The Gilbane Advisor

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A question of fluency

I was recently talking with a CEO of a company which operates in several countries all over the world. Not surprisingly, they use English as corporate language. But although they assume that new employees can work in English, there are differences in their fluency – and that can lead to misunderstandings, or people spending more time in communicating and understanding issues than they would in their own language.

I asked whether they tested the level of English skills when new employees were hired. It turned out that a tailored test based on the special terminology of their industry and also of management would be helpful in defining their skill level. After all, most of us would describe ourselves as fluent speakers of a language – but fluency is a very movable beast. Having spent most of my professional life writing an reading in English, I still manage to make errors of various seriousness practically every day. At times, such errors really obfuscate the meaning.

I repeat myself, but to me, the real future of the language business is in all the various new and yet even unimagined tools and solutions for employees working in a multilingual environment. As we exchange messages and develop ideas across contries, cultures and languages, we need new and faster ways to cross the language barriers. Using crowdsourcing for multilingual needs will open up interesting possibilities, just like in Google Translate where users can suggest a better translation.  Similar applications for crowdsourcing multilingual solutions inside companies and industries should proliferate.

Btw., an interesting point was made by another person responsible for training in a large global organization. He remarked that using social media in training allows them to evaluate the results better: they can tap into the conversations of the community and trough them see what people have learned and where they need to improve the training. Great idea!

CrownPeak Announces Banner Ad Content Manager

CrownPeak announced the launch of a new framework designed specifically for digital agencies and online marketers: The CrownPeak Banner Ad Content Manager. This content management framework addresses a core challenge that online marketers face — the need for a simple way to manage both the content in an online advertisement that is running outside their Web site, and the landing page to which the advertisement links. This solution, when combined with CrownPeak’s Landing Page Management solutions. enable digital marketers to manage, track and change the content on both landing pages and the banner ads running on external Web sites to drive greater ROI from marketing campaigns. With CrownPeak, companies can significantly improve online campaign performance, track results and experiment with new marketing strategies and messaging. The Banner Ad Content Management framework allows CrownPeak clients to change any element of their Adobe Flash based display ads without having to recreate the creative or re-distribute the ads to the publication. Using the CrownPeak Banner Ad Content Management Framework, any Flash based template ad can have as many versions as the marketer wants. Additionally, an update to the banner advertisement can also change the headline or any component of the landing page to which that advertisement links. Then, using CrownPeak, conversions and metrics can be tracked to determine the optimum message. www.crownpeak.com

Vignette Introduces New Pricing for Web Content Management

Vignette Corporation (NASDAQ: VIGN) announced the immediate availability of new licensing models for its Web Content Management solutions. The new models, created to provide organizations of every size with attractive cost options, include the Vignette Web Content Management Suites and subscription-based pricing. The Vignette Web Content Management Suite is tailored for organizations that require affordability, scalability and the option to add modules such as video and social media as their needs evolve. The enterprise-grade suite features a flexible content architecture, core presentation and workflow capabilities and high-performance delivery for less than $200,000. Companies can combine this suite with Vignette QuickSite, a fixed-cost professional services offering that accelerates the deployment of new Web properties. Vignette QuickSite offers modeling, gap analysis and best practices. Vignette QuickSite is priced at less than $100,000. The Vignette Web Content Management Enhanced Suite is for organizations that want to deliver personalized, media-rich and high-performance sites for less than $400,000. The suite includes: Management, workflow and publishing capabilities for virtually all types of content including video, flash and other types of rich media; A toolset to help integration with existing ERP and LOB systems; A presentation management framework that provides explicit personalization and allows delegated administration, and: Multi-tier caching for high-performance. Customers can now license the Vignette Web Content Management Suite for less than $9,000 per month with a one-year commitment. The Vignette Web Content Management Enhanced Suite is available for less than $18,000 per month with a one-year commitment. http://www.vignette.com

 

