Bitstream Inc. (NASDAQ: BITS announced the release of Pageflex Persona Cross Media Suite 2007. This is a significant upgrade to the company’s desktop software that enables the creation of database-driven variable data print and personalized HTML emails. This release introduces new features that provide design and content variability within an individual document, as well as graphic design and production workflow enhancements. Pageflex Persona Cross Media Suite 2007 includes the following new features: Document Actions – This new feature set gives power users the ability to create documents with unlimited variability. Every aspect of a print document – including variable values, content, attributes, colors, fonts, pages, shapes, and text – can be modified on a record by record basis; Global Copyfit – This enhanced copyfitting feature enables graphic designers to ensure consistent typography settings across a document even when text settings are adjusted to fit overflow variable text. The template designer can designate that specific containers in a document (e.g. caption boxes) all maintain the same type settings (font size, leading, tracking, etc.) when the document is produced, even if the text in only one of the containers has been copyfit; Bézier drawing tools – Graphic designers can add complex curves and shapes to their page layouts and static or variable text can be inserted and edited on curved or irregular paths; Conversion of shapes to text containers – Designers can now convert shape elements into both regular and Bézier text containers, and more. Pageflex Persona Cross Media Suite 2007 will be available as of March 7, 2007. http://www.bitstream.com
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Research and Market has announced the addition of “Content Management Market forecast” to their offering. The market for content management (CM) product licence revenues will continue to grow steadily at an average rate of 3.6%, from $1.59 billion in 2004, reaching $2 billion by 2009. Report findings include “2004 saw overall growth of 2.9%. Larger players have continued to pull away from the rest of the pack, with IBM, Microsoft, Documentum, FileNet and OpenText showing licence revenues of well over $100 million, with the others lagging behind. Market consolidation has steadied to a trickle, and has been limited largely to the acquisition of specific, niche technology. North America remains the largest market for CM, followed closely by Western Europe, which will continue to grow steadily. The Asia-Pacific market currently accounts for the third largest share in the CM market, and this share is set to increase over the next five years. The main drivers in the market are: Recognition of the commercial importance of providing employees, partners and customers with accurate, up-to-date and timely content; The continuing struggle to gain control of the mass of information within organisations and the mass of resources it takes up; The initiatives in government and corporate governance driving the effective management of electronic content.” http://www.researchandmarkets.com/
HiSoftware, a provider of software, services and managed operation solutions that monitor and optimize Web content governance, quality and regulatory compliance, today announced the release of Compliance Sheriff, a hosted management solution that provides testing and reporting for standards-based policies including accessibility and privacy. HiSoftware Compliance Sheriff allows organizations to integrate an automated solution for managing Web Governance standards as part of a corporate Risk Management strategy. HiSoftware Compliance Sheriff’s modules allow users to test for standards-based and custom factors including: Accessibility Compliance module can report on Section 508, WCAG 1.0 and WCAG 2.0, CLF, XAG and any standard derived from WCAG or Section 508; Privacy Policy Compliance module can report on a number of multi-national regulatory and compliancy standards including: Gramm-Leach Bliley Act (GLBA), Children’s Online Privacy Act (COPPA), Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA), US Privacy Act and other key US and international standards; Custom Guideline and Policy Compliance for all content including but not limited to: HTML, XHTML, SVG, XML and any other text or element based content. HiSoftware Compliance Sheriff provides an integrated digital Dashboard Reporting System that provides access to executive level summary reports. HiSoftware Compliance Sheriff is available immediately through HiSoftware and its authorized resellers as a hosted server solution. Solutions start at $4,995 for SMB offerings to $25,000 per module. http://www.hisoftware.com
For Immediate Release:
Enterprise Search expert Lynda Moulton, Collaboration expert Geoffrey Bock, and Web Content Management expert Tony White join Roster of Industry Veterans
Contacts:
Ralph Marto
Gilbane Group, Inc.
617.497.9443 ext 117
ralph@gilbane.com
Cambridge MA, February 28, 2007. Gilbane Group Inc. announced today the completion of the first phase of its planned expansion for 2007. In the first quarter of this year, the Gilbane group has added three new analysts, four new consulting practices, and six new analyst blogs:
New Enterprise Search Practice & Blog – Lead Analyst Lynda Moulton covers enterprise search and information access technologies and applications. https://gilbane.com/search_blog/
New Collaboration Practice & Blog – Lead Analyst Geoffrey Bock covers tools and practices for business collaboration, including the use of “social media” tools such as blogs and wikis. https://gilbane.com/collaboration/
New Globalization Practice & Blog – Lead Analyst Leonor Ciarlone and Mary Laplante with Contributor Kaija Poysti cover content globalization & localization. https://gilbane.com/globalization/
New Web Content Management Practice & Blog – Lead Analyst Tony White covers web content management technologies and strategies.
New Publishing Technology & Strategy Blog – Our existing Publishing Practice led by Steve Paxhia, with Senior Analysts Bill Trippe, Bill Rosenblatt, and Thad McIlroy now has a blog to complement their service.
New Industry News Blog seamlessly continues our 8-year coverage of hype-free information and content management technology news, but with added “Web 2.0” features for finding, organizing and sharing news.
https://gilbane.com/news/
“In addition to growing our analyst team to meet the increasing demand for reliable information and advice on the information technology areas we cover, we have built a new platform for collaborating with our customers and partners using enterprise blog technology.” said Gilbane Group CEO Frank Gilbane. “Our new platform includes tagging, comments, trackbacks, and topic-oriented newsfeeds, allowing us to collaborate more dynamically, and combined with our series of conferences and webinars, to do so all year round.”
