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Enterprise 2.0 & Content

March 17, 2007 / Frank Gilbane / 1 Comment

Dan Farber has nicely pulled together a couple of points in a post that suggest the inevitability of “Enterprise 2.0”.

Dan references a post by Euan Semple that has been picked-up by Ross Mayfield, Tim O’Reilly and others, and a post of his own where he reports on some of Don Tapscott’s research: “…the 80 million Net generation young adults coming into the workplace will want to be part of an engage and collaborate model rather than command and control.”

In addition to the demographic fundamentals, there is some kind of a parallel here with the evolution of information technology where the rigid structured data in relational databases is now dwarfed by the unstructured or semi-structured content in content repositories and websites. And also with the increasingly distributed IT function.

(rigidly) structured data -> unstructured data or content
(rigidly) structured organization -> unstructured organization

Do these parallels make Enterprise 2.0 more certain? Well, the fundamentals (the demographics and the new expectations and behavior) are true in a very real sense already. But of course this doesn’t mean that any particular Enterprise 2.0 products or technologies or best practices or methodologies or organizational reengineering will work. Dion Hinchcliffe has an extended thoughtful response that reinforces the fact that wikis etc. are proliferating behind the firewall, but also cautions that enterprise IT is a complex and controlled environment where enterprise 2.0 tools need to find a post-adolescent home.

Communities – Why Should You Care?

March 16, 2007 / Steve Paxhia / 1 Comment

I was pleased to attend the inaugural Community 2.0 conference this week. Sponsored by Shared Insights, it was an impressive gathering. Here are some of the highlights:

– John Hegel, the author of Net Gain (and other best sellers) gave his perspective on what has happened in the 10 years since he first wrote on the importance of communities to companies.

His equation for the benefits of communites is as follows: Shared ideas+shared discussions+shared relationships= shared meaning and shared motivation. This leads to higher customer loyalty and feedback that can help facillitate the development of better products and services in the future.

He feels that companies often lack the skillsets required to support successful communities. The key skills lacking are moderating, archiving, and attracting participants. He feels that companies often are afraid to give up the control of the community to the particpants and that is counterproductive.

Like all business practices, communities should be measured. He recommends calculating ROA- return on attention, ROI- Return on Information, and ROS- Return on Skills as the best measures of the impact of communities on the business in general. Space doesn’t permit complete descriptions of these measures. Mr Hagel’s blog and reading list can be found at www.johnhagel.com.

Ben McConnell author of “Church of the Customer” gave a fascinating keynote on the importance of word of mouth in marketing and the importance of communities in generating positive word of mouth. He also reported that only 1 percent of community participants actually contribute entries. However, that can be a large number!! For example, 68,682 individuals contributed to Wikipedia in just one month and 11,420 contributed to Microsofts’s channel nine in a similar time frame. It is amazing how many people are willing to invest their time (while receiving no remuneration) to create information that will be reviewed and scrutinized by many peer reviewers. More examples can be found at ChurchoftheCustomer.com.

Similar statistics were reported during subsequesnt sessions

About.com reports that it has 600 community sites with coverage of over 60,000 topics.
Shawn Gold of MySpace reported some staggering usage figures – They currently have 165 million profiles online that generate 60 Billion pageviews per month. And there are 40,000 videosbeing added to MySpace each day.

The conference finished with a report on the We Are Smarter Than Me project. That will be the subject of another blog entry in the very near future!!

Communities have the potential to help publishers and publishing professionals to create new and different products and to improve the quality of their future products by getting greatly increased customer feedback. Cases and opportunities will be presented at the forthcoming Gilbane Conference in San Francisco from 4/10-4/12.

