One of the fastest ways to mobilize your existing websites is to license special mobile middleware tools.  These tools access source content on your existing site but then apply a mobile-friendly layout to it. Key players include Dudamobile (also offered by Google via its GoMo initiative), dotMobi (offered by many hosting providers like GoDaddy) and many others of various types including open source libraries.

Most such "mobilize-an-existing-site" approaches work in a similar way. They act as a proxy between the visitor and your site and then perform what was classically called screen-scraping or web-clipping. Once they scrape content, they can then re-purpose and serve it to mobile devices.

Besides being a quick approach, proponents argue that you can reuse your existing site without making any major changes and thus save money, time, and hassle. I don't disagree with that conclusion, but I see this only as a short-term stopgap that you should consider while you evaluate a long-term approach.

The reason is, there are several problems with this quick-fix approach:

1. You've added an additional layer between your visitor and content. This obviously has performance implications because typically, screen-scraping happens on the fly. Sure, you can optimize and cache some of it, but you still have an additional layer to worry about.
2. This one proxy can become a single point of failure that's probably outside of your control, despite your other investments in rendundancy and reliability that you or your hosting partner have made. 
3. There are many problems with screen scraping itself. The quality of results will depend on the nature of the JavaScript, AJAX, CSS, and Forms code you've applied.  Your mileage will vary.

Besides these technical issues, my bigger problem is that this approach considers mobile as an "add-on" and not necessarily a channel becoming as important or more so than desktop access.

My recommendation to to our subscribers who are evaluating how to mobilize their web presence is to certainly consider this approach -- but only as a quick-and-dirty solution. If required, you should go back to the basics and evolve a strategy that treats mobile users with respect they deserve. This will inevitably require taking a hard look at your content strategy and your CMS technology. In fact, our recently released version 21 of Web Content and Experience Management (WCXM) Evaluation Stream specifically covers mobile capabilities of all the tools covered in that stream.

If you are an RSG subscriber looking for more personalized guidance, you can place an advisory session request here.

They pointed out that, like SharePoint of yore, Drupal was becoming all the rage among US federal web managers under the current administration. So naturally, this SI went looking for experienced Drupal talent. And could not find any. You see, as readers of our WCXM or Social Collaboration evaluations know, experienced Drupal talent comes in short supply, especially since Drupal fanboys promote it as the hammer for every nail (which it certainly is not). 

So what were these SI managers going to do? What nearly everyone else does: find some PHP developers, train them up on Drupal for several months, and hope they stick around for at least a year. That's exciting for the developer community, but what about you the customer? This sort of dislocation can be very jarring to your project and is something to consider when selecting tools.

No, I'm not suggesting you select some dullard WCXM product so that you can find cheap, unemployed developers. Rather, I'm suggesting that you build hype coefficients into your longterm total-cost-of-ownership calcuations. The more hyped the tool, the more you'll have to spend to get foundational advice. In some cases, a lot more.

And foundational advice is critical to any longterm investment. Ask a developer or architect to talk about their first two implementations with any tool. They'll roll their eyes and explain what they'd do differently if they had it all over again. Fine for them -- they got paid. Tough for you the customer.

Be sure to contract with seasoned implementers with at least 3 projects under their belt with any particular vendor. That's meaningful experience. And with Drupal, it's very hard to find today...

First and foremost, you will notice the name change: from WCM to WCXM.  To be clear, we're not after adding more ingredients to the acronym soup. However, the marketplace is undeniably changing. Customers and vendors are moving towards more sophisticated ways of managing their web content and the resulting customer experience. It is no longer just about managing content or just on the web.

With this in mind, we have also updated our scenarios and vendor ratings criteria to reflect the latest use cases, and features and functions we evaluate in the WCXM products.  For example, we pay much greater attention to mobile capabilities, which are surprisingly weak in this class of tools.

Version 21.0 also includes updated reviews of the following vendors:

• EPiServer – focusing on mobile and commerce with Mediachase acquisition, but highlighted by slow penetration in North America despite many hires
• Joomla! – slow progression with some concerns from the community about the impact of the long-awaited major 2.5 release
• Drupal – increasing commercialization under the watchful eye of Acquia, coupled with major talent shortage

Another key theme comes courtesy of today's press release: the increasing trend toward commercialization of open source Web Content & Experience Management (WCXM) solutions.

What does that mean for you, the buyer? You need to keep an eye on the narrowing gulf between open source and proprietary business models and how they might affect your CMS purchasing decision.

