Some of you may have seen the press release from us yesterday announcing our new consulting practice focused on the needs of commercial and corporate publishers. Of course this is not a new area for us – Bill Trippe especially, has long been very active in the publishing space – but rather a dramatic expansion of our activities in an area we know well. It is great to be working with Steve Paxhia again, who will be running this practice. It will also be great to be working more regularly with Gene Gable, Thad McIlroy, Bill Rosenblatt, and Dale Waldt. Here is a description of the practice. We’ve already launched the practice, but most of our team and our partners will also be at Gilbane San Francisco, where we have a lot of content relevant to publishers including (but not limited to!) the new Automated Publishing track.
Category: Publishing & media (Page 47 of 53)
For Immediate Release:
3/28/06
Industry experts Gable, McIlroy, and Rosenblatt join Paxhia, Trippe, Laplante, and Ciarlone to form uniquely powerful team of thought leaders
Contacts:
Steve Paxhia
617.497.9443 ext 214
steve@gilbane.com
Mary Laplante
617.497.9443 ext 212
mary@gilbane.com
Cambridge, MA, March 28, 2006. The Gilbane Report announced a new consulting practice focused on the needs of both commercial and enterprise publishing professionals. Gilbane has assembled a team of industry leading thinkers and doers who have many years experience in deploying technology to create profits. Questions they can help you answer include:
- Where could publishing technology have the greatest impact on our organization’s profits?
- Should our organization incorporate new technologies like wikis and blogs into our processes and product offerings?
- What are the best practices for developing products to be published in multiple media formats?
- How can our organization develop new electronic products derived from our existing content?
- How can we efficiently produce and manage customized versions of our products?
- Are our current technology platform and vendors the most cost effective?
- What are the best technology choices for the new project that we are starting?
“I am thrilled to have publishing and software industry veteran and colleague Steve Paxhia join us to run this important practice.” said Frank Gilbane, “We have been providing advice on publishing strategies and technology since the mid-eighties, but Steve brings a vision and focus of what commercial publishers and enterprises can, and should, be doing with publishing technology that will dramatically expand our ability to manage a broad range of large projects immediately”.
The Gilbane team’s expertise ranges from very strategic to cutting edge technical. While technology projects and decisions can often be complex, our goal is to help our clients clarify the key success factors and then empower their organizations to make the best decisions. Members of the Gilbane team include:
- Steve Paxhia, Vice President & General Manager, Publishing Strategy and Technology Consulting Practice
- Mary Laplante, Vice President Consulting Services
- Bill Trippe, Senior Consultant
- Leonor Ciarlone, Senior Consultant
In addition to our own team we have partnered with noted publishing industry experts:
- Bill Rosenblatt, President, GiantSteps Media Technology Strategies
- Gene Gable, President, Gene Gable Industries
- Thad McIlroy, President, Arcadia House
Meet this powerful team of experts at Gilbane San Francisco, in the Automated Publishing Track of the Content Technology conference or in the Enterprise Digital Rights Management conference. Contact Steve Paxhia for an appointment.
About Gilbane Report Consulting
The Gilbane Report serves the content technology and publishing community with publications, conferences and consulting services. The Gilbane Report also administers the Content Technology Works program disseminating best practices with partners Software AG (TECdax:SOW), Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ:SUNW), Artesia Digital Media, a Division of Open Text, Astoria Software, ClearStory Systems (OTCBB:INSS), Context Media (Oracle, NASDAQ: ORCL), Convera (NASDAQ:CNVR), IBM (NYSE:IBM), Idiom, Mark Logic, Open Text Corporation (NASDAQ:OTEX), SDL International (London Stock Exchange:SDL), Vasont Systems, Vignette (NASDAQ:VGN), and WebSideStory (NASDAQ:WSSI). https://gilbane.com
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Sarah O’Keefe from Scriptorium noted and commented on a great discussion of DITA and DocBook by Norm Walsh, the guru of DocBook. Norm was a featured speaker at last week’s DITA 2006 conference. Norm’s discussion is readable and lucid, and if you have been wondering about this question for a while, Norm’s post is required reading.
Jon Udell has an elegant post today on how we can get trapped in the blinders of our language use. The point he makes is true in general, but he applies it specifically to publishers stuck in old business models, as well as to buzzword-happy information technologists. Read his post to understand the title. Wittgenstein would applaud.
