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

Category: Content management & strategy (Page 157 of 479)

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/

Integrating Traditional Documentation with Social Media

The design brief is simple: integrate the outgoing supply chain that takes corporate product or service documentation out to users with the social media that may arise to address those same products or services. The benefits are also clear: leverage user experience, interest, and advice to everyone’s advantage.

After that, it gets confusing.

Corporate structures are brand-directed and very controlled, while social media is uncontrollable, individualistic (if not anti-brand), and hyperbolic. That’s why we love it, but how could a corporation trust it with their babies?

What does integration mean in this context? If you hire someone to help with social media, you may lose the integrity of independence. If the social media is independent and you endorse it, do you taint it? It’s likely to change rapidly, so how can you keep your position up to date? If you just react to it, how is that different than focus groups? I’ll argue that integration means, somehow, placing social media into an iteration loop in the documentation supply chain.

The scariest scenario is bringing independent outsiders to your breast and having them blast your new release. On the other hand, they’ll do that anyway, so the question is how quickly you’ll respond, and how? Who said “Keep your friends close and your enemies even closer?”

But let’s draw a distinction between unaffiliated commentators and those who are working in companies that are your customers. The former are always going to be less controllable, while the latter will likely cooperate with a cross-company integration. Just as an enlightened company will look to incorporate social media into its communications strategy, its customers will be exploring social media for its user-centric focus as a means of improving its own business practices.

Let’s assume that when social media is being practiced by independent outsiders, it will be a matter of chance whether their behavior is consistent with a corporation’s goals. When it works because all of the stars have aligned, as has happened at moments for Apple, Google, and even IBM and Microsoft, then it can be great. At other times, it may be ugly. Perhaps it’s just too early to draw those people too close.

But when the audience is composed of social media practitioners at client companies, then the field is open to all forms of social media: blog, wiki, twitter, IM, and other practices. For example, it’s easy to imagine deploying a documentation set via a wiki that issuing and client companies can both update, perhaps with a dedicated editor at the source company to keep brand, message, and metaphors consistent. That leaves the challenge of how that material gets integrated back into the supply chain so that it can feed the next release…

These are early thoughts, and tools such as wikis are low-hanging fruit. How will the less document-centric media be integrated? What new forms of relationship will develop around these practices? How can this be extended to independent outsiders?

New Kentico Beta Release Brings Customer Experience Management Solution

Kentico Software, the Web content management system vendor, releases a beta version of Kentico CMS 6 and adds a new product line – Kentico Enterprise Marketing Solution (EMS),  for Customer Experience Management. Out of the box, Kentico CMS 6 includes E-mail Marketing, Marketing Dashboards, A/B and Multivariate Testing, Campaign and Conversion Management, Integration Bus and improved Web Analytics. On top of this, Kentico EMS adds On-line Marketing features such as Content Personalization, Contact Management, Lead Scoring and Segmentation. Kentico EMS is also enriched with some additional Enterprise features as Health Monitoring, support of Multiple SMTP Servers and Scheduler Windows Services. The beta version of Kentico CMS 6 is available for download exclusively to Kentico partners via Kentico Partner Portal. Kentico CMS 6 will be generally available in late September 2011. http://www.kentico.com/

On Multilingual Communications and Open Source: An Interview with Jahia’s Emmanuel Garcin

Recently, we had an opportunity to catch up with Emmanuel Garcin, Vice President at Jahia, a Swiss-based vendor of open source solutions for web content and portal management. Jahia is a sponsor of Multilingual Communications as a Business Imperative,” a report released by Gilbane’s Globalization practice in July.

KK: What have been the biggest roadblocks to companies in demonstrating value for multilingual communications initiatives?
EG: We’ve found that web content management systems often need to be customized – in a big way – before they can be integrated with authoring tools, translation management systems, and other enterprise applications. This can result in big-ticket licensing and implementation costs as well as IT departments that become concerned with “overloading computing platforms. Open source technologies can help with these obstacles, but companies are often challenged to adopt and rollout new business models that go hand in hand with the open source context.