We’ve discontinued coverage of the following Web CMS vendors (though you can still access archived versions of our reviews):

• EMC | Documentum (now sunset)
• VYRE
• PaperThin
• Oracle (UCM) -- maintaining coverage of former FatWire tool
• Alterian (acquired by SDL)

We’ll be adding new vendors, including ModX and SalesForce, in forthcoming updates to the WCXM stream.

As always, our WCXM stream subscribers can download Version 21 in its entirety, or just individual chapters, and comparison charts immediately. For those of you not familiar with our evaluations, go ahead and download a free sample here.

I'm excited and proud to announce the new Digital Asset Management Maturity Model (DAM3). Its a collaborative effort between us, Optimity Advisors, DAM Foundation and Henry Stewart. I'm especially happy because personally for me, it was a rewarding experience to work with some of the world's leading experts in DAM and Information Management.

You can read a brief description of the model as well as download the detailed pdf here.

DAM3 is based on Enterprise Content Management Maturity Model (ECM3), an open-source model that we released a few years back and has proved itself hugely popular and extensible. ECM3 was created for projects that usually focus on more document- and file-centric scenarios, and not really for DAM projects. However, the model is flexible enough that it provided an excellent framework to extend to Digital Asset Management.

If you are attending the Henry Stewart DAM conference in New York this week, you can meet most of the team who worked on this model. My colleague Theresa Regli will be speaking about this model in her sessions on Thursday. So if you are attending the conference, do attend the session and say hi.

DAM3 is released under Creative Commons and is free for anyone to use it. We do hope though that if you use it, you will share your feedback. We also encourage organizations and individuals to participate and contribute to further development of this model.

Built on top of their Lucid Works Solr distribution and extended using a range of additional Apache projects (including the Mahout "Machine Learning" engine), this platform allows beta-approved customers to build Cloud-based sandboxes to test their data sources to a satisfactory level of accuracy, without building up the necessary architecture in-house. 

Where this gets interesting is Lucid's reference to "Dark Data" -- their term for unstructured data -- and their acknowledgement that the vast majority of data retained within organizations is such dark matter. Much in the same way that IBM positioned the purchase of Vivisimo to perform a quality control or curation role as an entry point for unstructured data into a Big Data system, Lucid attempts the same with their LucidWorks Solr/Lucene distribution. Machine learning via Mahout adds the potential for some classification/categorization functionalities to be built into this curation process.  All caveats about machine learning still apply here.

As we mentioned last time, sandboxing is where many -- if not most -- customers are right now in their Big Data journey. Whether Lucid's beta program is suitable for these experiments will depend heavily upon your available skill sets to utilize the toolset.

The Problem of Data Quality for Unstructured Content

For me this raises the question of quality -- especially when dealing with unstructured data.

"On two occasions I have been asked, 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' ... I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." (Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher).

Babbage's thoughts on the subject of data quality, were neatly summarized by George Fuechsel a century or so later as, "garbage in, garbage out," or "GIGO."

Understanding of data quality in the world of structured data (think ERP, CRM, BI) has reached a very high level of maturity. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the world of unstructured data, a.k.a., content.  Ensuring that same level of quality for unstructured data such that it doesn't skew subsequent analysis is much harder to apply.

Use Cases on Offer

Listening to Oracle discussing the possible outcomes from Big Data, you hear many references to use cases such as "smart meters" in domestic scenarios, or medical sensing equipment attached to patients. These examples certainly when scaled-out can produce vast quantities of data, and almost certainly that data will provide valuable insight once analyzed.

I would argue though that these are pretty limited use cases that simply extend existing applications.

They ignore the massive amount of true content: from short-form social, to long-form document text. Is this because such content is inherently not useful, or that the problem of quality makes it too hard to glean actionable results?

Reading IBM's own commentary on how they plan to apply their new Vivisimo technology to this problem suggests that they have at least recognized the issue exists. IBM envisions Vivisimo as a kind of content curation tool: federating sources and assembling data sets that have been filtered for quality and faceted together into logical collections. However, while this appears to be sensible in theory, it begs a question.  Why Vivisimo, rather than their pre-existing Content Analytics/Omnifind technologies? Might Enterprise Search find a new role across the board in this emerging area?

What You Should Do

There is certainly right now a paucity of solid business cases for Big Data in the enterprise. Certainly not a shortage of ideas and theories, but customers are still primarily sandboxing sub-sets of data, looking for indications that there are a demonstrable returns on investment to come. As you look for suitable use cases, and your Big Data explorations turn more to unstructured data, remember GIGO and don't lose sight of data quality.

So how far has Oracle progressed? Well, there’s a new contributor UI, a new page builder, deprecation of SOAP-based Web Services, dropped support for JBoss application server, and some other changes.

