CrownPeak announced the launch of a new framework designed specifically for digital agencies and online marketers: The CrownPeak Banner Ad Content Manager. This content management framework addresses a core challenge that online marketers face — the need for a simple way to manage both the content in an online advertisement that is running outside their Web site, and the landing page to which the advertisement links. This solution, when combined with CrownPeak’s Landing Page Management solutions. enable digital marketers to manage, track and change the content on both landing pages and the banner ads running on external Web sites to drive greater ROI from marketing campaigns. With CrownPeak, companies can significantly improve online campaign performance, track results and experiment with new marketing strategies and messaging. The Banner Ad Content Management framework allows CrownPeak clients to change any element of their Adobe Flash based display ads without having to recreate the creative or re-distribute the ads to the publication. Using the CrownPeak Banner Ad Content Management Framework, any Flash based template ad can have as many versions as the marketer wants. Additionally, an update to the banner advertisement can also change the headline or any component of the landing page to which that advertisement links. Then, using CrownPeak, conversions and metrics can be tracked to determine the optimum message. www.crownpeak.com
Category: Content management & strategy (Page 136 of 468)
This category includes editorial and news blog posts related to content management and content strategy. For older, long form reports, papers, and research on these topics see our Resources page.
Content management is a broad topic that refers to the management of unstructured or semi-structured content as a standalone system or a component of another system. Varieties of content management systems (CMS) include: web content management (WCM), enterprise content management (ECM), component content management (CCM), and digital asset management (DAM) systems. Content management systems are also now widely marketed as Digital Experience Management (DEM or DXM, DXP), and Customer Experience Management (CEM or CXM) systems or platforms, and may include additional marketing technology functions.
Content strategy topics include information architecture, content and information models, content globalization, and localization.
For some historical perspective see:
https://gilbane.com/gilbane-report-vol-8-num-8-what-is-content-management/
Vignette Corporation (NASDAQ: VIGN) announced the immediate availability of new licensing models for its Web Content Management solutions. The new models, created to provide organizations of every size with attractive cost options, include the Vignette Web Content Management Suites and subscription-based pricing. The Vignette Web Content Management Suite is tailored for organizations that require affordability, scalability and the option to add modules such as video and social media as their needs evolve. The enterprise-grade suite features a flexible content architecture, core presentation and workflow capabilities and high-performance delivery for less than $200,000. Companies can combine this suite with Vignette QuickSite, a fixed-cost professional services offering that accelerates the deployment of new Web properties. Vignette QuickSite offers modeling, gap analysis and best practices. Vignette QuickSite is priced at less than $100,000. The Vignette Web Content Management Enhanced Suite is for organizations that want to deliver personalized, media-rich and high-performance sites for less than $400,000. The suite includes: Management, workflow and publishing capabilities for virtually all types of content including video, flash and other types of rich media; A toolset to help integration with existing ERP and LOB systems; A presentation management framework that provides explicit personalization and allows delegated administration, and: Multi-tier caching for high-performance. Customers can now license the Vignette Web Content Management Suite for less than $9,000 per month with a one-year commitment. The Vignette Web Content Management Enhanced Suite is available for less than $18,000 per month with a one-year commitment. http://www.vignette.com
Autonomy Corporation plc (LSE: AU. or AU.L) announced the general availability of an enhanced version of Autonomy Interwoven TeamSite, powered by Autonomy’s Intelligent Data Operating Layer (IDOL) server. The latest version of TeamSite integrates Autonomy Interwoven’s web content management (WCM) platform with multivariable testing (MVT) and closed-loop analytics capabilities, helping marketers to more easily create, deliver, optimize, and analyze websites that engage online visitors. Leveraging Autonomy Optimost’s website testing capabilities in a self-service model within TeamSite, the new solution combines the intelligence of web A/B and multivariable testing and analysis with the ease and power of their WCM solution. TeamSite 6.7.2 SP1 is available now. http://www.autonomy.com/
Quark announced that it has teamed with IBM Enterprise Content Management (ECM) to enable the broad adoption of XML across the enterprise by integrating Quark XML Author with IBM FileNet Content Manager. Quark makes it possible for any IBM FileNet Content Manager user working in Microsoft Word to author intelligent content that can be reused and delivered to multiple channels or formats. The ability to author, manage, and reuse structured content enables critical business needs, such as managing intellectual property, complying with regulatory mandates, and automating business processes. A simple and streamlined process for XML authoring also helps organizations to enable enterprise-wide adoption of XML and DITA. Quark XML Author for Microsoft Word is an XML authoring tool that allows users to create XML content in a familiar word processing environment. Quark XML Author enhances Microsoft Word’s native XML support by allowing users to create narrative XML documents directly, without seeing tags, being constrained to boxes, or being aware of the technical complexities associated with XML. http://www.quark.com/
At the recent Worldware Conference in Santa Clara, California, I was delighted to learn about how a high-tech company was achieving great success in internationalizing their software through crowdsourcing. The story gets more interesting. This was not back-room software plumbing but an innovative application, none other than Second Life, a virtual world and a social-networking MMORG (Massive Multi-Player Online Role-Playing Game). Launched by Linden Lab in 2003, Second Life enables its users, called residents, to interoperate with a virtual world through software called a Second Life Viewer. Residents can socialize, participate in group activities, and create and trade virtual property. According to Google, there are over 9 million residents currently on Second Life.
