Listen to Lisa Welchman’s interview with Frank Gilbane and Tony Byrne about the upcoming Gilbane Government content management technology conference in this podcast.
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For Immediate Release:
6/5/06
New Session Just Added – WhiteHouse.gov: Utilizing Technology to Communicate the President’s Agenda Online; Free Technology Showcase of Content Management Solutions
Contact:
Welz & Weisel Communications
Evan Weisel, 703-323-6006
Cell: 703-628-5754
evan@w2comm.com
Washington, DC , June 5, 2006. The Gilbane Group and Lighthouse Seminars in cooperation with CMS Watch, today announced that it has pulled together an all-star line-up of government executives set to share with attendees how they use content management solutions to help accomplish their missions at the inaugural Gilbane Conference on Content Technologies for Government. Taking place June 13-15 at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington DC, this event also offers a free technology showcase where attendees can meet with leading content management vendors to see product demonstrations.
Speakers include executives from the GAO, FAA, NASA, FirstGov, Navy, Forest Service, EPA, OMB, World Bank, NPR, White House, GPO, International Trade Commission, Department of Energy, Social Security Administration, and many more.
Just announced, a new session titled “WhiteHouse.gov: Utilizing Technology to Communicate the President’s Agenda Online” presented by David Almacy, Internet and E-Communications Director, The White House, has been added to the schedule on June 15 at 3:30 pm EST. As the Internet continues to rapidly evolve, Federal government Web sites are constantly adapting to meet the needs of their visitors. The White House’s Internet and E-Communications Director will provide a brief overview of the White House Web site and discuss how technology is being used to assist in communicating the President’s message to a growing online audience.
Also on display throughout the event will be the Tera Byte 100 Lab.
— The Emergent Relationship Analytics Solution (TERAS) indexes and searches terabytes of multi-lingual, semi-structured text, extracts those pieces of content that are important to the analysts (names, phone numbers, addresses, company names, monetary amounts, etc), and uses the extracted metadata to enhance the categorization of documents and document components. Extracted entities are “marked” within the data so that they can be retrieved, and, the text data can be mined to identify indirect relationships. “Collection” metadata is captured and indexed by the system (e.g., the date/time that the information was collected), allowing temporal queries and retrievals. This very high speed and high efficiency indexing and retrieval system supports search operations across disparate data types. These search operations include fully integrated text and metadata search, as well as ontology-based text mining.
In addition to this special lab, several vendors will offer product demonstrations, including:
— “Aquilent provides Web presence and information management solutions for Federal agencies. On display will be case study examples of improving the user experience for FirstGov, USPS.com, and others agencies.”
— CM Pros is a membership organization that fosters the sharing of content management information, practices, and strategies. Join CM Pros today! www.cmpros.org
— CrownPeak is defining the future of content management with its cost-effective software services for Web content management and site search. Gain complete control over your web site management. www.crownpeak.com.
— Ektron will demonstrate CMS400.NET V6.0’s new features for creating and managing interactive websites and applications, including blogging, web analytics, polls/surveys, forums, content ratings, AJAX-enabled search, enhanced multi-site support and localization.
— eTouch Systems will launch eTouch SamePage Solutions for Government – industry’s first wiki supporting Section 508 compliance while delivering rich functionality and wiki ease-of-use with enterprise-grade scalability, security, and reliability.
— Idiom(R) Technologies optimizes the globalization supply chain by aligning global enterprises, language service providers and translators. Award-winning WorldServer(TM) software solutions expand market reach and accelerate multilingual communication with a proven platform for automating translation and localization processes.
— Mark Logic Corporation provides the industry’s leading XML content server. Mark Logic helps government agencies build custom publishing systems, integrate, repurpose and deliver content, and search and discover information.
— Percussion’s Rhythmyx CMS allows organizations to efficiently manage their Web and portal content, documents, and digital assets. Rhythmyx is rated in the Top 6 WCM vendors in the Gartner WCM MarketScope for 2005.
— Recognized throughout the industry as the fastest to implement and easiest to use, RedDot CMS and LiveServer extend usability, deliver more relevant content, and make site administration simple.
— Sitecore’s pure .NET web content management and portal software for growing and evolving organizations provides ease of use, flexibility and scalability, while seamlessly integrating with existing Microsoft platform investments.
To view the full conference program, visit: https://gilbane.com/gilbane-conference-washington-dc-2006/
About CMS Watch
CMS Watch(TM) is an independent source of analysis and advice on content management and enterprise search. In addition to the freely-available articles on its website, CMS Watch publishes vendor-neutral technology reports that provide independent analysis and practical advice regarding web content management, records management, and enterprise search, and portal solutions. These reports help sort out the complex landscape of potential solutions so that project teams can minimize the time and effort to identify and evaluate technologies suited to their particular requirements. For more information, visit www.cmswatch.com.
