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| Fierce Government IT | Five Tips for Government Web Portal Adoption

Tony Byrne spoke on government web portal adoption at AIIM Info360 in Washington DC on March 24.  During his presentation, Tony offered five tips:

  • Tackle the basics first and use layers
  • Take an empirical, test-based approach to selecting software
  • Make lists
  • Allow requirements to evolve
  • Don't be afraid to start over

During the presentation Tony highlighted specific examples of government agencies trying to use their Web CMS to perform like a portal.  Tony would advise to shy away from that approach.  

| | Federal Tech Talk: What CMS is best for you?

Tony Byrne talks with host John Gilroy about the history of the company and what it can do for the typical technology person, including:

  • What content management system is best for your company?
  • When is a license-based approach more appropriate than an open source solution?

During the interview, Byrne also offers guidelines for those frustrated with trying to reconcile various content management systems distributions

| Fierce Content Management | Drupal 7 released with native semantic technology

The Drupal community announced today the release of Drupal 7, the latest version of the popular open source web content management system. Among the enhancements is a very intriguing native support for RDFa, a technological building block for the semantic web.

RDFa in Drupal 7 provides a way to embed machine-readable metadata into websites, giving the industry a standard way to begin building the Semantic Web. The implications are huge, but as Drupal sees it, this will make it easier for search engines to extract data that's only machine readable, such as location information, to provide a location on a map or the correct date format for a given country...

That said, not everyone was impressed. Adriaan Bloem from the Real Story Group writes in a blog post this morning, it was a big step forward, but he believes it still has far to go. "Version 7 is one giant leap for Drupal, but one small step for man," Bloem wrote. "It doesn't fundamentally change how it stacks up against most of the platform systems we cover. Drupal still lacks a lot of the infrastructure that's considered a commodity in other platform systems."

| Information Management | Content Management Market Split, Analyst Group Says

There is a division between the types of enterprise content management vendors and continued success relies on catering to customer’s specific document needs, according to a report and analysis from The Real Story Group.

In a 2011 marketplace overview, the buy-side analyst firm states ECM is split into two seller segments. The larger segment is the infrastructure vendors, those companies that position platforms as a set of lower-level technology services to manage high-volume needs. The other segment is the document management application vendors, those companies in the market that configure products to accommodate specific needs.

The new year marks a likely “freeze out” of smaller vendors into the larger infrastructure market, says Alan Pelz-Sharpe, principal analyst with Real Story Group. Big vendors like Oracle, IBM, EMC and Microsoft have proliferated with large-scale enterprise content management systems, leaving the document management application vendors to focus on process-specific, according to the market overview.

While there may be a permanent fissure between the two ECM marketplaces, creativity could propel vendors at any level, Pelz-Sharpe says.

| Star Tribune | TV stations' online assistant

As the Internet plays an increasing role in the delivery of news, media companies are looking for better ways to aim news and advertising at specific audiences.

But this can be difficult for television stations because they deal largely in high-quality video that, on a website, becomes a series of huge computer files that aren't as easy to store, publish and search as text and photos are.

So TV stations have turned to customized website software...

TV stations are anxious not to be left behind by the rapid transition to online news consumption, said Adriaan Bloem, an analyst at Maryland-based research firm Real Story Group.

| Fierce Content Management | Hyland releases OnBase 10 with improved case management

Hyland Software has been around a long time. If you need proof, look no further than the release of version 10.0 of their content management product this week. As with many vendors this year, Hyland is firmly focused on case management whether that's medical or insurance or similar vertical.

Speaking at Gilbane 2010 last week in Boston, Ektron VP of Web Solutions Tom Wentworth quipped, "Content is king, but context is queen." What he meant is that without context, the content lacks meaning for the user. And that, says Hyland VP of development Bill Filion, is precisely the idea behind case management.

"Our customers have known that it's not only about the content. It's about the context in which the content is used," Filion said.

Analyst Alan Pelz-Sharpe of Real Story Group says this is a big strength of Hyland's. "OnBase is one of the more mature ECM platforms in the business. It is a transactional system that competes well in high volume imaging and case management scenarios," Pelz-Sharpe said.

He adds, "The firm builds out vertical applications for industries such as healthcare, higher education and banking." These are areas where case management will often come into play.

According to Hyland, version 10 builds on this case management ability. Says Pelz-Sharpe, "Version 10 is not a revolutionary change for Hyland, it is more a bundle of incremental changes to a mature and and solid platform." Regardless, it sounds as though Hyland is well positioned to compete in the case management arena.
 

| Fierce Content Management | Reactions to Adobe-Day purchase

The deal makes sense for both parties

Ultimately, says Alan Pelz-Sharpe of the Real Story Group, the deal makes sense for both parties. "Users of Creative Suite and LiveCycle ultimately want to publish their work through something, so taking on what Adobe would likely see as 'Web Publishing' is a logical step," Pelz-Sharpe says.

