Category: Web technologies & information standards (Page 47 of 58)

Here we include topics related to information exchange standards, markup languages, supporting technologies, and industry applications.

Sun & Microsoft on Open Document Formats & XML Strategy

April 5, 2005 / Frank Gilbane / 0 Comments

It wasn’t too long ago that all document formats were proprietary, and vendors that sold authoring and publishing software had a really unfair advantage over their customers because it was so difficult and costly for organizations to convert their content from one proprietary system to another. It was the granddaddy of descriptive markup, SGML, that led the way to the infinitely improved situation we have today with seemingly universal support for XML, and tools like XSL, XQuery etc. So, if most major software applications support reading/writing of XML, including the 800 pound gorilla of office documents Microsoft Office, hasn’t the issue of proprietary formats gone away?

If you are in charge of protecting your organizations content/document assets, you better not be thinking your problems are over. If you are involved in sharing content with other organizations or among applications, you already know how difficult it is to share information without loss — if it is that difficult to share, how easy will it be to migrate to future applications?

Our keynote debate in San Francisco next week is all about helping you understand how to best protect and share your content. While there are some differences between the Microsoft and Sun positions represented by Jean Paoli and Tim Bray, I think they agree more than they disagree on the critical issues you need to consider. We’ll be looking at different aspects of the issue including technology, licensing, cost, and complexity vs. flexibility. For some background see Jon Udell’s posts here and here, and the Cover Pages here. Both contain links to additional info.

I almost forgot… What does this have to do with my earlier posts on the future of content management and Longhorn? Well, Office applications, like all content applications, should benefit from an operating system that can manage content elements and attributes that could be described in XML. Would this make document interchange easier? I don’t know, but it might be fun to explore this question in the session.

If you have a specific question you would like us to cover on the panel, send me an email or add a comment to this post and we’ll summarize what happens.
UPDATE: Jon says he is in Jean’s camp on custom schemas and Tim’s on XHTML. At our Boston panel I think all of us agreed – of course neither Tim nor Jean were there. Jon is tagging his posts on the conference with gilbaneSF2005.

We are using the category and (more wordy) tag Gilbane Conference San Francisco 2005 for all our SF conference postings.

A New Reality for XML and Web Services?

April 4, 2005 / Bill Trippe / 0 Comments

When business people want to condemn a new technology to a geeky grave, they often say that the new thing is “a technology in search of a problem.” This suggests–quite correctly–that the best technology solves a pressing business problem.
Web services, specifically, and service-oriented architectures in general, solve a number of pressing business problems. In particular, web services allow organizations to continue operating legacy systems that work well and that, for various reasons, defy replacement or upgrade. If you can at least reach a point where the legacy system can be integrated with other applications via web services, you likely have a moderate-cost, stable, and workable means to integrate the legacy system with web-facing applications going forward.

XyEnterprise XML Professional Publisher, Design Science MathFlow Editor Integrate to Support MathML

April 3, 2005 / NewsShark / 0 Comments

XyEnterprise announced that its XML Professional Publisher (XPP) publishing software now integrates with Design Science’s MathFlow Editor. XPP is an XML-based publishing system used to produce scientific, technical and medical journals, as well as many other types of print and electronic publications. Combined with MathFlow’s graphical interface, which supports the creation of complex mathematical expressions, publishers of complex mathematical information now have a user-friendly publishing tool that supports the MathML standard. http://www.dessci.com,

Longhorn adoption, file systems & content technology

April 1, 2005 / Frank Gilbane / 0 Comments

Dan Farber raises the issue of Longhorn adoption and quotes a Jupiter analyst who claims the challenge is that XP is “good enough”. There is actually a more fundamental reason the question of adoption is interesting. What is that and what does it have to do with content technology?

I’ll start the answer with a little history. In 1994 at our first Documation conference, I moderated a debate between Tony Williams, Chief Architect of COM at Microsoft, and Larry Tesler, Chief Scientist at Apple. The Microsoft COM and OFS/Cairo and Apple OpenDoc efforts both recognized the need for operating systems to provide more support for the richness of unstructured information than is possible with the primitive file systems we had then.