Adobe, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle & Content Technologies at Gilbane San Francisco

March 15, 2007 / Frank Gilbane / 0 Comments

We have a great keynote panel lined-up for Gilbane San Francisco next month. If you want to know what the largest software suppliers are doing and developing for enterprise content applications, whether content management, search, collaboration, or delivery, you won’t want to miss this panel of senior executives who are leading the content technology efforts at these companies. You won’t find a line-up like this elsewhere. Here is the keynote panel info with link:

Keynote Panel: Content Technology Industry Update
We open each of our conferences with a panel of content technology and market experts. The panel is chosen to address the most important strategic issues technical and business managers need to consider for both near term and long term success in managing content and content technologies in the context of enterprise applications. The session is completely interactive (i.e., no presentations). Before embarking on a content management, search, publishing, collaboration or globalization strategy or project, you need to understand not only the vertical and horizontal solutions from the technology suppliers that address your specific content-oriented business applications, but also what the major platform providers are doing and how their offerings fit into your plans, or not. In San Francisco this year we look at what the largest software suppliers are doing that will affect enterprise content strategies both directly and indirectly. This is a session you won’t want to miss.

Moderator: Frank Gilbane, Conference Chair, CEO, Gilbane Group, Inc.
Panelists:
Paul Taylor, IBM Distinguished Engineer and Chief Architect, Enterprise Content Management, IBM
Kumar Vora, VP, Product Management, Enterprise & Developer Solutions, Adobe
Rich Buchheim, Senior Director, Enterprise Content Management Strategy, Oracle
TBD, Microsoft

If you can’t make the full 3-day conference, remember that the keynote is open to all “exhibit-only” attendees as well.

Ektron Announces Availability of CMS400.NET Version 7

March 14, 2007 / NewsShark

Ektron, Inc. unveiled the latest version of CMS400.NET. CMS400.NET V7.0 include features such as advanced navigation and built-in taxonomy and introduces geo-encoded mapping and wiki collaboration features which provide navigational taxonomy structure to articles and interwiki links. Ektron’s CMS400.NET Wiki enables organizations to create websites specifically designed for communication, collaboration and sharing information. Explicit structure functionality and enable efficient management of wiki content using Ektron’s Directory Taxonomy, which provides detailed category tagging, search, breadcrumb and navigation for all wiki articles. CMS400.NET v7.0 offers new features to the forums control, including: paging, IP address restriction, automatic restricted word replacement, predefined signature lines, upload and attachment capabilities, RSS subscriptions, history of a member’s posts, user rankings and a terms and conditions disclaimers. Ektron’s built-in blogging technology is enhanced to support blog creation and moderation by registered site members. It also now includes a standard blog API to interface with and get updates from Microsoft Office 2007 and integrate with other desktop blogging tools. CMS400.NET’s new search language API enables the generation of dynamic summaries based on content and assets. Ability to tag and classify content: Ektron’s hierarchal taxonomy classifies and structures web pages and managed documents into logical groupings based on their content. Ektron’s taxonomy provides the option of tagging one piece of content with many different category associations. It can also be used to limit the scope of a search to reduce the amount of irrelevant content returned. Ektron’s GeoMapping functionality enables content to be tagged with longitude and latitude coordinates to leverage Microsoft Virtual Earth and Google Earth. http://www.ektron.com

Tridion Expands US Web Content Management Activity with New US Headquarters and New San Francisco Office

March 13, 2007 / NewsShark

Tridion announced the shift of the company’s US headquarters to new offices to accommodate growth. Tridion US employee headcount increased in 2006 to support a full service marketing, sales, professional services and customer support organization. The company expects this to grow considerably in 2007, leading to the expansion into the new office space in New York City as well as plans to open a West Coast office in San Francisco in Q2 of 2007. http://www.tridion.com

WCM Trends for 2007: Monetization of Content

March 11, 2007 / Tony White / 0 Comments

As consumer behavioral patterns across verticals (including retail, media and entertainment, and financial services) increasingly shift toward online channels, Web content must become increasingly monetizable. Factors which improve the monetizability of content relate primarily to rich user experiences, which require Web applications to combine behavioral analytics with the cross-platform, targeted delivery of digital media of all types (audio, video, streaming content, Flash, myriad image types), all available customer data, and content from Web services-based sources (maps, shipping information, weather reports, stock quotes, news). Not only must successful Web applications seamlessly wrap these components together behind the scenes, they must supply an interactive presentation layer that is aesthetically pleasing and easy-to-use. The primacy of the trend toward monetizable content will fuel other trends in the WCM space, among them, the heightened importance of:

