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

January 31, 2008 at 11:10 am | In Content Management, Globalization | No Comments

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.

The OOXML/ODF Storm Hit While I Was Out of Town

January 16, 2008 at 6:29 pm | In Analyst biz, Content Management, Office | 2 Comments

I just got back from a business trip last night to find that a storm had hit.  My house is fine, but my e-mail inbox is wrecked.  The storm was caused by a document recently published by the Burton Group called “What’s Up, .DOC? ODF, OOXML, and the Revolutionary Implications of XML in Productivity Applications”.  A small minority of the comments address technical issues with the document, but the vast majority are mudslinging that call everything from our objectivity to our parental heritage into question.

This document was published in the Collaboration and Content Strategies service at Burton Group.  I am the manager of that service and the analysts (Guy Creese and Peter O’Kelly) that wrote the document are in CCS.  I stand behind the document, Guy and Peter, and Burton Group fully. 

In seeing this reaction to the document I am not entirely surprised.  My blog entry from September called Microsoft Loses Open XML Vote noted that much of the furor about the OOXML vs. ODF battle was not based on technical merit, but politics and techno-religion. That’s how it seems to have played out too.  It seems the majority of the negative comments in the blogosphere were written by people that haven’t read the report and are responding to a simple summary that they read somewhere.  Please folks - this report is free and available on the Burton Group website under “Free Research”. 

Microsoft had nothing to do with this document other than providing information and vendor review just like IBM, Sun, and others did.  If Microsoft was trying to buy or influence the writing of this document they would have to be pretty annoyed at how balanced it is.  Here is the entire conclusion of the document.  Does this sound like the fiery rhetoric of someone preaching for Microsoft?

The OpenDocument Format (ODF)/Office Open XML (OOXML) debate is part of a significant phase in the evolution of productivity application, with the shift to Extensible Markup Language (XML) file formats displacing traditional binary and proprietary file formats. The stakes are huge, with compelling new opportunities for content management, as well as both opportunities and challenges for software vendors. Organizations will gain important benefits by exploiting opportunities to improve information management and reduce vendor dependencies by shifting to XML file formats.

The articles on this debate like to pick up phrases from within the 37 page document or pro-OOXML recommendations (stripped of nuance of course), but they are doing a disservice to their readers.  Here’s the beginning of the analysis section.  The full doc has a lot more nuance and detail, but this gives the opening “attack”.  Is this a blustery, one-sided viewpoint? 

The recent industry debate about OpenDocument Format (ODF) and Office Open XML (OOXML) often comes down to the blunt question, “Which one will lead?” There are three answers. The first answer is, “It depends on who you are.” {description of applicability by industry given here … The second answer is, “Within the larger market, OOXML will lead,” for three reasons {the three reasons are detailed here} … The third answer is, “In the long run, perhaps neither.” {description of how OOXML and ODF may both be irrelevent as documents become more hypertext oriented}

Someone attacking our vendor independence pointed out a blog post I wrote about our SharePoint workshops.  This person seemed to believe that if we do workshops on SharePoint strategy we profit from SharePoint’s popularity and would therefore sell our soul to perpetuate it.  This isn’t a direct quote - this person was much less eloquent.  This assertion is flatly wrong.  Our workshop points out the flaws of SharePoint as well as the better parts.  It goes through the offerings of competing products from IBM, Oracle, Google, and more and points out where those products are better and where they are worse.  It points out that organizations have been unsuccessful with SharePoint and that if you fit the same profile, you might be better off with something else from another vendor.  If someone leaves that workshop deciding SharePoint isn’t for them, fine - I don’t lose a penny since we don’t do implementation and we offer the same objective advice about whatever other product they choose too.  And if SharePoint starts losing out in popularity to something like IBM’s Quickr/Connections products, then expect to see an IBM workshop from us that points out strategies, high points, and pitfalls there too. 

