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
Category: Content creation and design (Page 52 of 69)
Technologies and strategies for authoring and editing, including word processors, structured editors, web and page layout and formatting, content conversion and migration, multichannel content, structured and unstructured data integration, and metadata creation.
In a move to strengthen reach in the Asian market, Adeptol announced that it has signed a partnership agreement with VersaPAC, a solution provider of information management systems and reseller of HP TRIM records management software. With the partnership VersaPAC is moving from a legacy viewing system to Adeptol’s document viewing technology embedded in its Saffron web front-end application for HP TRIM. Saffron is available through VersaPAC resellers in Australia, Malaysia, New Zealand, North America, and the United Kingdom. The integration allows Saffron to support viewing of over 300 file formats including documents from Microsoft Office, OpenOffice, various image files, and Adobe PDF. Users will have access to the latest features such as document search, annotations, and document conversion to PDF – all from the viewer. Adeptol Document Viewer is a web-based viewer using Ajax technology, and is a built-in Information Rights Management (IRM) module that allows users to protect content by assigning policies to control the viewing, printing, navigating and saving of documents. http://www.ajaxdocumentviewer.com/ http://www.versapac.com.my/
I just published a new white paper, Social Publishing with Drupal, sponsored by Acquia and also available here. We forget that publishing and blogging (including this post) are stove-piped operations. But what would happen if we could intelligently keep track of all these disparate threads, combining the authoritative content from trusted sources with insights from friends and colleagues, organized contextually around the ways we think about things and make decisions? Social publishing is a new lens for delivering business value.
Here’s the executive summary for the white paper. Click the link above if you’d like to learn more. What’s the future of social publishing? Let’s start a debate. /geoff
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Social publishing combines groomed and authoritative content, produced by an organization and emphasizing its core messages, with user-generated content that customers contribute via blogs, wikis, and social media tools. Drupal is an example of a social publishing platform, developed and maintained as an open source project, and delivered at an affordable cost.
Drupal is now deployed in major media companies, high technology firms, universities, magazine publishers, government agencies (including the White House), research groups, and non-profit organizations. Whether it is in a commercial, non-profit, or government setting, organizations rely on Drupal to project their presence over the web and to channel the interactive experiences that foster communities of contributors.
By leveraging Drupal’s capabilities as a social publishing platform, organizations are able to reinforce their branded experiences and deliver relevant content to their customers and stakeholders. By exploiting Drupal as an open source project, developers supporting these organizations can easily enhance and extend Drupal’s capabilities, and introduce innovative modes of interactivity that meet specific business requirements.
Drupal is an attractive investment with substantial business benefits. Organization can keep their license and support costs modest by building on an open source project. Organizations can leverage the collective expertise of Drupal developers to solve immediate publishing problems. By relying on Drupal, organizations can stay abreast of the rapid technology changes when building competitive solutions for the digital age.
Apple recently unveiled its new iPad device with a flourish of global PR. iPads will go on sale in the U.S. around the end of March this year, and in other countries in the following months. Press and analysts have had a field day praising and condemning the iPad’s capabilities and features, predicting (depending on who you listen to) that the device will be either a terrible flop or another runaway success for Apple.
My analysis predicts that Apple will sell millions of units of its new “universal media device,” as analyst Ned May of Outsell Inc. describes it, but Apple’s success is not my subject today. Instead, it’s a warning: People who generate content for global markets need to know how the iPad might make their work more difficult.
The problem is caused by a technical gap the new iPad shares with its older siblings, the iPhone and the iPod touch. None of them can use Adobe Flash. (For more on Apple’s deliberate omission of Flash and its consequences, see this New York Times story and this one.)
Thousands of global businesses use Flash movies with captions or voiceover narration as quick, relatively low-cost ways to present marketing videos and user guides over the Web to multilingual audiences. For these businesses and the agencies that work with them, the Flash gap is a growing problem. Instead of Flash movies, millions of iPhone and iPod Touch users see blank white spaces. The iPad boasts a larger screen, with display capabilities that will be attractive for business tasks. But all those millions of Flash animations and interviews and guides and other videos will be invisible. Just blank white spaces, no matter what language you speak. That is the Flash gap, which the iPad will make worse.