The new contributor interface, replacing some of the older content contribution interfaces, seems to have been released in a hurry. If you don't believe me, just look at the number of issues related to the UI in release notes. For example, it does not support your browser's back button, and dashboard widgets cannot be moved around if you use IE9. Safari is not yet supported at all.

But all of this is really minor. It’s been a year since Oracle acquired FatWire, and I believe customers were hoping for more meaningful changes. But the name change appears to be the biggest change so far in terms of integrating former FatWire with the WebCenter family. While I realize platform integration can take a while to transpire, WebCenter Sites still looks and acts like a standalone product -- with its separate infrastructure requirements, different user and content repositories, and even its own middleware/integration framework.

Many features remain confusingly duplicated across different WebCenter modules; for example, support for gadgets, blogs, and wikis.

So in summary, Oracle has not done anything to unify and simplify things.  For now, the branding seems to be the only glue.

To be sure, a standalone product may not be a bad option for many scenarios and the product formerly known as Content Server does have many strengths including a well-regarded architecture as we have described in our Web Content and Experience Management Evaluations. 

So, if you’re evaluating WebCenter Sites as a potential web content and experience management tool, consider it on its own merit and not just because you've already made other WebCenter investments. Integrating Sites with your existing WebCenter modules is likely to be far from trivial, despite of what your sales rep tells you.

At NAB, Dalet announced its release plan for Galaxy, which will be the updated version of its core MAM platform, and outlined the features to expect when the package eventually ships. Before you get excited, though, note the timeline: select customers are expected to get a dekko of Galaxy in a couple of quarters and it will be a year down the road before full availability of the product.

Nevertheless, it raises the issue of BPM in the media segment.  In many other industries, BPM tools have already gone through the hype and hoopla routine, and by now enterprises have a fair idea of BPM capabilities and limitations. But in the media and broadcast industry, the BPM star has been on the ascendant only fairly recently, and vendors want to marry MAM and BPM. It won’t end up being a silver bullet but the logic is sound and there is merit to the approach.

No surprise then that one of the key features expected in Dalet’s Galaxy is a BPM engine that allows for greater automation of both IT tasks and user activities. Customers will also be able to configure many workflows themselves, supposedly without having to write code. New UI skins, better to-do lists for users, enhanced rich media editor, integration with additional craft editors (Avid NLE, Adobe Premiere), and support for Google gadgets are also part of the promised package.

On the multi-platform delivery front (which is a high priority item for broadcasters) - Dalet announced that its current MAM product (Enterprise Edition) is integrated with the Video Content Management System (VCMS) from the Australian company called Switch media. VCMS can in turn be integrated with other enterprise systems (DRM, Web CMS) and Content Delivery Networks to distribute content to multiple platforms like web and mobile. In general, a MAM system is also an integration hub -- so think through which integration points make better sense in your scenario.

In addition to sprucing up the product line, the company claims that it is streamlining its support processes, systems, and organization. MAM customers consider support a lifeline for their operations and SOS calls are not uncommon, so you'll want to monitor this very carefully.

Reportedly, the so called "Apple Tax" -- whereby developers pay 30% of revenues to Apple -- along with lack of access to customer data, are the main reasons prompting FT.com to follow others (including Amazon who did the same thing with their Kindle app).

Many argue that the 30% revenue share for Apple is reasonable in exchange for providing a storefront and app store management. I agree with that, and suspect this tax may not be a big reason. In any case, without Apple's app store, developers will need to manage their own download facilities and storefronts (and spend money doing that).  The 30% fee for repeat subscribers, though could be tougher to swallow.

A more important rationale for FT's move may lie in having no access to subscriber information -- something anathema to any publisher.

However, commercial considerations aside, there are more practical and technical reasons as well.

As we pointed out here and here, native apps have an edge over web apps for many scenarios when it comes to user experience and performance. However, native apps bring many challenges in a world of diverse device types and operating systems. The two dominant platforms -- iOS and Android -- themselves have many variations in terms of screen sizes and device capabilities. For example, the recently released "new iPad" may be the state of the art iOS device, but you will also need to support iPad 1 and iPad 2. On top of it, there are constant rumors of a different-sized iPad. The android-based device marketplace is even more fragmented. Now add Microsoft's Windows and RIM's Blackberry to the mix and you can easily see that having to develop and maintain native applications for all these is not a scalable proposition.

Having a standards-based (read: HTML5-based) app, either a web app or a hybrid app, will allow FT.com to target a much wider reader base with only an incremental effort required to support another device/OS variation in future.

