eZ Systems announced the immediate availability of eZ Publish 4.0, the latest version of its ECM product. eZ Publish 4.0 features PHP 5-compatibility. eZ Publish is freely downloadable and provides an out-of-the-box Open Source Enterprise Content Management System. The product offers development framework with advanced functionality for web publishing, media portals, intranets, e-commerce and extranets. Specifically, eZ Publish 4.0 will offer the following enhancements to the 3.x series: Complete PHP 5-compatibility, Full support for using eZ’s PHP enterprise components library, Performance improvements, Improved internal XML handling for increased performance and reduced memory usage, Updated Web site interface with new graphical design and enhancements, Improved clustering performance, Multilingual URL support, and Enhanced ISBN and multi-option datatypes. eZ Find, a new extension for eZ Publish 3.x and 4.x, enhances the search functionality on eZ Publish sites and includes features such as relevance ranking, native support for eZ Publish access rights, keyword highlighting and the ability to search sites containing millions of objects. eZ Systems also announced eZ Flow. eZ Flow helps news and media organizations to create dynamic portal pages by scheduling content publication, streaming rich content and managing revenue streams, including pay-per-view and paid content placement. Standard eZ Publish functionality within eZ Flow includes features designed to engage users, including surveys, ratings, tagging, comments, forums, polls and blogs. Multi-user, multi-role access permissions provide complete control over which users – including anonymous site visitors – can create and edit different types of content. With multi-channel exporting, site content can also be published to RSS, OpenOffice.org, Microsoft Word, and QuarkXPress. http://ez.no/
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Looking for a unique and meaningful holiday gift?
OLPC has extended its “Give One, Get One” program through the end of the year. A donation of $399 US (a portion of which may be deductible) covers two XO laptops. OLPC will send one device to a child in an OLPC educational zone, and you’ll get one XO device for yourself (or child in your family or local area). Giving options include donating both XOs covered by your contribution.
A recent article in the WSJ points out alternate approaches to addressing OLPC’s mission (“to empower the children of developing countries to learn by providing one connected laptop to every school-age child”). Regardless of who will ultimately provide solutions that take hold, OLPC offers an affordable way to do some good now. Think of it as an opportunity to give new meaning to the term “social computing.” Happy holidays!
It has been a week since the annual Gilbane Boston 2007 Conference closed and I am still searching for the most important message that came out of Enterprise Search and Semantic Web Technology sessions. There were so many interesting case studies that I’ll begin with a search function that illustrates one major enterprise search requirement – aggregation.
Besides illustrating a business case for aggregating disparate content using search, the case studies shared three themes:
- Search is just a starting point for many business processes
- While few very large organizations present all of their organization’s content through a single portal, the technology options to manage such an ideal design are growing and up to supporting entire enterprises
- All systems were implemented and operational for delivering value in less than one year, underscoring the trend toward practical and more out-of-the box solutions
Here is a brief take on what came out of just the first two of seven sessions.
