Microsoft Corp. announced it will take steps to offer the file format technology behind Micosoft Office as an international standard. Apple, Barclays Capital, BP, the British Library, Essilor, Intel Corporation, Microsoft, NextPage Inc., Statoil ASA and Toshiba will co-sponsor a submission to Ecma International, the standards organization, of the Microsoft Office Open XML document format technology. Microsoft will also make available tools to enable old documents to capitalize on the open standard format. These organizations have agreed to work together as part of an open technical committee that Ecma members can join to standardize and fully document the Open XML formats for Word, Excel and PowerPoint from the next generation of Office technologies, code-named Office “12,” as an Ecma standard, and to help maintain the evolution of the formats. The group will ask Ecma to submit the results of their collaboration to the International Organization for Standardization for approval. Since its inception in 1961, Ecma International (Ecma) has developed standards for Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and Consumer Electronics (CE). Publications can be downloaded free of charge from http://www.ecma-international.org
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I saw Jack Welch speak at a conference the other day, and he had a lot to say about content management.
OK, not really.
But he did have a lot to say about success, and about how to effect change in an organization. It was a manufacturing audience, so he touched on quality initiatives like Six Sigma, and he made the point that you should always put good people in charge of such initiatives. “Don’t pick the guy who is a year from retirement and shows it,” he said. “People can tell who the turkeys are.”
This reminded me of a recent discussion I moderated on implementing new technology. The question came up about success factors in implementing new systems, and one theme emerged again and again–new initiatives need champions. The conventional wisdom has become that technology projects need executive champions, but we ended up agreeing that projects need champions in the trenches too. I think of my own experiences with successful projects, where there were always stubborn, determined developers and content owners who bulled through technical glitches, patched software, and system crashes. No major project unfolds without setbacks. You need to have a certain doggedness. And if I could have asked Welch such a question (400 or so people were fighting for the microphone), I would imagine he would say doggedness is a good quality as well.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) announced a W3C Feed Validation Service, a free online tool which helps check the syntax of syndication feeds in formats such as RSS and Atom. This service is based on the open source software feedvalidator (the same software running the service at feedvalidator.org). Feedvalidator was written by Sam Ruby, Mark Pilgrim, Joseph Walton, and Phil Ringnalda and is under development over at sourceforge. In addition to the existing features of the feedvalidator, the W3C has made available a SOAP web service for the W3C feed validation service, and hopes that it will be a useful resource for the automatic or batch validation of feeds. This service is, for the moment, still quite experimental, and may have bugs or problems. http://validator.w3.org/feed/
Nexidia announced the formation of a media business unit to address audio-video search and content management using Nexidia’s core phonetic search technology. Currently, Nexidia’s technology is used to enable both government and commercial enterprises to leverage untapped information previously locked away in audio files. The growth in rich media content has created a market need to go beyond traditional metadata approaches and unlock the rich information contained in audio and video in order to easily index, search and access this content. http://www.nexidia.com
Ipedo announced the latest version of its EII platform. Ipedo XIP 4.1 incorporates several new product enhancements that focus on improving the user experience in enterprise deployments. Web Services Tables, a dynamic mapping of Web Services to virtual relational tables, allows seamless integration between SQL-based business intelligence applications and XML-based Web Services. The release also features a new management console that improves system manageability, and several additions to Ipedo’s query optimization engine that improve the performance of large and complex queries. Ipedo XIP leverages SQL and XQuery to integrate and manage information from disparate, complex data sources to enable real-time business decisions. A complete set of Ipedo XIP demos is available online. Ipedo XIP 4.1 will be available on December 20, 2005 for Windows 2000, Windows NT, Sun Solaris, Red Hat Linux and SuSE Linux. Pricing is on a per-CPU basis. http://www.ipedo.com
Our blog content is now under a Creative Commons license. The version of the license we chose was pretty much what we always told people they could do anyway. There are some rights reserved which you can read about.
We have not done the same for our main site as the issues are a bit trickier given almost 14 years of content, some of it generated with custom agreements, but you can always ask us about content there, and we are fairly liberal with granting permissions.
SDL International introduced the SDL Partner Program for technology partners. This new initiative is designed to accelerate the delivery of GIM solutions. The SDL Partner Program establishes an ecosystem for global information management (GIM). Technology partners offer content-related technology that can be incorporated into GIM solutions, ranging from authoring to content management to localization to publishing. The SDL Partner Program proactively assists partners to effectively deliver GIM solutions by providing marketing and sales support, technical materials and SDKs, and access to SDL software and technology. The program so far includes EMC Documentum, Interwoven, Blast Radius, Trisoft, Tridion, Astoria Software, Day, XyEnterprise, Alchemy, and PASS. http://www.sdl.com
Siderean Software announced a product and services solution for extracting and aligning metadata from large amounts of unstructured and structured data based on the IBM Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA). The new Seamark Metadata Assembly Process Platform (MAPP) improves digital content navigation capabilities by expanding and enriching available metadata so Seamark Navigator can present more accurate and complete scope of available content and context for accessing information. Seamark Navigator offers a harvesting back-end for accessing and generating metadata prior to loading it into its store. The existing harvester is best suited for applications where the metadata is reasonably evolved and well-organized outside Seamark Navigator, requiring little transformation and processing before incorporating the feed into the store. For more complex environments, where large volumes of diverse and unorganized digital assets must be processed for navigation, a more formalized framework is needed to manage and align the metadata representation to the business. This new solution uniquely combines the richness of the semantic Web with existing Web services and UIMA standards. Seamark MAPP is a configurable framework for generating and analyzing metadata from diverse sources including file systems, content management solutions, databases, Web pages, RSS feeds and blogs. Seamark MAPP is expected to be generally available before the end of the year. http://www.siderean.com
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