As Frank reported in our news, Documentum has acquired DRM vendor Authentica (more detail here). Bill Rosenblatt, who is chairing the Enterprise DRM Conference that is part of Gilbane San Francisco, says it is a watershed event for the industry. I agree. As Gilbane colleagues Glen Secor and David Guenette have pointed out (here and here, respectively), DRM is a piece of a broader network infrastructure that needs to be in place for more comprehensive document and content security. In truth, none of the ECM vendors has taken this very seriously so far, but the Authentica acquisition suggests Documentum may finally be doing so.
Onfolio, a company and tool I have used and liked, is being acquired by Microsoft. Onfolio is led by J. J. Allaire, one of the incredibly bright and hands-on entrepeneurial Allaire brothers who developed Cold Fusion. According to the Boston Globe, the entire six-person Onfolio team is moving from Massachusetts to Redmond. This is much like the case of Ray Ozzie’s Groove, where Microsoft is acquiring Allaire as much as they are acquiring Onfolio.
Also according to the Boston Globe, the Onfolio tool, which came in three retail versions ranging in price from $30 to $149, will be available for free, starting today, as part of the Windows Live Toolbar. However, I checked the Windows Live Ideas site quickly and couldn’t find it.
UPDATE: The Toolbar Beta is there now.
Vasont Systems announced that a standard Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) setup is included with every installation of the Vasont Content Management System. Vasont’s standard DITA setup is included at no extra cost. Users can choose to install the optional DITA setup when installing Vasont. In addition, Vasont is able to support any industry-standard XML DTDs such as DocBook and S1000D. For users with complex content, Vasont also supports proprietary DTDs created to accommodate an organization’s specific business logic. Multiple DTDs can also be used in Vasont when one DTD doesn’t fit all of an organization’s content. http://www.vasont.com
Hopefully some of you tuned in to our webinar yesterday and have had a chance to read the companion whitepaper. My radio theme – or podcast if you are so inclined – for the title of this blog is intentional. In fact, I also toyed with “Mixing Content and Web 2.0” to illustrate “the remix factor” — an intrinsic part of the Web 2.0 “engaging the user” vision and one of the reasons why professors call O’Reilly Media’s SafariU “revolutionary.”
Remixing. Familiar to your teenagers and made famous by iTunes, but not a word well known in corporate circles. Using Web services and MarkLogic Server, O’Reilly delivers a user interface that allows higher education professors to reassemble – or remix – sections and chapters from a vast library of O’Reilly and partner books to, in CJ’s words, suit their needs. Suit their needs. Since when do software applications suit the user needs without the word “customization” being part of the equation?
In terms of content applications and Web 2.0, since now. Is this analogous to the radio industry’s evolution? Absolutely. Can it provide new revenue for publishers through a compelling product? Definitely. Ian Krantz over at the Really Strategies blog continues the conversation. And CJ Rayhill , O’Reilly’s Chief Information Officer and General Manager of O’Reilly’s Education Division, is obviously the source.
Yesterday, the webinar audience asked me what parts of the SafariU story are universally applicable. Read on to see what I said. Also, feel free to submit questions and comments here about what you read and hopefully listened to about the SafariU case study. (I will let you know when the archive is available). Let’s continue the conversation!
What O’Reilly success factors are universal?
“When the Gilbane team evaluates a customer story as a potential CTW case study, we specifically look for elements of the deployment that would benefit other adopters of content technologies. So, how can we generalize O’Reilly success? Here are a few key factors that are universal.
First, we could not agree more with the Web 2.0 principle that — Data (including O’Reilly’s atomized content term — is the next Intel Inside. Having spent over 20 years researching and writing about content technologies, The Gilbane Report has consistently focused on how content technology can be used for enterprise business applications and how content and computing will evolve. Today, the power of “content as a corporate asset” is clearly one of the success factors for a myriad of business applications, commercial products, and community and government services. The same can be said for the rising intersection between content, collaboration and community – technology is enabling it and SafariU has clearly delivered it.
Secondly, as XML enjoys its eighth birthday this month, its application to gold source content is evident throughout many industries. Although regularly applied to data exchange during its first five years, it is the more recent years that demonstrate the value of content intelligence, flexibility, and reuse as enabled by XML and sister standards like XQuery. This value is reaping significant ROI for those making the commitment and investment.
Finally, O’Reilly’s is engaging their customers in new ways while simultaneously delivering strategic improvements to higher education. Their approach demonstrates the power of CJ’s infrastructure quote when describing Mark Logic Server, which gives O’ Reilly the power to single source both their content and infrastructure expand into higher education today, and more verticals in the near future. These are universal factors that you can take back as input to your own content strategies.” Leonor Ciarlone
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