly software by Atex. This system should allow clients to manage content for print and web distribution and will be available on a software as a service (SaaS) model. The system also integrates with the company’s other digital offerings such as e-mail marketing, digital editions, and analytics. http://www.pubpress.com

JustSystems Announces XMetaL Author Enterprise and XMetaL Reviewer 6.0

JustSystems announced the availability of XMetaL Author Enterprise 6.0 and XMetaL Reviewer 6.0, the latest versions of the company’s collaborative XML structured authoring and document reviewing software tools. New in this release is an integration between the two products that unifies the XML authoring process with real-time, distributed web-based reviewing to accelerate documentation cycle. The XMetaL Author Enterprise 6.0 and XMetaL Reviewer 6.0 integration is designed for unified authoring and reviewing, so that authors have tools to initiate and manage reviews as well as a set of specialized editing commands that help them directly act upon suggestions. This integration works with the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) standard as well as other industry standards. Other key features of the new release include– an unlimited number of documents can now be managed within the realm of a single project; a rendition can be associated with the project and used for direct navigation from the place in the final document’s layout to the originating topic that is under review; and arbitrary attachments can be associated in any number with projects, project cycles and drafts. http://www.justsystems.com

eBook Strategy Offering Now Available

As we have mentioned before, we have been very interested in leveraging the knowledge base we developed from our successful digital publishing study, Digital Platforms and Technologies for Publishers: Implementations Beyond "eBook."

With that in mind, we have moved forward and developed a strategic consulting offering, "Implementing Digital Publishing." 

Consultation Description

Publishers face a wide range of strategic and tactical decisions when looking to start or build their digital publishing programs, and while publishers have taken many paths to success with digital product development, marketing, sales, and distribution, the organizational underpinnings of the most successful efforts have the common characteristics of technology spending consistent with business needs and opportunities. 

The Gilbane Group’s Content Strategies service is offering a three phase consultation that is aimed at both management and operations personnel in educational, professional, trade, association, STM, and specialty publishing. The goal of the consulting is to assess the publisher’s current systems involved in digital publishing—planning, editorial and production, rights and royalties, manufacturing, promotion and marketing, sales and licensing, and distribution and fulfillment—and to provide decision-making support and guidance. The consulting targets and sets the course for achieving effective and efficient digital publishing business models.

Stakeholders

Depending on the size and scope of the publishing company, as well as the particular consultation phases sought, the stakeholders addressed in these consultations may include Publisher, VP and Editorial Director, VP of Production Services, VP of Digital Publishing, VP of Marketing, VP of Royalties, VP of Manufacturing, VP of Rights, VP of Business Development., VP of Digital Licensing, VP of Sales, VP of IT and CIO or CTO.

The Educational and Directional phase of the consultation (Phase One), which may be purchased as a standalone service or in conjunction with Phase Two and Phase Three, provides the publisher with a high-level assessment of the publisher’s current state of digital publishing capability across the multiple publishing systems. This phase concludes with a report and briefing that defines the publisher’s current state of digital publishing and provides recommendations for improving digital publishing capabilities.

The Analysis, Planning, and Recommendations phase of the consultation (Phase Two) moves the publisher from a general assessment of the conditions and challenges it faces in moving toward a more effective digital publishing business by providing an in-depth plan that a publisher can use to undertake its transformation into a more effective and efficient publisher for digital success. This phase concludes with 18-month action plans and on-site presentations and discussions of findings and recommendations with appropriate stakeholders.

The Implementation Support phase of the consultation (Phase Three) is designed to provide structured support as the publisher follows through on recommendations from Phase Two. Services within the Phase Three purview can include implementation progress reports, regular client visits, retainer and query programs, RFP assistance, prospective vendor research, and bid and implementation document review.

For a full data sheet describing the offering or for other information, you can email me or contact Ralph Marto via email or phone, 617.497.9443 ext 117.