To be sure, there are still advantages of native apps, but many of those are slowly getting eroded, at least for the most common scenarios such as news and content consumption. So if like many of our subscribers, you too are evaluating your mobile development strategies, do consider a web based app for your scenario and then decide whether you still need a native app. We explore this topic further in a recent advisory briefing.

Probably the best primer on that subject -- how the internet works the way it does -- is John Naughton's "A Brief History of the Future: Origins of the Internet." Straightforward without being over-basic, it traces the history of the internet from ARPAnet, through NSFnet, to the internet that we are familiar with today. It might be over a decade since it was published, but it's still one I recommend to people interested in internet history.

Predicting the future often involves a good grasp on the past, and in that vein Naughton's recent column "Graphic designers are ruining the web" in the Observer newspaper brought back an old topic of web page weight to the fore. 

He cites a statistic that "[between] 2003 to 2011, the average web page grew from 93.7kB to over 679kB." He goes go on to blame this on what he terms "graphic designers" (falling into that trap of conflating graphic design with web design). Naturally this brought on a bit of a backlash, not least from his own publication's tech team.

It's a good time to have this debate.   The real challenge here for digital managers -- performance for the end-user -- is not going away.  I've just written an advisory briefing for our subscribers, "Address Emerging Threats to Website Performance," which reviews some web development trends that are increasingly having a negative effect upon website user experience.

While Naughton cites images as being the baddies, the real performance culprit lies to a great extent with the vast number of remote elements that go together to make up contemporary pages -- such as advertising and analytics calls. The performance of these elements is difficut to predict, yet all go together to produce the final page render time.

Add to that the increasing complexity and dependency placed upon JavaScript and the yawning gap between available broadband and mobile bandwidths, it must make digital professionals yearn for the days when all they did have to worry about in terms of site performance was image optimization!

As I point out in today's release, the key is to carefully balance web architectures with data architectures...

A couple are worth monitoring since they could solve current broadcast pain points -- when they become available for stable deployment eventually.

Avid Interplay Sphere is a distributed content production system - meaning journalists can create, edit, and finish media assets from remote locations.  When other Avid tools begin to support the Sphere technology, you could have remote access to news room resources.

Avid's Multi Platform Delivery (MPD) technology was also previewed. All research shows that users are ditching the TV in droves and consuming content on alternate devices. This is really a make-or-break thing for broadcasters: if viewers disappear, so will advertisers too, breaking the back of broadcasters. So, naturally there is a lot of interest in following the users where they are going and serving content to them on these new devices/destinations. 

The current multi-platform delivery model in the media segment today is an after-thought and not elegant. So, Avid proposes an overarching "write once, publish many" model for video that in theory hides the complexity underneath from content creators.  It anticipates a process where journalists just use a single interface for TV, web, mobile, and social media.  In practice, there are some very tricky operational, technical and content challenges here.

Anyway, even though it's a long road from “demo to deployment,” these previews provides a rough glimpse of what you as a customer can expect to see come online in the marketplace, and perhaps use it in your own project planning.

Coming back to the present...

What’s also interesting to note is how vendors now position MAM to customers. Previously, MAM was positioned as “super software” that can completely transform the processes, systems, and operations of a media company. When it comes to  MAM, Avid now follows a more circumspect approach that focuses first on solving a particular pain point or optimizing a specific sub-process using the technology, and then perhaps expanding the scope of MAM deployment gradually. 

Probably a good thing for vendors to set more realistic expectations. If you're into anagrams, let's just say that "Avid Interplay MAM" can be rearranged to read "Am Avid, try me plain."

• Globecast-Netia: French vendor Netia has been part of Globecast for the past 3.5 years. Globecast provides production services to broadcasters and is a subsidiary of France Teleocom. Netia CMS consists of a workflow manager and MAM modules.


• Harris: One of the Big-4 MAM vendors. Demos of how the Invenio MAM services are being used across its portfolio of related products. Its current focus is on resource optimization using MAM.


• Primefocus: Primefocus brings the global delivery model to broadcasters and media companies, with presence in US, UK and India. Provides services CLEAR Platform, which also contains MAM functionality.


• Reelway: German company, founded by ex-executive from Blue Order (a MAM vendor acquired by Avid). Has an on-premise MAM (ReelRock) and a cloud version (ReelCloud).


• Snell: Broadcast Infrastructure vendor Snell announced a new MAM solution called Momentum. It’s too early to comment on the product but the launch of a new product in this space signifies the second coming for MAM solutions in general.


• Tedial: The Spanish vendor Tedial comes at this space with with a Business Process Management orientation. Their MAM Product is called Tarsys with clients chiefly in Spain and Mexico.


