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

Category: Content management & strategy (Page 165 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/

Welcome to XML Technologies and Content Strategies

As Frank noted in our main blog and in the related press release, this blog is part of our launch this week of a new practice focused on the technologies, strategies, and best practices associated with using XML in content management. With this focus on XML, the new practice is broad–XML is fundamental to so many aspects of content management. Yet the focus on XML also compels us to look at content management through a certain lens. This begins with the vendor offerings, where nearly every platform, product, and tool has to meet anywhere from a few to myriad XML-related requirements. As XML and its related standards have evolved and matured, evaluating this support has become a more complex and considered task. The more complex and feature-rich the offering, the more difficult the task of evaluating its support.

And indeed, the offerings are becoming more complex, especially among platform vendors like Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle. Looking at SharePoint means evaluating it as a content management platform, but also looking specifically at how it supports technologies like XML forms interfaces, XML data and content feeds, and integration with the XML schemas underlying Microsoft Word and Excel. It also means looking at SOA interfaces and XML integration of Web Parts,and considering how developers and data analysts might want to utilize XML schema and XSLT in SharePoint application development. Depending on your requirements and applications, there could be a great deal more functionality for you to evaluate and explore. And that is just one platform.

But understanding the vendor–and open source–offerings is only one piece of the XML content management puzzle. Just as important as choosing the right tools are the strategic issues in planning for and later deploying these offerings. Organizations often don’t spend enough time asking and answering the biggest and most important questions. What goals do they have for the technology? Cost savings? Revenue growth? Accelerated time to market? The ability to work globally? These general business requirements need to then be translated into more specific requirements, and only then do these requirements begin to point to specific technologies. If XML is part of the potential solution, organizations need to look at what standards might be a fit. If you produce product support content, perhaps DITA is a fit for you. If you are a publisher, you might look at XML-based metadata standards like XMP or PRISM.

Finally, XML doesn’t exist in a content management vacuum, removed from the larger technology infrastructure that organizations have put in place. The platforms and tools must integrate well with technologies inside and outside the firewall; this is especially true as more software development is happening in the cloud and organizations are more readily embracing Software as a Service. One thing we have learned over the years is that XML is fundamental to two critical aspects of content management—for the encoding and management of the content itself (including the related metadata) and for the integration of the many component and related technologies that comprise and are related to content management. Lauren Wood wrote about this in 2002, David Guenette and I revisited it a year later, and the theme recurs in numerous Gilbane writings. The ubiquitous nature of XML makes the need for strategies and best practices more acute, and also points to the need to bring together the various stakeholders–notably the business people who have the content management requirements and the technologists who can help make the technology adoptions successful. Projects have the best chance of succeeding when these stakeholders are brought together to reach consensus first on business and technical requirements, and, later, to reach consensus on technology and approach.

As Frank noted, this is “New/Old” news for all of us involved with the new practice. I first discussed SGML with Frank in 1987 when I was at Mitre and responsible for a project to bring new technology to bear on creating specifications for government projects. Frank had recently launched his technology practice, Publishing Technology Management. Leonor was a client at Factory Mutual when I worked for Xyvision (now XyEnterprise) in the early 1990s. And I probably first met Mary at a GCA (now IDEAlliance) event during my Xyvision days and when she worked for a competitor, Datalogics. We are, in the polite vernacular of the day, seasoned professionals.

So welcome to the new blog. Watch this space for more details as we announce some of the offerings and initiatives. I plan to blog actively here, so please add the RSS feed if you prefer to digest your material that way. If you have ideas or suggestions, don’t hesitate to post here or contact me or any of the other analysts directly. We look forward to the interaction!

EMC Announces Captiva eInput 2.0

EMC Corporation (NYSE:EMC) announced its newest distributed document capture solution that offers advances in Web-based distributed capture, EMC Captiva eInput 2.0. eInput 2.0 ia designed to make the scanning and indexing of paper documents from remote offices faster and easier, automating the classification of documents, extraction of data, and validation of information directly from a Web browser. Captiva eInput works as an extension to the Captiva InputAccel platform, delivering distributed capture with the EMC Documentum platform to address transactional content management (TCM) applications, such as loan processing, insurance claim processing, invoice processing, new account enrollment, and case management. In addition, working with InputAccel, eInput integrates with a wide array of back-end systems, including enterprise content management (ECM), business process management (BPM), and other enterprise applications. Together, these solutions enable organizations to add distributed capture capabilities to their existing business processes and information infrastructure. http://www.emc.com/

Would Margaret Fuller have joined TAUS?

