Open Text Corporation announced that it has expanded its portfolio of ECM solutions for Oracle Applications with the introduction of new content access and accounts payable solutions. Using these Open Text offerings, enterprises can associate Oracle transactions with business content. Open Text Content Access for Oracle is a new offering that provides a single point of access to Oracle and non-Oracle data and content assets from either the Oracle user interface or from the Open Text ECM Suite to enable companies to organize and manage all content, including legacy content, in virtual folders and provide a way to archive documents. This approach helps eliminate bottlenecks and distributes workload by allowing the people “in the know” to review, approve, and enter the invoice data directly into the Open Text solution without the need for direct accounts payable involvement. Open Text is a partner in the Oracle PartnerNetwork. http://www.opentext.com/
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TEMIS announced the launch of Luxid Content Pipeline, a new content collection module integrated within the latest version of its content discovery solution, Luxid 5.1. This platform collects content from a range of information sources and feeds them into Luxid. After annotating content with relevant metadata, Luxid then applies search, discovery and sharing tools to the enriched content and provides users with content analytics and knowledge discovery. Luxid Content Pipeline accesses content by three different methods: Structured Access connects and automates the collection of documents from structured content sources such as Dialog, DataStar, ISI Web of Knowledge, Ovid, STN, Questel, EBSCOhost, Factiva, LexisNexis, MicroPatent, Scopus, ScienceDirect, Minesoft, Esp@cenet, and PubMed. Enterprise Content Management Access connects to corporate knowledge repositories such as EMC Documentum, EMC Documentum CenterStage and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server. To be as compatible as possible with a wide variety of document sources, Luxid Content Pipeline also supports the integration of UIMA (Unstructured Information Management Architecture) collection readers, enabling the connection to these sources using UIMA standard protocol and format conversion. http://www.temis.com/
Kentico Software launched a new version of their Partner Program for Web design agencies, supported by a new Partner Portal. The new portal is used by 900 active Kentico Solution Partners located in 80 countries. The main goal of the new program is to support partners in delivering Web sites with Kentico CMS for ASP.NET. The Partner Program divides partners into 3 levels: Partner, Certified Partner and Gold Certified Partner, based on Partner Points. 39% of their partners come from Europe, 35% from North America, 11% from Asia, 10% from Australia, 3% from Africa and 2% from South America. The top 10 Kentico partners are: 1. Reed Business Information, Australia; 2. IBL-Software BV, Netherlands; 3. orange8 interactive ag, Switzerland; 4. DATA, Inc., USA; 5. Supremo Sp. z o.o, Poland; 6. Get Started Pty Ltd, Australia; 7. Gatesix Inc., USA; 8. Biznet IIS, United Kingdom; 9. Datacom, New Zealand; 10. DPS Technology, Czech Republic. http://www.kentico.com/
Canto announced the availability of Canto Cumulus 8.1, available free of charge to all customers on active software maintenance contracts with Canto or Canto Certified Partners. Cumulus 8.1 is the product line’s first scheduled upgrade since May’s release of Cumulus 8, which introduced a new core architecture. A new version of the Cumulus Client enables users to work with Cumulus Server-based catalogs, or catalogs created and stored locally for personal use. The metadata of Cumulus Server-based catalogs can be edited offline. Once reconnected to the Cumulus Server, local metadata edits can update the Cumulus Server, or vice versa. Included with Cumulus Workgroup, Enterprise and Complete systems, the new Cumulus Web Client helps users connect to Cumulus via Web browsers to find and download assets, edit metadata and upload new assets. The statistics and usage tracking introduced with Cumulus 8 includes new reporting options that include new report types and PDF output options. http://www.canto.com
The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) XML Schema Working Group has published Last Call Working Draft of “W3C XML Schema Definition Language (XSD) 1.1 Part 1: Structures” and “Part 2: Datatypes. The former specifies the XML Schema Definition Language, which offers facilities for describing the structure and constraining the contents of XML documents, including those which exploit the XML Namespace facility. The schema language, which is itself represented in an XML vocabulary and uses namespaces, substantially reconstructs and considerably extends the capabilities found in XML document type definitions (DTDs). The second publication defines facilities for defining datatypes to be used in XML Schemas as well as other XML specifications. Comments are welcome through 31 December. Learn more about the Extensible Markup Language (XML) Activity. http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/WD-xmlschema11-1-20091203/
Inmedius, Inc. announced the general release of iConvert, a comprehensive environment for the conversion of documents into structured eXtensible Markup Language (XML). The software supports conversion from legacy paper, Microsoft Word or PDF files. iConvert also comes pre-configured for XML conversion of original S1000D, 40051B and ATA documents, and supports any Document Type Definition (DTD) or XML schema. iConvert synchronizes the original document with the converted XML document in a multi-pane, on-screen display. This approach to XML conversion should allow for the continuous fine-tuning of document conversion rules for increased automated transfer. iConvert’s has modified its user environment and workflow design that guides the user through the XML conversion process. At the same time, iConvert provides a visual inspection of the original document that is synchronized with the configured XML output. During this step, the end-user should be able to drag and drop both unconverted pieces of data, as well as content that has been transformed properly. User defined rules files applied to create the original conversion are updated, allowing for a second pass with increased accuracy. http://inmedius.com/
Semantic search is a composite beast like many enterprise software applications. Most packages are made up of multiple technology components and often from multiple vendors. This raises some interesting thoughts as we prepare for Gilbane Boston 2009 to be held this week.