• TransMedia Dynamics (TMD): The UK vendor TMD has three variants of its Mediaflex MAM solution - for workgroups, mid-sized businesses and large broadcasters. Is also putting the solution to use in Archives and Collections Management scenarios.


• VizRT: One of the Big-4 MAM vendors. Global presence with headquarters in Norway. Viz Media Engine (VME) is the flagship MAM product. Integration of VME with the latest version of video editor Adobe Premiere is new.

Note that many Digital Asset Management vendors (e.g. OpenText) offer video content management functionality but are not included in the above list.

Any hidden gems not here that we should be aware of? Do let me know.

The answer that most portal vendors give you may not be very satisfying. You see, most portal solutions display chunks of information and services (portlets or web parts) via some sort of "theming" mechanism that lays those chunks out on a page. Naturally, their typical answer to the mobile challenge is to develop "mobile themes."

Mobile themes typically work like this. The portal detects the device or mobile operating system and streams your portlets one by one in a different order, perhaps leaving some of them out entirely. That's a nice short-cut for a hard problem, but note that it's not true adaptive design.

Consider for a moment the home page of noted portal vendor, Liferay. Here's the default view in a desktop browser.

Now let's look at the series of screens for that same URL that get presented by Liferay's mobile-aware theme.  You'll see that they stripped out some extraneous or not-mobile-ready portlets.  Here they are, top to bottom.

* * *

* * *

It's essentially a subset of portlets that have been concatenated vertically as I scroll down my iPhone. That's not a bad solution. It allows you to easily re-use existing components and prioritize them in different ways. I recently talked to one intranet manager who gloried in excising various lame-but-company-mandated web parts (e.g., CEO's speech) from her SharePoint mobile site.

The problem here is that stacking portlets and web parts does not necessarily lead to a great mobile experience. The same goes for simplistic mobile templates in a Web Content & Experience Management (WCXM) platform that simply streams down existing page elements in a specific order. The advantage to a WCXM platform, though, is that you typically have simple programmatic access to individual data fields, which means that you can modify the mobile experience at a much finer level.

Meanwhile, back on Liferay's inner pages, their default theme breaks down a bit. The first two screens on any inner page are always the top- and sub-nav respectively, which kind of gets in the way of the real content. To be sure, Liferay could create a different mobile theme for inner pages, though here again, that approach would probably require breaking out of the portlet motif.

In the end, there's two ways to think about mobile web experience:

1. From the top down, taking a subset of your existing, pre-built components and ordering them in a sensible way
2. From the bottom up, rethinking what content and services (and their associated display) make the most sense for your mobile visitors, and re-assembling from scratch

The former is much easier. The latter is much more valuable.

To be sure, other portal vendors suffer from similar deficiencies. For more details on how the top Portal vendors differ in their support for mobile-enablement, consult our detailed Enterprise Portal vendor evaluations.

MAM vendors come in all shapes and sizes, but mostly come by way of Europe

• Some are small and will struggle to field a football team of their own; many more are the size of a small platoon; the headcount of the larger vendors resembles the the average Facebook friend count (190).


• Some vendors span the entire broadcast chain while many others focus on specific activities only.


• Some remain rooted to their home countries while others travel well.

In coming months, we'll publish detailed evaluations of many of these products. For now, here's the sampler menu, arranged alphabetically.

• Arvato: Formerly known as S4M (solutions for media) and now rebranding itself as Arvato, which is its parent holding company. The big kahuna in its home base Germany but also has a US reseller.


• Aveco: Around since 1992, this Czech vendor is one of the early vendors in the MAM space. Their Astra family of products has clients both at home and in South America.


• Avid: One of the Big-4 MAM vendors. Avid Interplay MAM is now part of the larger Avid Interplay Production offering. We already took a look under the hood and a detailed evaluation is available to our DAM research subscribers.


• CatDV: This is a light-weight solution from UK software company Squarebox. One of the smaller vendors in the space and addresses a sub-set of the broader MAM functionality.


• Cinegy: German company Cinegy has broadcast R&D roots and its MAM offerings are Cinegy Archive and Cinegy Desktop. The company actively participates in standards bodies like AWMA (AWMA).


• Dalet: One of the Big-4 MAM vendors. French vintage but global footprint. Announced Galaxy (according to the company roadmap, available to all customers only next year). Has a well put together solution for the radio side as well. Detailed evaluation of the current core offering Dalet Enterprise Edition is available to our DAM research subscribers.


• Empress: Small US vendor who also offers digitization services. Software product eMAM Enterprise is an asset management system for media companies.


