Kentico Software announced that the new version 3.1 of their Web Content Management System will support Microsoft Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008. Kentico Software will release a new version 3.1 of their Web Content Management System Kentico CMS for ASP.NET in the middle of March 2008. The new version will work with Microsoft Windows Server 2008 and Microsoft SQL Server 2008 that will be launched on February 27. This news comes soon after the company announced their CMS supports Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 and Microsoft IIS 7.0 at the beginning of February. Kentico CMS will keep the support for Windows Server 2000/2003 and SQL Server 2000/2005 as well. http://www.kentico.com
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Attensity announced Attensity VoC On-Demand, a new secure software as a service (SaaS) that enables users to access the company’s “Voice of the Customer” (VoC) solution via the Web for on-demand customer feedback analysis. Enterprises can now extract and analyze data about their customers in Attensity’s user interface and through customizable analytic dashboards. Attensity’s VoC solution uses the company’s Exhaustive Extraction engine to automatically identify facts, opinions, requests, trends and trouble areas from unstructured first person feedback found in surveys, service and call center notes, emails, web forums, blogs, news articles and other forms of customer contact. Attensity turns the first person feedback into “First Person Intelligence”, enabling Attensity users to proactively understand and rapidly react to customer issues and requests. They also have the ability to discover product and/or service offering opportunities as well as potential areas for improvement. Attensity VoC On-Demand also offers a quick start implementation program, which includes appropriate data preparation – dictionary, domain and categorization development – to prepare data sets for extraction and output views and dashboards. Users can develop predefined analysis views, known as query templates, and dashboards tailored to the user organization’s requirements. http://www.attensity.com
Looking ahead to our conference in San Francisco, there are a number of sessions related to XML and content management, as well as some broader sessions on SaaS and content management platforms. David Guenette and I are working with Frank on the Content Technologies & Strategies (CTS) track as well as the Enterprise Publishing Technology (EPT) track. At this writing, we have the following sessions on tap (and you can see the whole grid here).
CTS-1: XML Strategies for Content Management
XML is fundamental to content management in two important ways–in how the content is tagged and structured and also in how content management systems interact with each other and with other enterprise applications. This session looks at how successful organizations make the best use of XML to support critical business processes and applications.
CTS-2: Enterprise Rights Management: Best Practices & Case Studies
As content management systems proliferate, so do the requirements for better and more sophisticated protection of that content. Simply stated, traditional protection is not enough–content needs to be protected persistently throughout complex business processes. Enterprise Rights Management platforms are answering these challenges, and this session uses case studies to help explain how this technology can help you meet your requirements.
CTS-3: SaaS – Is Software as a Service Right for You?
Software as a Service is exploding. Every day brings new offerings, new approaches, and new adopters. While content management SaaS offerings were once limited to Web Content Management, there are now SaaS offerings for document management, ECM, globalization, and XML-based component content management. This session looks at the big questions about SaaS and discusses whether SaaS might be right for you.
CTS-4: Platform Pros & Cons: SharePoint vs. Oracle vs.
Documentum vs. IBM
The long-predicted content management platform wars are upon us. Activity is everywhere–the introduction of SharePoint 2007, Oracle’s acquisition of Stellent, and EMC’s continued aggressive acquisition strategy, and IBM’s acquisition of Filenet. Will we all end up using one of these four platforms, and if we do, would this be a good thing? This session will offer the vendor, user, and industry perspective on this dominant issue.
CTS-5: Financial Content Collaboration with XBRL & RIXML
If you follow XML in the financial services arena, you undoubtedly know about XBRL, the emerging standard for financial data reporting that is really taking hold at the SEC and the regulatory agencies of EU countries. But a lesser known but equally intriguing standard is RIXML, the Research Information Exchange Markup Language. This session looks at these standards and the implications for the lifecycle of financial content.
EPT-1: Enterprise Publishing with XML (DITA)
June 2008 marks the third anniversary since DITA 1.0 was approved by the OASIS Technical Committee, and it is very safe to say that no XML-based publishing standard has had such rapid and far-ranging uptake. This session looks at some emerging uses of DITA while also discussing some of the positive business impact enjoyed by companies who have already adopted the standard.
EPT-2: Multi-Channel Publishing – How to Do It
Multi-channel publishing has become a mandate for nearly every organization. With the explosion in mobile devices, the mandate is becoming more complex. But along with this complexity comes opportunity to serve more users and more applications. This session offer case studies and practical advice for implementing multi-channel publishing to support your business objectives.
EPT-3: Digital Publishing Platforms: Magazines, Newspapers &eBooks
Amazon’s Kindle may be getting all of the publicity, but there is an explosion in new devices, technologies, and products for digital publishing–with implications for every traditional publishing medium. What are these new technologies, and what opportunities do they present to publishers? Hear from publishers and technologists, as well as some of the results of the Gilbane Group’s extensive research into how these technologies are reshaping the digital publishing landscape.
We’ll be publishing our special report by Stephen Arnold, Beyond Search: What to do When you’re Enterprise Search System Doesn’t Work soon – most likely at the beginning of April, and have set-up a page where you can sign-up to be notified when the report will be available at . There will also be a special price for early orders and we’ll be providing that info shortly.
