Curated for content, computing, data, information, and digital experience professionals

Category: Collaboration and workplace (Page 34 of 97)

This category is focused on enterprise / workplace collaboration tools and strategies, including office suites, intranets, knowledge management, and enterprise adoption of social networking tools and approaches.

Revenge of the ECM nerds

cats

For those of you who aren’t familiar with who I am, I am the Marketing Specialist for Gilbane, more specifically the man behind the various social media curtains. One of my favorite parts of social media is memes, defined as, “a unit of cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena.” The most famous example of a meme, almost synonymous with the internet now, is Lolcatz. One of the great pleasures I have managing the Gilbane accounts is the unique community. Defying stereotypes of computer geeks, the online CMS community has proven to be composed of a plethora of creative, witty, clever, and simply funny individuals spanning timezones, continents, and native languages. Earlier this year, we were treated with CMSHaikus, which I was happy to preserve in an ebook (the .pdf originally had Youtube videos embedded in it, but these have since been blocked due to a security patch). This time around, @Adriaanbloem took another meme and spun it with his own angle.

Adriaan bloem

The tweets that followed were a mixture of angst, disappointment, frustration, front-line experience, but most importantly humor! The sarcasm runs rampant here, but the jabs are taken at brands, vendors, scripting languages, developers, each other, and consulting agencies (although the “Godfather” and the agency in his name still seems to command respect as of this writing ).

The engine seems to have plenty of meme steam left in it, but when it’s gone you can read the #CMSRetraction Archive, or better yet follow the participants and become part of the quirky CMS Twitterrati. If I missed you on the list, drop me a line (@gilbane or @tallbonez) and I will be sure to add you!

Focusing on Smart Content

This summer, Dale Waldt, Mary Laplante, and I have been busy wrapping up our multi-vendor report about “Smart Content in the Enterprise: How Next Generation XML Applications Deliver New Value to Multiple Stakeholders.” We’ll be publishing the report in it’s entirely in a few weeks. We are grateful to our sponsors – IBM, JustSystems, MarkLogic, Mindtouch, Ovitas, Quark, and SDL – for supporting our research and enabling us to make headway on this important trend for the future of content technologies on the web. Here’s the link to access some of the case studies that are part of this report.

XML as a tagging standard for content is almost as old as the web itself. XML applications have long proven their significant value—reducing costs, growing revenue, expediting business processes, mitigating risk, improving customer service, and increasing customer satisfaction. But for all the benefits, managers of successful XML implementations have struggled with attempts to bring XML content and applications out of their documentation departments and into their larger enterprises.

So much XML content value remains untapped. What does it take to break out of the XML application silo? What is the magic formula for an enterprise business case that captures and keeps the attention of senior management? These are the issues we set out to address.

We believe that the solution needs to be based on “smart content.” When we tag content with extensive semantic and/or formatting information, we make it “smart” enough for applications and systems to use the content in interesting, innovative, and often unexpected ways. Organizing, searching, processing, discovery, and presentation are greatly improved, which in turn increases the underlying value of the information that customers access and use.

We started this discussion late last year.  We now have the solution-oriented case studies and the additional analysis to reinforce our perspective about the drivers for the digital revolution at hand. We look forward to the continuing conversations with all of you who are seeking to transform the content-related capabilities of your business operations by championing XML applications.

Open Text Launches Full Service Offering For Enterprise-wide Deployment of SharePoint 2010; Acquires Burntsand

Open Text Corporation, the provider of enterprise content management (ECM) software, announced the availability of a complete set of products and services intended to help enterprise information technology (IT) groups centrally manage large numbers of Microsoft SharePoint 2010 sites from creation through archiving. The consulting services will be led by Burntsand which joins Open Text after a recent acquisition. Using the SharePoint 2010 version of Open Text Content Lifecycle Management (CLM) and Open Text Case Management Framework for SharePoint 2010, Open Text services can help IT departments deploy the infrastructure needed to take control over unmanaged SharePoint 2010 deployments. Moreover, it can give users simple tools to create and deploy SharePoint 2010 sites and applications in accordance with corporate governance policies and manage the lifecycle of SharePoint 2010 sites. Open Text enhances SharePoint 2010 by adding a case-centric business application and process layer. Open Text business applications typically comprise a business database and records and archive repository, as well as a number of integrated SharePoint 2010 features, workflows, forms, reports and an administration user interface. Open Text’s solutions for Microsoft are offered as part of the Open Text ECM Suite.http://www.opentext.com/

Open Text Expands Solutions for the Global Legal Market

Open Text Corporation, the provider of enterprise content management (ECM) software, today announced that it has expanded its solutions in the global legal market including introducing key integrations between Open Text Document Management, eDOCS Edition (eDOCS DM) and Open Text Social Workplace available this fall. First released in the summer of 2009, Open Text Social Workplace supports a team’s ability to form, organize and collaborate on projects. Built to be flexibly deployed either standalone or as part of another solution, Open Text Social Workplace will integrate with Open Text eDOCS allowing users from within law firms to collaborate on documents and matters stored and governed within eDOCS. This includes new microblogging and instant messaging features and respects current permissions and governance rules. Open Text Document Management, eDOCS Edition helps eliminate inefficiencies caused by an inability to manage documents as well as the “islands of information” prevalent in many organizations. It helps control document-based knowledge assets by enabling users to capture, organize, locate and share business content in an integrated environment. With the release of eDOCS DM 5.3, full Windows 7 and Microsoft® Office® 2010 support and updated integrations are available. Also added in this release is new platform support for 32 and 64 Bit versions of Windows Server 2008,SQL Server 2008, and Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) support, while deployment costs are lowered through native Microsoft Windows Installer (MSI) support. eDOCS DM customers can now use the Open Text flagship records management offering with native integration, search and access from within the native eDOCS DM user interface. Records management of physical items, electronic records and email, as well as structured data from systems such as Microsoft SharePoint® 2010 and SAP are all available in this release. Support for Apple iPad is now available for WirelessDMS for eDOCS allowing users to access content from within eDOCS DM using the iPad device. http://www.opentext.com/

Into the Engagement Tier…

Recently I wrote an article for my blog – Taking the W out of CMS – exploring content management and content delivery as separate disciplines and this is a follow up to that article.