I have no trouble attacking SharePoint when it’s warranted.  One of the most popular documents I wrote when I was at Meta Group was called “Sharepoint: Why Not”. If anything, I’ve found Burton Group’s independence to be even higher.  We will not write a vendor document for hire (even for the vendor’s own internal use) or accept any money for a document we are writing.  We do present at vendor’s conferences (we are presenting at Lotusphere next week for example) and we do webinars and other events, but we give the same presentation we would at our own Catalyst conference. 

As stated by our vendor independence policy more than 80% of our customers are enterprise customers.  There are no catches hidden there (our split by revenue is approximately the same, we don’t count Microsoft as an enterprise customer, etc.).  We play to our base, and our base is large organizations and enterprises, not vendors. 

For more information, your first resource should be the document itself.  Go to the source and let us know where you agree or disagree.  If you want a summary of resources on the technologies themselves rather than the debate (good for you!) jump to the end of the report  and it links to information on the relevant standards.

  • The document itself can be found here under CCS.
  • Peter O’Kelly postings here and here
  • Posting on our service blog by Guy Creese here

Content Globalization: John Yunker Predicts

December 26, 2007 at 4:03 pm | In Content Management, Globalization | 1 Comment

John Yunker points out a driver for content globalization (web in particular) that I hadn’t glommed onto:

The weak US dollar is helping companies weather a poor local economy by selling their goods abroad. And this year I’ve noticed a number of companies boosting their Web globalization budgets to expand into new markets or improve their current localized Web sites. All signs point to 2008 being a very busy year for translators and Web localization teams.

I agree and, in addition, I don’t see why this has to be limited to web globalization. I believe all types of content (printed manuals, books, packaging, etc.) will see a similar increase in globalization.

This quote came from John’s top 10 Web Globalization predictions. From my point of view, there’s a key one missing from this list - a shift wherein enterprise IT (often clueless on content globalization until now) becomes part of the solution. John mentions this in a November blog post however, where he says

I believe the changes are due to the simple fact that the translation agencies are no longer leading the industry. The technologists have taken over, and they have a different vision for the future.

By technologists, I’m referring to software vendors, such as Idiom and Language Weaver and Clay Tablet. I’m also referring to the buyers of translation services, buyers who have seen how technology can make their lives easier and want to see their vendors make full use of this technology – from hosted project management software to machine translation.

While linguists focus on the “art” of translation, technologists focus on the “science” of translation.

John feels the machine translation vendors will make out very well due to this trend. True, but I think vendors in all stages of the enterprise content management (ECM) lifecycle will benefit from content creation to content management to analytics.

The Application Infrastructure Dilemma: How to Assess Risk When You Don’t Know the App

December 13, 2007 at 12:56 pm | In Content Management, collaboration, communication | No Comments

Yesterday I posted about the importance of recognizing how a lot of the communication, collaboration, and content technology that is implicitly seen as an application is really infrastructure (Everything’s Now Infrastructure! Where’s My App?).  Like a wolf in sheep’s clothing, it is infrastructure in application clothing - which can be just as dangerous.

The implications of the special nature of application infrastructure (as opposed to pure infrastructure or pure applications) became even more clear when a client asked about doing a risk assessment on Microsoft Office.  Remember that Office is more than Word, PowerPoint, and Excel.  It also includes InfoPath, Access, SharePoint, and many other products.  There’s a lot more variability to what end-user facing collaboration and content creation/management tools can be used for than there is for back end infrastructure such as a router.  Or even pure applications like an accounting system where the application is known.  There’s a level of indirection introduced by application infrastructure in that you first have to determine what the user will create with it, then the risk of that.  Think of the enormous span of artifacts that can be created by these systems:

  • End user databases and end user db applications with Microsoft Access
  • Portals and all kinds of extranet and Internet websites
  • All types documents that may contain sensitive data or macros
  • Workflow that can kick off automated transactions (such as approving invoices or links to payment systems

Then consider that the scope of users who can create applications, websites, and content with these systems is pretty much all encompassing (all information workers have access to Office in most organizations), and the idea of assessing the risks is daunting to say the least!

