The Gilbane Advisor

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Traction for eBooks?

Steve Paxhia noted during a meeting the other day that the kindle is indeed still on back order, though as far as we know there are no definitive numbers out on how many they have actually sold. Still, unless there are extraordinarily problems with their manufacturing or supply chain, they have to be producing and selling a healthy number of them. In another meeting last week, someone actually said, “I will read that on my Kindle on the flight back.”
Then today, via Slashdot I learn that science fiction publisher Tor is giving away free eBooks in association with the launch of their new website. Science fiction is another market, along with romance, that has been good for eBooks, and this kind of wide-scale marketing strikes me as a logical next step.
UPDATE: Evan Schnittman of Oxford University Press is making maximum use of his Kindle and thinks it beats the SkyMall catalog any day.

Here and There

  • Over at eWeek, Jim Rapoza looks at the most overhyped technologies of the century, and XML isn’t one of them.
  • At IBM developerWorks, Elliotte Rusty Harold speculates on the future of XML. He’s bullish on XQuery and Atom, and he declares the end of markup-centric editors.
  • Speaking of being bullish on Atom, check out Mochilla’s Atom-based API for premium content.
  • Geoff Bock sends along news that Microsoft’s push to get OOXML as a standard is being scrutinized by the EU.
  • Also on the OOXML front, IBM and Microsoft seem ready to go toe to toe. More perspective here and here.
  • Have you ever thought you should be able to take DITA-encoded content and pump it through InDesign? You are not alone.
  • If you follow the Apache Software Foundation or other technical listservs at any level of interest, you just have to try Mark Logic’s MarkMail application where you can ask questions like, “Who from Microsoft chimes in on the XML schema list at the W3C?“.
  • I’m not the only one to think that part of Microsoft’s interest in Yahoo is driven by Yahoo’s impressive efforts in wireless technology, which have XML at their core.

JustSystems Announces DITA Maturity Model Co-Authored with IBM

JustSystems, Inc. announced the availability of the “DITA Maturity Model,” which was co-authored with IBM and defines a graduated, step-by-step methodology for implementing Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA). One of DITA’s features is its support for incremental adoption. Users can start with DITA using a subset of its capabilities, and then add investment over time as their content strategy evolves and expands to cover more requirements and content areas. However, this continuum of adoption has also resulted in confusion, as communities at different stages of adoption claim radically different numbers for cost of migration and return on investment.

The DITA Maturity Model addresses this confusion by dividing DITA adoption into six levels, each with its own required investment and associated return on investment. Users can assess their own capabilities and goals relative to the model and choose the initial adoption level appropriate for their needs and schedule. The six levels of DITA adoption include:

Level 1: Topics – The most minimum DITA adoption requires the migration of the current XML content sources;

Level 2: Scalable Reuse – The major activity at this level is to break down the content in topics that are stored as individual files and use DITA maps to collect and organize the content into reusable units for assembly into specific deliverables;

Level 3: Specialization and Customization – Now, users expand the information architecture to be a full content model, which explicitly defines the different types of content required to meet different author and audience needs and specify how to meet these needs using structured, typed content;

Level 4: Automation and Integration – Once content is specialized, users can leverage their investments in semantics with automation of key processes and begin tying content together even across different specializations or authoring disciplines;

Level 5: Semantic Bandwidth – As DITA diversifies to occupy more roles within an organization, a cross-application, cross-silo solution that shares DITA as a common semantic currency lets groups use the toolset most appropriate for their content authoring and management needs;

Level 6: Universal Semantic Ecosystem – As DITA provides for scalable semantic bandwidth across content silos and applications, a new kind of semantic ecosystem emerges: Semantics that can move with content across old boundaries, wrap unstructured content, and provide validated integration with semi-structured content and managed data sources. http://www.ibm.com, http://na.justsystems.com

Search Behind the Firewall aka Enterprise Search

Called to account for the nomenclature “enterprise search,” which is my area of practice for The Gilbane Group, I will confess that the term has become as tiresome as any other category to which the marketplace gives full attention. But what is in a name, anyway? It is just a label and should not be expected to fully express every attribute it embodies. A year ago I defined it to mean any search done within the enterprise with a primary focus of internal content. “Enterprise” can be an entire organization, division, or group with a corpus of content it wants to have searched comprehensively with a single search engine.

A search engine does not need to be exclusive of all other search engines, nor must it be deployed to crawl and index every single repository in its path to be referred to as enterprise search. There are good and justifiable reasons to leave select repositories un-indexed that go beyond even security concerns, implied by the label “search behind the firewall.” I happen to believe that you can deploy enterprise search for enterprises that are quite open with their content and do not keep it behind a firewall (e.g. government agencies, or not-for-profits). You may also have enterprise search deployed with a set of content for the public you serve and for the internal audience. If the content being searched is substantively authored by the members of the organization or procured for their internal use, enterprise search engines are the appropriate class of products to consider. As you will learn from my forthcoming study, Enterprise Search Markets and Applications: Capitalizing on Emerging Demand, and that of Steve Arnold (Beyond Search) there are more than a lot of flavors out there, so you’ll need to move down the food chain of options to get it right for the application or problem you are trying to solve.

OK! Are you yet convinced that Microsoft is pitting itself squarely against Google? The Yahoo announcement of an offer to purchase for something north of $44 billion makes the previous acquisition of FAST for $1.2 billion pale. But I want to know how this squares with IBM, which has a partnership with Yahoo in the Yahoo edition of IBM’s OmniFind. This keeps the attorneys busy. Or may-be Microsoft will buy IBM, too.

Finally, this dog fight exposed in the Washington Post caught my eye, or did one of the dogs walk away with his tail between his legs? Google slams Autonomy – now, why would they do that?