Analyst biographies, contact information, and links to all out content are at https://gilbane.com. Meet our analysts at our Content Management Technologies conference in San Francisco, April 10-12, 2007. http://gilbanesf.com.
About Gilbane Group, Inc.
Gilbane Group Inc. is an analyst and consulting firm that has been writing and consulting about the strategic use of information technologies since 1987. We have helped organizations of all sizes from a wide variety of industries and governments. We work with the entire community of stakeholders including investors, enterprise buyers of IT, technology suppliers, and other consultant and analyst firms. We have organized over 50 educational conferences in North America and Europe. Information about our widely-read newsletter, reports, white papers, case studies and analyst blogs is available at https://gilbane.com.
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IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced that it is bringing Google Gadgets – or consumer-style web utilities – into commercial portal software. Available at no cost to WebSphere Portal and WebSphere Portal Express Version 6.0 customers, IBM now lets users create, customize and use rich Internet applications with Google Gadgets directly from within WebSphere Portal so they appear as ready-to-use services. Users can choose from nearly 4,000 Google Gadgets such as language translators, package delivery tracking, Podcast searches, Wikipedia information, YouTube postings and more. These features can be offered through a company’s portal with a click of a button. IBM is also announcing its search sitemap utility, based on a new sitemap protocol, agreed on by Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, that will make it possible to optimize publication of portal content for improved search by public search engines. This feature also includes the ability to notify search engines of the update frequency, last modification date, and relative priority of the content that is being published. The end result is an improved content relationship with external search engines so that all of the public content in a portal can be found and crawled efficiently. The IBM Portlet for Google Gadgets will be available in April via IBM WebSphere Portal catalog. WebSphere Portal Version 6.0 customers, including those using WebSphere Portal Express to deploy solutions for Small and Medium Sized businesses and WebSphere Portal Server Version 6.0 are entitled to use Google Gadget at no cost. Enablement for the Sitemap 0.90 protocol will be delivered for WebSphere Portal as a sitemap utility that customers can download from the WebSphere Portal catalog later in 2007. http://catalog.lotus.com/wps/portal/portal, http://www.sitemaps.org/
Atlassian announced the release of Confluence Hosted, a new hosted service to make wiki-based collaboration more accessible for small, mid, or large organisations or groups with limited IT resources. Confluence Hosted is based on the Atlassian Confluence enterprise wiki. Features include: Immediate accessibility with no installation required, Unlimited pages and unlimited spaces, WYSIWYG interface, Ability to store and search across all types of files (PPT, Word, PDF, GIF, etc), Enterprise-grade security and permissioning, and Email and RSS integration and support. Confluence Hosted customers can remain on Hosted indefinitely or they can bring the wiki on-premise at any time. Contegix, a provider of managed hosting applications, was selected to provide hosting services. A free, fully functional 30-day evaluation of Confluence Hosted is available. Its tiered pricing model starts at US$49 per month. http://www.atlassian.com
A tough truth about complex and integrated software applications is the lack of expertise and professional depth available to implement and maintain them. This explains a lot about why small business units and project teams often find and deploy their own software tools to get work done.
I am particularly concerned at the lack of will by organizations to fund implementation of applications like enterprise search to aggregate at the retrieval-end the content stored within disparate applications. No rational business planning can justify having workers sift through multiple repositories, each with a separate sign-on, search interface, and search engine protocols just to find a single document. True, organizations need highly competent professionals to meaningfully implement, tune, and administer enterprise search engines. They require the expertise of search analysts, taxonomists, librarians, IT specialists with security, platform, and software development training. However, developing a team of six to twelve “search engineers” to give workers in a thousand person company quick access to relevant content is an ROI no brainer when we know workers waste significant (5 – 15%) amounts of working hours hunting for stuff.
This week’s Information Week article by Nicholas Hoover on Web 2.0 contained a comment about Wells Fargo “…on another Enterprise 2.0 front, integrated search, the company has limited employees’ ability to search across data repositories because of the complex authorization schemes needed to keep people from accessing information they shouldn’t.”
Today’s (Feb. 27th) New York Times headlined with a story about Microsoft buying “a specialized search engine tailored to deliver useful medical information to consumers,” Medstory, Inc. The story goes on to cite comments by Esther Dyson who refers to the technology as “an ontology engine.” This underscores another truth about quality semantic (natural language) search; it depends on the existence of meaningful, topic specific vocabulary and concept maps to work well, a complexity in narrower markets.
Finally, we have seen the recent shift of companies like FAST moving from a strategy of selling solutions directly to enterprises for the purpose of aggregating content through a unified search portal to focusing on niche markets and highly tailored search architectures.
These are just three cases of a shift among search companies to leverage their search technology IP in more lucrative offerings. The losers will be organizations that really do need to deliver content more holistically to workers through a single search engine. Yes, security is a concern, and skilled search technologists must be hired and dedicated to delivering search options that tie directly to business operations.These efforts are not one-off projects but need to be sustained as permanent infrastructure. If you are in a position to influence search procurement solutions make your case for the most suitable software that will really help deliver the best retrieval option company-wide. Be realistic about funding and staffing; then go for it. If Enterprise Search is what you need, make sure that is what you get and deploy.
The new Content Management Professionals board of directors has chosen their officers for 2007. Congratulations to all – especially our very own Mary Laplante, who will be the President. The full lineup is:
- Mary Laplante, President
- Linda Burman, Vice President
- Emma Hamer, Treasurer
- Joan Lasselle, Secretary
- Travis Wissink, Director at large
For more information, see the CM Pros site at http://www.cmpros.org/, and join CM Pros for their Spring Summit meeting in San Francisco in April.
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