An attendee at an industry conference recently asked me, “Who are Vignette’s products really best suited for?” While the full answer to this broad question would require a consulting engagement to deliver, the short version is “medium-sized and large enterprises that have needs for a unified WCM, collaboration, and portal solution.” While each of these Vignette applications is fully functional on its own, the real value proposition of Vignette’s products stems from the synergies of tightly integrating all three modules. In support of this statement, one client several months ago bluntly stated that for the kind of static Web publishing it had in mind, the Vignette Content Management product was “too complicated and too expensive.” I agreed. But for larger enterprises with collaborative intranets, extranets, or public-facing internet sites – especially those with demanding requirements for dynamic content and personalization – less sophisticated Web publishing solutions would certainly fail, regardless of price.
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We’ve been so busy getting ready for next week’s conference in San Francisco that it was a bit of a surprise to be deluged with submissions for our Boston conference yesterday. Of course that is because the deadline for submitting proposals for the Gilbane Boston conference, December 2 – 4, 2008 was June 15. It’s great to see the interest!
Anyway, since we will all be very busy next week, we realized we might as well extend the deadline, so the new deadline in June 24.
See: https://gilbane.com/speaker_guidelines.html for instructions.
Questions can be sent to speaking@gilbane.com.
In a recent consulting project, the Gilbane Group had the opportunity to get a hands-on look at the current version of the Clickability Platform. Several marketing-oriented product enhancements over the past year will be of particular interest to our clients. While the product maintains its strengths in traditional online publishing (due in part to its origins in the publishing industry), there have been major improvements in areas such as analytics and reporting, social computing, and user interface design. In fact, Clickability has re-oriented its Platform to align specifically with the usage and campaign requirements of non-technical online marketing managers. Although product features such as in-context editing, workflow, library services, and user management, remain important and robust parts of the product, the new social computing functionality for online visitor collaboration have done much to bring Clickability to the forefront of Web 2.0-oriented content management offerings. This functionality includes out-of-the-box support for visitor loyalty profiles, discussion boards, visitor ratings, blogs, wikis, and podcasts.
Combining these new social computing components with improvements to Clickability’s analytics and reporting capabilities makes the product a natural fit for companies looking for a Web content platform to support online marketing initiatives. Areas of improvement within analytics and reporting include visitor analysis, profile targeting and reporting, campaign management, A/B split testing, reporting dashboards, ad weighting, and embedded in-context statistics. While organizations looking for a Web content management application to support traditional online publishing can still successfully use the product, they may find the marketing-orientation of the product unnecessary or awkward. And because good analytics and reporting in the service of online campaign management delivers high value for online retailers (in the form of higher average sales prices and better conversation rates among online shoppers), the product may demand a higher price than those publishing static HTML sites can justify. But for at least one of Clickability’s target audiences – online retail marketing managers – the new version of this platform warrants careful, hands-on consideration.
Hustling through my preparation list before the Gilbane San Francisco conference I have come to the fifth session on enterprise search that I’ll be moderating, Mining, Analyzing and Delivering Intelligent Content, featuring Amin Negandi, Principal, Echelon Consulting LLC, speaking on Enterprise Search at A.T. Kearney, and Rob Joachim, Information Systems Engineering Lead, MITRE Corporation presenting a case study on the development of An Expertise Finder Application Built on Enterprise Search. In listening to both of them talk about their projects, these are “must-attend” presentations for those seeking to build search-based solutions for their organizations. Both are examples of the practical and real challenges that surround value building projects. Both have positive outcomes but are hardly implementations that will become static legacy deployments; sustaining a value-based system is an ongoing activity.
As the session abstract states, there are as many technologies for finding content as there are types of content and types of enterprises. Locating a pile of links or citations is rarely the end game for those who really seek to leverage content. Both presenters in this session will talk about solutions that serve real and critical needs for one enterprise, in the first case being able to securely search content across a professional services firm in which collaboration is important within defined proprietary boundaries.
The second case also touches on the need for collaboration and sharing, in this case by enabling location of individuals who are experts. Using the context of content and associations to which they are linked for “defining” individual expertise, search filters relevant metadata to reveal those individuals. Connections are made to locate people and their professional work.
Delivering search results intelligently requires not only technology but also the art of the implementation team. Keeping the focus on specific business outcomes is the essence of ensuring that search delivers intelligent content. The stories of what problem was targeted, what tools were deployed, and how search was implemented by savvy search specialists are the most interesting and useful for learning. Finding out that serendipity also plays a role is getting closer to the best solution is always fun to discover in the process. We’ll be listening on June 19th.
Executives from four companies with unique products for solving search challenges within organizations will share their thoughts on what is most interesting, promising and problematic in the current market at Gilbane San Francisco, session EST-4 on June 19th. Because it is important to consider markets, this type of session gives the panel and audience a chance to recognize the perspectives of each other, sellers and buyers. I’ll be asking the executives to comment on their product strengths, with emphasis on specific value propositions for buyers. There will be an opportunity for the audience to ask questions because what is on the minds of buyers is often the most interesting for everyone to hear. When one listens to questions asked of vendors and hears responses, it reveals two important things about markets:
- Alignment that exists (or not) between what buyers want and what sellers have to offer
- Challenges both face to create value
Think about it. When individuals are tasked with selecting any technology on behalf of an organization or organizational unit, their ultimate success depends on selecting a product and company that truly supports a value proposition for that enterprise business need. While the buyer has responsibility for implementing or selecting the right implementation team, s/he rightly depends on good guidance and a healthy relationship with the purveyor of product.
