We open our conference in San Francisco in a little over a week with a panel of analysts who focus on content management. These were very popular and fun sessions at our Boston and LA events. We will have plenty of questions for them as usual, and we hope to see many of you there to ask questions in person. But for those of you that can’t make it, you can still send us your questions and we’ll provide some kind of synopsis on our blog. These are smart, opinionated people, so don’t be afraid to ask the tough questions. You can comment on this post so the panelists can all see, or send me an email.
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Dan Farber raises the issue of Longhorn adoption and quotes a Jupiter analyst who claims the challenge is that XP is “good enough”. There is actually a more fundamental reason the question of adoption is interesting. What is that and what does it have to do with content technology?
I’ll start the answer with a little history. In 1994 at our first Documation conference, I moderated a debate between Tony Williams, Chief Architect of COM at Microsoft, and Larry Tesler, Chief Scientist at Apple. The Microsoft COM and OFS/Cairo and Apple OpenDoc efforts both recognized the need for operating systems to provide more support for the richness of unstructured information than is possible with the primitive file systems we had then.
Before the debate I preferred the OpenDoc approach because it seemed more consistent with my view that new operating systems needed to be able to manage arbitrary information objects and structures that could be described with a markup language (like SGML at the time). However, Tony convinced me that OpenDoc was too radical a change for both users and developers at the time. Tony agreed with the ultimate need to make such a radical change to file systems to support the growing need for applications to manage more complex content, but he said that Microsoft had decided the world was not ready for such a shock to the system yet, and defended their strategy as the more realistic.
Eleven years later and we are still stuck with the same old-fashioned file system in spite of the fact that every modern business application needs to understand and process multiple types of information inside files. This means that database platforms and applications need to do a lot more work than they should to work with content. I am no expert on Longhorn, but the file system that will be part of it (although maybe not initially), WinFS, is supposed to go a long way towards fixing this problem. Is the world ready for it yet? I hope so, but it will still be a big change, and Tony’s concerns of 1994 are still relevant.
Thomas Technology Solutions, Inc. (ThomasTech), a software and systems integrator, has entered into a partnership agreement with Houston-based Riversand Technologies, Inc., a provider of Product Information Management (PIM) solutions. ThomasTech is a provider of content management and publishing solutions for industrial manufacturers, commercial publishers and other industries. Riversand PIM product suite will be integrated into ThomasTech’s content management solutions for developing electronic catalogs. ,
Leading Edge Design & Systems (LEDS) announces the newest addition to its Media Archive System (MAS) product suite. The MAS RSS Module gives companies the ability to search, organize and publish their managed content for worldwide syndication. Content that is selected is published to an RSS feed that allows an existing service to distribute the desired content to subscribing Web sites and news services. MAS’s security model allows users to configure which data elements will be syndicated as well as restrict other chosen content and metadata from syndication. MAS RSS will also support Media RSS. MAS RSS’ dynamic infrastructure allows a user to publish an asset to any number of RSS feeds, while also allowing multiple users the ability to distribute content simultaneously to a single channel. http://www.media-archive.com/
Adobe Systems Incorporated announced results of its collaboration with the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) and IDEAlliance with development of a new public specification, IPTC Core Schema for XMP. Exposed through Adobe Creative Suite software, “custom panels” are now available at www.iptc.org, giving photographers and news services immediate access and compliance with a standard that aims to streamline data capture for images used in news outlets. Additionally, Adobe announced that it is working with the AdsML Consortium (Advertising Mark-up Language) and IDEAlliance to implement advertising standards using XMP within advertising workflows. Software developers and system integrators can build support for Adobe XMP into their products via the XMP software development kit, available, free-of-charge, under Open Source License from Adobe. The SDK and additional information about Adobe XMP is available at http://www.adobe.com/xmp
Mondosoft announced the availability of MondoSearch Enterprise. Designed as a low-cost packaged solution to support sites with large numbers of documents and visitors, MondoSearch Enterprise searches and indexes millions of pages while providing capability to align search activity with organizational goals. In addition to enhanced crawl speed, MondoSearch Enterprise features comprehensive re-design for enterprise-class search database and memory-handling to boost search performance. Search performance is also improved through multithreaded connection pooling, reducing server load on both search and content servers. The MondoSearch Enterprise algorithm optimizes large volumes of data for indexing and rapid retrieval. MondoSearch Enterprise is easily integrated into an organization’s IT infrastructure through Microsoft .NET and Web services. www.mondosoft.com
The impact of the Internet on most things personal and professional could be the life’s work of many a sociologist. How we shop, play games, read newspapers and books, and even how we fall in love doesn’t escape redefinition and change. From my perspective, its how we communicate that’s one of the more interesting topics. Safe to say that 10, perhaps even 5 years ago, stating that “everyone’s a publisher” would be quizzical. Now, evidence abounds.