I had other plans for this week’s blog but all the Patriots Super Bowl talk puts me in the mode for looking at other competitions. It is kind of fun.

So What is this New Blog (and Practice) About?

Well as the name of the blog suggests, the focus is on both technology and strategy. We have been at this long enough to come to the stunning conclusion that technology adoptions minus well-thought-out and sound business strategies are doomed to failure. (Now you know why we get paid the big bucks!) While obvious, the conclusion is also true. I have had the luxury of consulting with several clients over a long period of time. I like to think they are successful because they listen to me (and they do), but the bigger reason they are successful is that they use my input to inform well thought out business strategies. Sometimes these are operational (they want to save money, improve efficiency), but more often they are about the top line. They want to drive more revenue.

For commercial publishers this means bringing more product to market more quickly, customizing products, and developing derivative products (think of offerings like SafariU). For enterprises, this is also tied to bringing more product to market more quickly; think of a company like Autodesk using XML-based publishing and globalization to bring more products to more markets simultaneously. These are world-class projects based on XML that are bringing incredible value to their organizations, but–even more significantly–these are not the only efforts of their kind. Whereas in the early days of SGML the community could count projects of this type in perhaps the low double digits, I have long ago given up on trying to remember or catalog how many of these projects are out there backed by XML technology.

But not every project is as successful as the ones I have cited. Indeed these stand out as case studies of the best practices. Projects do fail and projects do falter, and I will reveal my bias here in saying that, especially in the recent few years, few projects fail because of the chosen technology. (All complex systems require significant customization! Who would have thunk it?) Much more often they fail because of problems with project management, lack of sufficient staffing, and shifting plans and execution when the inevitable problems arise. And these kinds of failures come right back to a failure in strategy, or at least a failure in realistically planning for a complex undertaking that is critical to organizational success.
So content strategies are indeed a critical half of this practice, but technology is the other half. Here as well a comparison to SGML is in order. Whereas in the days of SGML there were few vendors at the table, now there are literally scores. Even more importantly, none of the major vendors are missing, and one can make the argument that the major vendors are–or soon will be–the dominant players in the market. XML is central to the product and development platform strategies of Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, Sun, Adobe, and EMC. One can only speculate at the level of R&D dedicated to XML at these companies, but it is safe to say it is a lot. Just as impressive is the community of developers who work in XML daily. Most programmers working in contemporary languages like Java and C# use XML for all kinds of routine tasks, and XML data mapping and modeling tools are built into Visual Studio and many other development tools.

To be more specific, we intend to cover what we categorize as the range of XML products of most interest to business and IT professionals responsible for content management initiatives. These include:

  • XML Repositories
  • XML Content Management Platforms
  • XML Editors
  • XML Transformation and Publishing Tools
  • XML Utilities, Middleware, and IDEs
  • XML Forms

Among other things, we will be developing an online directory of these product lines (more on that in a future post). I have been informally cataloging the companies over the recent few weeks and I already have 60 to 70 companies without trying very hard. We expect to interact with these vendors, get details of the products and product roadmaps, and also work with them when appropriate on product strategy and projects like white papers and case studies.

So that’s the news so far from here. Do get in touch if you have any questions, ideas, or complaints!

Beyond Search and Search

As many of you know from our press release at Gilbane Boston, two of the reports we will be publishing in the next few of months have to do with search. Lynda Moulton, who runs our Enterprise Search consulting practice is working on Enterprise Search Markets and Applications: Capitalizing on Emerging Demand, and our colleague Steve Arnold is writing Beyond Search: What to do When you’re Enterprise Search System Doesn’t Work. Lynda’s report covers the “Enterprise Search” market, what organizations are doing with the variety of technologies considered to be enterprise search products, and what their experiences have been. By the way Lynda is collecting experiences about implementations and would love to hear about yours.

Steve’s report is a look at what is coming next, and is largely, but not only, based on an analysis of what Google is doing, what they are planning on doing, and the emerging ecosystem they are creating. This is fascinating stuff. Steve has recently launched a must-read blog, Beyond Search, where you can get a peek at some of what will be in our report. For example, see his thoughts on enterprise search terminology.

Both reports will be important tools for enterprise IT strategists and executives. We’ll keep you posted on their progress.

Polopoly Version 9.9 Introduces Live Layout Management

Swedish software developer Polopoly releases the latest version of its Content Management system. Continuing the effort to launch more ready-to-use functionality, Polopoly version 9.9 marks an important milestone. By introducing a standardized way to build web sites and specifically how to break down pages into standardized and reusable elements, version 9.9 introduces out-of-the-box layout management functionality. Live layout editing is now as easy as dragging and dropping content and application components onto a page – allowing for full user customization on the fly. The Polopoly platform is built entirely in Java and has open and documented APIs. Like previous versions of the Polopoly system, version 9.9 provides enterprise level performance through Polopoly’s architecture and multi-level caching technology. The new release includes the addition of a new fragment cache, which automatically caches reusable page fragments.The new developer framework introduced in version 9.9 prescribes best practices for how to build web sites and web pages with Polopoly. Keeping this “developer contract” gives the editors benefits in the form of preview and editorial control over page layout. An editor may for instance rearrange the components within a page visually, using the modular interface with drag-and-drop capabilities. Page templating can still be used to control corporate graphical guidelines and accessibility demands, for example, while at the same time allowing for just the right level of editorial flexibility and creativity to ensure maximum use of content assets. For developers, the new Velocity integration will allow for dynamic update of website presentation logic, enabling hot deployment of new site functionality. The Polopoly Content Management system provides for multi-channel distribution of large amounts of content at high speed. The modular software includes tools for managing and editing multimedia, including user generated content, within one single system. Polopoly Content Manager Version 9.9 will be available from February 1, 2008. http://www.polopoly.com

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