• Etere: Italian vendor with a smattering of clients in other parts of the world, including Asia. Perhaps has the one of the broadest MAM frameworks -  called Media Enterprise Resource Planning (MERP), it is a bouquet consisting of resource planning, MAM and workflows.


• Evertz-Pharos: UK based Pharos was acquired by Canadian company Evertz a couple of years ago. The Pharos product Mediator is their MAM offering.

To be continued in Part 2...

Many commentators compare Drive with Dropbox and to some extent Microsoft's SkyDrive and Apple's iCloud. However, you should remember that you have many, many more choices.

On the face of it, most such services appear similar. They usually provide:

• Space for storing files (free up to a limit and then for-pay based on tiers)
• Syncing files with your various devices so you can access them on the move

However, once you move beyond the "mine is bigger than yours" debate, you will notice there are subtle differences among these services.

At a high level, I see four categories of services here:

1. Consumer oriented: Services like iCloud, Dropbox, and SugarSync are really focused on end users and have built some differentiating features. Dropbox, for example even has a Linux client and SugarSync allows you to sync any folder on your desktop and not just the one dedicated folder that most other services mandate.
    
2. File shares with document creation: Google Drive and Microsoft SkyDrive fall in this category. They are still focused on end consumers but allow more than just file sharing and storage. With Drive, you can edit and create documents using Google Docs, while with SkyDrive, you can access Microsoft Office WebApps.
    
3. Enterprise Focused: This category includes services like Box, Huddle, Oxygen, Citrix ShareFile, Glasscubes, Skydox and many others. These really focus on the enterprise segment. Box (like most others in this category) for example, provides granular controls for administrators to maintain access control for files and directories.
    
4. File shares with light collaboration: This category includes tools such as Alfresco and eXo which have traditionally focused on other enterprise needs (Alfresco does Document Management while eXo is a Portal platform), but have now started offering a cloud service that has some bit of file sharing. You could also consider SharePoint Online / Office365 in this camp.  These tools, however, typically lack advanced capabilities, such as file sync across devices.

Doubtless some of these services could be placed into multiple categories, and some will eventually evolve to provide services focused on more than one category.

But if you are an enterprise evaluating these sort of services for your needs, remember to look beyond the hype. Our forthcoming Cloud File Share evaluation research will look at such issues more closely and provide detailed evaluations of these vendors. Meanwhile, if you have any feedback on these categories, please feel free to contact me or leave a comment below.

The "creating cross-platform content" session at the NAB Show highlighted the challenges of truly integrated ad production. For example, TV is a linear medium while web/mobile/tablets are interactive. As advertisers increasingly create content simultaneously for multiple media, there are new and different scenarios that  Digital & Media Asset Management products have to support.

Take for instance, Honda's Good Reasons campaign from September 2011. In a series of TV spots and online videos, actor Patrick Warburton promotes the reasons to buy a Honda and directs viewers to online shopping tools. What's interesting to note is the setting: all the action is happening inside the website frame, with different page elements being pointed to or moved around. Producing this calls for exact synchronization between online elements and the offline shoot. From a DAM perspective, this requires maintaining the associations and linkages between different video / audio parts and image assets so as to be able to package them together.

Another example that highlights the complexities of integrated production is the Coca Cola "Move to the Beat" campaign for the upcoming London Olympics. Music Producer Mark Ronson travelled to 5 countries in different continents to record the sounds of sports while aspiring Olympians practice. These beats, instead of the regular music beats, are used to create the "Anywhere in the world" theme song. Here are more details.

A project like this involves multiple different partners and contractors spread across different countries, complex project management and co-ordination, content security and access controls, asset tracking, as well as different types of workflow both in the production phase as well as when the campaign is running.

As they say in the ad world, "Great ideas need landing gear as well as wings." I'm afraid it will be a rough landing for integrated campaigns with many of the DAM products in the market. Currently, many of them are built to support simple, linear workflows across a single medium. You’ll likely have to employ multiple systems and stitch them together yourself to support integrated scenarios that span across channels / platforms.

But in integrated advertising scenarios I can see the seeds being sown for the next generation DAM systems that customers require.

Vivisimo's major strength historically was its ability to federate results from a variety of other search technologies and bundle them together into something useful. Given that IBM has something like half a dozen different search products at its disposal (including Content Analytics née Omnifind, iPhrase, Websphere Portal Search, etc.) this might be an apposite moment for such a move.

Interestingly, in the same press release, IBM also announced a partnership with Cloudera, an organization that has recently been partnering with Oracle on their new range of "Big Data" appliances. This brings access to Cloudera's Apache Hadoop distribution, which provides the muscle for much of the processing required for Big Data scenarios (along with allied Apache projects such as Hive).

