Collaboration and Content Strategies Blog

Content Globalization and XML-based Content Creation: Goes Together Like Chicken and Rice

Blogger: Craig Roth

CMS Watch reported that

Translation and Content Management vendor SDL has taken a minority stake in privately held Trisoft N.V., a Belgian-based vendor of InfoShare, a component content management system (CCM). There was no fanfare, and in fact no announcement; evidently because it wasn't a full acquisition, the two companies dispensed with any press release. However, I think it's a significant move. When it comes to translation information management, XML; and in this case DITA-based XML, can matter. SDL had previously acquired Tridion, a Web CMS that can be used for component content management, early last year.

I think this is a good move by SDL, which has become quite a consolidator of globalization technology.  I haven't looked at InfoShare before, but buying into the XML-based content management market is prescient of SDL since component-oriented content is very useful for creating content that is going to be translated.

Four factors are compounded to increase the value of component-oriented content:

1. The number of localized variants that the content will be translated into

2. The number of formats that the content will be distributed in

3. The locality of the translation (e.g., needing to retranslate only one section of a document)

4. The frequency with which the content will be changed (thus necessitating retranslation)

When any of these four factors increase, component-oriented content creation starts looking better for any organization creating content that will be localized.  That means translation activities will be easier to track, take less time, make better use of translation memory, and be more consistent.

Note: This is a cross-posting from the KnowledgeForward blog

Google Apps Are Gearing Up

Blogger: Guy Creese

Based on a blog post at Google Blogoscoped, it looks like Google's in the process of inserting Google Gears into Google Apps. This will allow users to work with Google documents offline, rather than always having to be connected to the Internet.

This development is of interest to me because I'm in the process of updating my Google Apps report. Although it came out only five months ago--a short time ago for a report on software applications--it's now out of date, due to Google's continual updates. Google now has Presentations, the company is hinting that JotSpot functionality will finally turn up, Gmail now supports IMAP, etc. While I think Google Apps, Premier Edition still has a way to go before large enterprises will buy it, Google is clearly going down the list of prospect objections and picking them off one by one.

Lotusphere 2008 - Impressions From a Portal Guy

Blogger: Craig Roth

I'm back from Lotusphere and Orlando now and playing reggae to try to trick my brain into forgetting it's -1 degrees here in Chicago.  It's not working.  I posted a set of blow-by-blow notes from the sessions I attended in my personal KnowledgeForward blog (see Day 1, Day 2, and Day 3) but thought I'd post a summary of my impressions here.  My impressions are also based on some good closed door sessions with a number of IBM executives including Larry Bowden and Mike Rhodin.  That picture was then filtered through my portal-tinted lens to result in my view of where I see IBM doing well and neutral (there weren't any big failures in my view) based on the announcements at Lotusphere 2008.

 

I blogged before Lotusphere that I was looking for 2 things.  So how did they do on those?

1. Does IBM have an aggressive compete strategy against Microsoft SharePoint for Quickr and Connections? 

Answer: no.  They have very competitive products, especially in social software (where Microsoft is hobbled without Knowledge Network) and unified communications (where they beat Microsoft to the punch by over a year).  But there isn't an actual compete strategy on collaboration and portal.  I would consider a compete strategy to consist of technology (discovery and migration tools), sales programs (sales training with well-defined messages and materials, competitive package pricing, compensation incentives), and marketing programs (direct messaging to CIOs and architects).  I think SharePoint has huge momentum at the moment and IBM has the capability to compete if it wanted to.  The impression I got from IBM was that while nothing can be ruled out in the future, right now the most winnable areas are in social software and UC.  I agree, but I would like to see Microsoft get more of a fight as I think this kind of competition would benefit users of IBM and Microsoft collaboration products.  But, would IBM have a very good chance of winning the kind of battle I'm proposing at this time?  It's a gamble and the better odds of a payoff are with social software and UC.

 

2. How is WebSphere Portal adapting to the morphing of the portal market into composite applications? 

I like what is being done with WPS to adapt it more to a composite applications mindset and enhance its purpose-built functionality through the accelerators (7 or 8 accelerators depending on how you count them).  I was a bit surprised that the mashup tool was given different branding though, being "Lotus Mashups" rather than "WebSphere Mashups".  After talking to Rob Will about the architecture I am convinced that, given the addition of widget consumption to WPS, it's a smooth architectural fit even though the products are under different branding. 

