Category: Content management & strategy(Page 92 of 478)
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.
Digital experience company Acquia announced the availability of Acquia CMS Migrate, a new solution that helps organizations migrate their data from any content management system (CMS) to Drupal 9. It can make migrations to Drupal 9 “five times faster” compared to traditional website replatforming projects. Drupal 9 is built to handle more data at higher volumes, integrate easily with other platforms, and lower the barriers to entry for new Drupal users.
Acquia CMS Migrate combines both automation and the company’s Drupal 9 expertise. The software uses connectors to non-Drupal CMS platforms – including Adobe Experience Manager, Sitecore, Bloomreach, Documentum, Oracle Web Center, and others – to automatically migrate content, metadata, files, and configurations to Drupal. During migration, the software rationalizes content by removing duplicate or unused content, cleaning up file structures, and more. Acquia’s consultancy helps organizations prepare for migration by setting up a strategy, reviewing compliance objectives, and other counsel.
Digital asset management (DAM) vendor Bynder has acquired We Adapt, a SaaS solution to help brands scale video content creation. With the addition of We Adapt, renamed Video Brand Studio, Bynder offers brands a single platform to scale on-brand content capabilities across print, images, and video. Marketers need to manage the content demand for a wide range of mediums and distribution methods, including social media, websites, email marketing campaigns, and digital advertising platforms. The traditional video creative process of crafting videos one by one struggles to meet the new needs for large volumes of related videos with the agility that online channels require. Video Brand Studio alleviates that bottleneck by providing video creation and modification tools to quickly create and update similar videos simultaneously without any editing skills.
Once fully integrated, Video Brand Studio will be available as an optional add-on module alongside Digital Brand Templates and Print Brand Templates. The integrations Video Brand Studio offers with digital advertising platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram complement Bynder’s other downstream integrations to provide customers an integrated process for content creation, management, and distribution that boosts efficiency and agility. The same advertising platform integrations also give customers greater insights into creative performance through online video campaign performance data.
The open web has always been critical to Google’s business, which is why AMP was both puzzling and controversial. AMP’s faster page display was a clear benefit, but the forced and limited format made user experiences worse and was a burden with a questionable upside and loss of control for publishers. This post from Google’s Webmaster Central blog on upcoming search ranking changes has some welcome news. In addition to focusing more on web page experience [emphasis added]…
As part of this update, we’ll also incorporate the page experience metrics into our ranking criteria for the Top Stories feature in Search on mobile, and remove the AMP requirement from Top Stories eligibility. Google continues to support AMP, and will continue to link to AMP pages when available.
This is good for the open web, web user experience, and publishers. Google will obviously still compete with publishers as it continues to add richer results to its search pages. But their advantage will not necessarily be unfair, and a Google walled garden should be less of a concern. It is of course also good for Google as it heads into more serious calls for regulation. Read More
SaaS companies, app platforms, and product integrations
Scott Brinker has been making a case for “app platforms” as part of a model for understanding existing landscapes comprised of large platforms and extremely large numbers of “specialist apps”. In this post he looks at some research that ‘examined integrations, public APIs, and “app centers” offered by the 1,000 fastest growing SaaS companies from 2019’ by product category. Scott’s discussion and the detailed research he links to are worth a look by market and business strategists. Read More
The skills content professionals in government need
Our .gov readers will find this report by Ksenia Cheinman especially valuable, but the information and approach will also be helpful to commercial organizations. Ksenia provides a link to short version of the full research report in case you need to whet your appetite. Read More
The VR winter
Benedict Evans…
The problem is, we haven’t worked out what you would do with a great VR device that isn’t a game (or some very niche industrial application), and it’s not clear that we will. We’ve had five years of experimental projects and all sorts of content has been tried, and nothing other than games has really worked. … Pulling all of these threads together, the issue I circle around is not just that we don’t have a ‘killer app’ for VR beyond games, but that we don’t know what the path to getting one might be. Read More
The Gilbane Advisor curates content for content technology, computing, and digital experience professionals. We focus on strategic technologies. We publish more or less twice a month except for August and December. We do not sell or share personal data.
