Archive for April, 2007

did you now what this plus sign do!? (more…)

Steve Jobs’ new partnership with EMI to sell music without copy protection is a lesson in how to wield power in the digital age.

On its website, CMS vendor RedDot (now an Open Text subsidiary) points out that 3 years ago we lauded their CMS product
for its localization and authoring capabilities. Well, we learn over time as we talk to more customers. And products change over time — or rather don’t always change with the times. So it is with RedDot CMS, whose European customers tell us that its localization capabilities are aging, and its globalization facilities surprisingly underdeveloped. It will be interesting to see whether RedDot can make needed usability improvements over the next year while it tries to reconcile codebases with Open Text’s other WCM and ECM tools, and still upgrade its back-end to .NET. You can find more details in The CMS Report.

The long and winding road to DRM-free downloads from a major record label led this week to the door of The Beatles’ label, EMI. To the disappointment of many, the deal between Apple and EMI won’t include the long-awaited release of the Fab Four’s catalog on the iTunes Music Store.

Many large public sector agencies have groups of web coordinators/publishers/masters
that serve as a kind of formal or informal web council. I was recently asked
to suggest some "talking points" for the head of such an agency speaking
to an annual meeting of their web council. Of course, leaders should listen
as well as talk, but leaders should challenge, too, so this is what I suggested
the CEO communicate to the council:

The web is increasingly important to Agency X’s mission. Our constituents
are watching what we do here closely
We all need to think more strategically about the management of
web content
To the extent management means standardization, then I ask you to identify
best practices from your peers in government and industry and push agency
leadership to instill those practices
To the extent management means continuous operational maturation, I
ask you to develop effective and auditable processes that we can apply agencywide
To the extent management means enablement, I ask you to help us test
and implement new web publishing tools that can make you more effective
Throughout the journey we must be guided by the needs of our customers,
and continue to measure and adapt to their feedback

And of course it never hurts to thank people…

Your enterprise accountants may get very excited calculating how
much money could be saved by consolidating disparate content management systems.
Graham Oakes argues, however, that once you ask some key questions, the cost
savings — and business benefits — might not add up….

CMS Watch evaluates technology according to common business scenarios. But is it possible to identify a set of baseline capabilities and attributes for tools in a reasonably mature marketplace like enterprise portals? Janus Boye thinks so, and lays out “state of the art” for portal software, circa 2007…

Today we released The Web CMS Report - 2007. That’s Version 11 if you’re counting.
I have so much to say about the new trends, tools, and challenges
we found that I’ll write up a longer article about that next week. In the meantime,
for a quick review of deltas from Version 10, in this new update we:

Assess how Web CMS vendors are adapting Web 2.0 tools into their stacks
(and find them coming up a bit short — see press release)
Introduce coverage of Enonic, Drupal, Joomla!, and Alfresco WCM
Evaluate MOSS 2007 as a successor to Microsoft CMS
Expand our coverage of standards, development models, and tool testing

Plus of course we update all our product evaluations, drawing heavily on the experiences of you, the customer.

A combination light and drug treatment could save many from suffering through chemotherapy.

CMS vendor PaperThin
likes to tout the fact that CMS Watch cited their CommonSpot tool (among others)
twice for good value (2005,
2004).
See, for example, the closing "About PaperThin" paragraph in this
or other company
press releases. However, vendors and marketplaces constantly change — the Web CMS market
faster than many others. In the last several editions of The
Web CMS Report we have questioned CommonSpot’s value, citing comparatively
slower R&D and problems with customer support at PaperThin. The company
has since lowered its pricing a bit and is moving to shore up tech support.
Value is important, but always a moving target. In the end, make sure to factor
in "fit" for your business scenarios when assessing the value of any
vendor’s solution. [Update, 26 March: PaperThin tells us that this release language was a mistake and that it had removed its CMS Watch reference from other releases dating to last year.]

