Our news includes some details about the launch of QuarkXPress 7.0, but I have to ask if this is at all significant to the desktop publishing world at this point. Most–maybe even all–publishers I work with have made the move to Adobe InDesign. Some publishers are holding on to a few licenses of QuarkXPress for older books and products that might need to be updated, but all new products are being done using InDesign. Moreover, Adobe Creative Suite, which combines InDesign, Illustrator, PhotoShop, and other products, is simply too attractive an offering with very attractive pricing. Quark has nothing comparable to counter with.
For larger publishers, there are also very viable workgroup options with InDesign, which wasn’t true a few years ago. The combination of InDesign with InCopy for writers and editors is gaining traction, and there solutions such as K4 from Managing Editor and Smart Connection Enterprise from Woodwing for larger groups. These systems are often replacing Quark’s QPS solution as the publishers drop QuarkXPress for InDesign.
Quark 6.0 took forever to come out. Quark 7.0 took forever to come out. In the meantime, InDesign has really taken hold. So I have my doubts that Quark can overcome this.
Finally, there is a cautionary tale in all of this. Quark was famously arrogant in its heyday, and did a lot to alienate customers. When I wrote about the movement to InDesign for The Seybold Report in December 2004 (subscription required), industry maven Kate Binder said, “Never discount people’s absolute, bitter hatred of Quark the company. It’s genuinely a factor.”
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Well of course there are lots of obvious reasons it matters. But what is under-appreciated by many of us in the private sector is how often the government leads the way in developing, fostering and exploiting technology. This is especially true with information technology. The reason is simple: they have a bigger information management problem than anyone else combined with more resources than anyone else. For example, the US (as well as other governments) were building sophisticated markup-based content management, and electronic publishing applications a decade before the Web and browsers existed. While many of those SGML and electronic technical manual applications may seem primitive today, they were very forward-thinking and advanced then, and provided valuable lessons for today’s HTML and XML applications. Also, it is arguable that the entire (non-Google) search technology industry has been kept on life support for the last 20 years because of government investment.
So paying attention to government information technology initiatives is something all IT strategists should be doing. For our June 13-15 conference on government technologies in Washington, Conference Chair Tony Byrne is gathering a broad range of government speakers and experts who have, and are, building powerful content applications. It is a great place to get up-to-speed.
Speakers include:
GAO, FAA, NASA, FirstGov, Navy, Forest Service, EPA, OMB, World Bank,
PostNewsweek Tech Media, NPR, Government Computer News, White House,
GPO, International Trade Commission, Department of Energy, Social
Security Administration, DOT, and many more.
Topics include:
Content management, enterprise search, XML, business cases, content
modeling, open source CMS, best practices, records management, content
security, publishing, text mining, and new technologies being used for
government applications including blogs, wikis, RSS and Podcasting.
The full program is at:
One of the publications I find very useful and always relevant is Knowledge@Wharton, produced by the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Check out this timely article, Microsoft’s Multiple Challenges: Is its Size a Benefit or a Burden?
Excerpt: “Microsoft announces that it will spend about $2 billion to fend off rivals such as Google and thwart Sony’s video game ambitions, and the company loses more than $30 billion in market capitalization in a day. Fair trade or overreaction?” My favorite quote? Wharton finance professor Andrew Metrick’s comment that “$2 billion to Microsoft is like a pimple on an elephant.”
Certainly true, but the investment demonstrates the range of rivals Microsoft faces in retaining its “titan” status for the long-term.
As this news item reminded us today, vendors are gearing up for the launch of Vista and Office 12. We are already seeing vendors announcing support for both in various ways, but this will continue to build to a deluge of announcements over the next 6 months. XPS (XML Paper Specification) is one of the new pieces of Vista and Office 12 that bears paying attention to. While it is not likely to displace Adobe’s PDF (certainly not in the near term at least), it will certainly be used instead of PDF for certain applications. What those applications will be is something worth thinking about. There is more info on XPS from Microsoft here, including links to the specification, developer blogs etc.
The “early bird” discount for our conference in Washington DC, June 13-15 has been extended until May 19th. See the conference program, tutorial descriptions, and registration info.
Looks like Microsoft is adding blog posting support to Word 2007 in a way that not only does not screw up your HTML, but attempts to take advantage of Word features bloggers care about without other features getting in the way. This is more appealing than it may sound at first, and may be useful when building enterprise blog applications where Office is entrenched and familiar. It will be in Office 2007 Beta 2. Learn more from the developers.
For Immediate Release:
5/9/06
Contacts:
Welz & Weisel Communications
Evan Weisel, 703-323-6006
Cell: 703-628-5754
evan@w2comm.com
Cambridge, MA, May 9, 2006. The Gilbane Report and Lighthouse Seminars in cooperation with CMS Watch, today announced its analyst and end-user driven conference program for the inaugural Gilbane Conference on Content Technologies for Government taking place June 13-15 at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington DC. The conference program is divided into three tracks: Enterprise Content Management, Web Content Management and Enterprise Search & Discovery.
