Category: Content management & strategy (Page 179 of 479)

Frank, Mary, Tony, and I attended the Adobe analyst meetings in New York this week. To say that Adobe had a lot to share would be an understatement, but this was my first time attending this kind of event, so I have nothing to compare it to. Having said that, I have to say that I was impressed with the progress Adobe has made in several key areas–bringing Macromedia and its products into the fold; building out a much more compelling offering and clearer message with LiveCycle; and further solidifying its commanding presence in the creative tools space.

Along with the major focus on Creative Suite 3 (which was announced on Monday) and LiveCycle, Adobe executives also spent a fair bit of time on Software as a Service, discussing offerings like Adobe Document Center, which I have been playing around with since yesterday morning, and Acrobat Connect, nee Breeze, their web conferencing software. (And without having evaluated Acrobat Connect in detail, I have to say as someone who is on Webinars all the time that Connect is by far the easiest product I have ever used. It also seems to load like any other URL, but perhaps that is because I already have Acrobat professional on my system–not sure.)

A few other things that caught my eye:

• Kuler is, well, cool. It is a collaborative online application that allows users to discover and upload color themes that can be used with Creative Suite tools. Ryan Stewart has a nice writeup over at ZDNet.
• Apollo is impressive. We saw a number of demos, including the eBay one that has been written about (see here, and you can see a video of a demo here. The coolest Apollo demo, by far, is the one you can’t currently see, the Buzzword word processor from Virtual Ubiquity; their Website will tell you they have gone back underground after the alpha release. Again, Ryan Stewart has a nice overview and screen shots over at ZDNet. And there seems to be uptake for Apollo in the broad developer community. According to CTO Kevin Lynch, as of Wednesday the 28th, 30,000 people had downloaded the client since it was posted on March 19.
• There’s a new Beta of Acrobat 3D available for download. I have looked at the manufacturing space a fair bit over the last couple of years, and few areas seem to have more areas of meaningful technical interchange than do manufacturers, their suppliers, and their customers. PDF files are everywhere in these applications, so a more functional 3D Acrobat makes all the sense in the world.
• Adobe’s efforts to be more active in the standards world with PDF are clearly paying off. While we were there, they announced a win with the mortgage industry’s MISMO standards.

Lots to digest, but I came away impressed.

Leonor summed up Gilbane’s perspective on the real challenge in content globalization in her entry of January 19:

We’ve found that the problem for organizations is less about the act of translation itself, and more about aligning the business processes that support it.

The hard part of globalization isn’t translating one phrase to another. The core problem is the inefficiencies associated with how we do the translating, with how we move words from creation to consumption by their target audience.

Our latest Content Technology Works case study describes how Autodesk, a major software company with worldwide sales of $1.6 billion US, recognized that better processes and higher levels of automation are the critical elements of a scalable globalization strategy. More words in translation memory were important outcomes of its initiatives, but the real benefit to Autodesk is greater competitive advantage as a worldwide software company.

Minette Norman, Senior Software Systems Manager, Worldwide Localization, at Autodesk shares insights in a webinar on April 25, 1:00 pm ET. Registration is now open.