Design agencies as WCM solution providers. Vendors to watch: Blast Radius, Avenue A | Razorfish, Molecular.
Analytics functionality within the WCM application to support multi-channel marketing campaigns. Vendors to watch: Interwoven, CrownPeak.
The ability to incorporate rich media at the content creation stage. Vendors to watch: Adobe, ClearStory Systems, EMC/Documentum.
Support for integrated search and advertising/merchandising. Vendors to watch: Endeca, FAST, Google.
The emergence of WCM applications as primary brand managers. This is a channel strategy decision and is not vendor-oriented in nature.

Setting and Meeting Customer Expectations

March 9, 2007 / Lynda Moulton / 2 Comments

I had a briefing from a vendor that is a strong contender for a piece of the enterprise search market this week. The offering is impressive, other reviews have given it high technical marks and the pricing model is reasonable. But because I am currently immersed in the deployment of another enterprise search engine with a client, the issue of vendor client relationship is foremost in my focus.

I asked the CEO of this relatively new offering, what are the fundamental assumptions his company makes about customer technology environments (e.g. the mix of software applications, hardware environment) and the competencies required to integrate his software with that environment. His answer was given strictly in terms of what the IT staff needs to know to bring the product online. My question did have several levels of complexity and was probably badly phrased but I was trying to make a point by asking it.

There are three specific elements missing from search vendors:

Documentation or explicit models for deployment in environments where there are numerous technological variables to be considered
Availability of training that takes into consideration the context for enterprise search in a specific customer’s organization
Frank discussions with customers that set expectations about deployment and implementation, potential bottlenecks, and the need for experienced searchers, search analysts and subject matter experts on the team with the IT group

Downloading software and using automatic installers has become routine; with the launch of a menu and a few simple clicks on boxes on an administrative screen, vendors can claim “out-of-the-box” functionality. Never mind that what you find when you first search your targeted domain is nonsensical, the software finds “stuff.”

The IT guys are happy because it was easy to install, met their architecture requirement and, knowing little about the actual corpus of content, they are satisfied that everything works.

I am in a bit of a pickle with the current project, software from another vendor, because:

What the documentation says will happen when I make certain choices in the set-up does not, in fact, happen when a search is executed
My attempts through email and phone to schedule training have gone unanswered
My messages to the support service citing problems also get no response

I’ve only spent two weeks trying to get this software working but three weeks ago, on a holiday, I got a briefing from two executives from this firm because they were “going to be in the area” and wanted face time with a search analyst. Knowing my role as an analyst and as a client you would think they’d answer my phone calls.
What is it that makes the customer experience so easily ignored? All these products look great in demos; what is under the hood is often technologically wonderful but, boy, getting them to work in my environment always seems to be one long nightmare. I wish I could find out what I really need to know. A terrific search engine might help.

Scholar.com

March 7, 2007 / Steve Paxhia / 0 Comments

Blackboard Inc. has launched a new website–Scholar.com. It is an excellent web application that helps communities of people share bookmarks on topics of common interest. It is particularly helpful for high school and college students and their teachers and professors to use when doing projects or research. This is a great example of communities adding value to long established processes.

The Gilbane Advisor

Page 325 of 918

Enterprise 2.0 & Content

Communities – Why Should You Care?

Adobe, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle & Content Technologies at Gilbane San Francisco

Ektron Announces Availability of CMS400.NET Version 7

Tridion Expands US Web Content Management Activity with New US Headquarters and New San Francisco Office

WCM Trends for 2007: Monetization of Content

Setting and Meeting Customer Expectations

Scholar.com

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