EditShare’s new Flow panel for Adobe Premiere Pro is designed to simplify content management, proxy and remote editing, and review and approval workflows for editors. For open storage, EditShare’s EFS enhances collaborative editing with support for project-locking for Productions in Premiere Pro. With the Productions feature set, Premiere Pro can now handle projects with “an extraordinary number of assets” while maintaining peak performance. Sharing and organizing those assets is also simplified. Flow manages the entire media technology stack with tools to orchestrate assets and workflows across tiered on-premise, nearline and cloud storage environments. A secure platform for remote, collaborative productions, Flow offers an advanced proxy-based workflow with support for more than 500 codecs. Its enhanced Premiere Pro panel connects individual editors and production teams directly to the Flow media asset management and its productivity-focused toolset including extensive asset tracking, collaborative proxy editing workflow, and review and approval workflows across cities, countries and continents. EFS scalable storage enables media organizations to build extensive collaborative workflows on premise, in the cloud, or in hybrid installations, shielding creative personnel from the underlying technical complexity while equipping administrators and technicians with storage management tools. For Adobe editors, EFS is fast and flexible collaborative storage that supports Productions in Premiere Pro for project sharing.
Kentico Software announced the launch of Kentico Xperience, a new brand for its digital experience platform (DXP). Kentico EMS previously their combined content management, digital marketing, and commerce capabilities in a single platform. The new brand, Kentico Xperience, replaces product names Kentico CMS and Kentico EMS, and emphasizes the digital experience capabilities available in the platform. As part of the product brand launch, Kentico has two new websites.
Strapi announced a new release of Strapi Community Edition representing 13,000 commits made by more than 420 contributors across hundreds of releases. This version of Strapi is also the foundation for an upcoming Enterprise Edition that will include enterprise features, such as advanced role-based access control, unlimited content internationalization, audit logs, and SSO. Companies interested in getting priority access to these upcoming features can sign up for a private beta until July 1st.
The company also announced the availability of paid support for companies who are interested in Service Level Agreements and access to best practices directly from the core team, and an initial group of Solutions Partners that have experience with Strapi and are ready to assist companies with a large range of services, including frontend development, content management CMS migration, and plugin or custom development. Partners include: AE Studio (USA), Capfi (France), freshcells (Germany), Simform (USA) and SovTech (UK, South Africa and Kenya).
The core team and contributors fixed more than 80 issues in the new release to enhance the overall developer experience including:
Native support for .env files to simplify configuration setup for users.
Improved environment configuration with overwrites.
Better database lifecycles to trigger functions before or after a specific event.
New CLI command to easily migrate settings across environments.
Greater support for deployment configurations with proxy configuration changes.
SDL announced it entered into a technical partnership with DRUID, specialists in conversational AI, to launch multi-lingual virtual assistants for enterprise organizations that enable real-time communication through chatbots. By integrating SDL Machine Translation with DRUID virtual assistants, companies will be able to conduct chatbot conversations in different languages with employees, customers, partners and suppliers. The solution offers a real-time “interpreter mode” function, which can translate conversations along with “live chat” which can translate into multiple languages.
Chatbots are commonly configured to undergo complicated question-and-answering activities in different languages, but language-specific customization can be complex, time-consuming and costly. The issue becomes even more complex when a chatbot is connected to various data sources (ERP, CRM, BI, HRIS, or other types of business applications). With SDL Machine Translation, chatbots can converse in multiple languages without the need to translate data sources or conversational flows.
SDL Machine Translation provides the neural machine (NMT2.0) foundationand the combined solution includes the ability to control brand voice with a brand-specific terminology dictionary that contains company-specific product names and unique terminology. This is machine learning solution uses anonymized chat logs for continuous language model improvement.