More than likely. One of her more famous quotes was: “If you have knowledge, let others light their candles with it.”

If Fuller was still alive, would social networking have forged a connection somehow with Jaap van der Meer, Director of the Translation Automation User Society, otherwise known as TAUS? I’d bet money on it.

Long known as a language industry pioneer and visionary, van der Meer directs the TAUS-driven call for knowledge sharing as the driver of change for the translation industry. Efforts such as:

    • spearheading a language data sharing initiative, including a planned platform for cross-industry sharing
    • providing executive forums to discuss and design new translation business models, and
    • mapping the roadmap to share translation memories

are just a few examples of the innovation within this proactive organization.

Since November 2004, TAUS has managed to bring together more than sixty companies that exchange user cases, best practices and technology roadmaps specific to the language industry. The resulting membership is far from a “weighted” crowd; rather, it is a well-rounded collection of end users, service providers and technology vendors with a shared interest for change.

Shared vision. Common goals. Concrete results. No more secret languages.

This mission statement for 2008 defines how TAUS plans driving an “agenda of change” that stimulates innovation, automation and collaboration for the industry. Impressive goals, to say the least. Find out more by requesting a copy of the TAUS Annual Plan 2008. It is an excellent read.

The Social Language

Although it is already mid-January, I would still like to wish everyone a very good 2008! It definitely looks to be an interesting year.

Back to blogging, after a very long pause. The reason was my major geographical transition: after 8 very nice years in Boston, we returned to the bi-lingual Finland and the very multi-lingual European union last autumn. The time required for a trans-Atlantic move is not to be underestimated!

Leonor’s interview with Director General Lonnroth about the languages in the EU is an excellent description of the world on this side of the Atlantic. On a very personal note, I love tuning to YLE Mondo radio every time I am driving; a local station broadcasting news from several different countries. I even get the NPR! I listen to German, French, Spanish, and Italian news, and at the same time notice the differences there are not just in the language, but also in the content. Even more fun is to listen to news from Australia and South Africa, which really change the world perspective. A good reminder that from Africa or Australia, many things do look different than from the US or from Europe. How lovely it would be to understand what they say in Chinese, Japanese or Arabic, to name just a few languages!

Anyways, things are finally starting to find their places in their new home, so I am back to blogging. We had a wonderful Gilbane conference in Boston at the end of November; it got so many ideas going in my head, especially about the social aspects of content, search, collaboration – and of course language. The question “Where are languages in social media” was asked in the conference, and the first answer was on the lines of: gee, that is a tough thing to solve. True – and yet I am convinced that we will begin to see very new types of tools and solutions. It was interesting to note that several examples were given on how in corporations social media enabled people find a language speaker inside the organization. “Through our collaboration tool, we found someone who speaks Japanes and can check our translations.” “We realized someone in our German office could translate the materials we needed.” Language skills become yet another skill to be shared in communities.

Another interesting point was that MT and its usefulness came up. With the amount of user-generated information exploding, there is no chance to human-translate everything. Could this be the real coming of age of MT?

I spoke with one multilingual service provider who said that they have started receiving requests for checking user-generated content in corporate community sites. Interesting. I would guess that need for automated checking of “bad words” increases as more content on corporate sites comes not from employees but from anyone in the web. Enterprise searches have to be multilingual, but there is always room to improve.

As Leonor pointed out: collaboration yields knowledge. That knowledge is multilingual.

MadCap Software Debuts MadCap Lingo & MadCap Analyzer

MadCap Software announced MadCap Lingo, an XML-based, integrated translation memory system and authoring tool, aimed at eliminating the need for file transfers in order to complete translation. Document components, such as tables of content, topics, index keywords, concepts, glossaries, and variables all remain intact throughout the translation and localization process, so there is never a need to recreate them. MadCap Lingo also is integrated with MadCap Flare and MadCap Blaze, and it is Unicode enabled to help documentation professionals deliver a consistent user experience in print, online, and in any language. MadCap Lingo is being announced in conjunction with the new MadCap Analyzer, software that proactively recommends documentation content and design improvements. MadCap Lingo works with MadCap Flare, the company’s native-XML authoring product, and MadCap Blaze, the native-XML tool for publishing long print documents, which will be generally available in early 2008. A user creates a MadCap Lingo project to access the source content in a Flare or Blaze project via a shared file structure. Working through Lingo’s interface, the user accesses and translates the content. Because the content never actually leaves the structure of the original Flare or Blaze project, all the content and formatting is preserved in the translated version. Once a project is translated, it is opened in either Flare or Blaze, which generates the output and facilitates publishing. At the front end of the process, Flare and Blaze can import a range of document types to create the source content. Following translation, the products provide single-source delivery to multiple formats online and off, including the Internet, intranets, CDs, and print. MadCap Lingo is available and is priced at $2,199 per license, but is available at an introductory price of $899 for a limited time. MadCap Lingo also is available on a subscription basis for $649 per year. Fees for support start at $449 per year. http://www.madcapsoftware.com/