Small-medium solutions:
- Use of ISYS to manipulate search results and function as a back-office data analysis tool for DirectEDGAR, the complete SEC filings, presented by Prof. Burch Kealey of the University of Nebraska. Presentation
- Support for search by serendipity across the shareable content domains of members of a trade association (ARF) by finding results that satisfy the searcher in his pursuit of understanding with Exalead, presented by Alain Heurtebise CEO of Exalead. Presentation
- A knowledge portal enabling rapid and efficient retrieval of the complete technical documentation for field service engineers at Otis Elevator to meet rapid response goals when supporting customers using a customized implementation of dtSearch, presented by project consultant Rob Wiesenberg of Contegra Systems, Inc. Presentation
Large solutions calling for search across multi-million record domains:
- Hosted Vivisimo solution federating over 40 million documents across 22,000 government web sites accessible with search results clustered; it records over a half million page views per day on http://USA.gov and was deployed in 8 weeks, presented by Vivisimo co-founder Jerome Pesenti. Presenation
- Intranet knowledge portal for improving customer services by enabling access to internal knowledge assets (over half a million customer cases with all their associated documents) at USi (an AT&T company) using Endeca, a search product USi had experience deploying and hosting for very large e-commerce catalogs, presented by development leader Toby Ford of USi. With one developer it was running in six months. Presentation
- Within a large law firm (Morrison Foerster) and the legal departments of two multi-national pharmaceutical companies (Pfizer and Novartis), Recommind aggregates and indexes content for numerous internal application repositories, file shares and external content sources for unified search across millions of documents, contributing a direct ROI in saved labor by ensuring that required documents are retrieved in a single search process. Presentation
In each of these cases, content from numerous sources was aggregated through the crawling and indexing algorithms of a particular search engine pointed at a bounded and defined corpus of content, with or without associated metadata to solve a particular business problem. In each case, there were surrounding technologies, human architected design elements, and interfaces to present the search interface and results for a predefined audience. This is what we can expect from search in the coming months and years, deployments to meet specialized enterprise needs, an evolving array of features and tools to leverage search results, and a rapid scaling of capabilities to match the explosion of enterprise content that we all need to find and manipulate to do our jobs.
Next week, I will reconstruct more themes and messages from the conference.
Immediacy, part of the Mediasurface group (UK, AIM: MSR) announced the launch of Immediacy Web Content Management Suite 6.0 (WCMs 6.0). New features are:
- Extended Web 2.0 functionality allows easy creation of ‘My Pages’, profiles and blogs that help to deliver the content, context and connections for social interaction.
- Immediacy WCMs 6.0 creates a platform for community-driven tags (folksonomies) and business taxonomies to co-exist.
- The new Immediacy SharePoint Connector is designed to allow non-technical users to publish accessibility compliant content directly from SharePoint.
- Improved Search Engine Optimisation generates the XHTML-validated code that search engines such as Google prefer.
- Taxonomy and Categorisation Manager employs sophisticated algorithms to extract keywords, key phrases and a summarised description from any web page or document, then automatically categorise it against a taxonomy or folksonomy.
It also includes as standard new enhancements for social networking including RSS, OpenSearch, Robot.txt, PDF output and blog capabilities. http://www.mediasurface.com
Tomorrow, I will be part of a webinar, What Every Publisher Needs to Know About Content Management. It’s being put on by Book Business Magazine and sponsored by Follett Digital Resources. Matt Steinmetz, Special Projects Editor for Book Business will be moderating, and I will be joined on the virtual dais by Jabin White, Vice President for Product Management at Silverchair.
I’m going to be presenting a market overview, offer some definitions, and discuss some recent and emerging trends. I’m going to leave most of the heavy lifting to Jabin, though. He is truly one of the smart guys in the business and an excellent presenter, and I am looking forward to hearing what he has to say.
You can go right to the registration page here.
CM Professionals is now accepting nominations of candidates for the Board of Directors. The nominations period runs from now until December 21.
In a balloting period beginning January 7, CM Pros members will elect four new directors to two-year terms set to expire in January 2010. Eleven candidates ran in the 2007 elections held this past January. The Elections Committee expects to attract an equal number of qualified candidates for this election, given the growing profile of content management as a business practice and higher visibility of content management professionals within enterprises worldwide.
Candidates must be CM Pros members in good standing (i.e., current in their dues). The organization seeks individuals who are committed to the content management community and to the goals of CM Pros, can effectively lead international teams of volunteers and accomplish project and program goals, and have professional networks that can drive participation by all consitutents in the community. CM Pros from outside North America are especially encouraged to consider running for the board.