I have no answer or even framework for addressing the problem at this point.  I’ll be involved in some ongoing research into this topic and will post a summary of findings when ready.  Until then, if any readers have encountered this issue - particularly in regards to a risk assessment - please drop me a line.

Everything’s Now Infrastructure! Where’s My App?

December 12, 2007 at 1:31 pm | In Content Management, Microsoft SharePoint, collaboration, communication | 3 Comments

Burton Group was founded as a special kind of analyst firm - one that is specialized in infrastructure and is able to go deep technically.  Accordingly, our Collaboration and Content Strategies service was founded on the premise that collaboration, content, and communication have become infrastructure as well.

Many users still think of email as an application.  Part of it is.  But the vendors realized a while ago they needed to carve out the parts of email beyond POP3 and IMAP4 that should go on the server, named them Domino and Exchange, and now they are treated like infrastructure with service levels, backup/recovery, contingency plans, farm scaling, and operations-minded folks in charge of it all. 

Well, Microsoft Office is an app right?  Sure, until Microsoft realized they needed to carve out the parts of Excel that could go on the server and created the Excel Server part of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server.  A Powerpoint server is rumored to be in the works too.  And Office Business Applications (OBAs) are being created on the principle that Office is infrastructure that can be reused.  It can be repurposed to produce applications that treat Office as infrastructure, connected to line of business apps, rather than a hermetically sealed application.

Well, SharePoint is an app right?  Bingo!  That’s where this gets you into trouble. It has a purpose built front end and a wide and deep pool of infrastructure underneath it.  When the purpose built part doesn’t do exactly what you want, it can be a long fall down to the deep pool underneath.  SharePoint buyers should understand that as much as the initial demos look like an application, really they are buying collaboration and content infrastructure. If you go into SharePoint thinking it’s an app because the demos or out-of-the-box test install you did seemed to do what you want, you can be very surprised when all of a sudden this starts looking like infrastructure.  You quickly move from being an application owner to an infrastructure owner and those are very different hats to wear. 

As the infrastructure nature of communication, collaboration, and content (I’m including content creation in this category, not just what WCM or DM tools do) is being properly realized, we’re seeing a separation of what used to be considered “applications” into infrastructure with an application on top.  The infrastructure parts keeps getting thicker (such as email going from POP3 to Domino and Exchange).  Accordingly, there needs to be more awareness - from end users and from vendors - of how the transition is made from application to infrastructure. 

The transition is difficult, but doesn’t need to be as painful as it has been.  Not if vendors recognize quickly what parts of their apps need to be pulled out and treated as scalable, reliable, reusable infrastructure and are clear about the depth and solidity (how far are you likely to get before needing to call for a team of coders, is this supported, etc) of the applications layers they provide on top.  Enterprises need to set up management processes and organizational structures to catch new infrastructure as it sinks from the application layer down into their domain and to understand the difference between infrastructure capabilities surfaced in a demo sort of UI and real applications.

Infrastructure has special characteristics that applications do not have and that can stymie implementers of communication, collaboration, and content technology (such as discussion groups, document libraries, portals, and wikis) that seems like an application at first:

  • Infrastructure (with regards to the kind of communication, collaboration, and content software we’re talking about here) needs an application to be useful.  Will a little bit of customization and tweaking to the out-of-the-box UI and templates be sufficient to act as an application?  If not, who is going to design and build your application now that you have the infrastructure?
  • Infrastructure is meant to be reused and repurposed, so who is going to own something that will be leveraged by a multitude of groups?  Probably not the first team that wants an application - if that’s the case it will be game to see who can stand on the sidelines the longest and let the first, most desperate group that needs an app take the plunge and wind up owning and paying for the infrastructure the groups on the sidelines will now leverage. 
  • Infrastructure needs to be managed.  It needs availability (according to negotiated service levels [SLAs]), contingency planning, backup/recovery. This is stuff that tends to be considered boring and “not in my job description” for programmers and power users.