Oracle’s not the only vendor with overlapping offerings. IBM and Open Text support multiple Web CMS offerings, BEA sells multiple portals, and so on. In most cases, overlapping offerings result from an acquisition, whereas in Oracle’s case, even though the new WebCenter product includes external component, it not acquired from another company.
WebCenter is targeted at organizations that want to build a portal (a website, an intranet, or a traditional enterprise portal) using a J2EE framework as opposed to a Portal framework. It emphasizes so-called “Web 2.0,” and some of the key features in current version or planned in the roadmap are discussions, wikis, IM, VoIP, team spaces and mashups — features you won’t find natively in Oracle’s Portal product, but can be exposed as portlets. Currently, WebCenter is just a first release whereas the Portal is quite mature. But going forward, Oracle has great plans for WebCenter, including an integration with recently-acquired Stellent.
I suspect that it’ll be a long time (if ever) before the company merges its two portal products, and in the meantime, Oracle customers will need to decide between one or both.

For the past two decades I’ve heard about the “coming convergence” in enterprise software between the data and content sides — or, if you like (I don’t like, but other people do) — between structured and unstructured information management. This always seemed like more of a vendor fantasy than real enterprise need, but let’s acknowledge that CRM and ERP systems use free-form text fields and document attachments, while Web CMS and Records Management systems need good data to run. At various points, people have promoted Portal, EAI, and (most recently) Search tools to unify these two worlds. But the whole idea still see,s rather fuzzy. So I’m pleased to be moderating a panel on convergence at the forthcoming AIIM Expo in Boston, where 4 leading lights on this issue will hold forth. I’m going to challenge them to turn the concept around, away from technical capabilities, and make it relevant for you, the buyer. I plan to learn a lot, and hope you will too!

In news from the Nordic market, Danish CMS vendor Dynamicweb has bought all shares of local competitor Synkron. Except for a press release in Danish, few details are out on the sale. It seems like Synkron CEO will lead the new organization and both brands and product lines will be kept. While Dynamicweb has focused on simple scenarios, Synkron has tried to tackle the more complex ones and has worked to line up resellers across Europe. The press release talks about the beginning of market consolidation, something that vendors and press alike has predicted for years and we have still not seen. The joint company will have about 80 employees and less than $9 million revenue, still comparatively smaller than regional competitor EPiServer. Integrating local fierce competitors and still maintaining multiple brands and product lines is an ambitious project. Local buyers may want to evaluate their options carefully until more details are available. Microsoft’s new edition of SharePoint was perhaps looming in the background of this deal, but buyers should remain patient and not rush to Redmond on the strength of one merger…

Managing an intranet seems inherently an overwhelming task. First, there’s
the word, intranet. It sounds important, huge, nebulous, and boundless
at the same time. In most enterprises, the opportunities for internal information
sharing, collaboration, and process improvements are, well, limitless…but
also very difficult to pull off.
That’s why I very much like Step Two Designs’ new guide, 6×2 methodology for intranets. It’s a practical approach to agile intranet development that emphasizes six-month chunks in the context of a longer plan. I especially liked the part about how to create a 1-page “intranet concept,” to replace lists of unreachable goals and supplant vague, windy strategy documents. For about the cost of one developer-hour, this guide is well worth it.

Last week BEA announced the release of WebLogic Portal 10. Unlike BEA’s last major WebLogic Portal release, this release was timed with the version 10 update to the underlying WebLogic application server. Support for the new application server seem like the major news, but WebLogic Portal 10 also brings a bit of its own candy: Web 2.0 tools such as AJAX portals and mashup functionality, alongside better support for content management, and improved administration. All talk of merging WebLogic with AquaLogic, BEA’s other enterprise portal, seems to have disappeared, also witnessed by the fact that BEA keeps WebLogic product management in San Francisco, while AquaLogic is run from Boulder, Colorado. As previously noted BEA WebLogic sales hit a bump last quarter and new buyers should consider themselves warned: Experience with the new release is still very limited, and in many regions of the world almost non-existent. Proceed with care.

