Our colleagues over at CMS Watch have published a new report on enterprise portals. As our earlier reports here and here on the portal market suggested, the list of vendors covered in the report shows the market is now dominated by infrastructure players. Janus Boye, the author of the report is giving a tutorial on Enterprise Portal Software: Architecture and Products – Intensive Review & Roadmap for Product Selection at our upcoming conference in San Francisco, and also speaking on Challenges in Integrating Portals & Content Management Systems. The report, tutorial, and conference session would be a great way to get fully up-to-speed on corporate portals and content management.
Category: Collaboration and workplace (Page 60 of 94)
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.
Onfolio, a company and tool I have used and liked, is being acquired by Microsoft. Onfolio is led by J. J. Allaire, one of the incredibly bright and hands-on entrepeneurial Allaire brothers who developed Cold Fusion. According to the Boston Globe, the entire six-person Onfolio team is moving from Massachusetts to Redmond. This is much like the case of Ray Ozzie’s Groove, where Microsoft is acquiring Allaire as much as they are acquiring Onfolio.
Also according to the Boston Globe, the Onfolio tool, which came in three retail versions ranging in price from $30 to $149, will be available for free, starting today, as part of the Windows Live Toolbar. However, I checked the Windows Live Ideas site quickly and couldn’t find it.
UPDATE: The Toolbar Beta is there now.
Lot’s of talk about ‘attention’ here at ETech. Thinking of attention in terms of economics is fascinating and thought provoking, but I have not quite got the essence of the excitement – just saw Tim Bray who also said he was not sure he got it, and everyone at my lunch table squirmed and then said they didn’t get it either.
The last thing I want is someone managing or making money or even knowing about my attention allocation. I don’t mind some – I am not averse to sharing certain preferences and behavior – but it is mine to share or not, and mine to monetize or not. As a consumer, what is the return? I get more personalized ads? I get stats on my own behavior? I get more people and advertisers paying attention to me? I definitely am not yet interested in making it easier for others to try to influence me based on some attempt at interpreting my activity/interest – is this a matter of not just being good enough at it yet? Maybe.
Will Attention Trust make a difference? I don’t know.
I understand that some people have more intense desires to communicate everything they think and do and will buy into attention for that, but surely that is an edge group…?
Attention and its scarcity and therefore value are important to pay attention to when deveoping products or businesses – but it is not all in the user’s interest.
UPDATE:
Listened to Michael Goldhaber’s talk on the economy today at ETech. He’s the one who everyone quotes. Interesting talk, but I still don’t get it. I suppose the desire for attention might be as rational as the desire for money (although I hope not – it doesn’t seem as practical, you can’t simply bank attention over time without its value diminishing). Trading in “attention bonds” as Seth Goldstein wants, is a bit scary in that it depends on people who don’t think they get enough attention!? I thought Seth’s talk was the most enlightening on the topic.
UPDATE 2:
And this will be it for the updates. See Jon Udell’s and Doc Searls’ comments on this.
UPDATE 3:
Well, it is now 2018, and does this dated or what!
Linda Stone is talking about “continuous partial attention” a phrase she coined in 97 or 98. What is it? It is what I am doing right now, paying partial attention to Linda talking, partial to writing this blog entry, partial to those sitting around me rustling papers or not, I am also interspersing all this with thoughts of lunch, what session I will attend this afternoon, und so weiter …. We all do it.
It is not surprising. It is the way the brain has always worked (well at least for a while – remember all those cognitive science experiments in the 70s) – it is now just more explicit and we are getting better at it. Or at least some of us are; as much as I do it my daughter leaves me in the dust.
Apparently Linda has seen a backlash about the idea, but, as she said, “…continuous partial attention isn’t bad or good – it just is.”
Just as technologies are only tools that can be used for good or bad, our brain hardware can also be used for better or worse, to help or hinder. Our brain functions can be mis-used just like technology. As we get better with continuous partial attention, the result can be beneficial or rude. (e.g., easier to be rude and interrupt when you feel like it – it is not always OK) we have to learn the ethics as well as the efficiencies.
There are also some interesting challenges for product development. There are different tolerances for multi-processing, and these change even within one human unit, e.g., when you are tired vs. alert.