The alternative is to deliver videos using HTML5. But not all web browsers work with HTML5. Neither do all devices, especially mobile devices. This means Web video providers need to research what specific devices their target audiences use, and what video technology those devices will support.
So if you provide multilingual video content, you have one more detail to pay attention to when you plan your schedules and budget.
Amazon.com has announced details of a new program that will enable authors and publishers who use the Kindle Digital Text Platform (DTP) to earn a larger share of revenue from each Kindle book they sell. For each Kindle book sold, authors and publishers who choose the new 70 percent royalty option will receive 70 percent of list price, net of delivery costs. This new option will be in addition to and will not replace the existing DTP standard royalty option. This new 70 percent royalty option will become available on June 30, 2010. Delivery costs will be based on file size and pricing will be $0.15/MB. At today’s median DTP file size of 368KB, delivery costs would be less than $0.06 per unit sold. For example, on an $8.99 book an author would make $3.15 with the standard option, and $6.25 with the new 70 percent option. DTP authors and publishers will be able to select the royalty option that best meets their needs. Books from authors and publishers who choose the 70 percent royalty option will have access to all the same features and be subject to all the same requirements as books receiving the standard royalty rate. In addition, to qualify for the 70 percent royalty option, books must satisfy the following set of requirements: The author or publisher-supplied list price must be between $2.99 and $9.99; This list price must be at least 20 percent below the lowest physical list price for the physical book; The title is made available for sale in all geographies for which the author or publisher has rights; The title will be included in a broad set of features in the Kindle Store, such as text-to-speech; This list of features will grow over time as Amazon continues to add more functionality to Kindle and the Kindle Store. Under this royalty option, books must be offered at or below price parity with competition, including physical book prices. Amazon will provide tools to automate that process, and the 70 percent royalty will be calculated off the sales price. The 70 percent royalty option is for in-copyright works and is unavailable for works published before 1923 (public domain books). At launch, the 70 percent royalty option will only be available for books sold in the United States. http://dtp.amazon.com/
DocZone by Really Strategies, Inc., a software as a service (SaaS) XML content management system, delivers multi-channel output from single-source content. DocZone Publisher offers publishers a web-based editorial and production system that supports the creation, management, translation, and single-source publishing of content. DocZone Publisher offers CMS functionality in one system and provides support for high-end XML-based composition to PDF, HTML, EPUB, online help, and MS-Word formats. www.doczone.com.
Inmedius, Inc. announced the distribution of S1000Dimpact v4, to provide support for the S1000D Issue 4.0 Schema, including Descriptive, Illustrated Parts Data (IPD), and Procedural document types or Data Modules (DMs). The change management software links S1000D technical documentation and Logistic Support Analysis Record (LSAR) data, so that modifications in engineering data are tracked and implemented by publication departments. The efficiency of creating initial S1000D Data Modules and managing changes from the logistics source can be enhanced with Impact. Users map technical publishing structures to the logistics source, track changes and create Data Module Requirements Lists (DMRLs) for S1000D projects. Impact also provide workflow capabilities, audit trails and reporting functions to maintain controls and manage changes. Impact is one of seven modules in the Inmedius S1000D Publishing Suite, an integrated solution set, supporting the entire S1000D technical documentation lifecycle. The software modules work together, integrating authoring through publishing. Browser-based Impact works with S1000Dmanager, facilitating a direct link between LSAR data and the S1000D Common Source Database (CSDB) to review and manage engineering changes. www.inmediusS1000D.com
Open Text Corporation announced the release of Vignette Content Management 8. Vignette Content Management 8 introduces a new design aimed to let business users to create websites, microsites and landing pages on-demand, while staying within branding and technical guidelines. The design caters to specific personas in marketing or other departments, providing tools, designs and other resources based on their roles. Vignette Content Management 8 offers a way to create and manage Web experiences by streamlining the management of Web layouts and structures. This includes page management, site and navigation management, content production, taxonomy and task management. Vignette Content Management 8 has been designed to help users move to the new interface at their own pace. Marketers can assign search engine compatible vanity URLs to specific pages, or navigation channels; leverage site templating capabilities to quickly generate microsites for promotions or events; establish seasonal or event-specific designs when and where applicable in a consistent manner; add content contextually within the website; and work with rich media and social media assets. www.vignette.com/v8
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