SharePoint 2010 – The Big Story

I spent a couple of days at the SharePoint conference two weeks ago with about 8000 others. Many attendees were customers, but the majority seemed to be Microsoft partners. It would be difficult to overstate the enthusiasm of the attendees. The partners especially, since they make their living off SharePoint. There has been a lot of useful reporting and commentary on the conference and what was announced as part of SharePoint 2010, which you can find on the web, #spc09 is also still active on Twitter, and videos of the keynotes are still available at: http://www.mssharepointconference.com.

As the conference program and commentary illustrate, SharePoint 2010 is a major release in terms of functionality. But the messaging surrounding the release provides some important insights into Microsoft’s strategy. Those of you who were at Gilbane San Francisco last June got an early taste of Microsoft’s plans to push beyond the firewall with SharePoint – and that is the big story. It is big because it is a way for Microsoft to accelerate an already rapidly growing SharePoint business. It is big for a large number of enterprises (as well as the SharePoint developer/partner ecosystem) because it is a way for them to leverage some of their existing investment in SharePoint for building competitively critical internet applications – leverage in expertise, financial investment, and data.

The numbers are telling. According to an IDC report Microsoft Office and SharePoint Traction: An Updated Look at Customer Adoption and Future Plans, IDC # 220237, October 2009, of “262 American corporate IT users, just 8% of respondents said they were using SharePoint for their Web sites, compared to 36% using it for internal portals and 51% using it for collaborative team sites.” (the report isn’t free, but ComputerWorld published some of the numbers).

Can Microsoft increase the use of SharePoint for Web sites from 8% to 36% or 51% or more? Whether they can or not, it is too big an opportunity for them to ignore, and you can expect the market for web applications like content management to look a little different as a result. Of course SharePoint won’t be the right solution for every web application, but Microsoft needs scale, not feature or market niche dominance.

There are more pieces to this, especially integration with Office 2010, which will have a major impact on the scale of penetration. We’ll look at that issue in another post.

You can see why SharePoint is a major topic at Gilbane Boston this year. Join us next month to continue the discussion and learn more.

SharePoint 2010 – Get the Full Story

With the upcoming release of SharePoint 2010 “The business collaboration platform for the Enterprise and the Web”, Microsoft is hoping to accelerate the already dramatic growth of SharePoint. The SharePoint partner ecosystem is clearly excited, and even sceptics agree it is a major release. But how do you decide whether SharePoint is right for you, or which parts of SharePoint could meet your needs, either on their own or in conjunction with other enterprise applications? Should you use it for collaboration? for search? and what about web content management – a major focus of SharePoint 2010?

With SharePoint 2010 just entering public beta and scheduled for release in the first half of the year, it is time to make sure you know what its capabilities are so you can make informed near term or strategic decisions. And, you need to get the full story, and the way to do this is to see it for yourself, and talk to sceptics, evangelists, and people already using it for applications similar to yours.

Whether you are attending the full conference or just visiting the technology demonstrations at Gilbane Boston, you will be able to learn what you need to know. Get the full story on SharePoint 2010 for content management at Gilbane Boston:

Adobe LiveCycle Enterprise Suite 2 Available

Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) announced the availability of Adobe LiveCycle Enterprise Suite 2 (ES2), a major software release enabling businesses and governments to build applications to improve interactions with customers and constituents across devices and channels. LiveCycle ES2 provides a rich Internet application (RIA) framework for building customizable RIA workspaces, mobile and desktop access to critical applications, and deployment in the cloud. Adobe LiveCycle Workspace ES2 Mobile offers access to LiveCycle ES2 from iPhone, Blackberry and Windows mobile devices. Adobe LiveCycle Launchpad ES2, an Adobe AIR application, provides easy access on the desktop to kick-start LiveCycle ES services such as Adobe LiveCycle PDF Generator ES2. Adobe LiveCycle Mosaic ES2 is a composite RIA framework for rapidly assembling and engaging activity-centric enterprise applications. LiveCycle Mosaic ES2 provides knowledge workers with real-time, contextual information from multiple sources in a single, personalized view. Developers can extend existing applications by exposing their business logic and user interfaces into application “tiles” that can be assembled to create unified views. Adobe enterprise customers will have the option to deploy LiveCycle ES2 in the cloud, hosted in the Amazon Web Services cloud computing environment. LiveCycle ES2 Solution Accelerators now include‚Äî human capital management, eSubmissions, correspondence management, new account enrollment and services and benefits delivery. LiveCycle Forms ES2 streamlines format-driven business processes and improves data accuracy and LiveCycle Reader Extensions ES2 activates functionality within Adobe Reader, extending document and form-based operations outside an organization. New features allow users to generate RIA interfaces that leverage shared data models. Document and Information Security‚ LiveCycle can now apply rights management on the server to Microsoft Office documents for automated secure document workflows. Adobe LiveCycle Process Management ES2 enables business users to manage ad-hoc content reviews without involving IT. Users can publish content, create a list of reviewers and define approval stages, deadlines and escalation guidelines. The content can then be automatically converted into PDF, enabled for inline commenting, rights protection and distribution. Users can monitor and modify the process at any time. Adobe LiveCycle ES2 is currently available worldwide. The Adobe LiveCycle ES2 cloud deployment option is expected to become available in early 2010. http://www.adobe.com/livecycle