Whether these two announcements are connected is not, at least at this stage, clear. What they do show is a measure of public intent from IBM not to let Oracle steal too much of a march on the enterprise market for Big Data and that, despite some comments to the contrary, federated search apparently ain't dead yet...

As always, existing IBM customers should not rush to buy into this latest offering just because it has a new owner.  For a detailed review of Vivisimo's capabilities, consult our Enterprise Search evaluations.

As you have already heard a gazillion times, converting capital expenditure into operating expense is a key value proposition of cloud computing. Yes, but customers need to understand that cloud vendors have different payment models which can eat into any such potential benefits. For example, a cloud vendor may offer deep discounts if you pay upfront. But does not paying upfront (for a long duration of say 2 years) equate to a kind of capex? Also, almost all cloud vendors ask you to pay the monthly bill in advance, while enterprise customers typically pay in arrears for non-cloud purchases (e.g., 45-60 days after service provisioning / invoicing) -- so there is an interest cost to paying in advance.

These may seem like very small leaks in the savings bucket, but lopping off a few percentage points from a large base of spend means tidy savings.

Media companies are starting to pay particular attention here.  You may not think of it usually, but computing costs comprise a very big portion of movie budgets, particularly when the film involves out-of-this-world animation and special effects. A big line item in the estimated budget of $280 million for Avatar is the IT costs. You can imagine the compute power that goes into movies these days when the Kiwi company Weta's data center is counted among the Top 200 super computers in the world. Weta also created the special effects for King Kong and the Lord of the Rings trilogy. The new recipe for hit movies may well be “star power plus server power.”

Strategic Blue, a UK start-up whose founders have a finance background, is trying to bring smarts from the world of trading to optimize cloud purchases. The company is a cloud broker and dealer. It keeps track of the financial terms of different cloud providers and tries to offer you better terms and conditions by serving as a demand aggregator and may alleviate some of the issues discussed above. Note that you deal with the cloud provider directly for support and SLAs. 

While the rest of the media industry is still trying to figure out the cloud, the finance folks at movie studios are evincing a lot of interest in such models, loosely based on the portfolio theory of modern finance. As they say, but now in a good way: In Hollywood, the really creative people are the accountants, perhaps?

Even if you're not in show business, keep an eye out for opportunities to optimize cloud procurement. If you decide to use an intermediary, be sure to fully understand any commercial / technical trade-offs and the implications on flexibility. And in the end, don't forget to negotiate.

Portal technology remains quite relevant in an enterprise context, and the portal marketplace is not going away. Nevertheless, the marketplace is shrinking in terms of active vendors, in part because Web Content & Experience Management (WCXM) vendors are adding many "portal-like" capabilities to their offerings. More active vendors within the portal marketplace have responded to this challenge in multiple ways. Many have focused on providing better WCM capabilities and have incorporated features such as collaboration, support for cloud deployments, and mobile delivery capabilities.

For a better understanding of the Portals marketplace, you can also check out the following advisory papers:

1. Should you go with a Portal or Web CMS?
2. Eight Ways to Integrate Content into Your Portal
3. Alternatives for Building Portal-Like Applications

To date, the native gamification functionality in Jive (even in the latest version 5.0) was very limited, with basic functionality you would expect in such tools going missing.

The Bunchball add-on is meant to plug such gaps, ideally increasing adoption and engagement of the social network. Users can be awarded points for different actions (e.g., comment on documents, write a blog, answer questions) they perform in the Jive-Bunchball powered social networks, with points getting tallied in different ways (leader boards, status levels).  In theory this is supposed to spur collaboration.

In our evaluation of Jive software in the Enterprise Collaboration and Social Software research stream, we note that Jive is known to OEM third party modules in its platform at a fast pace and swap them out at an even faster pace. Jive is sticking to the script. Much before the current announcement and as early as October 2011, a similar app "Nitro for Jive" had been available. Details and documentation are still scarce, but the new, new module seems to be the next version of the older app.

The jury may still be out on gamification and its merits, but enterprises looking to experiment should note that this is an optional module that costs extra license fees and most likely some custom development to work it into your applications.

It's also worth mentioning that similar Bunchball modules to gamify your social network are available for IBM Connections and Salesforce Chatter as well.

At the NAB show, futurist Marina Gorbis talked about the seismic shifts taking place in the world of content creation and used examples of installation art pieces to illustrate trends like algorithmic content and non-human content creation.