Bob Doyle at CMSReview has once again generously devoted his time and resources to record and produce one of the events at our recent Boston conference. David Berlind from ZDNet, who has tracked the controversial Massachusetts decision to standardize on OASIS‘s ODF on Between the Lines (a blog you should subscribe to) in more detail than anyone, interviewed lobbyist Morgan Reed from the Association for Competitive Technology (ACT) before a live audience at Gilbane Boston. ACT, who lobbies for small businesses, but also Microsoft, is against the Massachusetts decision – Morgan was gracious enough to submit to David’s penetrating skepticism. Bob Doyle says he keeps this interview on his video iPod! Bob says you should use the QuickTime player. Here is the full interview, or you can choose chapters below:
Frank Gilbane – the Background
The Debaters – Morgan Reed and David Berlind
Lobbyist for Microsoft (MS) and Small ISVs
How Much Money Spent Lobbying Open Formats?
MS to Mass: Do you respect IP?
MS Press Release: Mass ODF Plan has failed!
By 2007 only ODF-compliant applications?
Does Massachusetts have any leverage with OASIS?
What if MS OpenOffice was chosen as standard?
Do MS and Internet Explorer encourage non-standard HTML?
Structured blogging activity has accelerated, and has reached the important milestone where there is debate about whether it will amount to anything. If you are not familiar with structured blogging, the term itself should be enough to give you a good idea – think of structured editing, eForms, and blogging all mushed together. Structured editing has been around since the early 80s when companies like Datalogics, Texet, Arbortext, SoftQuad and others were developing SGML authoring and editing tools (I was involved in the Texet effort). The big problem then was the user interface. WYSIWYG was new, but the real issue was not that the tools were not graphical enough, it was that authors were not interested in tools that forced them A) to use a different tool, B) to use a tool that required them to do more work, and C) to use a tool that they were not convinced would provide significant benefits. Today many of us use eForm, HTML or XML tools and the interfaces are far superior, but A, B are still major hurdles to overcome. C is less of a problem, and maybe appealing applications based on ‘microformats’ will help even more. Perhaps the blogging tool plug-ins in the works will alleviate A and B, but winning the hearts of bloggers will not be easy. It will be far easier to do in the context of enterprise applications, but the difficulty should not be underestimated. I am a fan of structured blogging and authoring in general, but the concerns being raised are real. To catch-up on the pros and cons of structured blogging see posts from Bob Wyman, Charlie Wood, Paul Kedrosky,
Our conference in Boston served up evidence that companies are beginning to get serious about leveraging their content, moving beyond managing, storing, and retaining it. “Content in context” was a theme in the analyst panel and in the sessions on adoption of DITA and sustainable content strategies. Frank and Hummingbird CMO Andrew Pery discussed the issues in “Intellectual Capital@Work: Finding the Added Value in Your Enterprise Content” during a web seminar on December 6. Listen in here:
Recording URL: https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/hummingbird1/view
Recording ID: C377S436
Look for “Tune Into Gilbane, Part 2” for information on our first venture into conference podcasting.
The Gilbane Conference in Boston is well underway and already a raging success in my mind. Besides facilitating the “Enterprise Content Management: Myth or Reality” roundtable at the CMPros Summit, I have also moderated a session in the CM track titled “Avoiding the Big Mistakes in a CMS Project.” Both experiences were exactly the kind I hoped for — interactive, participant-driven, and enlightening. Summarizing my thoughts will likely take several blog entries — this one focuses on “the glue people” as related to the concept and in turn, the organizational reality of an enterprise content management strategy. Not software, not tools, not “which capabilities are applicable,” — just the strategy.
The glue people may very well be the answer to whether ECM strategy makes it to reality in an organization. What and who are they? The folks who manage to bridge the gap between the isolated goals and pressures of IT, business units with key content owners, and the C-level tier. As a former Business Analyst in the IT organization of a global insurance company, I know the pain of the glue people. Part psychotherapist, part geek, and part business person, glue people are often a rare breed. They must educate, facilitate, coordinate, smooth egos, see the bigger picture — the greater good, and make it home by 7PM if at all possible. They are often un-named, under-appreciated, and caught in the gaps themselves — resulting in the need to find their own psychotherapist.
BUT — the glue people can make an incredible amount of progress toward the organizational design, implementation, and evolution of an enterprise content management strategy. And — for those caught in the chaos of outsourcing, downsizing, re-organization, and downright unemployment — there’s likely never been a better time to become a glue person. (Read: technical writer, taxonomist, business analyst, etc.) If you peruse the professional services and consulting market for ECM and all its acronym children, what will you find? A lot of glue people.
Are you a glue person? What’s your title? What have your experiences been? How have you been able to gill the gaps with glue? Please step up and respond with comments! The opportunity to turn glue people into a formal, empowered, and acknowledged profession is now.
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