As for Day, it comes down to a small company simply cashing in, he says. "Every small technology firm has a point where they want to exit and cash in their chips, the options for Day to grow organically were limited, and growth by acquisition is highly risky--I think it was time, that's all."

| Information Management | Integration is Never Simple

As ECM vendors’ attempts to take the proprietary route fizzle – hoping that enterprises will consolidate all their content within a single repository – vendors are shifting focus to buyer’s integration demands, says Jarrod Gingras, analyst for Real Story Group.

“ECM buyers are no longer viewing ECM as a standalone application; rather ECM is being viewed as an important piece of an enterprise’s IT stack,” Gingras says.

| Information Age | Adobe buys Day Software to be "taken seriously" in content management

 “Although they had some of the necessary [technology] pieces, Adobe were never taken seriously as a content management player,” wrote Apoorv Durga, a web content management specialist for analyst firm Real Story Group, earlier today. “This announcement will surely change the situation dramatically.”

| Fierce Content Management | Fatwire-EMC release web content compliance product

 Apoorv Durga agrees it's a positive development, but is concerned that the new tool could end up resulting in redundant content in the repository.

| KM World Magazine | How do you know if it’s time for a new CMS?

Tony Byrne finds that many enterprises are fed up with their current Web content management platform. But is replacing the platform always the right approach? Changing vendors and tools gets costly, not just in money, but in time and attention as well. That’s why in many enterprises just as many people want to hold on to an incumbent platform as replace it....

| CIO | How CMS, Enterprise Search Promote Product Innovation

Who is doing it: BioMérieux, a global company that specializes in making disease diagnostic tools and detecting microorganisms in food, pharmaceuticals and cosmetics, is developing a system that will use search technology to help it automate early-stage research into new product areas.

How it works: The system, called Strategic Watch, would integrate an enterprise search engine with BioMérieux's content management system (CMS), says Corporate VP and CIO Mojgan Lefebvre. Using search terms relevant to a new area of research, the engine will crawl both public and fee-based data sources daily and pull documents into BioMérieux's repository. The point is to give company workers more time to analyze the data and determine a business case for new products, as compared to manually compiling information. BioMérieux hopes to have the first version of the system live by the end of this year.

Growth Potential: Vertical industries have long used specialty research firms that curate data, says Alan Pelz-Sharpe, a content management analyst with The Real Story Group. "It's fairly new that people are trying to do that themselves." Integrating search engines with CMSes is getting easier, thanks partly to capabilities offered by search and CMS vendors, and to simpler application programming interfaces from data providers.

| Reuters | Beware the WordPress white screen of death
| Valerie Valentine, Information Management Online | Digital Asset Management Lightens Up

DAM vendors rolling out advanced features to compete with Web content management and document management

| Jim Ericson, Information Management | CMIS a Winner for Content Management Customers

Not many people get excited watching tech standards bodies work. Let's face it, when software -- especially big software -- representatives get together to talk about interoperability, you can bet there's a tinge of distaste behind the smiling faces and pledges of cooperation.

| Information Management Online | Specialists Challenging ECM Leaders

Document management software specialists are enriching the product landscape and bringing more choice to customers seeking to address a broad range of content management challenges...

| Fierce Content Management | Optimism returns at AIIM 2010

Fierce Content Management's Ron Miller recaps his experience at AIIM 2010...

| Inc. | What is XML and Why Should Companies Use It?

XML is an international data standard, a sort of lingua franca for computing. To be formal about it, XML stands for Extensible Markup Language. Practically speaking, XML is a method to structure electronic documents, and its aim is to separate presentation, structure, and meaning from the actual content. It's been so successful at doing this, it's now used to represent any kind of data structure (including databases and other business information).

| Inc. | How to Use Internal Collaboration and Social Networking Technology

Collaboration and Social Networking Technologies: The Top 5 Tools

Somewhere in your organization, you are probably already using the five most popular types of collaboration and networking tools. They are:

• File Sharing. File-sharing is the mother of all digital collaboration. When people work together, inevitably they need to share files in a more methodical way than e-mail allows. If you do nothing else, start here.

• Blogs. Blogs are great for sharing individual knowledge and experience, as well as spurring discussion, but not ideal for project-oriented collaboration.

• Wikis. Wikis are well suited to the task of creating shared documentation over time. To manage them, however, most companies find it necessary to assign an active caretaker to make sure they don't become chaotic and lose their usefulness.

• Microblogging. Think "Twitter within the company." Microblogging is better suited to group interaction than instant messaging. Services such as Yammer can help employees share Facebook-like status messages such as "Remember, I'm on vacation tomorrow." It is important to set expectations for when microblogging is and isn't appropriate; it  is not well suited for more complicated discussions, for example.

• Forums. Discussion forums or "bulletin boards" are among the oldest collaborative tools, and still very useful for sharing and discussing ideas around a particular topic, like "where should we open our next franchise?" Unfortunately, forums can be hard to navigate and search.

| PC World | WordPress Guns for Web Content Management Duties

There's a debate raging within Twitter about whether traditional blogging platform WordPress is also a CMS., Our take: many organizations are using WordPress as a CMS. That makes it a CMS.