So the next time someone shows you the interface for a great looking communication, collaboration, or content tool, think about stepping back and saying “That’s great infrastructure.  Now who builds the app on top of it and who manages the infrastructure?”

Note: This is a cross-posting from the Collaboration and Content Strategies blog.

Network, Analysis, Collaboration Fall Conference Notes

October 18, 2007 at 2:13 pm | In 1652, Content Management, collaboration | No Comments

I’m sure all of you out there in blogland are wondering where Craig Roth was this week.  Was I at the Mandalay Bay in Vegas this week for the IBM Information on Demand conference?  Nope.  Snug and comfy in my bed in my hometown of Chicago for the Lotus Collaboration Summit?  Nope.  Moline, Illinois.  It’s actually a pretty drive about 3 hours west of Chicago and I got to present and co-host a roundtable at a good event called the Network, Analysis, Collaboration Fall Conference.  The issues they are working through and problems they are encountering resonate well with what I’ve been hearing from other large organizations.  Here are my notes:

  • A security working group came up with a list of critical questions they are dealing with at the intersection of security and communication/collaboration
    • Who determines classification of information?
    • Can you selectively encrypt outgoing communications?
    • How do you deal with partners who have much more or less stringent security than you?
    • Their current efforts revolved around setting policies, education, and defining the need for data classification (determining what counts as confidential)
  • A Collaboration and content working group presented their findings
    • Two companies reported severe difficulty unifying content repositories.  One manufacturing company had 28 different repositories.  Another, an insurance company, had tried to consolidate and failed since it was difficult to communicate to users which to repository they should use
    • There were concerns about how to determine what counts as a “record” for records management retention purposes
    • Two companies said they evaluated the new XML file formats that are the default storage mechanism for Office 2007 and decided to to switch it back to the old format and not XML since they are not ready for it yet
  • A large Big 10 university did a presentation on their collaboration challenges
    • A university is unique in terms of their turnover.  They have 10k user turnover per year as students graduate, which places unusual burden on provisioning, training, etc.
    • Students feel entitled to email and calendaring and have it integrated with their devices
    • The students are amateur integrators too, trying to embed one service inside another
    • They did a study of the pros/cons of outsourcing.
    • Pros of outsourcing for collaboration: cost savings, redirect scarce resources, richer environment, better agility, larger disk quota, SaaS, more functionality
    • Cons are lack of control, availability, security/privacy/IP, support and response, viability, portability, records mgmnt
    • Their security issues list is topped by identity management, privacy, integrity, availability, data mining (FERPA), and profiling
    • They looked at using Google apps, but it doesn’t seem likely at this point because they couldn’t guarantee Google wouldn’t roll over if asked by the government for information and couldn’t handle FERPA regulations

SAP Integration: SharePoint and Day Software

October 9, 2007 at 11:29 am | In Content Management, Microsoft SharePoint, NetWeaver, SAP | No Comments

I just finished watching a Flash movie on integration of SAP into SharePoint (my Tivo’s on the fritz so I couldn’t watch Jon Stewart as planned). I thought I’d post my notes here to save you the 20 minutes or so it would take to watch it here, although you’ll miss out on the nice British accent and spiffy Flash graphics. It matches up pretty well with my outline of Integration With SharePoint and Anything, which proposed a similar continuum of 9 integration levels (from most complex to least) as: Programmatic/API level, Database/Repository/Metadata, Execution, Web Services/SOA, Portlets/Web Parts, Single sign-on, Unified search, Screen scraping, and Linking. They reverse the continuum, but hit most of the same notes.

Here are my notes of the presentation, followed by a few comments:

Document management:

  • Their scenario assumes you store your content in SharePoint and then use WebDAV, web services, or a packaged .NET data provider (.NET Data Provider for mySAP Business Suite) to get at it
  • You can use the Business Data Catalog (BDC) to search for SAP data from Sharepoint

Front-end integration:

  • A few low-end methods are mentioned, such as linking, using framesets to embed pieces of SAP portal-displayed views inside a SharePoint page, and embedding customized portlets (not sure what kind they mean)
  • WSRP: SAP acts as the WSRP producer in this scenario and SharePoint as the consumer. This is apparently a custom bit of work as you need to produce the xml-compliant templates in visual studio.