Currently on Intelligent
Enterprise you can read my recent review of Xythos
Document Manager Version 6. Though I have a short fuse with those who say
that "basic content services" (BCS) are all that any enterprise needs
for their ECM requirements, I remain nonetheless supportive of "lite"
offerings. ECM is such an overblown and overused term (but it’s the only
one we have) that encompasses everything from huge imaging and case management
deployments to simple document collaboration projects. There is room for all
the vendors who want to deliver value; the problem comes for the buyer to make
sense of apparently similar, but actually widely divergent ECM products in this
confused market. Many niche vendors such as as Xythos,
Saperion, FormTek
or Cimage can tend
to be overlooked as a result, and that’s a shame, because under the right circumstances
they may offer a better fit for your needs than the likes of IBM,
Interwoven or Open
Text…

This past weekend, Theresa Regli and I presented at the 2007 IA Summit. In
a room full of about 80 information architects I asked how many worked with
a Web CMS tool. Approximately 60 hands went up. And of those I asked, who was
pleased with their current CMS. Every hand went down. Without exception. And
what about enterprise portals? About 30 hands went up and 5 stayed up (hurrah!)
when I asked if they were pleased. An informal survey 4 years ago showed similar frustrations.
What’s going on here?
At one level, I think vendors have had a tendency to remain distant from the
IA and user experience communities, and their tools have suffered as a result.
But I also think IAs tend to shy away from technology selection and understanding
how the tools work (that’s what we were presenting about) to the detriment of their projects. More fundamentally,
enterprises underestimate the potential as well as the cost to making CMS and
portal software more adaptable — and therefore adoptable. That’s actually good
news. Poor software can be impossible to fix. Poor implementations can be avoided,
or remedied.

Violence and video games go together like peas and carrots. It’s no surprise that the first video game involved two spaceships trying to blow each other up. By Chris Kohler and Lore Sj�berg.

A year after introducing the X1 pure-electric race car prototype that blows away Ferraris in drag races, the startup company Wrightspeed is seeking investment for plans to morph its demonstration car into a super-fast production hybrid.

By ralph ramah
One of the basic principles of marketing is market segmentation. Matching the right product and services to the right market is critical. This certainly applies to the web design business and industry. There are obviously several market segments in the web design business, let alone the IT business in general. (more…)

By Tarun Gupta

In any successful website four aspects of the game are taken care of and they are development, design, content and SEO. They are the four essential pivots of a website and are perennially important. (more…)

Currently on Intelligent
Enterprise you can read my recent review of Xythos
Document Manager Version 6. Though I have a short fuse with those who say
that “basic content services” (BCS) are all that any enterprise needs
for their ECM requirements, I remain nonetheless supportive of “lite”
offerings. ECM is such an overblown and overused term (but it’s the only
one we have) that encompasses everything from huge imaging and case management
deployments to simple document collaboration projects. There is room for all
the vendors who want to deliver value; the problem comes for the buyer to make
sense of apparently similar, but actually widely divergent ECM products in this
confused market. Many niche vendors such as as Xythos,
Saperion, FormTek
or Cimage can tend
to be overlooked as a result, and that’s a shame, because under the right circumstances
they may offer a better fit for your needs than the likes of IBM,
Interwoven or Open
Text…

By John Greenfield

There have been plenty of promises made to small businesses
about how e-commerce can transform a poor business into a
thriving success through simple technology. Let me say from the
outset, e-commerce must be thought of as an extension to
existing business models. What do I mean? (more…)

By Mark Flavin

While we have become a digitized world, people still like
physical products - including products that they can use on
their computers, such as CD’s and DVD’s. Marketers also know
that physical products typically bring more profits than digital
products as well, because they are conceived to be more
valuable. (more…)