We have written about the idea of content that is critical to business process before, such as the content that is intimately tied to eCommerce (see here and here). Forrester Research, as well as Gilbane colleagues Mary Laplante and Bill Zoellick like the term “transactional content,” and Bill and Mary have offered the following helpful definition in the past:
Transactional content can be defined as shared information that drives business-to-business processes. It is the content that flows through the commerce chain, initiating and automating processes such as procurement, order management, supply chain planning, and product support. Transactional content is shared in the sense that it is exchanged among partners, suppliers, customers and distributors who each can contribute to it.
Gilbane colleague David Guenette and I have grappled in the past with ‘actionable content” as a preferred term. We keep thinking that transactional is just too narrowly suggestive of the financial transaction that takes place when something is finally purchased. Instead, we argue, there are many, many steps leading up to the financial transaction where content can support a series of actions. Looking at the industrial buying process in the recent past, I see this idea of a series of actions making more and more sense. More complex buying doesn’t happen in one single transaction. A prospective buyer needs to first search for information, find it, review what he or she has found, perhaps download more detailed information, evaluate what he or she has learned, query for more information, and so on. Each ot these are actions, and content drives each one.
In industrial buying, the particular actions around content can be complex–reviewing technical specifications, downloading and using CAD drawings, and even configuring the content and CAD drawings prior to downloading them. This kind of content and this kind of parameterization of content is increasingly available on the Web. For example, look at the detailed information one motor company, Oriental Motors, provides for one of its thousands of available products. This page includes specifications, photos, dimensional images, connection diagrams, and both two-dimensional and three-dimensional CAD drawings. Users can view all of this information and then download, for example, CAD drawings in one of several formats, depending on what CAD package they are using. Once downloaded, these drawings can be more closely analyzed, and can even be inserted directly into active designs.
Has a transaction taken place yet? It could be argued both ways, I guess. Whatever the terminology, however, a great deal has happened. The engineer has learned a great deal. The company has been able to share their product information. The design of a new product has been furthered by the engineer downloading the drawing. Research tells us that a drawing inserted in this way usually results in the product being sourced when the design goes to manufacturing. Actionable or transactional? Either way, it’s good news for the company that has deployed their content to the Web in such a usable, flexible manner.
I will have some more thoughts on this in the next couple of days.
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ZyLAB announced that its channel program has gained several new partnerships in the past six months. Ambit Solutions, Information Management Solutions, Light Industries, Lockheed Martin, RS Pacific, Solutions in Software, Southeast Digital Networks, SECURE ITnet have all engaged ZyLAB to participate in the program. ZyLAB offers partners a modular information access platform to manage e-mail, electronic documents and paper. http://www.zylab.com
Scientigo, Inc. (OTCBB:MKTE) and Critical Technologies, Inc. jointly announced the signing of a technology teaming agreement. The collaboration between the companies joins Critical Technologies transaction processing solution with Scientigo’s multi-patented intelligent document recognition and search solutions to create an information processing, management and retrieval solution. The companies will initially concentrate on addressing the document management demands associated with medical and dental revenue cycle management processes, compliance issues mandating large data and email storage, and other enterprise management applications within the healthcare, financial and legal markets.
Altova announced a new approach to accelerating the creation of reliable Web services by leveraging the visual design capabilities of Altova XMLSpy and MapForce. Customers can develop applications based on WSDL, SOAP, and other Web-based standards so that data can be shared across disparate business systems. To help customers better understand Web services and how Altova tools simplify their development, the Altova Solutions Center now contains specific business scenarios, case studies, technical guidance, video demonstrations, white papers, free online training classes, and a recommended gameplan for Web services success. The complementary features of Altova XMLSpy and MapForce automate many of the otherwise complex steps in Web services development so developers can concentrate on business rules and logic instead of becoming mired in source code or the arcane implementation details of the infrastructure. The Web services information resources are available now in the Altova Solutions Center and can be accessed free of charge at: http://www.altova.com/solutions_center.html
Idiom Technologies, Inc. announced expanded deployment and licensing options for its WorldServer globalization platform. Aimed at the translation and localization needs of global organizations of all sizes, Idiom now provides deployment and licensing options to suit nearly every IT resource and budgetary need. These options include hosted solutions, with the ability to deploy WorldServer offsite in a secure datacenter, and month-to-month or multi-year term licensing choices in addition to the company’s traditional perpetual license agreements. With WorldServer Hosted Solutions, Idiom Professional Services or an Idiom Technologies Certified Partner install, configure and run WorldServer offsite in a secure, reliable and high-performance datacenter. All WorldServer Hosted Solutions are based on a dual-server configuration designed for optimal performance. Customers may choose from Microsoft SQL Server or Oracle Database, and a variety of user configurations. An alternative to traditional perpetual licensing plans, WorldServer Term Licensing provides customers with the option to make time-limited software licensing commitments on a month-to-month or multi-year basis. Software maintenance is included in the term license fee.
Microsoft’s InfoPath was announced with great fanfare in October 2003 as part of the Office 2003 release. Microsoft then included some enhancements to InfoPath in a Service Pack release (SP1) of Office, which was distributed in June 2004. Since then, there has been little news about InfoPath. The InfoPath team blog at the Microsoft Developer Network went quiet in early 2005, with its last post in November of 2005, which was an announcement of an InfoPath 2003 Toolkit for Visual Studio 2005. There is a newish InfoPath tips-and-tricks blog by Microsoft blogger Tim Pash, but other than that, Microsoft has been very quiet about InfoPath. Does this suggest a reduced commitment by Microsoft?
UPDATE: As you can see from the comments, Microsoft appears to be plenty busy with InfoPath. See also this post from Eric Richards, who is a development lead on Microsoft Office.
Hopefully you got to hear Mary and Bill on today’s radio show. Next up is Leonor, who will join O’Reilly’s C.J. Rayhill in a webinar next Wednesday, February 15 at 2:00pm EST to talk about how O’Reilly Media expanded into the textbook publishing market by creating a custom publishing platform that enables educators to produce more targeted and less expensive teaching materials using MarkLogic Server.
See more details or Register today.
Also see Mark Logic CEO Dave Kellogg’s blog post.
UPDATE: Forgot to mention you can read Leonor’s case study!
SDL International announced the early-bird release of SDL Trados 2006. This release provides integrated terminology management, sophisticated quality checking, flexibility in choice of translation editing environment and enhancements such as support for OpenOffice and TMX in a single product with a single license key. SDL Trados 2006 offers a choice of Translators Workbench, TagEditor and SDLX editing environments. It includes new support for Quark, InDesign CS2 and Java files. Integration with SDL MultiTerm provides terminology lookup and search functions to help ensure adherence to corporate terminology and reduce translation time. Existing and new translations can be more easily reviewed and cleansed using the enhanced QA checking. New built-in translation and terminology checks have been added and any number of user-defined checks can be set up to search for particular quality criteria. SDL Trados 2006 is immediately available to pre-order at Early-Bird special pricing during the month of February. Freelancers can pre-order online at http://www.translationzone.com, http://www.sdl.com/products
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