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Gilbane San Francisco

February 24, 2008 / / 0 Comments

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.

Sign up for our “Beyond Search” Report

February 24, 2008 / / 0 Comments

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.

Around and About

February 22, 2008 / / 0 Comments
  • 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!

Taxonomy and Enterprise Search

February 22, 2008 / / 1 Comment

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.

A Sharp Stick in the Eye: Tying $$ to Multilingual Content

February 20, 2008 / / 0 Comments

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?

Oprah and eBooks

February 16, 2008 / / 0 Comments

eBook followers will remember that Oprah endorsed eBooks early on, even choosing one of the early eBook readers as one of her Favorite Things. Now she has caused a bitstorm around an eBook version of Suze Orman’s book Women and Money.
The Oprah touch doesn’t just work for traditional books. More than 1 million copies of Suze Orman’s “Women & Money” were downloaded after the announcement last week on Winfrey’s television show that the e-book edition would be available for free on her Web site, , for a period of 33 hours.
“I believe `Women & Money’ is the most important book I’ve ever written,” Orman said in a statement released Saturday by Winfrey. “So this was not about getting people to buy the book, but getting them to read it, and that was the intention behind this offer.”
The download offer “has built excitement for Suze’s book across all formats,” Julie Grau, the book’s publisher, said in a statement.

RIXML

February 14, 2008 / / 1 Comment

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. RIXML.org is a consortium of buy-side and sell-side research firms, and vendors, that is defining an XML-based standard for categorizing, tagging and distributing global investment research.

Like XBRL, RIXML has great potential to enhance how financial analysts work with financial content. With rich, XML-encoded financial information, you can imagine analysts finding ways to better filter information, to develop powerful queries and reports, and to commingle research content from various sources. I was talking to colleague Geoff Bock about this, and we both know financial analysts who do all this now, but do it with Excel. They are the ultimate Excel power users, and they consume and model vast amounts of financial information. And they typically do this under tremendous time pressure.

XBRL clearly has traction–9,540,000 Google hits, lots of vendor support, and a roadmap to mandatory SEC adoption (warning, big PDF file!). RIXML is a more nascent effort–9,740 Google hits–but its potential impact is significant. Financial reporting and research data already has an important lifecycle. We see it in the markets every day, though most of us only from a distance. XML has the potential to make this lifecycle much more efficient, much more content-rich, and much less dependent on the manual efforts of those frazzled financial analysts. Instead of 16-hour days during earnings season, maybe they can work, heck, 14-hour days! (Actually, their managers will likely just give them a few more companies to cover…)

By the way, an obvious question to ask about RIXML is how it might integrate with XBRL. This too is nascent, though the two organizations have signed a very general memorandum of understanding. You can also find a related presentation here (PDF again).

UPDATE: The SEC has launched a new website, Financial Explorer, that enables users to generate custom data from the underlying XBRL-encoded reports.

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