Exhibit 1 is what I call "real-time fashion". In 1998, artist Nancy Paterson created a stock market skirt . Economists say there is a relationship between the stock market and fashion fluctuations. If the market is doing well, the skirt length reduces and if the markets are floundering, the length increases. The installation art consists of the mannequin Judy, a computer, several display monitors, and a mechanical system of motors, cables and pulleys. Some Perl scripts analyzed online stock quotes, and the skirt length adjusted accordingly.

"Painting the town LED" is Exhibit 2. In Erik Krikortz's art project Emotional Cities, the aggregated responses to "How are you feeling today" are used to light up a city's skyscrapers and serve to illumine the city's zeitgeist. You'll recognize the more prosaic version of this as "sentiment analysis" which is increasingly being added to marketers' tool kit.

Not mentioned by Gorbis but Exhibit 3 is "Writing on the wall". The Think Exhibition at New York's Lincoln Center to commemorate IBM's centenary consisted of a 123 feet long data visualization wall, which displayed dynamic patterns based on data feeds from the city's traffic, pollution, and sunshine indicators. The art on display was not a Da Vinci, but perhaps a Fibonacci.

Conventional notions of what constitutes art get challenged in these explorations. Similarly in an age of convergence, boundaries blur and traditional categorizations like platforms and channels can crumble.

Metadata so far has been operating in a linear, unidimensional fashion and has been helping make only basic connections and discovery for us. Are our information models, sense-making apparatus, and systems (and yes, even our own evaluations) ready for this brave beautiful world of multi-dimensional interconnectedness? What do we need to get ready?

Welcome your comments below...

Of course, one of the most satisfying parts of building with Lego is the interoperability of the parts, the way they snap together with a real feeling of rigidity. You can mix and match parts from different kits to create your own designs whenever inspiration takes you. I do wonder whether if that's why I took to being a developer with great enthuiasm.

A few weeks ago, before the London weather decided to bring us a year's rainfall in less than a week, I spent a sunny weekday lunchtime catching up with an old colleague. Before long, conversation turned -- as it generally does with nerds -- to development. One thing that came up in that discussion stuck with me: "I wish people would remember that APIs are not Lego."

Software vendors are very fond of APIs. So fond that they often see the mere existence of an API in their product as a fait accompli in and of itself. However, what this really means in practical terms is, "We're giving you a way of making our product work with others you might already own employing code you'll to have to build and maintain yourself. Oh, and it's going to be pretty-much proprietary. Maybe you'd like to buy some training?"

Not only are APIs certainly not like Lego, they are not equal. Talk to a developer and you'll find out pretty quickly that they range from the well-formed and functional to the fiendishly complex and arcane. Then ask about the documentation. Then probably buy them a beer to recover from having to relive personal nightmares.

The chances are that every piece of software you purchase is going to have to work with a range of others that you already own. Unlike Lego, they won't snap together simply. You'll have to tease them in place via an integration.

The good news is that you probably know well in advance how you like this to work at a business process level -- e.g., content from System A should be sent to System B under circumstances XYZ --- long before you start any purchase cycle. This should become one of your test scenarios that you can subsequently use to help decide which supplier offers the best  technical fit. (Vendor fit is another thing.)

So when you ask "How?" and a prospective supplier answers with, "...via our extensive range of APIs," be sure to request documentation to illustrate their answer. And then validate with developers or with your systems integrator. 

Whilst accidentally treading on a Lego brick in bare feet is one of life's more painful experiences, relying on an unknown and untested API to meet a critical need to your business can bring about much more lasting pain...

We recommend that you make Content Migration a part of your overall project and start planning for it from the very outset. This will allow you analyze your content and make improvements to overall content quality. You will also have better chance of keeping your project on track and avoid any major cost or schedule overruns.

In our recent advisory briefing, Start Your Content Migration Planning Early, we lay out what migration activities you need to plan or execute at each stage in a project, from team selection to piloting.

This advisory is for subscribers to our Collaboration, DAM, ECM, SharePoint, Search, CMS or Portals streams.

For more about content migration, you should also check out our earlier advisory, A Guide to Successful Content Migration in conjunction with this one.

The first part of the analysis summarizes seven key trends in this marketplace. Check out the press release describing those trends.

The second part of the analysis provides a 4D view of 22 vendors.

Slightly modifying what the ancient Greeks said, you cannot dip your finger twice in the same (activity) stream. There is a constant ferment of activity in the E2.0 space, and we try to capture the rate of change of both vendors and their products. This should give you a good sense for the relative riskiness of your technology choices and help you match the options that are right for your enterprise risk appetite and eliminate any nasty surprises for you down the road.

Let us know what you think.