NewsGator Technologies, Inc. announced that NewsGator Enterprise Server (NGES) has shipped to several clients in various markets throughout the world. An application of RSS aggregation tools, NGES applies all of the benefits of NewsGator’s existing products, services and capabilities behind the firewall for secure and manageable RSS aggregation of both internal and external content. Companies are using NGES “Smart Feeds” function to monitor what’s being said about their brand, their prospects and their competition; others are using NGES to subscribe to existing internal blogs or RSS feeds off of their ERP and other business systems; yet others are creating internal RSS feeds for project management and corporate communications. http://www.newsgator.com
Category: Publishing & media (Page 49 of 53)
We updated our survey on enterprise use of blog, wiki and RSS technology for our presentation on the same subject to a group of documentation and training managers yesterday. With 91 respondents the results are a little more respectable. The only obvious differences from our earlier results were an increase the use or planned use of RSS, and the amount of support provided by IT for blogs, wikis, and RSS. We are not sure if there is real “hockey stick” growth going on here – our results don’t show it – but there just might be. Chris Shipley thinks their numbers show it. Perhaps they do, but we need to know more about the demographics. Our own demographics are very broad and include a sizable non-technical component, which could explain the difference. There was certainly strong interest among the doc and training folks yesterday, but deployment was almost non-existent. The only other sort of relevant survey we are aware of is Technorati’s, but that was aimed at bloggers so is a very different animal.
Based on all the evidence, my inclination is to believe the growth is hockey-stick-like. We’ll try and come to some more concrete conclusions on this in time for our keynote debate on this in Boston next month.
Almost forgot to mention the new Yahoo! White Paper on RSS (pdf). If you thought most internet users knew what RSS was you had better read this.
Addendum: Here is more info on the demographics and methodolgy we were looking for re the Guidewire/Edelman survey mentioned by Chris Shipley we referenced above.
When people think of piracy protection, they usually think about music and movies, occasionally about other media such as e-books. But I have always been interested in how Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology can help any company with intellectual property protect these assets. Think of examples like a chipmaker’s CAD drawing for its newest design, a drug company’s formulation of a new medicine, or the draft agreement that gets shared during a corporate merger. Any one of these things is highly valuable, and easily distributable in digital form.
Enter BASCAP, Business Action to Stop Counterfeiting and Piracy. Bill Rosenblatt has an interesting take over at DRM Watch.
CM Professionals founding director and all-around great guy Bob Doyle has a cute take on DITA in the current EContent Magazine newsletter. Bob makes a lot of very good points, and also offers perhaps the best plain-English explanation of DITA’s value to implementers I have read:
While it is doubtful that out of the box DITA will find widespread use without customization (called specialization in DITA speak), the ready-made generic topic, and three “information-typed” specializations called concept, task, and reference, will get documentation teams producing very quickly. These documents will also be easily exchangeable with others. Because specializations inherit (thus the Darwinian name) properties from the general topics, their default behaviors–like printing, conversion to PDF, or XHTML Web pages–will produce decent results when transformed by default DITA XSLT style sheets.
One detail deserves mention though in Bob’s writeup. He refers to a “rumor” that Adobe recently used DITA to produce documentation. We know this rumor to be true, and have written about how Adobe used DITA to produce localized documentation for the recent release of Creative Suite 2. And, to all of Bob’s positive points we can add this one–at least two major companies (Adobe and Autodesk) have already used DITA to produce major documentation releases. Interestlingly, both Adobe and Autodesk used the same core technology to work with DITA–FrameMaker on the authoring side and Idiom World Server for content management and localization.
FrameMaker 7.2 was announced this week (see our news here and Adobe’s home page for the product here). Our news story touches on many of the new product features, but a few things are worth highlighting. Overall, the release is a significant step forward for FrameMaker, and should be seen as very welcome news for organizations that rely on the product for technical publishing.
- The new release adds XML schema support. While Karl Matthews, Adobe’s Group Product Manager for FrameMaker, was careful to point out to me that the schema support does not extend to data typing, I think this is sufficient for the kinds of publishing applications FrameMaker users would develop.
- The product now includes XSLT support. XSLT transformations can be invoked at the time a structured FrameMaker document is opened or saved. This will enable, for example, a “save as” function that could invoke an XSLT transformation on an XML document to create other content sets, metadata extractions, and so on. This is a clever addition to the product, and gets FrameMaker developers away from being reliant on the FrameMaker SDK.
- The product comes with a starter application for DITA. This is also welcome news, as there is a groundswell of support for DITA, and an independent group had been working on a separate FrameMaker application for DITA. This gives FrameMaker users a DITA application supported by Adobe. Moreover, the FrameMaker DITA application reflects a great deal of work Adobe had done in-house using FrameMaker to produce the documentation set for Adobe Creative Suite 2. (For Adobe’s own case study of how they used FrameMaker for this project, you can download this pdf. A related case study at Idiom’s web site describes how FrameMaker was used with Idiom’s WorldServer technology to manage the localization of the documentation into many languages.)
- The new version also adds some additional features and functionality for migrating unstructured FrameMaker content to XML. They have a pretty useful Migration Guide here (pdf).
On the whole, I was impressed with what I learned about the new release. It has some important new structural features (schema, XSLT), and the DITA application is timely and useful to a growing number of potential users. The strength of this release should quiet some of the feelings among users that Adobe is not fully committed to FrameMaker. Moreover, at a list price of $699, FrameMaker continues to provide a great deal of value for its user community by combining XML editing, high-quality print publishing, well integrated support for Adobe PDF, and support for multichannel publishing.
Reactivity, Inc., announced it has entered the enterprise RSS market, announcing that its Reactivity Gateways are able to make XML-based syndication practical for use with sensitive, secure and private content. Reactivity Gateways provide the security and other features enterprises need to take RSS beyond public news, marketing and product announcements, while ensuring that RSS use complies with the privacy and data protection requirements of government and corporate regulations. Reactivity Gateways can be used to authenticate access, secure transport, encrypt single and aggregated RSS feeds and transform RSS data to and from other XML formats. Advanced tracking, alerting, reporting and XML message manipulation capabilities, made possible by Reactivity’s Advanced Messaging Architecture, simplify the compliant use of RSS while enabling enterprises to respond proactively to non-compliant RSS situations and improper identity usage. And Reactivity’s any-to-any interoperability and mediation with other XML and Web services formats, standards, transports and data allows integration of RSS with existing back-end systems. Reactivity also supports Atom 1.0. Reactivity also announced that SimpleFeed has partnered with Reactivity to deliver Secure RSS service. http://www.reactivity.com
Sounds like an oxymoron, doesn’t it? But there are, in fact, a number of initiatives in this space, and Sun has entered the fray.
Bill Rosenblatt has an interesting take on the announcement over at DRMWatch.
Simple truth: there’s no better way to judge the effectiveness of content technologies than by listening to the people that implement them.
When I transitioned from the corporate to the analyst world, I was determined not to fall into the “continental divide” that often disconnects pundits from practitioners. I’ve found that authoring case studies is one of the best ways to avoid the abyss. The process is rewarding in many ways, but the most profound is the ability to connect the dots between the potential impact of content technologies and real-world results.
Another simple truth? Content technology works. CTW’s newest case study on Whirlpool Corporation’s implementation of digital asset management is proof positive. The story describes the journey from departmental DAM to an enterprise brand management infrastructure as told by Whirlpool’s Creative Works organization. Their successes are admirable; their experiences are best practices material; their candor provides vital advice for content technology adopters.
Although I am certainly biased, this case study is well worth the read. Check it Out!
Subscribe to the Gilbane Advisor
