Atlassian Software Systems announced the availability of the newest version of Confluence, the enterprise wiki. Confluence 2.3 offers users an optional clustered configuration, Confluence Massive, that provides unlimited scalability, together with exceptional performance and reliability, for large deployments of the wiki. Confluence Massive provide the performance required for organisations with tens of thousands of users, or for those businesses with mission-critical applications that require high availability. Confluence 2.3 contains dozens of other new features and improvements, including a People Directory, which allows users to easily find other Confluence users’ profiles and personal spaces; an activity-tracking plugin that generates statistics on application usage; and a WebDAV client plugin. Atlassian selected Tangosol and their Coherence product to deliver the clustering capabilities of Confluence Massive. Confluence 2.3 is available for evaluation and purchase. Release notes, pricing and licensing information are also available online. http://www.atlassian.com
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Intalio, Inc. announced that it has signed OEM agreements with Diamelle and OperMIX for the embedding of Intalio|BPMS, its standards-based Open Source Business Process Management System (BPMS). Diamelle Technologies will embed Intalio|BPMS into its solutions in order to support the deployment of complex identity and access management processes, while complying with strict auditing and compliance requirements that are demanded by its financial services customers. OperMIX will use Intalio|BPMS to deploy custom business processes on top of Salesforce.com AppExchange and provide real-time integration with third-party applications such as SAP R/3 and mySAP Business Suite.http://www.diamelle.com, http://www.opermix.com, http://www.intalio.com
Enterprise Search has been an illusive dream for too many organizations for too many years. Search technology is ubiquitous but the “holy grail” for most organizations is to be able to find all content within the organization through a single query interface. My instinct is to give a chronology of search over the past four or five decades to guide your understanding of why enterprise search has remained so “out of reach.” I could also describe the ways in which search technologies have evolved and morphed with hundreds of functions and thousands of features. It would certainly help explain why the typical company has a daunting task narrowing its options but it would probably not quicken the selection process.
For now, one view of the current market segmentation is a starting point. Sue Feldman, Research VP, Content Management and Retrieval Solutions at IDC, gave the audience a high level view of the market in a session at Gilbane Boston 2006. She placed enterprise search technology into three big buckets: Appliances and Downloadable Search, Enterprise Search (software) Platforms, and Application Specific Search embedded with other software. She then broadly described the features and functions that characterize each major type. If you have grown up with search in your professional life for over 30 years as I have, it makes perfect sense that this is what we have come to in the market but differentiating the options is a step far less clear-cut.
After the sessions, 15 conference-goers joined me to continue discussing and learning about enterprise search in a roundtable forum. It was hard to know which end of the search animal we should address first to help everyone speak the same language. That is precisely what is making this marketplace such a tough one. Vendors represent a huge variety of solutions, each positioning product(s) for a problem of their definition, offering technology that targets the specific problem. Buyers have multiple search needs but still want a single solution. Further complicating the mix is a dizzying array of search jargon. With vendors and buyers using their own language the market is, frankly, a real mess.
Take Ms. Feldman’s three big buckets and think of one example of search product in each category. Now think about all the types of searches that people in your organization need to perform just to get their routine work done:
- Looking up an address in a directory
- Finding an image for a presentation
- Retrieving a press release your department issued last year on a new product
- Locating a configuration change to a piece of equipment in manufacturing
- and so on…
Can you imagine any single search interface or product from the tools you know that would give you the means to find all of these pieces of information? Can you imagine a single search tool that would answer your query in a couple of simple steps, and able to perform the functions right out of the box? Simple solutions that address the complexity of business variables and technology standards in most organizations make any single solution an unlikely candidate at a reasonable cost.
Blog readers can request answers to questions, ask for help with sorting out the marketplace or definitions to understand the jargon. I invite readers to tell me what you think needs to be talked about and I’ll give it my best shot. What do you need to know first to tread through the search marketplace?
Traveling in Europe during the holidays reminded me again on the importance of languages in the European market. With Bulgaria and Romania joining the EU the size of the European market increased yet again – and made it even more language-intensive. American companies wanting to sell to the European market, or outsource their business processes in the quite interesting former Eastern Europe, need to add yet a couple of more languages to be maintained in materials, web sites etc.
For those interested in reading more about the differences of language requirements in Europe, USA, and Asia, and on the solutions being developed for them, provides an interesting European view. With the rapidly growing requirement for faster and cheaper translations, maximal utilization of automation is the only solution to meet the multilingual needs. This will include a shift towards giving end-users more tools to both understand and produce material in other languages.
I believe that some of such new tools will come from outside the traditional translation industry: content management, collaboration tools or similar.
One of the big questions will be: can Machine Translation provide a solution? This will be the topic of my next blog.
On February 1, FatWire hosts the second in a series of web seminars on enhancing online experiences with relevant content. Gilbane Group will once again participate in a lively discussion of a topic that will be top-of-mind for many organizations in 2007.
At the upcoming webinar, attendees will learn a few simple techniques for quick, easy experiments that illustrate the value of delivering content that’s relevant to specific audiences.
The idea for the February topic came from one of the polling questions that we asked during the first seminar in October:
What is your biggest obstacle to delivering a more relevant online experience?
The number one response (41% of attendees) was
We don’t have enough information about the needs and behaviors of our customers.
The next webinar in the series is designed to address this issue.