IBM Opens Up Jazz.net, Announces Rational Team Concert Express

IBM (NYSE: IBM) unveiled new software and research aimed at improving the way employees across an organization collaborate in a globally integrated enterprise. The challenges of globalization are forcing companies to become more nimble, using an increasingly geographically-dispersed and virtual workforce to remain competitive. In the world of software development, this means 24×7 collaboration with specialized teams around the globe to pick up where another left off. IBM is also examining how virtual worlds can help software development teams break down the barriers caused by globalization. IBM is announcing it is opening up its development platform based on Web 2.0 technologies for developers to collaborate and contribute to software under development at jazz.net. Jazz.net is an open, commercial community designed to help companies globally and transparently collaborate on the development of Jazz-based technology. Previously only available to IBM customers, academics and partners, Jazz.net is now open to the greater software development community. IBM also announced IBM Rational Team Concert Express, available later this year, which will help small and mid-sized development teams enable real-time collaboration across a geographically dispersed software delivery team. IBM will also offer IBM Rational Team Concert Express free of charge to qualified open source projects and to academic institutions for use in accredited course programs or academic research projects. IBM Rational Team Concert Express beta 2 includes Web dashboards to help software project teams see real-time project status data such as the status of work items and project health. IBM Rational Team Concert Express beta 2 allows software development teams to use DB2 and other databases to host the IBM Rational Team Concert repository. IBM Rational Team Concert Express is based on middleware including IBM WebSphere, IBM Lotus Sametime, Apache Tomcat, Apache Derby and Jabber. To register for the Jazz project or download IBM Rational Team Concert, beta 2, visit http://www.ibm.com/

Collaboration Yields Knowledge: Two Opportunities to Share Experiences

Globalization is a strategy rather than a project. Global customer experience is a mindset, not a deliverable. In turn, supporting these objectives requires complimentary strategic initiatives driven by subject matter experts that utilize a range of rapidly evolving processes and technologies in innovative ways.

Based on our community discussions, organizations that focus on combining the practices of localization design, content management, and translation management achieve results. And that focus in no way equates to a series of siloed application implementations.

We believe there is no better way to demonstrate this truth than by encouraging collaboration and promoting success stories. Agree? Here’s two opportunities to do so, in the form of a Call for Papers for synergistic events:


Gilbane San Francisco: June 17 – 19, 2008
Localization World Berlin: June 9-11, 2008

Collaboration yields knowledge. Sharing experiences spurs innovation for all organizations. Here’s your chance to contribute — our experience shows that it’s well worth the effort.

SiberSafe Hosted XML CMS Service Now Available On-Demand

SiberLogic announced SiberSafe On-Demand, a monthly subscription approach to XML content management for technical documentation teams who are looking for significant efficiency gains in producing long-lived, complex, evolving content. SiberSafe On-Demand delivers full SiberSafe functionality as an ASP service in a secure data center. Each team has full access/administrative rights to their server for system administration and configuration. SiberSafe On-Demand also includes daily content backups and SiberLogic’s technical support service. SiberSafe On-Demand “out of the box” configuration offers your choice of DTD – DITA, DocBook, or MIL-STD 2361 – with sample templates and stylesheets. Also included are SiberSafe Communicator (our XML authoring tool) and our integrated publishing tool. Alternatively, you can continue to use your own editor, such as XMetaL, Epic, or FrameMaker, or your own publishing tools. SiberSafe On-Demand costs only $799 per month for the first pair of users (one author and one reviewer) and as little as $275 per user monthly for 10+ users. There are no additional upfront costs. Anyone who signs up for SiberSafe On-Demand before the end of January 2008 will receive access for one additional author free of charge for the first year. http://www.siberlogic.com/

« Older posts Newer posts »

© 2025 The Gilbane Advisor

Theme by Anders NorenUp ↑