Before the debate I preferred the OpenDoc approach because it seemed more consistent with my view that new operating systems needed to be able to manage arbitrary information objects and structures that could be described with a markup language (like SGML at the time). However, Tony convinced me that OpenDoc was too radical a change for both users and developers at the time. Tony agreed with the ultimate need to make such a radical change to file systems to support the growing need for applications to manage more complex content, but he said that Microsoft had decided the world was not ready for such a shock to the system yet, and defended their strategy as the more realistic.

Eleven years later and we are still stuck with the same old-fashioned file system in spite of the fact that every modern business application needs to understand and process multiple types of information inside files. This means that database platforms and applications need to do a lot more work than they should to work with content. I am no expert on Longhorn, but the file system that will be part of it (although maybe not initially), WinFS, is supposed to go a long way towards fixing this problem. Is the world ready for it yet? I hope so, but it will still be a big change, and Tony’s concerns of 1994 are still relevant.

Everyone’s A Publisher

March 30, 2005 / Leonor Ciarlone / 0 Comments

The impact of the Internet on most things personal and professional could be the life’s work of many a sociologist. How we shop, play games, read newspapers and books, and even how we fall in love doesn’t escape redefinition and change. From my perspective, its how we communicate that’s one of the more interesting topics. Safe to say that 10, perhaps even 5 years ago, stating that “everyone’s a publisher” would be quizzical. Now, evidence abounds.

In terms of “social” publishing, blogs and wikis certainly top the list of examples. These days however, those who chat, shop or place a classified ad in a newspaper can also be called a social publisher. And that’s a lot of people.

Granted, the usability of online forms for these types of tasks is usually exceptional enough to hide this fact. But the underlying result immediately publishes opinions, product reviews, and ads to the broadest communication vehicle available today. Even better, the tools are intuitive, fast, cheap, in some cases, free.

In terms of “corporate” publishing, the once contained group of professionals who publish to the Internet is no more. Formalized content technologies allow personnel across most, if not all business units to redefine information creation and delivery — toward the goal of eradicating Web publishing bottlenecks.

The tools in this arena, a.k.a content management systems and according to IDC, “dynamic enterprise publishing products”, certainly don’t boast the same reputation as those for social publishing. In fact, evaluation criteria such as usability, speed and cost often contradicts the notion of “intuitive, fast, and cheap.”

Still, the content technologies software market continues to redefine corporate publishing and support the fact that indeed, “everyone’s a publisher.” And every so often, there’s a real grassroots example of the ever-expanding definition of corporate publishers who create and deliver Web content on a daily basis. From my perspective, Macromedia provides the most recent example.

Since introducing Contribute in December of 2002 for a mere $99, Macromedia has enjoyed consistently growing sales for the past 2 ½ years for this desktop Web content and creation tool. In fact, the company has shipped over 360,000+ seats in less than three years based on the mantra “Web Publishing for Everyone.”

According to the company, users from its business and consumer markets are responsible for the uptake, bolstering a 165% and 258% year-on-year revenue growth respectively. Christening its Web Publishing System in July 2004 with a similar mantra, Macromedia now boasts 250 enterprise customers according to its latest product update release. Both products are included in the company-defined “Information Convenience” category.

Certainly, reputation and marketing have helped Macromedia establish a formidable presence in the corporate publishing arena. A savvy partnership with eBay will surely make a mark in the social publishing arena by introducing Contribute to thousands of consumers.

It’s my opinion, however, that Macromedia’s growth numbers can also be attributed to the fact that everyone is, or at least wants to be, a publisher. And the Internet makes it possible.

Example: in the enterprise, the definition of “everyone” has morphed from the traditional publisher roles such as Webmaster or technical writer into the evolving responsibilities of business unit representatives across a wide spectrum. Borrowing from Field of Dreams, it’s pretty clear that “if you build it, they will come.” Yes, of course it depends how and what you build, not to mention how much it costs! The point is however, that the corporate publishing audience is ready and waiting.