The webinar will also report the results of an online survey on the current state of customer experience practice, business goals and metrics, and factors influencing satisfaction with web interactions. Interested parties can take the survey here. FatWire is offering incentives for participating.
Details about registration for the February 1 webinar will be posted soon.
View the October 12 webinar on content relevancy and online channels in the FatWire archive.
2006 convergence and consolidation in the ECM market undoubtedly validated “the infrastructure players are moving in” expectations — in a big way. Press and analysis on IBM’s FileNet acquisition as well as Oracle’s Stellent acquisition is still ongoing. Not to be discounted, OpenText’s summer coup over Symphony in winning Hummingbird validates that pure-play ECM suite vendors will not simply fade away anytime soon. IMO, neither will many of the pure-play WCM, RM or DAM vendors, several of which are shrewdly riding the crest of SaaS.
And never to be discounted is Microsoft, whose vision for MOSS 2007 is to be “as pervasive as the Office suite.” The company is certainly turning up the volume in terms of positioning business intelligence/process management, content management and collaboration as synonymous.
So, is this “technology trio” 100% new and innovative? Well…not for customers of FileNet, whose BPM capabilities were more than likely the crown jewel for IBM’s successful pursuit. And not for customers of Adobe’s LiveCycle products, who benefited from a major product line upgrade in September along with the release of Acrobat 8. And not for customers of EMC’s Documentum Process Suite, who take advantage of “the automation of high-volume transactional processes and complex collaborative processes” according to product descriptions. And certainly not if you have been following our ECM-BPM intersection discussions.
Will ECM convergence and consolidation raise the market awareness and visibility of content-centric BPM?
More than likely. However, the ECM market certainly can’t take all the credit. Let’s not forget the achievements of BPM suite vendors in 2006, who continue in their efforts to bridge the divide between data-driven versus content-driven business process management. This is a tall order, given the need to overcome the holy grail of all “divides” — IT versus the business — especially given “do not cross” domains for skill sets such as process modeling.
Still, vendors such as Appian, Savvion, Intalio, and others tout ease of use and graphical process modelers targeted to business users. Vendors such as BEA (via the Fuego acquisition,) Lombardi, Ultimus, and Pegasystems stress support for interactive workflows, business-driven usability, and provide direct integration with selected ECM solutions (including Sharepoint.) Vendors such as Global360 provide baseline document and records management capabilities, but shy away from describing them as ECM capabilities. And most if not all BPM suite vendors provide case management support such as attaching and keeping track of documents for vertical-specific processes that require it.
Consider these examples as a sign of deeper capabilities and integrations to come or even more interesting — markets that merge in 2007.
Side note: examples are simply that, and not an exhaustive list. Feel free to comment or even better, we invite CTOs from any type of organization to weigh in on this and other subjects on our CTO Blog. Send an email to ctoblog@gilbane.com if you’d like to start contributing!
Google announced new features for the Google Search Appliance that give enterprise customers the ability to customize search results for their individual corporate environments. The Google Search Appliance now also offers improved integration with Google services as well as additional content sources. New features include Results Hit Clustering and Source Biasing. Results Hit Clustering are groups of dynamically formed sub-categories based on the results of each search query. These clusters appear at the top of search results and help searchers refine their queries from possible ambiguous terms. For example, if an employee searches for “customer” on the company network, a set of categories could appear at the top of the results with groups of topics such as “customer support” or “customer contacts” to help guide the search. Administrators can customize the location and appearance of Results Hit Clustering within search results. Source Biasing enables administrators to assign various weights to search results on their corporate network, based on source or type of content. For instance, if a company has multiple Documentum servers, the site administrator can strengthen the content from the one primary Documentum server. The same is true for types of content. If a financial services corporation values content in .pdf form more than content in a word processing document, administrators can use Source Biasing to increase the weight of .pdfs in the search results. A menu-driven interface allows weak or strong increases or decreases, and requires no complex coding or scripting. The new version of the Google Search Appliance also adds improved integration with Google Sitemaps export (for simpler export of information about web pages available for crawling), as well as open source connectors for indexing content in SharePoint 2003 and SharePoint 2007. http://www.google.com/enterprise/gsa/
Welcome to the Gilbane Group’s new Blog on the Publishing Industry. Our team of Analyst/Consultants will be offering their thoughts a variety of topics including:
- Opportunities and Challenges presented by new technology and media options
- Key new technologies to watch in the coming year
- Case studies demonstrating current best practices
- News and commentary about Publishing Companies and their technology partners
Think of this Blog as a perpetual iteration of the Publishing Track at our Gilbane Conferences. To that end, we welcome your questions and encourage your comments…
At this year’s fall conference, the CEO of Art Plus Technology—Elizabeth Gooding—gave an excellent presentation concerning her firm’s approach to providing the customers of financial firms with improved statements and communications. She and her clients set very tough targets. The statements must be highly individualized, be attractive in both electronic and print formats, be produced in a timely fashion, and of course, cost less to produce. In meeting these goals, Elizabeth and her team found ways to break down long established practices that had become limiting factors in improving the delivery of information to customers.
What does this have to do with publishers in general? Most publishing enterprises have their own long established practices that have made them very successful through the years. We think that the publishers who will gain market share in the next decade are those who are most willing to re-examine those practices to enable new product offerings that will appeal to the demands of today’s customers. Over the next week or so, we’ll look at some examples of different strategies and tactics.
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