Category: Content management & strategy (Page 182 of 479)

Congratulations to Linda Burman, Emma Hamer, Joan Lasselle, and Travis Wissink, newly elected by their peers to serve on the board of directors of Content Management Professionals. They will step in for retiring directors Seth Gottlieb, Erik Hartman, Samantha Starmer, and Scott Abel, who resigned his seat on the board to fill the role of CM Pros executive director. Continuity on the board is provided by current director Mary Laplante, now serving the second year of a two-year term.
CM Pros members will have an opportunity to meet with the directors at the upcoming spring Summit, April 13, in San Francisco following the Gilbane conference on content technologies.

In my previous entry I wrote about the effect of working in a foreign language. I think that we will see interesting developments in tools and services targeted to people who need to work in a language other than their native language – simply because this is a rapidly growing group. Obviously there are more and more non-native English speakers using English daily at work. But as European call centers relocate to Poland and the Czech Republic, we will also see more people using German as their second language.

An interesting question is: what will happen in China and India? According to Wikipedia, India has 23 official languages (one of them is English), 800 spoken languages and 2000 dialects. In China, there are 6 to 12 main regional groups of Chinese, according to classification. A friend of mine said that China could choose English as their official langauge, just like in India. I am not quite so sure. With about 800 million Mandarin speakers, maybe we will all be learning Mandarin in the future.

Anyways, I checked the most popular blogs from Technorati, . The top 30 “most linked to” blogs included 8 blogs in a language other than English. To me, this is just a reminder that there is a world outside English.

The recording from our February 14th webinar, “Integrating Translation and Content Management Workflows” is now available here. Many thanks to Steve Billings, Senior Solutions Engineer with Idiom Technologies, and David Smith, President of LinguaLinx, for joining me for the conversation and of course, to the participants for attending.

We informally polled participants during our last webinar on globalization business drivers and published the results here. In this webinar, we asked the question again. Here’s the results:

We also added a new poll specific to integrating translation and content workflows. Here’s the results:

Clearly the subject of this webinar was right on for participants, with 21% citing “integration of CMS (content management systems) and GMS (globalization management systems) as the number #1 headache. The good news is that there are a number of market approaches to cohesive workflow integration for translation processes. We’ve provided details on our definitions of Levels 1-3 here. Steve and David presented a typical customer scenario involving all three integration levels during the webinar. Check it out.

If so…

The LISA Forum Asia in Beijing on March 12-15 will focus on buyers/end-users of globalization services. Entitled “The Globalization of China 2.0,” the program features some of China’s international expansion leaders alongside high-tech multinationals such as Microsoft, Huawei, Cisco Systems, Nokia, Adobe Systems, TIBCO Software and IBM.

The program includes sessions such as “The Basics of Going Global: Understanding Globalization, Internationalization, Localization and Translation,” “Buying and Implementing Content Management and Global Translation Management Systems,” and “How to Run a Globalization Audit of Your Business Processes.” Register here.

For those of you not going to Beijing, note that the LISA Forum’s highly-popular globalization audit session will also run at Gilbane San Francisco on Tuesday April 10th during pre-conference tutorials.

A reminder for all you CM Pros out there, forwarded on behalf of the Elections committee:

This is your last day to vote for the 2007 CM Pros Board. Voting closes at midnight ET!

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NOTE: If your email address is very long, enter as many characters as the login field will take. You can view candidate profiles online on the CM Pros site .

Thank you for voting to make CM Pros a continued success.

Ann Rockley, Tony Byrne, Rahel Bailie
CM Pros Elections Committee

In my previous entry I said that I think multilinguality should be a strategic issue for companies. When companies operate globally, they should think about the impact of languages on customer satisfaction, internal efficiency, increased sales, feedback from product support to prodct development etc., instead of just looking at translation costs.

For compliance alone, language can have a huge effect. What if your Chinese subcontractor did not understand your English instructions properly, and made a serious mistake? Who is responsible? How do you ensure or measure the language understanding level of your subcontractors or employees in other countries?
I would like to welcome comments on this issue. Is it enough to say “Our corporate language is English” and that takes care of it? Does the personnel all over the world speak English so well that this is a non-issue? Do non-native English speakers spend more time reading and writing in English, and would it be easier using one’s own language?

I know several Finns who say they prefer to read everything in their special field in English, as that is the language in which they have learned their speciality. Is this the norm, or would working in own language be preferable? (When talking about working, I mean both writing and reading in a language.)

There’s no doubt that Microsoft understands the value and opportunity in the ECM/BPM intersection. It is also clear that the roads MOSS will use to get there are not confined to small neighborhoods, hence the reference to the U.S.’ most famous highway.

Microsoft’s significant investments in workflow and business intelligence have been widely reported. I’ll leave the work of dissecting components such as Windows Workflow Foundation, Excel Services, and MOSS BI web parts to resources such as Ziff Davis’ Microsoft Watch and Russ Stalters’ BetterECM blogs as well as Microsoft resources from the SharePoint Product Group and Customer Experience Team (although this one does not show much action since the summer’s LOBi (line-of-business interoperability) announcement.

Blogging over at BPMEnterprise.com, Stalters also has an excellent 3-part series called BPM and Steak: A Great Combo, the latest of which pinpoints MOSS capabilities designed for BPM practitioners. Microsoft’s strategy for full-scale ECM/BPM however, requires somewhat of a “detour” from MOSS and Office 2007 suburbs. The roadmap is evident via multiple, alliance-driven crossroads. Avenues include “Gold Certified” partners such as Bluespring Software, Global 360, Lombardi Software, and Ultimus as well as “Certified” or “Registered” partners such as Savvion and Appian.

Implementing integrations with some of these products does not appear to be fraught with “Exit here” or “In Construction” signposts. (And given all in the “Gold Certified” group are private, one can’t help wondering if there’s an acquisition strategy in the works. I digress…) Rather many are direct and well-embedded crossroads between MOSS and Office 2007, targeted directly at business users.

Case in point: Bluespring’s BPM Suite 4.5, the result of a decidedly Microsoft-centric BPM play that began in 2003. Most interesting to me is the 4.5 focus on “document manipulation,” highlighted multiple times during my briefing with the company. Capabilities include rules-driven analysis, extraction, and dynamic assembly of content from Word, Excel and InfoPath — with PDF thrown in for good measure. Although many ECM players have been doing “ETL for content” for years, this is not common expertise in the BPM market. In a content-centric BPM application such as compliance, this certainly provides some interesting opportunities for aggregated, context-specific reporting.

As I noted in my last ECM-BPM checkpoint, there are multiple road signs (quickly becoming billboards…) that signal technology convergence and deeper integrations between two blurring market segments. Microsoft’s Route 66 strategy is surely one of them.