Here are some other points I came away with:

• Despite the attempts to make big splashy announcements, I still feel this was more of an incremental year.  Last year, with Quickr and Connections, was a quantum leap. 
• There is solid movement into areas the market is looking for, such as mashups, SaaS, and appliances.  But those last two are more of an immediate play to business partners than end users, so there's one level of indirection to resolve before the success of those programs can be judged. 
• The Atlantic project is a good step towards SAP integration that may even nudge out what Microsoft can do with SharePoint since much of Duet is about integration with Office productivity tools and only a little bit is about SharePoint portal-like integration.

Lotusphere 2008 - Innovation Lab

Blogger: Craig Roth

I'm back from Lotusphere and Orlando now and playing reggae to try to trick my brain into forgetting it's -1 degrees here in Chicago.  It's not working.  I posted a set of blow-by-blow notes from the sessions I attended in my personal KnowledgeForward blog (see Day 1, Day 2, and Day 3) but thought I'd post a summary of my impressions and some of the non-session activities.

Below is a quick report of what I saw at the Innovation Lab at Lotusphere.  Three of my interests were represented there: virtual worlds, portals, and globalization. 

Bluegrass

• There were actually four virtual world projects, the best of which was Bluegrass, which was neat because it shows how virtual worlds can be used as a visualization mechanism for existing data
• Architecture: It runs on Torque rather than Second Life, a good choice for business applications and one I expect to see more of to get away from the quirks of Second Life.  Torque does the visual rendering and has client and server components.  The client is C++ with a JNI layer that does the bridging between the Torque client and the interface.
• Content: It renders information on development projects from Rational Jazz such as teams, actions taken on components, and repositories.  Jazz uses a standard textual IDE to allow access to this information.  But Bluegrass acts as an alternate view (I won't say UI since it isn't meant to replace Jazz's UI) to enable better discovery of information, socialization, and brainstorming.  Each team is represented as a tree.  People are shown as, well, people.  When people take an action it shows as a bubble floating up over their heads, like a tweet.  One can look around a busy team and see little bubbles (emitters) floating up, kind of like smoke signals.  Where there's smoke, there's fire in that project! Actions taken in Jazz have instant effect in the virtual world and vice versa.
• Social aspects: You can enter a brainstorming house where sticky notes can be picked up and moved.  This part was ok, but not as cool to me as the rendering of real information in an alternate view.
• Usage: Alas, there isn't a great success story on usage yet.  But it is being picked up by a few teams at IBM and hopefully they can show some sort of improvement or ideas that only came about because of Bluegrass

Contextual Portal

• This project demonstrated usage of pattern recognition to guide the user to pages they might be interested in but not know about, much in the way Amazon makes recommendations. 
• It can recommend portlets, people, and pages based on what others in your same role did
• There is a "contextual search" part that results in a custom portal page with the portlets related to that search, such as maybe entering a company name and getting a legal news portlet, financial information portlet, and ERP system data all with info on that company

Real-Time Translation Service

• I thought the coolest thing I saw in the Lab was the Real-Time Translation Service.  There were a number of demonstrations of IBM's various forays into translation
• One was an IM plugin.  While there are other examples in the industry of 2-way translation to allow IM users speaking different languages to converse, I liked that this one had a dropdown to select the domain of conversation (like helpdesk versus programming), which really helps a translation engine's accuracy
• The speech to speech translation was very good.  Well, I guess I can't judge how good considering I don't speak Arabic, but from the textual translation on the screen it seemed to be picking up the spoken English very well.  He spoke English into the microphone and a few seconds later smooth-sounding Arabic came out the speaker
• The translation tool was like the speech to speech translation, but supported speakers on both ends and a persistent chat window between them.  The demonstration showed speaking in English to someone in Japanese and getting responses back, with the chat window keeping a record of the conversation
• He also showed a shipping product, GALE, that does rapid translation of video feeds.  For example, you can watch Al Arabiya and English subtitles appear at the bottom.  It is useful even for English since the text is stored with the image and can then be searched to, for example, help a PR agency find every mention of a product on talk shows

Lotusphere 2008 - Day Four - January 23, 2008

Blogged by: Karen Hobert

I decided to stay an extra night to see the Application Development keynote this morning. I am glad I did. Allistair Rennie, VP Development and Technical Support, Lotus Software was originally slated to deliver the keynote but he was not there. Instead Kevin Cavanaugh, VP of Messaging and Collaboration, Lotus Software did the honors (a formidable substitute). Despite the change up the keynote went very smoothly and was informative. Unfortunately the keynote only had a one hour time slot. I suspect the session could have gone for at least another hour on all the new tools to develop and/or customize applications, widgets, mashups, portals and more for IBM Lotus solutions. Kevin even admitted at the end of the session that there are many permutations of tools and options for developing for IBM Lotus products that they had not been able to get to.