As part of a panel on semantic search, moderated by Hadley Reynolds of IDC, with Jeff Fried of Microsoft and Chris Lamb of the OpenCalais Initiative at Thomson Reuters, I wanted to give a high level view of semantic technologies currently in the marketplace. I contacted about a dozen vendors and selected six to highlight for the variety of semantic search offerings and business models.
One case study involves three vendors, each with a piece of the ultimate, customer-facing, product. My research took me to one company that I had reviewed a couple of years ago, and they sent me to their “customer” and to the customer’s customer. It took me a couple of conversations and emails to sort out the connections; in the end the relationships made perfect sense.
On one hand we have conglomerate software companies offering “solutions” to every imaginable enterprise business need. On the other, we see very unique, specialized point solutions to universal business problems with multiple dimensions and twists. Teaming by vendors, each with a solution to one dimension of a need, create compound product offerings that are adding up to a very large semantic search marketplace.
Consider an example of data gathering by a professional services firm. Let’s assume that my company has tens of thousands of documents collected in the course of research for many clients over many years. Researchers may move on to greater responsibility or other firms, leaving content unorganized except around confidential work for individual clients. We now want to exploit this corpus of content to create new products or services for various vertical markets. To understand what we have, we need to mine the content for themes and concepts.
The product of the mining exercise may have multiple uses: help us create a taxonomy of controlled terms, preparing a navigation scheme for a content portal, providing a feed to some business or text analytics tools that will help us create visual objects reflecting various configurations of content. A text mining vendor may be great at the mining aspect while other firms have better tools for analyzing, organizing and re-shaping the output.
Doing business with two or three vendors, experts in their own niches, may help us reach a conclusion about what to do with our information-rich pile of documents much faster. A multi-faceted approach can be a good way to bring a product or service to market more quickly than if we struggle with generic products from just one company.
When partners each have something of value to contribute, together they offer the benefits of the best of all options. This results in a new problem for businesses looking for the best in each area, namely, vendor relationship management. But it also saves organizations from dealing with huge firms offering many acquired products that have to be managed through a single point of contact, a generalist in everything and a specialist in nothing. Either way, you have to manage the players and how the components are going to work for you.
I really like what I see, semantic technology companies partnering with each other to give good-to-great solutions for all kinds of innovative applications. By the way, at the conference I am doing a quick snapshot on each: Cogito, Connotate (with Cormine and WorldTech), Lexalytics, Linguamatics, Sinequa and TEMIS.
The Gilbane Publishing Practice is diving deep into the transformation of publishing as more and more publishers realize that the digital domain can not be ignored. Not that there aren’t plenty of publishers—especially in STM and other professional publishing efforts—already very active in digital publishing. Still, trade publishing, for example, is seeing the very real opportunities in eBook markets, and we’re wrestling with what makes for best practices for them.
Not that anyone’s strategy makes for a “one-size-fits-all” approach. There are some trade publishers that have started in on or already have well-established single repository XML-based content management systems, the benefits of which are tremendous not just for eBooks, but for content re-use, custom publishing, localization and translation, and even to varying extents, integration with other line of publishing business systems. In trade publishing, however, there are plenty of publishers that have diverse collections of editorial and production platforms—often the result of the long history of mergers and acquisitions in this industry—and the level of integration within these editorial and production systems is ad hoc, at best, never mind effective tie-ins with marketing or sales systems, or royalties, or rights, etc. You know who you are.
So, what is the trade publisher supposed to do? While the ideal solution might be to create content chunks rich with meta-data that feed workflows across not just departments like production, but in and out of all of the other business systems as needed, there is a lot of time and money that goes into such a set up. For trade publishers with publishing systems that work—and maybe it doesn’t really matter if it’s taken a lot of gum and baling wire—what really is needed to add eBooks to the mix?
Companies like Aptara and even newer comer Tizra, along with well-established composition and conversion services, will tell you that if you can output in PDF, they can make eBook for you. And depending on the vendor, the eBook production may be very inexpensive, or have very sophisticated features, or be ready to market and sell, or some combination. SaaS is becoming more common for such processes, so investment, too, is relatively painless. Let’s think of this class of eBook production as “tigers.” This class of solutions offers impressively quick solutions and a good range of capabilities across a growing number of vendors, and represent a strong competitive argument.
XML-based repository digital asset and content management platforms, with their ability to embed rich metadata that may even enable actionable content to other publishing systems—including sales and distribution—stand as a class we can think of a “grizzly bears.” There is no doubt that this class of digital publishing solutions is a competitive strategy choice itself. One example is Wave Corporation, another is Mark Logic. Some solutions work better with publishing business-specific platforms (e.g., Klopotek, Firebrand, MEI).
Of course it may not be an either/or question. Recent news from codeMantra, about partnering with Mark Logic, points to the combining of the tiger and the grizzly. A “tizzly,” anyone?
Keep an eye open for our efforts to answer such questions, and if you are a vendor in this space, please be sure to contact Bill Trippe or Ralph Marto about participating in our multi-client reports. To read more about our Gilbane Publishing Practice consulting services, click here.
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