“We have put together a strong program that ensures every conference session leads off with a leading industry expert who can educate and provide big-picture perspectives, followed by a federal information manager explaining how they solved a particular problem,” said Tony Byrne, Conference Chair. “This way, the attendee learns both how to approach a content technology challenge as well as draw lessons from peers. And for maximum information exchange, we have avoided clogging the sessions with vendor marketing-speak. All in all, it promises to be a great learning experience for attendees.”
The following highlights several conference sessions taking place at the event:
Opening Keynote Panel: Industry Analysts Debate Current and Future Trends in Content Technologies
Government Keynote Panel: Key Issues in Federal Content Technologies
Enterprise Content Management Track
ECM and the FEA
The Federal Enterprise Architecture (FEA) comprises a collection of interrelated “reference models” designed to facilitate cross-agency analysis and the identification of duplicative investments, gaps, and opportunities for collaboration within and across federal agencies. This session will look at Enterprise Content Management in the context of the FEA. Inasmuch as there is no Content Reference Model, do the Business Reference Model (BRM) Service Reference Models (SRM) provide an adequate business framework for architecting ECM solutions? Could either taxonomy serve as an organizing principle for content in a production system?
The iECM Standard: what’s in it for you?
iECM, “Interoperable Enterprise Content Management”, is a proposed standard sponsored by industry trade group AIIM. The goal of the new standard is to produce a single set of functional requirements for process oriented web services that enable disparate enterprise content management systems, portals, and enterprise applications to interoperate – better enabling content to be exchanged, integrated, and managed securely between systems. Led by FAA enterprise architect and iECM co-chair Paul Fontaine, this session will look at how iECM can facilitate greater interoperability among content technologies within and beyond federal agencies.
Web Content Management Track
Building a successful business case for your agency CMS
Content management technology can help relieve overtaxed federal content managers and add value for the enterprise, but CMS implementations typically represent a significant, multi-year investment as well. Join a panel of federal managers who have successfully built a business case to justify the purchase of content management technology. Discussion will include business case justifications, anticipated efficiencies, and navigating the 300-B process.
Role of new media technologies in Government Part I: Blogs, Wikis, and RSS
New communications tools – blogs, wikis, and RSS – have proliferated in the past few years. In industry, many companies now employ these technologies for collaboration, knowledge management, and publishing applications, and innumerable vendors now market products based on these new technologies. Meanwhile, some government agencies have begun to experiment with these tools. Do these agencies only represent the experimental fringe, or are they early adopters of technologies that will soon be part of every agency’s bag of IT tricks? This panel will look at the actual implementation experience: when do blogs and wikis make sense, and when do they not? How do they fit into broader content architectures?
The future of the federal government web
Mired in the day-to-day operations of large, high-profile federal web properties, it’s easy to lose sight of long-term trends in government website management. In a lively look into the future of the government web, FirstGov.gov Senior Content Manager Sheila Campbel will identify key patterns and emerging norms, and leave participants with a peek at what the federal web landscape might look like 5-10 years from now.
Enterprise Search & Discovery Track
Enterprise Search: the federal experience
Google has made everyone pay more attention to search. But providing effective search capabilities across diverse enterprise information repositories represents a far more complex problem than indexing web pages and measuring link relevance. Join this panel of federal managers who have implemented different search technologies as they share lessons learned and advice for their peers.
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, 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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Here are some comments on our conference in San Francisco 2 weeks ago. This is a partial list, but it is already long enough that my plan of introducing and commenting on the comments is history. So, I’ve decided to just list them to get them out since some of them are very useful. They are bunched by author. The Podcasts at the bottom were all produced by Rahel Bailie. Thanks Rahel!
/item.php?id=646
/item.php?id=643
/item.php?id=642
/item.php?id=637
.com/2006/04/web_office_gets _real_innovator.html
http://ykm.typepad.com/yerfdogs_knowledge_manage/2006/04/gilbane_confere.html
http://ykm.typepad.com/yerfdogs_knowledge_manage/2006/04/cm_pros_summit__3.html
http://www.drmwatch.com/enterprise/article.php/3601771
http://creese.typepad.com/pattern_finder/2006/04/gilbane_confere_1.html
http://creese.typepad.com/pattern_finder/2006/04/gilbane_confere.html
http://bill.cava.us/index.php/2006/04/28/a-monolog-a-dialog-a-catalog/
Podcasts:
http://www.intentionaldesign.ca/index.php/weblog/blogcentre/frank_gilbane_on_content_management_trends/
http://www.intentionaldesign.ca/index.php/weblog/blogcentre/tony_byrne_on_cms_trends/
http://www.intentionaldesign.ca/index.php/weblog/blogcentre/kay_ethier_simplifies_xml_for_content_authors/
http://www.intentionaldesign.ca/index.php/weblog/blogcentre/theresa_regli_talks_taxonomies/
http://www.intentionaldesign.ca/index.php/weblog/blogcentre/janus_boye_takes_a_hard_look_at_content_management/
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