The session focused on new stuff for Domino and Portal development tools. The biggest news was that Domino Designer is been ported to eclipse and will be available in the Notes/Domino 8.5 timeframe - which is slated for release later in 2008. Sadly developers will have to be patient and wait until then. Maureen Leeland demonstrated some of the improved experiences that the Designer will have in 8.5, such as robust, programmer-grade script (LotusScript, JavaScript) editing and management tools, new design elements for creating widgets and XPages. The XPages seem to be a remnant of Lotus Component Designer (LCD) pages that have been added to the Designer elements list. It allows developers to create a web page via graphical tools and pre-built objects (e.g., pre-coded Submit buttons), apply style sheets and connect to multiple data sources. The demo showed how to build a widget in the Designer and then use it in Notes as well as in Portal. The demos dove home the concept that the developer builds a widget in Designer and it can be used in other platforms like WebSphere Portal. Let's hear it for standards!

The next set of demos illustrated how to customize WebSphere Portal (WSP) 6.1 applications using new features in the browser-based portlet editors. There is support for JSR 268 and WSRP 2.0 for inter-portlet communication in WSP 6.1 (I think I just hit the legal limit on the number of acronyms that can be in one sentence). Dee Zepf (who I had the pleasure to work with on Domino.Merchant in 1997) did a nice demonstration of a few new Portlet Factory (an eclipse plug-in) features for building portlets that can also run in Notes and Expeditor clients. Although this version of the Portlet Factory provides custom widgets that came out of the Dojo toolkit, the ability to create widgets in Portlet Factory will be provided in a later release.

The keynote wrapped up with tools that are part of the Notes 8.0.1 client (due end of February 2008) to create widgets and live text elements that can bring external data in Notes composite applications. The Composite Application Editor (CAE) has been beefed up with many more options for wiring together components in composite applications from the comfort of the Notes client. The final tid-bit showed how to embed a Symphony Editor control into a composite application inside of Notes.

I have to say I'm still unsure of the development model for Domino development. I would have liked to have seen a tools strategy slide in the keynote so I had a frame of reference for all of these options. Who would use them and when would they be used? There was no mention LCD and what happened to it. There was also no mention of building and customizing Quickr or Lotus Connections interfaces. I hope I will be able to get a more complete picture of the strategy soon.

Lotusphere 2008 - Day Three - January 23, 2008

Blogged by: Karen Hobert

Day Three started out with a social software keynote that introduced several customer case studies where Quickr and Lotus Connections have been deployed to provide collaboration among diverse sets of users. In one case, Teach For America, the customer used IBM Lotus social software to support a dynamic workforce that is marked by high turn over, geographically dispersed members, and users with an average age of less than 30 years old. It was a sort of amplified version of the next generation information worker.

More meetings in the morning which included some lively discussions about SMB channel and the overall Notes/Domino market and uptake of N/D 8. My conversations indicate that it is very interesting time and I believe we're in for a dynamic market in the next few years. 2007 was what I consider a "release to the market" year where vendors focused on releasing new and upgraded products to the market. Much of that time was spent explaining the new products and the product strategy. Since both IBM and Microsoft release major upgrades of their core products the discussion has shifted from being application space focused (i.e., Notes Mail vs Exchange/Outlook) to platform focused ( i.e., IBM Lotus vs Microsoft). I feel that this new conversation has driven customers to re-evaluate their collaboration assumptions and solutions. Much of 2007, evidenced by customer questions, has been spent doing this evaluation and I believe that in 2008 we'll begin to see the results of their decisions. I'm expecting a fun ride.