To summarize that article – firstly, to know me professionally, is to know that when it comes to the tribes of CMS folks, I am firmly in the WCM tepee.

Secondly, I disagreed the first time this discussion rolled around, as the millennium clicked over – we were all going to use portal platforms and content management functionality would be in our application server infrastructure (we don’t and it didn’t).

Thirdly, the difference between the systems we are building for tomorrow and then – our digital engagement activities were single threaded following a website groove and the end was very much the driver for the means.

For the mainstream CMS industry it was a web site centric world and in most projects and applications the term ‘CMS’ was interchangeable with ‘WCM’. Today we have a fragmented communication channel; it’s the age of the ‘splinternet’ (in this context, a term coined by Josh Bierhoff), delivering relevant content consistently to multiple places.

This not just devices – our websites are less the single and only web destination, folks consume information about our products and services from other web destinations like Facebook and Twitter (to name two). Plus, of course the needs of customer, consumer and citizen engagement means that we can chuck in multiple touch points, in e-mail, call centres and real life.

We used to get ourselves worked up about ‘baking’ or ‘frying’ content management/delivery applications, about decoupled systems that produce pages and dynamic content – but (as I said in response to a comment on my original blog post) today’s consumer wants super dynamic content fresh caught that day, prepared their way, hot off the griddle – Teppanyaki served to share – family style.

So, we have a new level of complexity and requirements for our systems to support our digital marketers and communicators. A level of complexity of requirements that sits between our content repository and our consumer, which used to be the section of the RFP that simply said “must produce compliant HTML”.

When talking about delivery of content, this is typically where our requirement starts to gain some uniqueness between projects.

The question is, so you have your well-ordered, neatly filed, approved content – but what are you going to use it for?

A requirement for an approval process supported by workflow is fairly ubiquitous – but if you are a membership organisation that engages its audience over email or a consumer packaged goods company with fifty products and a YouTube channel – your Engagement Tier requirements are going to be quite diverse.

This diversity in requirements means two things to me.

1. As an industry we are very good at understanding, defining and capturing CMS requirements – but how are we at identifying, understanding and communicating an organisations engagement needs?

2. If there are diverse requirements, then there are different solutions – and right now it’s is a blend of dynamic web content delivery, marketing automation, campaign management, email, web analytics (etc. etc.) – There is no silver vendor bullet – no leader, no wave, no magic quadrant – its different strokes for different folks.

It’s this that I want to explore, how do we define those needs and how do we compare tools?

So, into the Engagement Tier – my colleagues here at Gilbane challenged me to draw it. Hmm.. right now it’s a box of content, a big arrow and then the consumer.

I am going to need to work on that…

 

SDL Acquires Xopus

SDL announced the acquisition of Xopus, a provider of online XML editing. The acquisition by SDL’s Structured Content Technologies division addresses the growing trend to broaden the adoption of structured authoring beyond technical writers. Founded in 2001 in the Netherlands, Xopus has emerged as a friendly and simple-to-use online XML editor. Complementing high-end XML editors that are designed specifically for technical writers, Xopus enables a broader audience to contribute comments and content to increasingly distributed structured authoring processes. Accessed through a Web browser, Xopus provides the flexibility, ease-of-use, and interactivity of a Wiki, while still leveraging the benefits of structured content. The Xopus organization will become part of SDL’s Structured Content Technologies division. A prototype integration already exists between SDL Xopus and SDL Trisoft, the company’s Component Content Management system for DITA. Looking forward, SDL Xopus will be integrated with SDL LiveContent , the company’s publishing solution. Future integrations are envisioned with SDL Contenta  for S1000D and related markets, as well as SDL’s suite of Global Information Management technologies. SDL will continue its philosophy of supporting an “open technology” approach to the enterprise ecosystem through integration to 3rd party applications and systems. SDL Xopus will continue to support existing integrations to 3rd party content management systems. http://www.sdl.com/

Office 2010, SharePoint 2010 Available for Business Customers Today

Microsoft has announced that the 2010 release of Office, SharePoint, Visio and Project are available to business customers worldwide. 2010 Releases are Available to Businesses after Record Beta Adoption: The beta programs for Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 were the largest in the products’ history, reaching three times the size of prior Office beta programs. As a result, 8.6 million people are already using Office 2010 and related products. In addition, more than 1,000 partners are already building solutions for the 2010 set of products. Office, Project and Visio will be generally available online and in retail outlets in the U.S. on June 15th. Microsoft’s Office Web applications will be available to all Office volume licensing customers, offering productivity technologies in the cloud. In addition, customers will be able to purchase a subscription to Office Web Apps as part of Microsoft Online Services, Microsoft’s cloud-based applications. Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 are available in 14 languages, and over the next few months, 80 more languages will be added. A live webcast further detailing this release can be viewed at 11 AM EST 5/12/10. www.the2010event.com

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