For more information about opportunities to serve CM Pros, please see the nominations page on the CM Pros website. You can also send email to elections@cmprofessionals.org.
dominKnow Inc. announced that the dominKnow LCMS 5.1 Web-based Learning Content Management System now offers a Language Module that allows customers to provide e-learning in almost any language. At launch, the Language Module gives dominKnow LCMS customers the ability to present courses and courseware interfaces in French Canadian, French European, German, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Simplified Chinese and Korean. Additional languages will be added to the module in the coming months. The new Language Module also gives customers a Translation Tool to extract the text assets of a course on their own and have them translated into any language they choose. Additionally, customers can substitute same-language interface words to match organizational terminology – for example, “Student” could be changed to “Learner” throughout the system if “Learner” is more appropriate. dominKnow LCMS 5.1 customers can export training content compatible with both SCORM 1.2 and SCORM 2004. dominKnow LCMS also supports the AICC standard. http://www.dominknow.com
With the advent of Kindle, from Amazon, a second dedicated ebook reader device has made the news, not counting the press and high hypes of the many preceding, deceasing ebook device contenders. There is a lot to like about Kindle on the face of it: like the Sony reader, Kindle uses the very effective E-Ink display, and few argue that the display lacks sufficient print page fidelity. But, so what? If you want good black type on white, readable only when illuminated by lamp or sun, the book itself has proved a pretty good format.
But, of course, Kindle promises much more, including all the old bromides about ebooketry like storing many titles, interactive index capabilities, bookmarking, etc., but there are some new tricks in Kindle that may indeed spark new interest. The best one is that through cellphone data network connectivity, the user may order new titles anywhere and anytime the cell network works (which, admittedly, is a whole lot more where and when than Wi-Fi, unless one happens never to leave the office or home network, or lives in a Starbucks). Hats off to Amazon for this innovation. Other features include some sort of Web browsing, an online ebook ordering system that should be second nature to Amazon, and, kinda, MP3 playability. But many of the newest features Kindle offers are more disappointment than delivery, and these shortfalls have everything to do with one of the biggest conceptual problems of dedicated ebook readers in the real world: The additional device conundrum.
While readability is a key requirement for an ebook device (and the lack of which helps explains why PDAs have proved to be a poor ebook market factor), the human species has neither physically evolved more hands, nor has human culture fashioned more pockets. Like 99% of people, I have enough trouble making sure that I have my keys with me when they might be needed, and when you throw in the now essential cellphone, it can seem like half of each day is spent performing the mime of pocket swatting. (Thank god I long ago gave up smoking, and now no longer have to also pat myself down to see about matches or the pack.) People sherpa the minimum, and the idea of having a cell phone, and a PDA, and an MP3 player, and a laptop, and an ebook reader doesn’t require a lot of imagining to be seen as unattractive. And that’s before you figure than anyone hitting their forties also has to carry reading glasses, not to mention for some of any age inhalers or secure ID cards, and for many, breath mints, handkerchiefs, gloves or mittens, and the wallet or two. I’m sure that this is all good training if you’re going to be a combat grunt, but for daily living our current list of the things we carry is a burden.
That’s what drives me crazy about Kindle. It has a built-in cell phone, but there’s no option to use it for anything else other than ordering a book. It has the ICs and jacks for playing MP3 files, but no playlist management, nor—absurdly enough, considering that Amazon is set up to sell things like music—any iTunes-like music downloading. The critical assessment of the Web browsing capability of Kindle is not fully formed, but there’s already plenty of complaint about the Kindle’s shortcomings there. Even one of the strong features of Kindle—E-ink—comes with its own drawback; while promotional copy claims that it is just like reading a page, that also means that you can’t read without a light, so better add a booklight to your pack, even as you’re carrying an electrically powered “book.” And with Kindle’s fundamental lack of support of PDF files—without question the single most widespread format for ebooks—you have to wonder, “What were they thinking?!”
Yes, I’d love to have an ebook device with seamless book ordering. But gosh darn it, it better handle phone calls and calendars, text entry and music playlists, and a good enough Web browser before I’d consider it. Throw in a breath mints storage bin, and I’m sold.
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