About The Gilbane Group
Gilbane Group, Inc. serves the content management community with publications, conferences and consulting services. The Gilbane Group administers the Content Technology Works(TM) case study program disseminating best practices with partners Software AG (TECdax:SOW), Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ:SUNW), Artesia Digital Media, a Division of Open Text, Astoria Software, ClearStory Systems (OTCBB:INSS), Context Media (Oracle, NASDAQ: ORCL), Convera (NASDAQ:CNVR), IBM (NYSE:IBM), Idiom, Mark Logic, Omtool (NASDAQ:OMTL), Open Text Corporation (NASDAQ:OTEX), SDL International (London Stock Exchange:SDL), Vasont Systems, Vignette (NASDAQ:VIGN), and WebSideStory (NASDAQ:WSSI). https://gilbane.com.
About Lighthouse Seminars
Lighthouse Seminars’ events cover information technologies and “content technologies” in particular. These include content management of all types, digital asset management, document management, web content management, enterprise portals, enterprise search, web and multi-channel publishing, electronic forms, authoring, content and information integration, information architecture, and e-catalogs. http://www.lighthouseseminars.com.
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The Wall Street Journal reported today that talks between Adobe and Microsoft over the inclusion of PDF creation in the upcoming release of Office have broken down, and they speculate that Adobe will file an antitrust suit as a result. The issue is that MS was planning to include PDF creation for free, which is obviously a direct hit at Adobe’s Acrobat revenue. If you have been following Microsoft’s XPS (XML Paper Specification) development as we reported here, you won’t be too surprised.
It is too early to know exactly how this will play out, but anyone with applications or workflows that depend on heavy use of both Office and PDF needs to keep this on their radar!
UPDATE: Mary Jo Foley has more info on this.
We have added a new session to our Washington DC conference the week after next. David Almacy, Internet and E-Communications Director at The White House will provide a brief overview of the White House web site and discuss how technology is being used to assist in communicating the President’s message to a growing online audience.
Also, EMC is now going to host a reception at the conference (which is at the Reagan Building) on June 14th, 4:30 – 6:00pm.
Our friends over at CMS Watch have released an updated version of their Enterprise Search Report. The report suggests a healthy enterprise market and covers 28 vendors. There is a free excerpt available. A few of the findings (taken from the press release) are:
– IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft continue to struggle to rationalize multiple search technologies and strategies. Oracle’s “Secure Enterprise Search 10g” product may be the most straightforward offering of the three, but it has not yet seen extensive customer testing.
– Smaller search vendors continue to exploit Microsoft’s inability to develop effective search solutions atop SharePoint. Mondosoft, Coveo, dtSearch, and others are likely to continue offering value-added capabilities after the release of Microsoft’s new search services in SharePoint 2007.
– Google’s search appliance has disrupted the market, but customer testing still often finds the appliance lacking in “tune-ability” and integration capabilities.
– Faceted or “guided” navigation capabilities originally associated with enterprise search vendor Endeca have gone from product differentiator to widespread feature. Customers can obtain faceted navigation capabilities from several low-cost search vendors. Now, the key differentiator is the extent to which a search system can successfully autogenerate a useful set of metadata “facets” with minimal customer intervention.
Steve Arnold, the main author of the report, will be leading a couple of sessions on Enterprise Search at our upcoming conference with CMS Watch in Washington DC June 13 -15. Join us there and get more details from Steve.
See updated links for 5/30 and 5/31 below.
Friday was a busy day and I did not see the press release on the Hummingbird acqusition until about 3pm. Curiousity killed that cat and I took some time to listen to the archived conference call (find the number in the “Conference Call” section of the Hummingbird press release.)
I got more than I bargained for on a Friday afternoon. Not surprised to find an audience of financial analysts, I was more than a bit surprised to hear comments such as “stunned,” “ridiculous,” and “questionable as to fiduciary responsibility.” Cetainly, many of the financial analysts asked (redundant) questions in the manner that reporters would use, i.e. slow, steady, and determined to get an answer. Others however, were quite more emotional than I’ve ever experienced from an acquisition- or earnings-type call — or from financial analysts for that matter. Some analysts advised shareholders to “vote against this” with vigor. It got so interesting that I realized I had listened to the entire call without intending to.
I must say I too was “stunned” at the announcement because the acquisition was not a technology to technology play. I have followed Hummingbird for years and think they have done a great job educating the market on ECM as well as expanding a very tangible beachhead in the legal vertical. So *my* stunned was that I thought it would be… well, just someone else! Just who is Symphony Technology Group? According to their Web site, it is a strategic holding company. According to Hummingbird, it was the only *serious* bidder they spoke to about an acquisition and talks began in February.
The “open door or not” title describes the crux of the emotion on the part of the financial analysts. In essence, Hummingbird described a process in which Symphony approached Hummingbird. Hummingbird did not solicit other bids from other financial or technology vendors. At the same time however, Hummingbird was repeatedly adament at stating that Symphony was the only serious bidder. Clearly there was at least one more.