An article on The Verge and quotes from Microsoft’s Jared Spataro about Fluid reminded Thompson of OpenDoc and he begins his own thoughts on Fluid with a bit of history on Steve Jobs decision to kill OpenDoc in 1997. Thompson suggests the reason was that a combination of Microsoft’s dominant marketshare, and
that the application model was simply a much better approach for the personal computer era. Given the lack of computing power and lack of connectivity, it made much more sense to have compatible documents made by common applications than to try and create common documents with compatible components — at least with the level of complexity implicit in OpenDoc.
Thanks to Thompson for giving me an excuse to indulge in a little history of my own, which largely supports his view. Below is what I shared with him. The history is fun, but the new Fluid Framework is also worth a closer look.
———————-
Fluid also reminded me of the competing OpenDoc and OLE approaches in the early 90s. To supplement your history…
At the first Documation conference in February 2004 1994 I moderated a session that included Apple Chief Scientist Larry Tesler, and Tony Williams, Microsoft Software Architect and Co-creator of COM. I had asked each of them to discuss requirements for and their approaches to building a “compound document architecture”. OpenDoc was naturally appealing to me (and many of my subscribers) at the time, but Tony made a strong case for OLE. Tony’s argument for OLE was technical but he also addressed the issue from a business point of view, and argued that OpenDoc was too much of a radical change for both developers and end users. While this was more of an issue for Microsoft with their large developer community and installed base, OpenDoc was radical, and I expect that was the reason OpenDoc languished at Apple and for Jobs’ ultimate rejection.
On Wednesday the general session was divided into two sections. One covered new technologies being developed to enhance document computing and document management. The other presented senior managers from large corporations who described their own document management needs.
Your editor opened the technology session by describing three components of current document management systems, each of which presage future developments. Objects — whether in terms of object-oriented databases, object-oriented programming, or multimedia document component “information objects” — play a big role in making systems more flexible and capable of dealing with complexity. Building an architecture to manage and share distributed objects, and to link and assemble them into document form are requirements of many enterprise-wide document management solutions. Finally, the document metaphor is increasingly seen as the most effective and friendly way to interface not only with document management systems, but with information in general.
Today, these capabilities are built either at the application level, or as “middleware”. For many reasons (e.g., application interoperability, performance, and ease of application development), it would help instead to have support for these capabilities at the operating environment level.
Previous attempts at compound document architectures to provide such an environment have failed. But this is clearly something we need, and eventually will get. Whoever defines and builds such an architecture will be in a powerful position to dominate the IT market. We can expect fierce battles among the platform and architecture vendors to control this architecture . The two leading candidates today are Microsoft’s OLE, and the Component Integration Lab consortium’s OpenDoc (based on Apple technology).
Larry Tessler from Apple described the “Information Tidal Wave” (his alternative to “superhighway”) coming with the growth of electronic multimedia documents, and with the rapid building of electronic document repositories. IS managers will face severe new problems arising from the need to manage these repositories. Larry positioned OpenDoc as a core technology for supporting the management and assembly of these new kinds of documents.
Microsoft’s Tony Williams focused on user requirements for a compound document architecture. Compound documents should be thought of as “compound views” of information, and documents are just one form of information, and thus need to be handled as part of an information architecture. Information architectures in turn need to be able to manage many different types of multimedia data for both document and data applications.
A standard “containment model” is needed, Williams said, to allow applications to share and organize information objects. Previous attempts at standard compound document architectures, e.g., ODA (Office, or Open Document Architecture) failed because they attempted to define a too restrictive representation. Such systems also need to handle ad hoc information (for example, that created with a personal information manager) as well as structured documents.
Tony emphasized the need to protect both user investments in information and developer investments in applications. While a compound document architecture environment is a requirement of any new operating environment, there must be an evolutionary path provided — a compound document architecture that forces a radical change too quickly will not gain acceptance. Tony positioned OLE as the technology that meets these requirements.
When asked, both Tony and Larry Tessler claimed that OpenDoc and OLE should work together and described generally — each in terms of the architecture they were promoting — how that could happen. However, this is definitely an area where there needs to be continued and aggressive vigilance on the part of corporate users to ensure that operating environment interoperability results. It would certainly not be wise — at least not yet — to assume that one of these approaches will become dominant.
