Solutions for document-intensive business processes have traditionally been among the workhorse applications for enterprise content management–complex workflow requirements, high-volume throughput, lots of documents processed on a daily basis. Buyers with light-duty but high-value applications have been underserved by the suppliers of document management technology. Enter SharePoint. Has Microsoft stepped up with a solution that will do the job for a new class of buyers and an expanded range of applications?
Bill Trippe discusses SharePoint and platform strategies for enterprise document management with Bob Bueltmann, co-founder of KnowledgeLake. How does SharePoint change the solutions landscape? How does it stack up in terms of core capabilities like security and metadata support? How do you recognize a good fit for SharePoint?
Thursday, Nov 8, 11:00 am ET. Registration is open. Sponsored by KnowledgeLake.
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PaperThin, Inc. announced the release of CommonSpot Version 5.0. This latest release introduces a new authoring interface; RSS feeds, Blogs, and Wikis; and XML publishing and rendering capabilities. Business users can now get their message out by delivering content to any news reader, Web browser, or email program as an RSS, Atom, or Podcast feed without writing any code. Users can also create live bookmarks on a page so visitors can subscribe to feeds of interest through CommonSpot’s Feed Index Element. The listing is automatically generated, displayed, and updated based on filtered metadata criteria. With this release PaperThin has made available four open source applications: a Blog, Wiki, RSS Reader and multi-view Events Calendar, each built using the Custom Application Development Framework. The browser-based rich text editor includes enhanced editing features, wide browser and platform compatibility, improved standards-based support, and Microsoft Word-like toolbars. New image editing functionality allows users to easily edit and manage digital assets, such as: images, photos, and other graphics directly within the system. http://www.paperthin.com
Perhaps it’s cyclical — like the long Indian summer we’ve been having here in the Northeast. The Web/Enterprise/stuff “2.0” buzz has died down (for now) and we seem to be into the hard business of real application development. Perhaps this is a good thing — running on hype does little to transform businesses or pay the bills.
Certainly there’s been a lot of excitement around Facebook as a collaborative platform for digital natives (and fellow travelers). Yet the long-lasting innovation, I think, is around the APIs and the notion of “open platforms.” Of course Google was first to open the komono with its wildly popular Web services API into Google Maps. Now we’re trying to make mashups of social networks.
I’m curious but not convinced. Facebook is building out its community — Google is not far behind, pursuing the notion of social graphing. So far we can do all kinds of useful things in the consumer space. My favorite this week is friend finding — which also leverages GPS technology. But business applications? I haven’t heard of anything really compelling, yet. I’m still looking.
Which brings me to a preview of coming attractions. My colleagues Steve Paxhia, Nora Barnes, and I expect to cut through the Web 2.0 hype next month and shed some light on industry trends. We’ll be reporting the results of our industry survey at our Boston conference. We’ll have a statistically significant profille of what collaboration and social computing tools are being using in American businesses — beginning with email and Web sites and assessing many popular forms of social media. We’ll snapshot how effective companies rate these tools and also report on what each tool is best suited for. And I expect that before we’re done, we’ll have a few indicators of next generation collaborative business applications.
So join us, November 27th – November 29th in Boston.
Got quality?
Join Mary, Shannon Zimmerman from Sajan, and myself on Wednesday October 24th for a discussion of quality in the Global Information Age, in which mere information availability no longer suffices. Today’s customer expectations demand relevant information that is culturally acceptable, appealing, and most important, understood. Delivering contextual, multilingual information – communications that make sense in the customer’s language of choice – is fundamental.
Any company with a multinational revenue profile knows that fusing quality and translation is a significant part of the formula for success in a global economy. In and of itself however, the act of translation provides no “certificate of excellence” or “seal of approval” for its quality quotient. So, the obvious question is: What is quality translation and how will organizations know when they achieve it? What is a quality quotient?
Join the discussion as we offer our take on improving, maintaining, and measuring the quality quotient of information products for the Global Information Age. Register here.
I sat in on a demonstration for an enterprise search engine this week. There were several things that really impressed me. First it was not canned; although the demonstrators were clearly following a script, and members of the audience members were asking questions throughout the demonstration. The audience was a mix of consultants and prospective customers; they had a lot of questions, asked to be shown features, functions and “what ifs.” The person demonstrating was very soon off script and doing nothing more than answering questions and demonstrating completely ad hoc searches and with excellent results.
The second impressive aspect was that the entire corpus of content was company information for the vendor. It was not everything they have on their intranet for this public view but enough to see that this is a company that actually uses its own technology throughout the enterprise for all of its divisions. Content from Lotus Notes, SharePoint, Documentum, an employee gallery, emails and files were all there and presented in a clear format for the audience to see and understand.