Lotusphere 2008 reflected that dynamic. There were many new solutions, partnerships, channel programs, and product updates announced at the event. Some were significant updates to tools, such as porting Domino Designer to the eclipse rich client framework in the 8.5 release of N/D (currently not expected until later in 2008), and some announcements support more significant IBM Lotus market directions, such as Bluehouse and Lotus Foundations, that support IBM Lotus' SMB strategy.

I'll be back later with my thoughts on Day Four!

What's the value of social networking? Let me count the ways...

Blogger: Mike Gotta

The term "Architecture of Participation" is a phrase open to a lot of interpretation - Joe is not alone in terms of being a little skeptical. The term itself is also confusing because organizations have spent years deploying collaboration tools and pursuing knowledge management efforts.

But Burton Group does believe that concepts behind an architecture of participation are taking shape - and that those ideas and approaches are not really revolutionary but reflect a steady maturation of our thinking and evolution of technology in the social computing domain. I would suggest reading our report Enterprise 2.0: Collaboration and Knowledge Management Renaissance as well as a recent post on my personal blog, Why is social software important? I would also read the numerous posts on the topic social networking and collaboration. There are a growing number of examples where social computing tools (blogs, wikis, XML feeds, tag and social bookmark systems as well as social networking) are being piloted, rolled-out or are actually in production. This is a strategic area for many of our clients to address strategic talent initiatives, shifting workforce demographics, corporate social responsibility efforts, innovation programs and specific needs of business processes. Not only is there value from these tools behind the firewall - there is greater value outside the firewall when it comes to customer relationships, alumni networks, retiree networks and social media strategies often linked back to brand value and feedback loops for improving products and services. 

Back in July at OSCON, I was thrilled to learn that I'm by no means in the minority in wincing and rolling my eyes every time I hear the phrase "Web 2.0." It made me feel a bit sorry for Tim O'Reilly (who handled it like a champ). To my jaded ear, catch-phrases such as "architecture of participation" and "social networking"  are almost as bad - and things like Second Life are even further down the ladder.

.....

Yes, I sound like a cranky old Luddite - and this area is outside my team and responsibilities at Burton Group - but I'm trying to understand the phenomenon, to make sure I'm not missing something. My question is serious. What's the value of social networking tools inside the enterprise firewall?

Application Platform Strategies Blog: I've been thinking this all along...

Lotusphere 2008 - Day Two - January 22, 2007

Blogged by: Karen Hobert

It's the middle of Day 3 and I'm now getting around to my thoughts on yesterdays events. It was another full day of keynotes and briefings. I had little time to sit in on sessions but I did get to spend some time in the Innovation Lab.

The innovation lab is one of my favorite places at Lotusphere. I enjoy talking with the developers and seeing what they are up to. Sometimes the tools look like week-end projects other's are incredibly impressive and robust. My strategy in the lab is to do a quick once around, identify the tools that I'm most interested in and start with those. I never seem to have enough time to talk with all of the developers so I might as well get to the ones I really want to learn about. A few jumped out at me; a social interface called BeeHive (that Craig mentions in his blog), Spectacular a syndicated feed aggregator and web-based feed reader (something I believe should be a collaboration platform service), and OmniFind Personal Email Search a semantics-based e-mail search tool that lets users enter queries like "Jim Smith's phone number" that actually returns a list memos with Jim Smiths phone number, not memos with "Jim" and "Smith" and "phone" and "number". All good work and potentially very useful solutions.

Much of my day was spent in conversations with IBM Lotus executives in charge of the various products and strategies. There's been a lot of focus on the small and medium business market (SMB) in those meetings. I'm still sorting out my thoughts on all the commentary and discussions. What is clear is that IBM Lotus is committed to developing the SMB channel, through product offerings, solution up-sells, and partner incentives. SMB is a market that IBM has historically had difficulty attracting. It's a tough market to work with when you offer broad, industrial strength solutions. One challenge for IBM is to make products that can be right sized for the customer needs and then be augmented and enhanced as the customer grows. Another challenge is for IBM to make the product decision making as easy as possible for the SMB customer. Too many permutations of delivery models and solution choices will send SMBs hiking.