KK: What is the “tipping point” that compels companies to move forward with your solution as part of the infrastructure for multilingual communications
EG: The key business driver is a burning need to broadcast both local and global messages for brand management. We also have customers that must address language-based government regulations. Since there are three official languages in Switzerland, Jahia’s Swiss origins naturally focused us on the implementation of adequate business logic to provide flexible language management tools to accommodate this need. Other customers have a need to mix languages when they publish a particular country or regional site. One example is a large international institution that publishes in over a hundred languages who found that Jahia provided the vitamins (enterprise & portal capabilities) and the painkiller (globalization capabilities) needed to implement its content globalization strategy.

KK: What do you do to educate, prepare, and enable customers to be successful?
EG: There’s a lot of back and forth. Companies often want to shape new solutions around existing business rules, but they also need to plan intelligently about how they’re going to communicate globally, and determine which processes should continue to evolve. We educate and train organizations on how to get the best results and can help with planning, installation, and configuration. At the end of the day, it’s all about technical details. Companies want to manage content in any language, decide for themselves which languages are mandatory and which are optional, and even publish web sites that mix languages on the same screen. In addition, they want to give their customers the ability to select a new language through a simple, easy-to-use interface.

We spend a lot of time communicating a vision of successful web communication. We talk about how content repositories are the new databases, that all content should be dynamic, and how successful enterprise applications need to be function and feature-rich. We make sure companies are fully aware of industry trends that affect global communication practices and common standards, such as JSR-170/283.

KK: What have been your customers’ best practices in building a global content value chain?
EG: You can’t overlook the significance of having a globalization strategy in the first place! Examples of success that I’m familiar with include a large international agency, a GPS vendor, and a global glass manufacturer. The most successful companies are equally concerned about which solutions for multilingual communications they choose, and how they roll them out; about a single source of content, along with information that is customized or added to meet regional needs. They have a globalization strategy that strikes the right balance between centralized and regional content management.

What is most important, however, is to define how that strategy relates to business needs. A good example of this is a pan-European government agency that we work with. A particular document may be mandatory for certain countries and languages but irrelevant for others. To address this challenge, they prepare source content in a single language, deliver translations up to 25 languages, and publish local language sites with different, additional or custom content for a variety of regions and countries.

Day Software Announces OEM Relationship with Exstream

Day Software (SWX: DAYN) (OTC:DYIHY) announced it has entered into an Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) agreement with Exstream Software, a subsidiary of Hewlett Packard. Under the terms of the agreement, Exstream will bundle Day’s technology – CRX Repository, Communiqué (CQ) Workflow, and CQ User Interface – with its Dialogue and Dialogue Live products, helping customers to build content-centric interactive applications regardless of location, format, or language. Day has also launched a corporate blog and portal designed to encourage communication among those who share ideas and interests around content-related topics. Geared toward software developers, the new resource features news and commentary surrounding JSR 170, the Java Content Repository (JCR) application programming interface (API) for stored content; representational state transfer (REST), open source and other related topics and technologies. http://www.exstream.com, http://www.day.com

Gilbane Group Releases New Report on Multilingual Communications

For Immediate Release

Pioneering research combines content and localization/translation management market perspectives to present unique insight into current state of content globalization

Cambridge MA, August 20. Gilbane Group, Inc., the analyst and consulting firm focused on content technologies and their application to high-value business solutions, today announced the publication of its latest research report, Multilingual Communications as a Business Imperative: Why Companies Need to Optimize the Global Content Value Chain.

The study is backed by in-depth qualitative research on how global businesses are creating, managing, and publishing multilingual content. Given that many companies expect growth from multinational revenues, 92% of respondents are concerned about the risks of not improving content globalization processes. The research identifies key challenges, including a gap between strategic business goals and investments in multilingual communications, difficulties in balancing centralized and regional operations, and the lack of integration and interoperability across authoring, content management, localization/translation management, and publishing components. Moreover, the study reveals how industry leaders are addressing these challenges, and provides Gilbane’s recommendations on best practices.

“Global businesses recognize the need to address localization and translation in tandem with content creation and management, but they are often stymied, even overwhelmed, by how to achieve this,” commented Leonor Ciarlone, Senior Analyst, Gilbane Group, and study director for Multilingual Communications. “Our research points to the emergence of what we define as the Global Content Value Chain, a strategy for meeting these challenges. Organizations embracing this strategy are leading the development of much-needed best practices, as we describe in the report.”

