The Gilbane Advisor

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Arrival of the Chief Globalization Officer

Just a short note: In December Cisco appointed Wim Elfrink as its Chief Globalization Officer . This certainly brings additional emphasis to globalization in corporations, and will probably result in more CGOs being appointed.

In Cisco’s case the CGO came from Cisco’s Customer Advocacy group. According to Elfrink, with the new globalization center “we will be able to best serve our customers by creating new ways to deliver information, products and services”. Creating and managing content in local languages forms a big part of serving global customers better.

Wikimedia

We marvelled when we saw the prestigious Encyclopedia Britannica usurped by Microsoft’s Encarta. It was a tribute to the clever utilization of multimedia and excellent marketing that leveraged Microsoft’s position in the software world. Given Microsoft’s incredible resources and market clout, it was assumed that the Encarta franchise would build and thrive to become the most heavily utilized fact resource. Therefore, it was even more shocking when Wikipedia burst onto the scene in 2001. And it’s continued evolution demonstrates that this project is no fluke. There are over 1.5 million articles and there are over 100 international versions. How is this possible? Is it simply because it is a free reference resource? I do not think so. Average consumers seem to have voted for breadth and currency over authority. More importantly, a large group of contributors and reviewers seem to feel a pride of ownership in the work of their collaboration. This phenomena has interesting implications for publishing firms.

Wikimedia now has a number of related projects including Wikibooks and Wikiversity. Wikibooks has generated 23,476 content modules for over 1000 topics in less than three years. Wikiversity is in its formative stages but plans to offer free course materials and may provide a platform for developing research topics into wikimongraphs.

It is sometimes difficult to get past the fact that all Wikimedia content is free to focus upon the powerful authoring metaphor that they have created and proliferated. These very same techniques could be used by commercial and corporate publishers. All School, College, and Professional publishers could use these techniques to refine and improve the quality of their publications. These techniques could enable publishers to keep their intellectual property much more current than is possible with today’s authoring approach. And the collaboration aspect could help learners and professionals grow by exchanging and debating ideas. In the corporate world, we need look no further than the communities established around Microsoft Sharepoint to see how valuable information can be rapidly developed and disseminated. These communities have relieved Microsoft of a tremendous support burden.

The Wiki modules are quite similar to open source code modules… More on this in a subsequent post…. Your comments are encouraged!!

Gilbane Washington D.C. to Provide Venue for Sharing Best Practices between Government and Industry

The Gilbane Group, Lighthouse Seminars and CMS Watch announced that the second annual Gilbane Conference on Content Technologies Washington D.C. will take place at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington D.C. June 5-6, 2007.

This is the industry’s most comprehensive forum for bringing together both government and industry executives to share content management best practices. The Gilbane Conference on Content Technologies will focus on concrete lessons learned and best practices for industry and government specialists alike. The Conference will be chaired by Tony Byrne, founder of CMS Watch, an authoritative, vendor-neutral source for comparative evaluations of content management and search technologies. Content technologies for managing documents, websites, and records have grown in utility and sophistication. New technologies can enable searchers to find and retrieve information on a scale unheard of just five years ago. In the meantime, emerging standards in industry and government are supporting greater content exchange and systems interoperability.

By attending The Gilbane Conference on Content Technologies, attendees will learn about: Enterprise Content Management technologies, business applications, and solutions; How to get your Content Management project funded; Best practices in content governance and web operations management; Content technologies and 508 compliance; New standards in content interoperability; Enterprise Architecture and Enterprise Content Management; Latest Search and text-mining technologies: beyond the hype; Comparative approaches for using XML to manage authoritative content; How different enterprises have successfully implemented records management solutions; What lessons can be drawn from hard experience; Role of new media technologies – blogs, wikis, and RSS; The future of web publishing; How non-profits, associations, publishing, and other firms are managing growing volumes of content successfully.

Speaking proposals are due January 29th.

Adobe Releases Major Upgrade to RoboHelp

Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) announced Adobe RoboHelp 6, a system to create, manage and publish software help systems, knowledge bases and documentation for desktop and Web-based applications. As a key element of Adobe’s technical communications product line-up, which includes Adobe FrameMaker, Adobe Captivate and Adobe Acrobat, RoboHelp 6 provides all the desktop functionality that authors need to create Help content, including table of contents, index, glossary, graphics, special effects and context-sensitive Help. Adobe RoboHelp Server 6, also introduced, provides server features that ensure the delivery of up-to-date online content, with real-time tracking of how end-users engage with the help system that provides feedback to Help publishers. With this release, Adobe has consolidated the Adobe RoboHelp product family into two choices – Adobe RoboHelp 6 for authoring and Adobe RoboHelp 6 Server for the delivery of online content. Users of RoboHelp 6 also benefit from the integration of Adobe Captivate 2 for improved workflow and more engaging content with simulations and demonstrations. In addition, users can automate the building of their help at a predetermined time using command line compilation. Conditional Table of Contents (TOC) allows for greater control and customization of table of contents. With User Defined Variables, changes can be made just once, but seen everywhere in Help. Updated Adobe RoboSource Control provides a source document and version control system for Windows and Web development for both individual users and collaborative teams. Adobe PDF creation generates support for hyperlinks & bookmarks and enables accessible PDFs. RoboHelp 6 and RoboHelp 6 Server are available for purchase for Windows 2000 and Windows XP. Support for Windows Vista will be added in 2007. The estimated street price for Adobe RoboHelp 6 is US$999 and US$1999 for Adobe RoboHelp 6 Server. Previous users of RoboHelp and RoboInfo can upgrade to Adobe RoboHelp 6 and RoboHelp Server 6 for an estimated street price of US$499 and US$999, respectively. http://www.adobe.com

MarketLive and Endeca Partner

MarketLive, Inc. announced that it has teamed with Endeca to introduce new MarketLive Intelligent Site Search and Navigation. Designed for online retailers, MarketLive Intelligent Site Search and Navigation includes search, Guided Navigation and Dynamic Merchandising capabilities powered by Endeca and will be offered as a component of the MarketLive E-commerce Platform. MarketLive Intelligent Site Search will be generally available to new and existing MarketLive v5 customers in Q1 2007. http://www.endeca.com, http://www.marketlive.com

QUMAS Partners with PleaseTech for Collaborative Document Review and Authoring

QUMAS announced a partnership with PleaseTech Ltd., which adds collaborative review and authoring capabilities to QUMAS DocCompliance. The partnership provides out-of-the-box interoperability between the QUMAS DocCompliance software and the PleaseTech PleaseReview software. PleaseReview reduces version control issues and creates an audit log of changes to documents. The integrated solution is available now from QUMAS and PleaseTech. http://www.qumas.com, http://www.pleasetech.com

Language Requirements in Europe, USA, and Asia

This is re-post from our Main Analyst blog by Kaija Poysti on January 8.

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.

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