Microsoft Unveils Exchange 2010 with Public Beta

Microsoft Corp. released a public beta of Microsoft Exchange Server 2010, part of Microsoft’s unified communications family. Exchange 2010 is part of the next wave of Microsoft Office-related products and is the first server in a new generation of Microsoft server technology built from the ground up to work on-premises and as an online service. This release of Exchange 2010 introduces an integrated e-mail archive and features to help reduce costs and improve the user experience. The next wave, which includes Microsoft Office 2010, Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, Microsoft Visio 2010 and Microsoft Project 2010, is designed to give people a consistent experience across devices, making it easier to create and edit documents and collaborate from any location. In addition, to help businesses reduce costs, the next wave will introduce new delivery and licensing models, improve deployment and management options for IT professionals, and provide developers with an expanded platform on which to create applications. Exchange Server 2010 will become available in the second half of 2009. Additional Office products including Microsoft Office 2010, Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, Microsoft Visio 2010 and Microsoft Project 2010 are scheduled to enter technical preview in the third quarter of 2009 and release to manufacturing in the first half of 2010. A public beta of the server is available for download starting today at http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/2010

When User Communities Take Control Everyone Wins

One of the LinkedIn groups I belong to has a great discussion started by Tom Burgmans , Enterprise Search Specialist at Wolters Kluwer, a publisher. The group is Enterprise Search Engine Professionals and has over 1,600 members. Tom began a discussion with this question: FAST Technical Users Group? As I read his call to action by the FAST user community, and the subsequent cheers in response from group members, I was delighted to see the swell of support. Here’s why.

This is a perfect example of where social tools meet a need. A suggestion I also made as a panelist at FastForward 2009 has emerged spontaneously as a direct result of market forces. My observation had been that the FAST user conference was largely attended by IT folks, and the overwhelming number of keynotes and session topics focused on social tools, not especially tied directly to search either. A recommended call to action directed to Microsoft was that they host a platform of social tools to facilitate genuine user community sharing around the FAST product. The people who most need this are search administrators and content managers who presumably have some governance responsibilities for searchable content.

In Tom’s suggestion we see the effective use of a social tool to generate interest among members, a large and focused audience who serve as a great test of the viability of his idea.

That is neat!

Almost 30 years ago when I ran a software company, we (the company) organized and ran annual user group meetings in tandem with a large professional conference that most of our customers attended. These meetings were very successful, well attended by 40 – 50% of our customers. Over almost 20 years the group spawned a lot of professional and collegial relationships that gave our small user community a sense of collective investment in furthering the improvement and support of the product around which they met. Efforts to turn over total control of the user group to the community were not successful because, in those days, the infrastructure needed for planning, organizing and running meetings across the North American geography did not exist. My company provided that support mechanism out of necessity.

However, three regional user groups began their own programs to share knowledge, and the entire user community collectively published a “cookbook” of source code for reports that many of the users had built for use with the database application and wanted to share with others.

Today the opportunities for building these communities of practice have a vast number of “free” social tools to employ, so that barrier has gone away. More important, the benefits to the user community are limitless. It gets to drive discussion about the product, share hints, workarounds, and tips for successful implementations. The user community gets to decide what is important, what is needed in the knowledge-base of operational information. It can call for product changes, improvements and use social platforms for galvanizing the community around specific issues.

One of the best outcomes we saw with our own user community was around a visitation day at our offices for customers to meet together to “test-drive” an alpha version of a major new release. We purposely stayed out of the meeting for an extended period. Later we learned that when each had developed a “wish list” of changes and tweaks to the release, some rather marginal choices had died a natural death as a result of the “wisdom of the crowd.” This was an ideal scenario for us as a development company because we did not have to disappoint any individual users with a unilateral decision to reject their ideas.

Trust me when I recommend to the enterprise search user community, you will empower yourselves in ways you can’t imagine when you join forces with other customers to drive the improvements and success of any product you use and value.

Autonomy Enhances Interwoven Teamsite

Autonomy Corporation plc (LSE: AU. or AU.L) announced the general availability of an enhanced version of Autonomy Interwoven TeamSite, powered by Autonomy’s Intelligent Data Operating Layer (IDOL) server. The latest version of TeamSite integrates Autonomy Interwoven’s web content management (WCM) platform with multivariable testing (MVT) and closed-loop analytics capabilities, helping marketers to more easily create, deliver, optimize, and analyze websites that engage online visitors. Leveraging Autonomy Optimost’s website testing capabilities in a self-service model within TeamSite, the new solution combines the intelligence of web A/B and multivariable testing and analysis with the ease and power of their WCM solution. TeamSite 6.7.2 SP1 is available now. http://www.autonomy.com/

 

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