W3C Releases RDF/Topic Maps Interoperability Working Draft

March 28, 2005 / NewsShark / 0 Comments

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Semantic Web Best Practices and Deployment Working Group has released the First Public Working Draft of A Survey of RDF/Topic Maps Interoperability Proposals. The document is a starting point for establishing standard guidelines for combined usage of the W3C RDF/OWL family and the ISO family of Topic Maps standards. The group expects to publish Survey and Guidelines Working Group Notes based on this draft. www.w3.org/TR/2005/WD-rdftm-survey-20050329/, www.w3.org/2001/sw/

Microsoft & Sun: What is the Right XML Strategy for Information Interchange? – Keynote Debate at Gilbane Content Management Conference

March 16, 2005 / Clea Durrell

3/16/05

Attendees to Learn What XML Experts Consider the Best Strategy for Preserving and Protecting Critical Business Content in Electronic Documents

Contacts:
Evan Weisel
Welz & Weisel Communications
703-323-6006
evan@w2comm.com
Jeffrey Arcuri
Lighthouse Seminars
781-821-6634
jarcuri@lighthouseseminars.com

Cambridge, MA, March 16, 2005. The Gilbane Report and Lighthouse Seminars today announced that the Gilbane Conference on Content Management, taking place April 11-13 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, will present a keynote debate titled: “What is the Right XML Strategy for Information Interchange?” Participating in this debate are Tim Bray, Director of Web Technologies for Sun, Jean Paoli, Senior Director, XML Architecture at Microsoft, and Jon Udell, Lead Analyst at InfoWorld. The keynote takes place on April 11th at 3:45 p.m.

The keynote debate description: Until recently it was difficult and costly to preserve your content in an “open” industry standard format so that it wasn’t, in effect, held hostage by being in a software vendor’s proprietary format and their own product and business goals. Integration of office documents into enterprise applications was a risky proposition for the same reason. With the widespread adoption of XML, and in particular Microsoft’s support for XML in their Office suite, it seems like enterprises should finally be able to own their own information, share it with whom they want, and integrate office documents into critical enterprise applications. But is it really that simple?

At one level this can be framed as a debate between Microsoft and Sun/OpenOffice.org – and that is a choice organizations will have to make, but it is more complicated than that. In spite of the fact that OpenOffice and Microsoft Office both provide comprehensive XML support, there are still subtle differences that need careful consideration. Is one more “open” than the other? What are the practical implications of each approach? What are the relevant technical, legal, policy, and resource considerations? This is a significant issue: governments in Europe and in the U.S. (e.g., Massachusetts) are making policy/ purchasing decisions about “open” document formats as well as about open source code. This panel will look at all sides of the debate, peel away the political and marketing hype, and provide you with a clear understanding of the real issues so you can make your own well-informed decisions.

“Although XML has been around for years, this remains an underestimated and misunderstood issue,” said Frank Gilbane, Conference Chair, “Developers, IT managers, and business managers will all learn from Tim, Jean, and Jon, who have emerged as the chief industry spokespeople because of their deep knowledge of this issue from both an application and technical perspective, as well as a facility for eloquence and refreshing straightforwardness.”

This event brings together 750 thought leaders and practitioners to provide attendees with actionable advice, techniques, best practices, and case studies to help understand and successfully implement content technologies critical to their businesses.

The Gilbane Conference on Content Management is unique in that the majority of its conference sessions are delivered by industry analysts and researchers to offer attendees a neutral and balanced market perspective related to content technologies and trends. The program is organized into five technology-specific areas: Content Management, Enterprise Search & Knowledge Management, Content Technology Works (case studies), Document & Records Management & Compliance, and Enterprise Information Integration.