Content integration

  • Business Data Catalog (BDC): It doesn’t say whether there is a non-manual way to create the BDC metadata for an SAP system. While SAP systems are highly customized, there are often tools that can be run against them to do discovery of customizations and allow click-and-drag access to data objects. It doesn’t seem like that is done here
  • Forms: Online forms from MOSS can be submitted to SAP
  • You can develop iViews in Visual Studio. There’s a portal add-on, a portal runtime for .NET, and a Java .NET interoperability plug-in that runs in SAP
  • They mention additional integration that is needed such as SSO, multiple iViews in a SharePoint page, and migrating iViews into SharePoint

They point to www.microsoft.com/sap and www.duet.com as well as their generic msdn and sdn.sap sites for reference.

A few comments from me:

WSRP portlets have been a sticky issue for SharePoint and, indeed, when listening to the slickly produced Flash movie, I can clearly detect that the part about using WSRP portlets from SAP in SharePoint was done as an overdub. The vocal quality and volume changes for that section. It could be they just needed to clarify the technical detail later, or they had to be very careful to say what they can do because one bit of wrong wording would expose some limitations with that method. Or maybe last minute decisions were made that required redubbing (like a lack of packaged WSRP portlets).

They don’t mention unified search between an SAP portal and SharePoint site. If anyone out there has gotten that to work well I’d like to hear how you went about it.

In general, this demonstrates that integration with SAP or SharePoint occurs across several dimensions and any organization looking at integration needs to consider all of them. If a vendor is asked about integration and gives a nice detailed answer about one level (such as portlets) you need to ask about all 9 levels.

As an exercise, the integration that Day Software (a content management vendor) announced today with SAP can be analyzed across these levels as well. Day’s press release says:

Day’s extended capabilities provide out-of-the-box portlets, allowing managed content that is dynamically associated with the SAP NetWeaver Portal, to be displayed through iViews. Presentation capabilities are supported through the use of iViews, themes and external facing portals. Integration into portal navigation and TREX search is also available. Day extends the value of managed content through multi-language support, inter-portlet communication, content sharing and personalization. Support for LDAP and Single Sign-On enables seamless integration into the portal framework.

While the devil is in the details, you can at least see they are touching the bases. Once you see the integration dimension pattern, it becomes easier to assess SAP or SharePoint integration.

Communication, Collaboration, and Content for Outsourcing

September 19, 2007 at 9:41 am | In Content Management, collaboration, communication | No Comments

Note: This is a cross-posting of an entry I did in the official Collaboration and Content Strategies blog.

I had a conversation this morning with a large, information services organization about outsourcing.  That may seem strange since the Collaboration and Content Strategies service does not cover outsourcing.  But along with the standard questions about where in the world outsourcing was taking place, near-shoring vs. off-shoring, and legal questions the company also wanted to know about how best practice organizations are working and collaborating with their offshore workers.  I thought that was a very good question to ask, so I’m posting what I told them up on this blog.

Communication, collaboration, and content management are enabling technologies for outsourcing.  It is hard for me to remember how outsourcing worked twenty years ago without these technologies and now I can’t imagine doing outsourcing without them.

Of course, outsourcing was happening twenty years ago anyways.  But the expectations for return were lower, as was the pace of communications and the expectations for collaborative involvement in decision making.  Organizations make a decision to outsource based on competitive pressures.  Accordingly, a certain degree of efficiency is required to get the returns expected from outsourcing.  I don’t believe an organization can get the returns expected today without near best practice in joint creation of documents, sharing of information, brainstorming and decision making, and mechanisms that enable a single source of truth (such as web publishing, document libraries, and document management).  And while there are many non-technical factors and other technology domains (networking and security come quickly to mind) involved, those near best practices cannot be accomplished without a strategy for the enabling technologies that support them.

