CM Professionals, a group of content management professionals from around the world, elected its first formal Board of Directors. The new Board roster includes: Ann Rockley, President; Erik Hartman, Vice President; Seth Gottlieb, Treasurer; Samantha Starmer, Secretary; and Frank Gilbane. The election marks a kind of coming of age of the organization, which was formerly launched in October, 2004. Now with more than 250 members from around the world, CM Pros is expanding rapidly. The new board – which take the reins from an interim board – will be charged with converting a variety of strong program ideas from members into active initiatives. Early accomplishments include a resource gallery, active mailing lists, and a successful member “summit” in Boston, USA. CM Professionals is the premier community of practice for people involved with managing content for electronic and other media. CM Professionals collects, develops, organizes and provides access to knowledge about content management through online resources, email interaction and face-to-face summits. By identifying, refining, publicizing and advocating for respected content management practices and models, CM Professionals educates and fosters interaction among content management professionals, enterprise leadership, product vendors and university educators. www.cmprofessionals.org
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With the start of this new group blog, I have decided to fold my technical blog, “Ideas in Technology and Publishing” into this blog. I want to thank my readers and welcome them to join the conversation here.
I have posted a PDF copy of my slides from the Idiom webinar. If you haven’t read our white paper on DITA, you can download it here.
“Binary XML” sounds like an oxymoron. It is, after all, the plain text encoding of XML that makes it so easy to work with. Heck, I still use the “vi” editor to make quick changes to XML and HTML files.
Writing in the Australian edition of Builder.com, Martin LaMonica provides a nice roundup of the pros and cons of some efforts to develop a binary XML. He summarizes some related projects at Sun and the W3C, and has some very lively quotes from XML guru (and Gilbane Report Editor Emeritus) Tim Bray. (And if you want to hear directly from Tim on the issue of binary XML, his blog has plenty of related entries.)
I’ll leave it up to people much smarter than me to figure this one out, but the discussion of binary XML is related to the larger question of performance. As XML is more and more pervasive, organizations will need to find ways to deal with performance impacts over time. We talked about XML hardware in this context a few days ago, and ZDNet is reporting today that Cisco may be getting in the XML hardware game. Stay tuned.
The Sarbanes-Oxley Act doesn’t just impact US companies. Non-US
companies listed on US stock exchanges must also comply with the act. Many
of them don’t like it. Here is a good
article in The Register with a dateline of January 11 that provides a
quick summary.
Design Science announced the release of MathFlow 1.4, targeted at users of Arbortext’s Epic/E3 (v 4.3 or later) or Blast Radius’ XMetaL/XMAX (v 4.5) that need to deal with mathematical content. Free MathFlow evaluations are available. www.dessci.com
This morning I attended a workshop on the impact of Sarbanes-Oxley on
nonprofit organizations. The combination of SOX and nonprofits intrigued
me. Since Sarbanes-Oxley is all about public companies, with rules issued
by the SEC, my impression was that the connection between SOX and nonprofits was
zip. It followed that the workshop was likely to be either very
interesting or very short.
It turned out to be very interesting.
Boiled down to essentials, there at least four ways in which the governance
and internal control concerns intersect with nonprofit organizations:
- The "whistleblower protection" in section 1107 of
Sarbanes-Oxley, which provides substantial penalties for any retaliation
against employees or others who provide law enforcement officers with
information about possible violation of Federal law, applies to nonprofits
as well as to other kinds of entities. - The penalties for document destruction in section 802 of
Sarbanes-Oxley also apply to nonprofits. - As SOX applies to more and more for-profit entities, parts of it are
emerging as the expected standard of performance in the eyes of public and
private funding sources. At the very least, nonprofits should expect
that expectations regarding conflicts of interest, audits, and evidence of
internal controls will increase and will follow the general outline of SOX - Some states are beginning to consider state regulations that impose parts
of the COSO framework and other aspects of SOX on nonprofits.
California has already passed such legislation. (For a summary of
other state activity, take a look at this
document from the National Council of Nonprofit Associations).
Practically speaking, my sense was that the most immediate impact on
nonprofits from a content management point of view was that, regardless of size,
these organizations need to document policies and procedures and ensure that
they are available and that they are used. The focus of this effort
should, of course, be on staff and on board members, but should also extend to
volunteers who act as agents of the organization. The policies and
procedures should include mechanisms for handling employee complaints and
document retention and destruction, in accord with SOX requirements. They
should also, of course, deal with broader internal control issues such as
handling cash, soliciting and accounting for donations, making bank deposits,
and so on.
Writing for WindowsIT Pro, Paul Thurrott reports that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts has reached agreement with Microsoft on a license change to Microsoft Office that may have far-reaching consequences in several arenas of interest to Gilbane Report readers.
Microsoft has reached an agreement with Massachusetts that will result in the software giant easing its license restrictions for its Office 2003 document formats in return for the state dropping a previous requirement to only use document formats based on open standards. In early 2004, Massachusetts announced that it would require all state agencies to create and store information in document types based on open standards like HTML… The goal of the format requirement was to ensure that the state could read digital documents in perpetuity and not have to worry about document conversions down the road if they adopted a format that was later abandoned by its maker. However, under terms of its agreement with Microsoft, Massachusetts has revised its requirement to include so-called “open formats” such as the XML-based document types supported by Office 2003 applications such as Word and Excel.
Thurrott goes on to say that this compromise with Microsoft should be viewed as a blow to open source advocates, who would rather see governments adopt open standards for document archiving. Thurrott has a good point; I know from my own consulting that government archivists would love to have open, high-fidelity document formats to choose from. On the other hand, it is potentially good news that Microsoft will be loosening its licensing restrictions on the schemas that underlie the ubiquitous document formats.
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