Another area that I spent time looking at was Unified Communications (UC). The morning mini-keynote announced the 10 year anniversary of Sametime as a product and focused on the new Sametime 8.0 features. The Sametime team continues to impress me with its clearly articulated strategy and products that support the vision. The Sametime team demonstrated current, planned, and future product features. The big announcements that didn't make it to the Opening General Session included OEM and partnering agreements with some large communications solutions providers. OEM agreements with Cisco and Nortel with sell through in each vendor's partner channels were announced. IBM Lotus also announced partnerships with Ericsson for smartphone integration of presence and live tags, and NEC for Internet broadband Sametime UC services. The big message with Sametime is "Unified Telphony" so customers can use Sametime services to manage calls across multiple telephony systems, networks (VoIP, land lines, wireless) and receivers (e.g., smartphones, softphones, telephone sets).

I'm off to the showcase to look at vendor products now!

For additional insights on Day Two take a look at Mike Gotta's and Craig Roth's blogs.

Lotusphere 2008 - Day one - January 21st, 2008

Blogged by: Karen Hobert

The first day at Lotusphere is always a long one with keynotes and meetings jammed into our analyst schedule. In addition to the meeting schedule, Mike Gotta and I gave a presentation on Enterprise 2.0 to a well turned out crowd. Top that off, I've got a flaky laptop which means I've got a bunch of hand written notes to transcribe on the flight home.

The big event is the Opening General Session (OGS) where IBM Lotus announces new and updated products and show us its product strategy for the year. January is a good time to have an event like this, it can set the tone for the year and still get people in the new year frame of mind for positive change. The IBM Lotus theme this year is "Emergence" which comes with a disclaimer that the product strategy being presented "is subject to change without notice."

IBM Lotus made a number of announcements at the OGS, ranging from optimized performance of Domino servers and improved web interfaces for Notes/Domino applications, to iPhone support (some of the wind was knocked out of IBMs sails by an early report), to empowering users to customize their user experiences with widgets and the ability to build layered mashups of enterprise information and tools. 

A lot was presented and there are many things for customers to consider. What didn't emerge at the OGS was a clear picture of the future IBM Lotus customer and user. We saw a lot of new technology and choices but no way to figure out which to use when. Still I think there is a compelling story in there, one that will be attractive to IBM Lotus installed base and new customers.

The product strategy is becoming more complex with tools and hosted delivery models that are focused on small and medium businesses. I found the image of the IBM Lotus product and solutions strategy dramatic; where the product strategy in 2007 was built around 5 pillar products and platforms (Notes/Domino, WebSphere Portal, Sametime, Quickr, and Connections) the picture in 2008 has over 10 solutions, including appliances, platforms, services, and end user customization tools.

To summarize the mood was upbeat although it wasn't a pep rally. I think people are having a really good time but I haven't really been able to spend much time with attendees today. Still, there’s a serious edge. I think it might be that partners are finally really busy and that customers have a lot to think about. From what I can tell attendance is up from 2007 and there appears to be a BIG international crowd here.

For more blow by blow coverage of the OGS see the blog entries my colleagues Mike Gotta and Craig Roth posted this afternoon.

Some Counterpoint to Our ODF/OOXML Report

Blogger: Guy Creese

There's been some disagreement with our ODF/OOXML report, to put it mildly. Unfortunately, many of the criticisms are from people who have not read the report and are reacting to second- and third-hand interpretations of it.

In happy contrast to this "I'll react to the headline" mode, there have been some thoughtful discussions of the issues:

• Leadership by Numbers: A blog post by an IBM/Lotus/Linux/Java consultant in the DC area who characterizes himself as "leaning strongly towards ODF."
• ODF Alliance: The ODF Alliance has published a counterpoint to our report, and based on comments from OASIS and a branch of OpenOffice.org, does a nice job of summarizing an opposing viewpoint.
• Erwin's StarOffice Tango: A blog post by Erwin Tenhumberg, a marketing manager at Sun, entitled, "Dispelling Myths Around ODF."

If you are interested in the ODF/OOXML debate, we encourage you to read our report in its entirety, as well as the counterpoint resources above. We interviewed people at Adobe, Altova, IBM, Microsoft, Novell, and Sun in the course of putting it together, and they all offered feedback/corrections before we published it. However, it is still our opinion, and others disagree. From our point-of-view, the best thing that can happen as a result of this report is a civil, rational discussion of the issues--and not the religious war that this debate has often nosedived into.

For those who have asked when we plan on updating the report, we plan to in the next quarter, with an eye to (1) accepting or rebutting arguments made by others, (2) taking into account the result of the ISO vote, and (3) clarifying points that people misunderstood or misinterpreted.