Finally, what impressed me was the extent to which their content reflected how their search engine was being used as a platform for doing business and working collaboratively, internally. This caused me to reflect back to a presentation for an analyst group earlier in this year by another search company. That company was rolling out a number of features in the business intelligence (BI) space. So, I asked them a couple of questions, “How are you using these tools to manage your own enterprise, doing business intelligence? How are you exploiting internal content to understand the dynamics of a rapidly growing company?” There was a long silence but the answer was along the lines of, we aren’t but we should probably consider it and it takes time to think through a strategy for deploying a good BI solution.
In my experience, if everyone in a company with an enterprise search technology product does not find a use for and evolve with its own offerings, then there is a missed opportunity and a flawed business strategy. This missed opportunity is the terrific feedback the developers will get from that internal use and the evangelism that can come from enthusiastic employees. The flawed business strategy is the huge disconnect that develops between customers and suppliers when supplier employees just never have a customer experience themselves. Search and BI are two functions that every company can benefit from using; why on earth wouldn’t every search vendor be aggressively seeking opportunities to apply its own tools.
So, buyers be aware – look for evidence that the purveyors of search actually have their own experiences to talk about and demonstrate. That can tell you a whole lot about how you will be treated as a customer because they are one, too.
We’re moderating a session entitled Successful Processes for Selecting a Content Management System: How to Become an Expert in Technology Acquisition at DocTrain East 2007, Thursday, Oct 18, 3:30 pm to 5:00 pm.
The session begins with a discussion of why technology acquisition is not about tools, but about assembling capabilities that lead to competitive advantage for your organization. We walk through two scenarios that draw on our recent experience helping users acquire XML publishing and web content management technologies. The fun begins when we turn to a panel of experts who will share what they’ve learned about making a business case, distilling requirements, crafting great RFIs and RFPs, developing the short list of suppliers, and scoping a successful proof-of-concept. We’ll also look at acquiring software as a service and how the acquisition process is different from acquiring licensed software solutions.
The goal of the sesson is show attendees how to develop the skills to lead a successful technology acquisition process. If you’re interested in the topic but can’t make it to the conference in Boston this week, send us email and ask for our presentation materials. We also welcome comments from readers who’d like us to address a specific question during the session.
Multilingual business communication keeps the wheels of global commerce spinning. High quality content drives us forward, while poorly translated content can bring business to a halt. What’s the “quality quotient” of your multilingual content? How can you measure it? More importantly, how can you use it to bring continuous improvement to your global content life cycle?
Learn more about quality strategies for multilingual content in an upcoming webinar featuring Gilbane’s Leonor Ciarlone and Shannon Zimmerman, founder and president, Sajan, Inc. In this interactive online panel discussion, Leonor and Shannon present the multilingual quality quotient principle and show you how to incorporate it into an enterprise global content lifecycle strategy.
Register Today
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
11:00 AM – 12:15 PM EST
Attendees and registrants will receive an advance copy of the new Gilbane Group white paper, Quality In, Quality Out: The Role of Technology in the Global Content Lifecycle.
The topic of the month seems to be “social search;” I confess to being a willing participant in this new semantic framing of a rash of innovative new tools for enterprise search products. I would, however, defer to the professional intent of some great new features by stressing that this is really a next step in bringing collaboration closer to where expert knowledge workers do their work. As I view enterprises with a heavy research component, 10 – 30% of the average professional’s time is spent in a search environment. In other words, we all spend a lot of our day just looking for “stuff.” We also spend a significant amount of time in meetings, exchanging emails, and making presentations. More and more of us contribute to collaboration spaces where we work together on various types of document production.
Putting together the work habits and needs of a time-poor and information-rich community of knowledge workers in a post-processing environment where they can “mash up,” tag and commentate their search discoveries is a natural evolution of search technology. It is remarkable to see how search companies that are serious about the enterprise market (search within and for the enterprise) are rapidly turning out enhancements for their audiences, now that they are convinced that “Enterprise 2.0” has a boatload of early adopters in the wings. Search should always be about connecting experts and their content. Add collaboration and the ability to enrich search results by searchers for the benefit of their colleagues and you have a model for, soon-to-be, heavily adopted products.
That pretty much sums up how we should be thinking about “social search” in the enterprise. You can hear more of my views in a KMWorld Webinar, Using Social Search to Drive Innovation through Collaboration next Tuesday in a presentation sponsored by Vivisimo, one of the leaders in this area.
The week had plenty of virtual ink devoted this topic so you might want to check out these two articles with more commentary. The first was in eWeek, by Clint Boulton, Vivisimo Marries Search, Social Networking. The second shows that Google is on the bandwagon, as well, Google Enterprise Search gets social, a blog entry at C|Net News.com by Rafe Needleman.
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