eZ Publish, a provider of enterprise content management solutions, now is available in a cloud version to meet the Web publishing needs of mid- and smaller-sized organizations. Called Granite Horizon In The Cloud, the eZ Publish content management system (CMS) is available on a software as a service (SaaS) basis through Granite Horizon LLC, a California-based web developer and implementer. GH In The Cloud is based on the eZ Publish platform with added extensions and custom features including a basic mobile site version, e-commerce and payment gateway, Google Analytics integration and RSS import/export. The service is hosted at a Tier IV data center with financial grade security and N+2 redundancy for complete reliability. GH In The Cloud is offered on two levels, determined by the need for custom workflows, storage and bandwidth. http://granitehorizon.com http://ez.no
Category: Enterprise software & integration (Page 22 of 31)
Traditionally, publishing is a pushy process. When I have something to say, I write it down. Perhaps I revise it, check with colleagues, and verify my facts with appropriate authorities. Then I publish it, and move on to the next thing – without directly interacting with my audience and stakeholders. Whether I distribute the content electronically or in a hard copy format, I leave it to my readers to determine the value of whatever I publish.
However, as we describe in our recently completed report Smart Content in the Enterprise, XML applications can transform this conventional publishing paradigm. By smart content, we mean content that is granular at the appropriate level, semantically rich, useful across applications, and meaningful for collaborative interaction.
From a business perspective, smart content adds value to published information in new and compelling ways. Let’s consider the experiences of NetApp and Warrior Gateway, two of the organizations featured in our report.
NetApp
As a provider of storage and data management solutions, NetApp has invested a lot of time and effort embracing DITA and restructuring its technical documentation. By systematically tagging and managing content components, and by focusing on the underlying content development processes, writers and editors can keep up with the pace of product releases.
But there is more to this publishing process orientation. Beyond simply producing product information faster and cheaper, NetApp is poised to make publishing better. The company can now easily support its reseller partners by providing them with the DITA tagged content that they can directly incorporate into their own OEM solutions. Resellers’ customers get just the information they need, directly from the source. With its XML application, NetApp incorporates its partners and stakeholders into its information value chain.
Warrior Gateway
As a content aggregator, Warrior Gateway collects, organizes, enriches, and redistributes content about a wide range of health, welfare, and veteran-related services to soldiers, veterans, and their families. Rather than simply compiling an online catalog of service providers’ listings, Warrior Gateway restructures the content that government, military, and local organizations produce, and enriches it by adding veteran-related categories and other information. Furthermore, Warrior Gateway adds a social dimension by encouraging contributions from veterans and family members.
Once stored within the XML application powering Warrior Gateway, the content is easily reorganized and reclassified to provide the veterans’ perspective about areas of interest and importance. Volunteers working with Warrior Gateway can add new categories when necessary. Service providers can claim their profile and improve their own data details. Even the public users can contribute to content to the gateway, a crowd sourcing strategy to efficiently collect feedback from users. With contributions from multiple stakeholders, the published listings can be enriched over time without requiring a large internal staff to add the extra information.
Capturing New Business Value
There’s a lot more detail about how the XML applications work in our case studies – I recommend that you check them out.
What I find intriguing is the range of promising and potentially profitable business models engendered by smart content. Enterprise publishers have new options and can go beyond simply pushing content through a publishing process. Now they can build on their investments, and capture the pull of content value.
