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.
Category: Publishing & media (Page 47 of 52)
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
Hopefully you got to hear Mary and Bill on today’s radio show. Next up is Leonor, who will join O’Reilly’s C.J. Rayhill in a webinar next Wednesday, February 15 at 2:00pm EST to talk about how O’Reilly Media expanded into the textbook publishing market by creating a custom publishing platform that enables educators to produce more targeted and less expensive teaching materials using MarkLogic Server.
See more details or Register today.
Also see Mark Logic CEO Dave Kellogg’s blog post.
UPDATE: Forgot to mention you can read Leonor’s case study!
Some of you have likely listened to the excellent technology radio show at MyTechnologyLawyer.com. Gilbane Report Senior Editor Mary Laplante and I will be talking about the upcoming Gilbane San Francisco conferences on content management and digital rights management. The interview will be at 1:00 Eastern time tomorrow, Thursday, February 9, and you can listen live here.
UPDATE: If you missed the live broadcast, you can listen to recorded versions here (Real Media) or here (Windows Media). Among the topics discussed at some length were DITA and Enterprise DRM.
So I will be participating in Wednesday’s webinar with Idiom and Blast Radius, “DITA Directions: Topic-Oriented Single Source Publishing for the Web and Beyond.” Most of my presentation will be based on our upcoming white paper, Success in Standards-Based Content Creation and Delivery at Global Companies, which is subtitled, “Understanding the Rapid Adoption of the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA).” The white paper focuses on two highly successful case studies of DITA in use at Adobe and Autodesk. Both of these companies have already produced tens of thousands of pages of documentation and Help using DITA. In both cases, the documentation is being simultaneously, or near simultaneously, released in more than 15 languages. The case studies are impressive and offer a lot of insight for other companies who are considering going down this path.
We continue to be struck by the rapid adoption of DITA across the product support marketplace, and are starting to see uses of DITA outside this specific application. We are hard pressed to come up with other document-management or content-management standards or technologies that have enjoyed such rapid adoption and widespread use. So one of my slides, sampled below, has a litle fun with Gartner’s now classic Hype Cycle chart. Has DITA avoided the Hype Cycle, where the “Peak of Inflated Expectations” is followed necessarily by a steep drop to a “Trough of Disillusionment”? Here we are in the midst of the hype over DITA (indeed, the standard was only formally published in May 2005), and the case studies show productive work being done in advance of the approved standard. Impressive, don’t you think?
I had flashbacks as I sat in the DITA session at the Boston Gilbane Conference. True flashbacks. Back to the days of creating a complex automated compilation “system” to create context-sensitive help for a Windows-based manufacturing control application. Partnered with an object-oriented developer who had better things to do than “play nice” with a technical writer, we managed to build a routine based on Word macros, RTF, Excel, and DLLs to output coded Microsoft help files linked directly to RC files. Convoluted, but it made us proud.
The flashback was not about the coding, although I felt compelled to document the story. It was more about the writing methdology developed with my fellow technical writers. All about standard topics, we developed a core set of help panels based on chunking information into concepts, procedures, reference info (UI and dialog box help) and glossary items. We developed a simple hypertext strategy with non-negotiable rules for what should link to what — and when. (Ended up with a nice triangle graphic for a cheatsheet.) It worked so well that I wrote and delivered a help standards paper for ACM in…. 1993. Still lives!
So, back to the DITA session, which was excellent — CM4 featuring IBM and Autodesk — two real-life and useful stories of implementers from the documentation trenches. Bill wrote about DITA in practice back in October, noting that Adobe techdoc”ers” are also DITA users.
And finally, back to the point of writing methdologies (aka content strategy component,) which I believe is one of the key drivers of the rapid adoption of DITA. DITA = topics = chunking. It is as much a methodology as it is a technology. Information Mapping, Inc., well-known to techdoc folks as a longtime proponent of information organization = usability, clearly agrees. They have rolled their methodology quite nicely into Content Mapper, blending DITA in as well. Their entry into the authoring software market, full of vendors with equally strong heritage, is a good sign for those following the pulse of ECM as strategy (more on that later.)
Takeaways? Information architecture is hot. Technical writer with online help expertise = DITA fan. Getting information from those in the trenches is key — check out What’s New at Gilbane.com and register for a discussion on real-world DITA adoption on January 11th.
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