I attended the presentation, “Brave New (Virtual) World,” and had an opportunity to catch up with Danica Brinton, Director of International Strategies and Localization at Linden Lab. Here’s what she had to say.
Kadie: When did Linden Lab realize the importance of internationalization?
Brinton: Around the middle of 2008, Linden Lab realized some discrepancies between U.S. and international business. While 60% of the residents and twice the new registrations were from outside the U.S., revenue and retention numbers, while still healthy, indicated a gap in the localized user experience.
Kadie: What happened when you entered the scene?
Brinton: I joined the company in June. When I checked things out, I was stunned. I discovered that we were paying $40,000 per quarter to LSPs. What were we getting? The viewer was translated only partially into 3 languages, and was nearly incomprehensible. The website was translated partially into 2 key languages. In both cases there were a lot of localization bugs. On the flip side, hundreds of wiki-based Help pages were translated quite well into 8 languages, which was pretty darn good. An interesting trend…
Kadie: So what did you do?
Brinton: Although we were a small company, when I showed my management the opportunity they were very supportive…but with limited funding. So we had to get creative. We enlisted the help of power users to translate the application and website. To ensure quality control, we set up a repeatable localization framework, with translation, editing, testing, and end user review. We established a tier system of resident translators, drawing on our super-users. We built and acquired localization tools to manage translation memories and the localization process, and installed a locale-based ROI calculator to manage costs. Finally, we hired 3 in-house linguists. So you can see, it was a hybrid of crowdsourcing from the Second Life community on the one hand, and our in-house linguists and contracted translation agencies on the other.
Kadie: How did you divide up the work?
Brinton: Who did what depended on the language tier. Let’s look at the viewer, for example. For tier-1 languages, we developed the glossary, did the translation, and collaborated with the Second Life community on the editing, QA, and some of the glossary. For tier-2 languages, the Second Life community did nearly everything.
Kadie: What kind of results did you achieve?
Brinton: Less than a year later, I can truthfully say that we achieved some dramatic results. We now translate the viewer and the website into 10 languages, and expect to reach 16 in May. The active residents from outside the U.S. grew to 64% of the user base, and new registrations are now more than 2.5 times the U.S. Even better, international revenues have surpassed U.S. domestic revenues. Between the Viewer, the website, and the knowledge base, we now regularly localize over 150,000 words per language.
Kadie: What’s next for localization at Linden Lab?
Brinton: Strangely enough, past is prologue. This new localization program is helping to increase customer satisfaction and bolster an affinity group. You can even say that community-driven translation is building brand advocacy. Some of the elite power users are evolving into business partners. Localization is not only supporting our business, it’s helping to grow it.
The Content Globalization practice at the Gilbane Group closely follows and blogs on the role of multilingual communication in social networking (see interview with Plaxo).
EMC Corporation (NYSE:EMC) announced two new enterprise content management (ECM) solutions: A new EMC Documentum Case Management Solution Framework, which accelerates the development of case management applications, and EMC Documentum ApplicationXtender 6 with new modules for workflow and retention management. Case management is a pattern of work commonly used in almost all industries, such as financial services, public sector and healthcare, that requires a group of people to systematically process and collaborate on a case folder that consists of both content and data. The Case Management Solution Framework enables system integrators and application partners as well as internal IT developers to build case management solutions faster. The Case Management Solution Framework includes: pre-integrated technologies utilizing the core capabilities of the EMC Documentum platform, a tutorial that illustrates the creation of a case management solution, a case management sample application and other best practices covering, application development and deployment, and an Express Install tool which provides single-click installation of all the components needed for case management on a single server.