Steve has also set-up a page describing the report at: , and has a blog where he is providing some supplementary material. Also keep an eye on Lynda’s blog where she might have some comments while she is doing some editing.
- I was researching something yesterday and ran a search for DITA and decided, heck, we have some good resources here.
- Danielle Guinebertiere writes to tell us that the 2008 Mark Logic user conference will be held June 10-13 at the Intercontinental Hotel in San Francisco.
- Ditto Ektron CEO Bill Rogers, who alerted us to the call for papers for their 2008 user conference.
- AIIM is almost upon us. One of the things I’ll be checking out is the XPS showcase.
- Speaking of AIIM, I will be speaking as part of a post-AIIM webinar March 12 on dynamic documents.
- D-Day for Microsoft Office at ISO?
- Interesting article over at DevX about using PHP to create dynamic SVG. Always warms my heart to see new energy behind SVG!
This blog entry on the “Taxonomy Watch” website prompts me to correct the impression that I believe naysayers who say that taxonomies take too much time and effort to be valuable. Nothing could be further from the truth. I believe in and have always been highly vested in taxonomies because I am convinced that an investment in pre-processing enterprise generated content into meaningfully organized results brings large returns in time savings for a searcher. S/he, otherwise, needs to invest personally in the laborious post-processing activity of sifting and rejecting piles of non-relevant content. Consider that categorizing content well and only once brings benefit repeatedly to all who search an enterprise corpus.
Prime assets of enterprises are people and their knowledge; the resulting captured information can be leveraged as knowledge assets (KA). However, there is a serious problem “herding” KA into a form that results in leveragable knowledge. Bringing content into a focus that is meaningful to a diverse but specialized audience of users, even within a limited company domain is tough because the language of the content is so messy.
So, what does this have to do with taxonomies and enterprise search, and how they factor into leveraging KA? Taxonomies have a role as a device to promote and secure the meaningful retrievability of content when we need it most or fastest, just-in-time retrieval. If no taxonomies exist to pre-collocate and contextualize content for an audience, we will be perpetually stuck in a mode of having to do individual human filtering of excessive search results that come from “keyword” queries. If we don’t begin with taxonomies for helping search engines categorize content, we will certainly never get to the holy grail of semantic search. We need every device we can create and sustain to make information more findable and understandable; we just don’t have time to both filter and read, comprehensively, everything a keyword search throws our way to gain the knowledge we need to do our jobs.
Experts recognize that organizing content with pre-defined terminology (aka controlled vocabularies) that can be easily displayed in an expandable taxonomic structure is a useful aid for a certain type of searcher. The audience for navigated search is one that appreciates the clustering of search results into groups that are easily understood. They find value in being able to move easily from broad concepts to narrower ones. They especially like it when the categories and terminology are a close match to the way they view a domain of content in which they are subject experts. It shows respect for their subject area and gives them a level of trust that those maintaining the repository know what they need.
Taxonomies, when properly employed, serve triple duty. Exposing them to search engines that are capable of categorizing content puts them into play as training data. Setting them up within content management systems provides a control mechanism and validation table for human assigned metadata. Finally, when used in a navigated search environment, they provide a visual map of the content landscape.
U.S. businesses are woefully behind in “getting it;” they need to invest in search and surrounding infrastructure that supports search. Comments from a recent meeting I attended reflected the belief that the rest of the world is far ahead in this respect. As if to highlight this fact, a colleague just forwarded this news item yesterday. “On February 13, 2008, the XBRL-based financial listed company taxonomy formulated by the Shanghai Stock Exchange (SSE) was “Acknowledged” by the XBRL International. The acknowledgment information has been released on the official website of the XBRL International (http://www.xbrl.org/FRTaxonomies/)….”.
So, let’s get on with selling the basic business case for taxonomies in the enterprise to insure that the best of our knowledge assets will be truly findable when we need them.
As I write this, someone in Halifax, Nova Scotia, is editing the entry on British Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm. As Ben Vershbow notes over at if:book, it is weirdly compelling.
Hewlett-Packard has long been a poster child for the application of people, process, and technology to content globalization solutions. The Gilbane case study on HP documented the company’s commitment to satisfying customers in their local langauges. The mandate for multilingual content was made clear by the then-VP of content and product data management: 90% of HP’s customers buy based on content, not on touching the product.
The importance of investment in content globalization solutions was driven home once again with HP’s announcement of quarterly earnings on Feb 19. Overall, the company posted a 38% increase in earnings and a 13% rise in revenue for its fiscal first quarter. Of note to our readers:
In its first quarter, H-P’s results were fueled by strong sales in its personal-computer division and robust sales overseas, particularly in markets such as Brazil, Russia, India and China. International markets accounted for 69% of H-P’s revenue for the quarter.
Put these results together with customer buying patterns.
- 69% of the company’s revenues were in markets outside the US.
- 90% of customers buy based content, not on touching the product.
Can there be any more compelling reason to develop a multilingual content strategy? And invest in people, process, and technology to execute against it?
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