IBM announced the acquisition of Datacap Inc., a privately-held company based in Tarrytown, NY. Datacap is a provider of software that enables organizations to transform the way they capture, manage and automate the flow of business information to improve business processes, reduce paper costs or manual errors and meet compliance mandates. Financial terms were not disclosed. The acquisition strengthens IBM’s ability to help organizations digitize, manage and automate their information assets, particularly in paper-intensive industries such as healthcare, insurance, government and finance. Additionally, regulations such as HIPAA and Sarbanes-Oxley have demanded new standards and now legislation is encouraging the adoption of new records management solutions, including scanning and capture to increase accuracy, lower costs and speed business processes to meet these regulations. http://ibm.com http://www.datacap.com/
Acquia has launched Drupal Gardens into private beta today, e-mailing out invites to the intial batch of people who signed up to be beta testers. Drupal Gardens is a hosted version of Drupal which is remotely installed, hosted and upgraded. It is designed to have an interface similar to sites such as WordPress.com or Ning. Equipped with multi-user blogging, commenting, forums, custom content types, and advanced user management, Drupal Gardens aims to be a tool for organizations that want to build social sites. While currently on a private beta you can sign up to request an invite, and Acquia expects to transition to a public beta by spring 2010. Drupal Gardens will be available for free to the public throughout all of 2010. www.drupalgardens.com/
EntropySoft announced the commercial release of an Open Text Vignette Content Management connector. Features for the read/write connector include preparing Vignette content for search, e-discovery, Records Management or for daily document transfers. This connector aims to facilitate web publishing of content coming from different sources and speed up the update of sites. The connector should also be able to integrate vertical applications working with Vignette content. The EntropySoft Vignette Content Management connector works with the Vignette Management Console API. The connector is a single java library, a .jar file. The EntropySoft Vignette connector allows the creation and modification of Vignette objects such as sites, channels, projects and documents. The Vignette connector will be CMIS-compliant when the specification is available. The Vignette connector can also be integrated in third-party applications or used in conjunction with EntropySoft’s content hub or Content ETL. http://www.entropysoft.net
Alfresco Software announced that it has included the OASIS Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) Version 1.0 in Alfresco Community 3.2 to enable developers and organizations to participate in the public review process. The OASIS CMIS Technical Committee (TC) has recently approved CMIS Version 1.0 as a Committee Draft and announced the start of a two month public review period. The objective of the CMIS specification is to deliver a common REST or Web Services API that can be used to develop write-once, run-anywhere, next generation content and social applications. The CMIS specification is backed by vendors including Alfresco, Adobe Systems, EMC, IBM, Microsoft, OpenText, Oracle and SAP. As an OASIS TC member, Alfresco is able to offer an implementation of CMIS for developers who wish to participate in the public review process. The public review ends December 22, 2009. The OASIS TC has issued an open invitation to comment and strongly encourage feedback from potential users and developers. CMIS 1.0 Public Review can be downloaded with Alfresco Community 3.2 at: http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Download_Community_Edition.
As I pointed out in my first post (SharePoint: Without the Headaches – A Discussion of What is Available in the Cloud,) you don’t necessarily need to host SharePoint in your own organization. Although I believe that most businesses should focus on leveraging the front end of SharePoint to its full extent, it is important for non-technical users to have an understanding of what it takes to host SharePoint and why one might want to do so. Therefore, this post provides a discussion of what it takes to host SharePoint and the driving factors for hosting SharePoint.
Microsoft’s original intent was to build a tool that was easy to leverage by non-technical users. Microsoft thought of this as the natural extension of Office to the web[1]. That being said, the complexities got away from Microsoft, and in order to leverage a number of features one needs access to the back end.
Before delving into the SharePoint back end, let me point out that many businesses hire SharePoint development staff, both permanent and on a consulting basis. I think that developing custom SharePoint code should be done only after thoroughly justifying the expense. It is often a mistake. Instead, organizations should clearly define their requirements and then leverage a high quality third party add-on. I will mention some of these at the end of the post.
SharePoint is a fragile product and therefore custom code for SharePoint is very expensive to develop, test, and deploy. Furthermore, custom code often needs to be rewritten when migrating to the next release of SharePoint. Finally, SharePoint is a rapidly growing product, and chances are good that custom code may soon become obsolete by new features in the next generation.
In my first post, I pointed out that inexpensive SharePoint hosting options are available in the cloud. These options tend to be limited. For example, the inexpensive rentals do not provide much security, only provide WSS (not MOSS), and do not allow one to add third party add-ins. It is possible to lease custom environments that don’t surrender to any of these limitations, but they come at a cost. (Typically starting at $500 per month[2].) I believe that robust MOSS offerings with third party add-ons will be available at competitive prices within two years.
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[1] SharePoint is developed by the Office division.
[2] For example, FPWeb offers a SharePoint hosted environment with the CorasWorks Workplace Suite included starting at $495 per month.
If you’re like me and have been thinking about CMIS (Content Management Interoperability Services), but need some use cases to help you conceptualize it better, Laurence Hart has put together a very useful presentation. He welcomes comments.
As usual, Robin Cover has a great list of resources here.
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