When a technology company puts its product in the hands of a buyer it must do so with the confidence that its product comes with a total value package. By that I mean not just the technology but also the design, toolkit, and support team to guide its successful implementation.
No one, particularly vendors, likes to talk about negatives. However, given all the things that can go wrong for a buyer trying to manage an implementation team or for sellers who don’t anticipate expectations about their products not explored during the selection process, it is important to consider factors that lead to failure or less than satisfactory outcomes. One question I will have for vendors is to share honestly some of the challenges or disappointments about the market that are a particular point of pain for them. Bad-mouthing customers is not the answer but conveying how hard most vendors honestly try to create value and how their best intentions can be derailed through miscommunication may help buyers and sellers smooth the communication flow.
After all, don’t we all want to provide value for our internal and external customers? I think you will find the panel a receptive group: a 25+-year veteran of the information access market, a marketing executive with an international search and text analytics firm, a founder of a rapidly growing plug-and-play search solution, and a marketing VP working to position a company with a large scale solution against the “big-three” search solutions. You’ll hear straight talk and interesting value propositions.
Speakers: Margie Hlava, President, Accession Innovation, David Haucke, VP Global, Marketing, ISYS, Laurent Simoneau, President & CEO, and Rebecca Thompson, VP Marketing, Vivisimo
Thursday, June 26 2008, 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM EDT
Richly-formatted reports, often automatically generated by enterprise applications, contain a wealth of information that companies can use to accelerate efficient decision-making or quick diagnosis of customer problems. But business managers and users have long been stymied by complicated technology tools. They need simple, specialized search to aggregate content already output in formats they understand, reports hidden because of far-flung enterprise distribution and storage.
Apps Associates, Oracle, and The Gilbane Group join forces to illustrate the potential simplicity for harvesting the value data hidden in rich content that already exists. Topics include:
- The pain points involved in harvesting valuable data in enterprise reports.
- The technology capabilities that are required to address the pain.
- The solutions that combine these capabilities to deliver application-ready report search.
The panel will also discuss real-world business scenarios that illustrate the value of enterprise search solutions that are fine-tuned for reports. Participants are Lynda Moulton, Lead Analyst for Enterprise Search, Gilbane Group; Jinyu Wang, Principle Product Manager, Oracle Secure Enterprise Search; and Ajay Kapur, Principal and VP – Product Development, Apps Associates.
Moderated by Gilbane Group. Sponsored and hosted by Apps Associates. Registration is open at: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/176132958
Relevance has always been the main goal of search for most of us searchers, although sometimes completeness can be even more important, e.g., when we want to determine relevance ourselves and volume is not an issue. Relevance is relative, and there is no way to write code that can anticipate relevance in a general way. (Of course quality is relative too!) Fortunately, search can be extremely useful even without the mind reading option – in fact, mind-reading wouldn’t be enough to anticipate relevance enough anyway.
Much of the discussion about search quality these days revolves around the front-end of relevance, i.e., determining, as much as possible, searchers’ intent. And we do have increasing amounts of information (such as surfing behavior) that allows us to make better guesses about intentions.
We can also make information richer so that search engines can make more accurate determinations about relevance. For example XML site maps provide context in the form of structural information; providing additional metadata to search engines provides even more context.
Despite the imprecise, and constantly changing meaning and use of language, we have been able to asymptotically improve our ability to determine both intent and relevance, and incrementally improve search quality.
I say “we”, but I am neither a developer nor an expert on search technology. We are fortunate to have someone who is arguably the most influential expert and developer today speaking about search quality in two weeks at our San Francisco conference. Udi Manber, VP Engineering, Search Quality, Google is going to open the conference with a presentation on Search Quality and Continuous Innovation. While Udi won’t be giving away any secrets, his presentation will provide valuable and fascinating insight into the way Google thinks about improving search quality. For a taste of Udi’s clear and straightforward style, and what he’ll be talking about read his recent blog post: Introduction to Google Search Quality
Swedish Polopoly and Spanish Protec, announced a technology agreement aimed at closely integrating the Polopoly Web Content Management technology with Protec’s editorial cross media platform. For Protec customers it will be easy to integrate the Milenium technology to Polopoly. Editors and journalists will be able to publish content in Milenium and from there distribute the same information through different digital channels. A journalist updating a text in Milenium will automatically have his or her text updated also in Polopoly and vice versa. Polopoly enables personalized services, such as local weather and search services, quick polls and user ratings of articles. Polopoly also offers an advanced community module, where user-generated content can be managed in co-ordination with other content. Polopoly’s features for Live Layout Management offers possibilities to create and edit web pages on the fly. Polopoly is entirely based on open standards to ensure platform independence and to simplify legacy systems integration. Protec offers with Milenium Cross Media an object oriented editorial production system built on media neutral software architecture and a multimedia CMS. Multiple use of content is enabled through connectivity features to centralized or within distributed newsroom configurations. Polopoly and Protec will be integrated using Polopoly’s integration framework. http://www.polopoly.com http://www.protecmedia.com
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