In response to repeated analysts’ opinions that the valuation was extremely low, that the company was worth far more, and that the bidding process should have been more open, the Hummingbird response was: “The door is now open, other bidders can come to the table; we were not shopping – we did not put ourselves on the block.” The “or not” part of the “is the door open?” question is that simultaneously, Hummingbird stated that the process will move swiftly and the company is confident that Sympony has no other technology company holdings that overlap Hummingbird’s expertise in ECM. Also according to Hummingbird, “nothing has changed in our company” and there are no management contracts in place with Symphony for the deal.
The documents on full disclosure on the details will be available tomorrow, Tues 5/30, according to Hummingbird. I am sure more blog entries will add to my report. I’ll update this entry with links I find tomorrow.
Tony Byrne from CMSWatch has weighed in…
Tuesday 5/30 Update:
Computer Business Review Online has weighed in…
Wednesday 5/31 Update:
Canada.com’s National Post has weighed in… Note the quote “Fred Sorkin and Barry Litwin, Hummingbird’s chairman and chief executive, respectively, own about 12% of the outstanding shares and don’t want the company bought by another technology firm. The company might cut [our] products,” said Mr. Sorkin, although all offers will be entertained. This leads to distraction and lack of value creation.”
Arrangement Agreement Papers Available… The site is www.sedar.com, “the official site that provides access to most public securities documents and information filed by public companies and investment funds with the Canadian Securities Administrators (CSA) in the SEDAR filing system.” Search for Public Companies = Hummingbird + Date Filed = May 26,2006 if you are interested. Curiously, the Document Type is listed as “Other”.
On May 9, I was one of several speakers at an Innodata-Isogen event, “Future Tense – Emerging Trends in Publishing Workflow Management.” They have now posted the presentations and accompanying podcasts. Registration is required, but there are a number of interesting presentations and case studies, including ones from The New Yorker, Houghton Mifflin, Time Out New York, and Harvard Business School Publishing.
(Full disclosure: I’ve consulted many times with Quark and with Adobe, and was specifically hired by Quark to prepare a brochure called QuarkXPress 7 for Output Service Providers.)
I think that QuarkXPress 7 is an important release for Quark, its customers, Adobe and the publishing industry. We’re well past the days of “feature wars,” so, for example, the addition of OpenType support, something first offered in InDesign 1.5 five years ago, is not shaking my world. There is also new support for transparency, improved color management and PDF support, and various other goodies that you’d expect to find in your Christmas stocking, but none of these are anything much more than “overdue.”
What’s most important from my perspective is Quark’s forward strides in supporting improved publishing workflows, the last frontier for the electronic publishing industry. Two new features stand out in this respect. One is “Job Jackets” and the other is JDF (Job Definition Format) support.
According to CIP4 (www.cip4.org) the non-profit industry association pushing JDF, “JDF is a comprehensive XML-based file format and proposed industry standard for end-to-end job ticket specifications combined with a message description standard and message interchange protocol.” Along with its earlier incarnations, JDF has been in the making for more than 15 years now. It has very broad industry support – hundreds of vendors have added JDF functionality to hundreds of hardware and software products. That being said, it’s still a challenge to find a robust JDF-based publishing installation in the field. The main reasons for this are the complexity of the standard and the need for all of the players in a broad publishing workflow to be in the game – if one key component lacks support the JDF flow grinds to a halt.
Adobe have added JDF support to Acrobat, which is to some extent accessible from InDesign, but Quark has moved ahead of Adobe by building JDF support directly into the page layout application, independently from PDF. No doubt Adobe will follow suit in the next version of InDesign, expected early next year, so the issue is not so much who got there first. But having what is still the mostly widely-used page layout application in the world throw its support behind JDF is of key importance at this time when broad-based JDF adoption by the publishing industry is still in question.
Quark uses JDF also in its Job Jackets feature. A Quark Job Jackets file contains all of the rules and specifications necessary to describe a QuarkXPress project. A Quark Job Jackets file can include specifications for colors, style sheets, trapping, and color management as well as picture color space, format, and resolution. The file can also include information such as the page size, number of pages, and contact information for the people involved with a job. And the file can include rules that specify configurations for font sizes, line thicknesses, box backgrounds, and other project elements. Workgroups can obtain consistent output by using Quark Job Jackets to share specifications across workstations.
For me the most intriguing benefit of Quark Job Jackets is that it re-invents the concept of preflighting. Preflighting has always been a post-process step: create your file, and then find out where you screwed up. With Job Jackets users can ensure that a print job adheres to its specifications from the moment it’s created, and that it continues to adhere to those specifications all the way through the production process until it rolls off the press. I’ve long maintained that page designers would not be able to perfect their process until it was possible to prevent errors, rather than to correct them after the fact. I’m certain this approach will fast become the production norm.
It’s interesting to me that searching through Google News the day after the Quark 7.0 launch in New York, there’s nary a mention in the mainstream press. Neither the New York Times nor the Wall Street Journal seem to have found it worthy of coverage. To me this reflects the new prevailing “wisdom”: Adobe has won the page-layout wars (and every other war for that matter), so Quark’s announcement isn’t newsworthy. I think they are underestimating the importance of QuarkXPress 7.0. Only time will tell.
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