In terms of “social” publishing, blogs and wikis certainly top the list of examples. These days however, those who chat, shop or place a classified ad in a newspaper can also be called a social publisher. And that’s a lot of people.
Granted, the usability of online forms for these types of tasks is usually exceptional enough to hide this fact. But the underlying result immediately publishes opinions, product reviews, and ads to the broadest communication vehicle available today. Even better, the tools are intuitive, fast, cheap, in some cases, free.
In terms of “corporate” publishing, the once contained group of professionals who publish to the Internet is no more. Formalized content technologies allow personnel across most, if not all business units to redefine information creation and delivery — toward the goal of eradicating Web publishing bottlenecks.
The tools in this arena, a.k.a content management systems and according to IDC, “dynamic enterprise publishing products”, certainly don’t boast the same reputation as those for social publishing. In fact, evaluation criteria such as usability, speed and cost often contradicts the notion of “intuitive, fast, and cheap.”
Still, the content technologies software market continues to redefine corporate publishing and support the fact that indeed, “everyone’s a publisher.” And every so often, there’s a real grassroots example of the ever-expanding definition of corporate publishers who create and deliver Web content on a daily basis. From my perspective, Macromedia provides the most recent example.
Since introducing Contribute in December of 2002 for a mere $99, Macromedia has enjoyed consistently growing sales for the past 2 ½ years for this desktop Web content and creation tool. In fact, the company has shipped over 360,000+ seats in less than three years based on the mantra “Web Publishing for Everyone.”
According to the company, users from its business and consumer markets are responsible for the uptake, bolstering a 165% and 258% year-on-year revenue growth respectively. Christening its Web Publishing System in July 2004 with a similar mantra, Macromedia now boasts 250 enterprise customers according to its latest product update release. Both products are included in the company-defined “Information Convenience” category.
Certainly, reputation and marketing have helped Macromedia establish a formidable presence in the corporate publishing arena. A savvy partnership with eBay will surely make a mark in the social publishing arena by introducing Contribute to thousands of consumers.
It’s my opinion, however, that Macromedia’s growth numbers can also be attributed to the fact that everyone is, or at least wants to be, a publisher. And the Internet makes it possible.
Example: in the enterprise, the definition of “everyone” has morphed from the traditional publisher roles such as Webmaster or technical writer into the evolving responsibilities of business unit representatives across a wide spectrum. Borrowing from Field of Dreams, it’s pretty clear that “if you build it, they will come.” Yes, of course it depends how and what you build, not to mention how much it costs! The point is however, that the corporate publishing audience is ready and waiting.
Hummingbird Ltd. unveiled Hummingbird Enterprise Client for Microsoft Outlook. The new Client provides an interactive, business-based view of the entire suite of Hummingbird Enterprise functionality from within Microsoft Outlook. Building on the concepts of Hummingbird’s document management client for Microsoft Outlook, Hummingbird Enterprise Client for Microsoft Outlook allows knowledge workers to interact with all their business content, applications, and processes without having to leave the Outlook client interface. A corporate banker will work with a deal management view of business content, manage an engagement, and collaborate with colleagues on complex, linked company valuation spreadsheets by sharing content in a secure collaborative deal room. A government employee will interact with all incoming and outgoing correspondence including e-mail, fax and mail through a correspondence management view. And a senior partner of a law firm will organize and view all the pleadings and correspondence related to a client matter, and also instantly generate a report with the most up-to-date information on billable hours – all from within Outlook. At the core of the new Client is a Business Solution Framework, encompassing business logic, vertical specific taxonomies, and role-based presentation rules. Leveraging the Business Solution Framework and the supplied vertical templates, organizations will be able to tailor Hummingbird Enterprise to fit their business model. Hummingbird Enterprise Client for Microsoft Outlook will be an interface option for Hummingbird Enterprise 2005, which is expected to be generally available this summer. www.hummingbird.com
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