Gilbane’s study methodology included in-depth interviews with 40 content and localization/translation management practitioners in multinational organizations. The result is a unified perspective on the full spectrum of multilingual content processes, previously viewed as isolated activities. “Gilbane’s study will educate both language professionals as well as content management professionals,” said Donna Parrish, editor, MultiLingual magazine. “The report should be required reading for any company needing to integrate, automate, and streamline domain-specific processes that are often self-contained today.”

Availability
Multilingual Communications as a Business Imperative: Why Companies Need to Optimize the Global Content Value Chain is available as a free download from the Gilbane Group website. The report is also available from study sponsors Jahia; Jonckers; RedDot, the Open Text Web Solutions Group; Sajan, Inc.; SDL Tridion; Sitecore; and Systran.

About Gilbane Group, Inc.
Gilbane Group, Inc., is an analyst and consulting firm that has been writing and consulting about the strategic use of content and information technologies since 1987. Clients include organizations of all sizes from a wide variety of industries and governments. Gilbane works with the entire community of stakeholders including investors, enterprise buyers of IT, technology suppliers, and other consultant and analyst firms. The firm has organized over 50 educational conferences in North America and Europe. Its widely read newsletter, reports, white papers, case studies and analyst blogs are available at https://gilbane.com.

For More Information
Leonor Ciarlone, Senior Analyst
+1.617.497.9443

Welcome Fred Dalrymple

Fred is our newest contributor, and has already posted his first blog entry. Fred pokes at the challenging tension in search between intent and context, especially over time as context (or intent) changes. Lynda has also posted about intent, and the subject also came up in discussions of search quality around Udi Manber’s talk at our conference in this past June.

Fred brings the welcome perspective of a serious software developer, and will be blogging on a few different topics, so he may be posting here on on one of our other blogs. Welcome Fred!

On Crowdsourcing and Social Media: An Interview with Plaxo’s Regina Bustamante

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Regina Bustamante, Director of Globalization with Plaxo, to discuss the company’s content globalization strategy and how Plaxo users are integral to its success. Plaxo offers a suite of online solutions for social networking. Top services are the address book and calendar applications in addition to Pulse, a sharing and networking tool.

KK: How has the growth of global web access affected the adoption and development of your social networking solutions?
RB: Plaxo’s user base continues to grow steadily since we reached the 15 million user mark back in October 2006. As a result, our product release cycles have accelerated from two or three months to just one week. At the same time, Plaxo’s non-English base of users and users with international connections is growing rapidly. Shorter product cycles coupled with user demand for multilingual products made it necessary for us to explore new ways to release products to major markets in local languages.

KK: What model did Plaxo use for its initial localization/translation efforts?
RB: We localized our address book and calendar tools into French, German, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish and Simplified Chinese over a year ago, using LSPs for the initial translations. We then provided early release versions to specific “power users” in each international market who reviewed everything, including the UI and suitability to local cultures.

KK: So Plaxo users provided quality assurance in this effort?
RB: Yes, users were even willing to test and report on features such as sorting, name and address formatting, etc. When Pulse was released with localizations into the same languages, non-English users continued to send suggestions, comments, and to act as informal quality control agents. The involvement of the user community improved the quality of local versions of our software.

KK: The Dutch version, released in July, increased the role of longtime power users, correct?
RB: Absolutely. The Netherlands has quickly become one of the largest markets for Pulse and we expanded the involvement of the user community, relying on a group of long-time Plaxo members for the development of the Dutch glossary.

KK: What’s in store for the future of Plaxo’s localization/translation efforts?
RB: For future product releases, we will move to a crowdsourcing model based on a translation portal we are developing that will enable any Plaxo community user to submit and comment on translations. To ensure high levels of quality, this portal includes separate roles for a language moderator and project manager.

KK: What will be the key to success for this model?
RB: Plaxo’s position as a provider of no-charge consumer software helps us to engage users for localization/translation assistance. The key is to only ask users to help with things that directly benefit them. Our crowdsourcing model is not intended to entirely replace LSPs. For example, we have no plans to use crowdsourcing to translate the corporate website or documents such as the Terms of Service or Privacy Policy.

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