ApplicationXtender is a departmental document management solution for organizations with limited IT budgets and supporting resources. The solution provides out-of-the box capabilities that allow departments to manage content such as images, documents and reports. Built on a central repository, ApplicationXtender provides capabilities for high-speed image capture and storage and is designed for quick deployment. New features in ApplicationXtender 6 include: A Workflow Manager module for creating departmental workflow solutions designed to improve efficiency in business processes, built on Microsoft .NET, and: A Retention Manager module for applying automatic retention capabilities such as holds, reporting, disposals and audits trails to documents to ensure regulatory compliance. The Case Management Solution Framework and ApplicationXtender 6 are available now. http://www.emc.com/
As the world of technology makes literally breathtaking strides, the world of automation finds itself increasingly focused on the technology. Indeed, in many areas of popular culture, the technology becomes an end in itself, conferring the patina of success on projects that are techno-heavy, never mind that they may not meet their objectives particularly well. This despite the pronoucements of virtually every management authority since the 60’s that technology and automation are different and the latter is the most important to success of the organization.
Nowhere is the tendency to focus on technology itself, to the detriment of meeting functional goals, more pronounced than in the general area referred to as “conent management” or CM, and in no part of CM has this tendency more clouded the picture than in the relationship of its semantic components; “Content” and “Management.” In today’s CM world, the focus on Management means that software and technology takes center stage with an implicit assumption that if one just adheres to the proper technological dictums and acquires the most powerful CM software, the effort will be successful. When efforts so constructed fail to meet their objectives, the further implicit assumption is that the technology… or the technology selection… or the technology governance… or the technology infrastructure has failed. In many cases while some of these may be true, they are not the reason for the failure.
Often, the cause of failure (or marginal performance) is the other side of the CM terminology; the content being created, managed and delivered. Look closely at many automation environments and you will see a high-performance management and delivery environment being fed by virtually uncontrolled content raw material. If “you are what you eat”, so too is a content management and information delivery environment. In fact, failure at the delivery end is more often than not a failure to develop usable content instead of a failure of management and delivery technology. So why, with all the tools at our command, do we not address the content creation portions of our information life cycles?
I don’t claim to know all the answers, but have formed some impressions over the years:
FIRST: Content creation and its unwashed masses of authors, providers and editors has traditionally been viewed as outside the confines of automation planning and development; indeed often as a detriment to automation rather than an integral part of the overall process. With that mentality, the system developers often stay completely away from content creation.
SECOND: The world of software products and vendors, especially those in the management and delivery space, would rather spend more money on their systems in an attempt to make them resistant to the vagaries of uncontrolled content, of course at higher fees for their products. The world of content creation, if it can be called that, is still controlled by the folks in Renton, to their own corporate and marketing ends.
THIRD: In most automation projects involving content, the primary resource is the IT group that, while highly capable in many cases, does not understand the world of content over which it does not itself have control. The result is usually a focus on the IT itself while the content creation groups in the organization find themselves outside with their noses pressed against the glass… until they are called in to be told what will be expected of them. The resulting fight often virtually dooms the project as it had originally need conceived.
So what should we do differently?
While every project is unique, here are some thoughts that might help:
FIRST: Understand that technology cannot fully make up for the absence of content designed and structured to meet the functional needs on the table. Indeed, if it came to a choice between good content and high-performance management resources, content can be delivered with a surprisingly low level of technology while no amount of technology can make up for AWOL content.
SECOND: Accept the premise that well-designed content, fully capable of supporting the functional objectives of the project, should be the first order of business in any major project. With this, acknowledge that the content creators, while they may be less controlled and sometimes not easy to work with, are a critical component in the success of any project based on their output. In many content creation environments, negotiation between what would work best and what can be provided will result in a set of compromises that gets the best possible content within the constraints in place. That done, technology can be applied to optimize the life cycle flow of the content. Note that in this construction, the technology is a secondary factor, supporting but not defining the strategic direction of the project.
THIRD: Despite what you may hear from the software industry and its sales force, understand that in the term “content management”, content is the most important component and just buying more technology will not make up for its lack. From this understanding, you will be able to create a balance that accords both content and technology their rightfully important places in the overall effort.
Regards, Barry
April 14, 2:00 pm ET
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Updated April 9: Download the new Gilbane white paper.
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