Where and How Can You Look for Good Enterprise Search Interface Design?

Designing an enterprise search interface that employees will use on their intranet is challenging in any circumstance. But starting from nothing more than verbal comments or even a written specification is really hard. However, conversations about what is needed and wanted are informative because they can be aggregated to form the basis for the overarching design.

Frequently, enterprise stakeholders will reference a commercial web site they like or even search tools within social sites. These are a great starting point for a designer to explore. It makes a lot of sense to visit scores of sites that are publicly accessible or sites where you have an account and navigate around to see how they handle various design elements.

To start, look at:

  • How easy is it to find a search box?
  • Is there an option to do advanced searches (Boolean or parametric searching)?
  • Is there a navigation option to traverse a taxonomy of terms?
  • Is there a “help” option with relevant examples for doing different kinds of searches?
  • What happens when you search for a word that has several spellings or synonyms, a phrase (with or without quotes), a phrase with the word and in it, a numeral, or a date?
  • How are results displayed: what information is included, what is the order of the results and can you change them? Can you manipulate results or search within the set?
  • Is the interface uncluttered and easily understood?

The point of this list of questions is that you can use it to build a set of criteria for designing what your enterprise will use and adopt, enthusiastically. But this is only a beginning. By actually visiting many sites outside your enterprise, you will find features that you never thought to include or aggravations that you will surely want to avoid. From these experiences on external sites, you can build up a good list of what is important to include or banish from your design.

When you find sites that you think are exemplary, ask key stakeholders to visit them and give you their feedback, preferences and dislikes. Particularly, you want to note what confuses them or enthusiastic comments about what excites them.

This post originated because several press notices in the past month brought to my attention Web applications that have sophisticated and very specialized search applications. I think they can provide terrific ideas for the enterprise search design team and also be used to demonstrate to your internal users just what is possible.

Check out these applications and articles: on KNovel, particularly this KNovel pageThomasNet; EBSCOHost mentioned in this article about the “deep Web.”. All these applications reveal superior search capabilities, have long track records, and are already used by enterprises every day. Because they are already successful in the enterprise, some by subscription, they are worth a second look as examples of how to approach your enterprise’s search interface design.

How CMOs Are Planning for Social Media

Updated November 24

While preparing for today’s webcast on digital marketing and lessons learned from the publishing indusry, we discovered the August 2009 CMO survey conducted by professor Christine Moorman at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, with support from the American Marketing Association. Moorman’s results include insights into expectations about the role of social media in digital marketing.

The 511 top marketing executives of US companies interviewed in late July expect to increase spending on social media efforts by more than 300% over the next five years, moving budget allocations from 3.5% to 13.7%.

Top investments are pegged for social networking (65%), video and photosharing (52%), and blogging (50%).

The five most frequently projected uses for social media applications are brand building, customer acquisition, new product introductions, customer retention, and market research.

Read the CMO survey press release for details on the research and links to full results. Register for today’s webinar on digital marketing and lessons learned from publishers. 

Update: The webinar recording is available here.

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