Pegasystems announced the latest version of its award-winning SmartBPM Suite. Enhancements focus on providing business users with better access and more precise control over their business processes. New features include Flex-based interactive business visualization, complex business decisioning support, insurance-specific capabilities to manage multi-channel, multi-state policies and rules, SOA integration testing, AJAX and Flex automation, and accessibility features to support all users. The release also adds new accessibility support to meet the requirements imposed by the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Disability Discrimination Act (UK) as well as other accessibility requirements in the EU.
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Mediasurface and Google have signed a distribution agreement in which Mediasurface will bundle the Google Search Appliance with Morello, its web content management system enabling the two organisations to provide web content management and corporate search facilities in one offering. As part of the agreement, an interface between Morello and the Google Search Appliance has been developed; enabling Morello to use the Google Search Appliance to deliver highly relevant search results. Mediasurface can now deliver the same Google search experience while searching content managed by Morello on public websites and intranets. The security model within Morello is fully maintained; a search will only retrieve and display content relevant to the access privileges of the user. The integration between Morello and Google Search Appliance ensures that a richer and relevant set of content is delivered than would have been available previously by adding in metadata such as the original content author, the date the content was first published, keywords, and so on, which is held separately within the CMS. The Morello content author can create “keymatch” terms that relate to an item of content and enabling certain content to appear at the top of a search result. Morello and the Google Search Appliance can now group and manage information for specific audiences so if, for example, someone searches for technical data on a product, they can select the technical collection and avoid the brochures. http://www.mediasurface.com
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
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!
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