Full event details can be found at: https://gilbane.com/San_Francisco_05.html

About Bluebill Advisors, The Gilbane Report
Bluebill Advisors, Inc. serves the content management community with publications, conferences and consulting services. The Gilbane Report administers the Content Technology Works(TM) program disseminating best practices with partners Software AG (TECdax:SOW), Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ:SUNW), Artesia Technologies, Atomz, Astoria Software, ClearStory Systems (OTCBB:INCC), Context Media, Convera (NASDAQ:CNVR), IBM (NYSE:IBM), Mark Logic, Open Text (NASDAQ:OTEX), Trados, Vasont, and Vignette (NASDAQ:VIGN). www.gilbane.com

About Lighthouse Seminars
Lighthouse Seminars’ events cover information technologies and “content technologies” in particular. These include content management of all types, digital asset management, document management, web content management, enterprise portals, enterprise search, web and multi-channel publishing, electronic forms, authoring, content and information integration, information architecture, and e-catalogs. http://www.lighthouseseminars.com

XBRL on the Inside?

March 2, 2005 / Bill Zoellick / 1 Comment

In the middle of this month a new SEC rule will go into effect, allowing companies to voluntarily submit EDGAR filings in XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language). As the rule explains, the SEC is interested in “allowing registrants, the Commission and others to test and evaluate tagging technology.”

In a press release on the topic early last month, SEC Chairman William H. Donaldson said that “this initiative is part of the Commission’s broader effort to improve the quality of information available to investors and the marketplace. By working to enhance the Commission’s filing and disclosure process through the use of new data formats, including tagged data, the Commission can improve how content is organized and analyzed.”

What This Might Mean

The interesting thing about sending out financial reports tagged with XBRL is that you can analyze the reports automatically. Rather than manually picking through the numbers, you can use software to compute values and ratios for things such as working capital, free cash flow, asset utilization, and so on. You could then automate comparisons between companies, or could load data into spreadsheets for more detailed analysis. Widespread use of XBRL could transform the financial marketplace, bringing new transparency. An analogy might help bring the impact of all this into focus …

It used to be that, if you were buying something sold through specialized retailers … say, a really good camera or a high-end audio system … you did your product research by visiting lots of stores and reading lots of magazines. It was even more difficult to get a transparent view into the pricing of such products. All that changed with the advent of the Internet. On the Internet, buyers had access to professional reviews, discussions and evaluations by consumers who owned the products, and could find broadly available pricing information. Shopping “Bots” even automated the pricing comparisons. The result has been the emergence of a more competitive, more transparent marketplace. XBRL has the potential to bring some of the same changes to the securities market.

Further, as Amey Stone suggested in a BusinessWeek article titled
“After Sarbanes-Oxley, XBRL?” the SEC’s interest in XBRL could make such possibilities more than theoretical. She suggested that, “like many SEC voluntary programs, it’s likely to become mandatory if it’s successful.”

What’s In This for Public Companies?

All of this leaves open the question of why senior management should want to support this, short of someday finding that it turns into a requirement. Does XBRL do any good for the companies that use it?

It seems to me that the answer to that question depends on where the XBRL is being used. Here is a diagram taken from the XBRL International website. It shows that there are a number of very different ways to use XBRL:

The two kinds of applications on the right of this diagram are what the SEC is talking about. For these applications, it does appear that the benefit of XBRL is primarily for external users of financial information. But, if XBRL were also used in the kinds of applications on the left side of this picture–aiding in the preparation of internal financial reports and in the translation from internal to external reports–there could be very substantial benefits from XBRL adoption. I could also see applications to compliance and internal control initiatives.

Are any readers engaged in XBRL applications that would fall on in the left half of this diagram? Is anyone thinking about it? Does this seem like a good idea? Send an e-mail or post some comments …

Category: Web technologies & information standards (Page 47 of 58)

Sun & Microsoft on Open Document Formats & XML Strategy

A New Reality for XML and Web Services?

XyEnterprise XML Professional Publisher, Design Science MathFlow Editor Integrate to Support MathML

Longhorn adoption, file systems & content technology

Everyone’s A Publisher

W3C Releases RDF/Topic Maps Interoperability Working Draft

Microsoft & Sun: What is the Right XML Strategy for Information Interchange? – Keynote Debate at Gilbane Content Management Conference

3/16/05

XBRL on the Inside?

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