Furthermore, as I mentioned in my telebriefing on preparing a business case for collaboration, the technology needs to be in place today to enable business collaboration that will take place in the future.  And this technology needs to be adopted in a strategic manner, not just tactically for each individual outsourcing project.  In a tactical adoption of communication, collaboration, and content technology the burden of the research time, implementation time, and learning curve is borne by an individual project.  For this reason, tactical adoption of these enabling technologies greatly increases the risk of not achieving the expected return from business collaboration projects such as outsourcing.  And without strategic forethought, there is a significant risk that the technology that was a good fit for its intended project will not be a good fit for future projects. 

All of this adds up to a good case for any organization that is contemplating outsourcing to evangelize a strategic approach to communication, collaboration, and content management so that these technologies will be ready to be leveraged when needed for outsourcing - or any other project requiring information efficiencies that happens to come along.

E-Discovery: What’s in That E-Mail?

July 19, 2007 at 3:04 pm | In Content Management, Legal, communication | No Comments

There was a seminar this morning on E-Discovery that focused on the intersection between the law and IT with regards to information retention and discovery. There were presentations by Joseph L. Fogel and Hillard M. Sterling (attorneys at Freeborn & Peters LLP), Karen Hobert (Burton Group analyst for Collaboration and Content Management), and Trent Henry (Burton Group analyst for Security and Risk Management Strategies). Then I moderated a panel with the four speakers. The audience was about one third lawyers and two thirds IT people. E-Discovery is not my normal area of research, but I found the issues and discussion fascinating and thought it could be useful to others if I posted my notes here.

  • I had an interesting discussion with Joe before the seminar about how the courts reconcile the leading edge nature of e-discovery and the conservative nature of many large corporations when it comes to IT. It’s all to easy for someone who hasn’t been a part of IT migration and upgrade plans to see a brochure for some great search, categorization, or discovery tool, take that as a proof point that a high level of information is reasonably accessible, and then assume any corporation that isn’t using such technology is just being obstinate. I’m not a lawyer, but Joe pointed to a Rule 26(b)2)(B) that says “a party need not provide discovery of electronically stored information from sources that the party identifies as not reasonably accessible because of undue burden or cost. …”. This market is obviously at the leading edge of its growth curve judging by the number of disconnected technology markets, number and size of vendors, and confusion among IT shops in what to do. So how quickly are organizations expected to be able to adopt the newest technology and best practices? Joe’s answer is that, like much else in law, it depends on the judge you get. There is a wide variance in the level of understanding of technical matters that judges have and that can strongly influence whether he/she deems an organization to be lax in its duties for disclosure.
  • It was made clear that policies for retention or auto-deletion of information have allow for modification due to potential pending litigation. Rule 37(f) (”safe harbor”) was cited. To me this means the policies have to be flexible and there needs to be a path of communication between legal and IT so that they know who to tell in IT that auto-deletion must stop and that it can be stopped quickly once that order is sent.
  • Hillard mentioned that for most of the large judgments that are handed down for inability to disclose requested information in a reasonable amount of time, there is usually a historical pattern of non-compliance present. An angry judge then sees a pattern of obstruction and decides to make a statement.
  • There still seems to be a legal limbo between countries that affects global US-based companies. US discovery laws may order the disclosure of information from, say, the London office of a company. But stricter British privacy laws may make compliance with that order illegal in England. During the panel the attorneys were asked how that is resolved and it seems the answer is that issue is still up for debate.

There is a lot more depth that was discussed, but needless to say one morning wasn’t enough for me to feel my opinions would be worth much. This was just my first taste of a topic I hadn’t been exposed to before. Just as we had three groups in the room - legal, IT security, and IT communication/collaboration/content - many organizations need to build bridges between these groups before e-discovery issues come to a head.

« Previous Page — Next Page »

Blog at WordPress.com. | Theme: Pool by Borja Fernandez.
Entries and comments feeds.