EMC’s Lance Shaw, Group Product Marketing Manager, Knowledge Worker Applications, says that CenterStage, an enterprise collaboration tool, is not meant to be a direct competitor to SharePoint. But looking at what it is and what it does, one can easily draw the comparison and see why a organization would implement it instead of SharePoint.

Shaw took us on a tour of this new offering from EMC.

Swedish Web CMS vendor EPiServer (news, site) is increasing its European reach beyond the Scandinavian home base. Recently, EPiServer signed 11 new implementation/reseller partnerships in the United Kingdom.

As we know, EPiServer works through resellers/partners only. And now, through more of them, including UK’s Byte Art, Charteris, Cimex Media, Corporate Document Services, IMGROUP, Kieon, Nucleus, Obergine, Ogilvy Action, The On Connection and STEEL. The majority of them are interactive/digital agencies specializing in website building and web content management.

Neal Perry, Country Manager of EPiServer UK & Ireland said: “Our partners include some of the largest and most well known agencies in Europe. They all know that we provide them with a straightforward way to create websites, which engage the visitor and are easy to manage.”

Good move, eh? For EPiServer’s growth, it is crucial to sign the right implementation partners, as much of the overall success in the CMS market depends on them. You might’ve noticed that it is not always easy to find skilled EPiServer integrators, especially outside of Sweden.

EPiServer says there are more than 2,500 customers worldwide using EPiServer CMS. A bit hard to believe, but the vendor also notes, “Two new commercial sites built using EPiServer CMS go live every 24 hours.”

The current count of EPiServer’s partner network is around 300 companies in 25 countries, including U.S., where EPiServer has recently opened its North American HQ office.

Day’s customer? Evaluating Day CQ5 CMS? CMS geek generally curious about the present and the future of web content management? Check out Day’s (news, site) Ignite 2009 customer summit scheduled to take place in ZÜrich (October 14-15, 2009) and Chicago (October 28-29, 2009).

Day’s plan for this event is, mainly, to share strategies and customer stories around CQ5 Web CMS that was released in November 2008. CQ5.2 that came out earlier this year included new DAM and Social Collaboration features.

There are several tracks planned at the summit, including business and technical. The business track is focused on CMS project objectives, CQ5 selection and criteria, and CQ5 business results. In the technical track, attendees will look into CMS project objectives and implementation plan, CQ5 deployment details, and lessons learned in best leveraging Day’s CQ5.

Very often, it’s best to get right into the vendor’s camp if you want to get more insight into what’s going on with the company and where it is going. While, as we reported, Day has had many good days lately, nothing beats a chance of being able to talk to the actual customer who had already put a check mark next to that line that says “CMS implementation.” Getting direct access to Day’s management and technical teams wouldn’t hurt either.

A bit of gazing into the crystal ball is also on the menu with one of Gartner’s analysts leading a discussion on where Day and the content management industry are headed in 2010.

Don’t miss:

• Unveiling of CRX 2.0: the JCR 2.0 (JSR-283) content repository

• Day’s 2010 roadmap

Cherry on top: Day’s CTO David NÜscheler will give a sneak peek of the upcoming CQ5.3. Now, that should be interesting.

Highlights of the Week

• Open Source Is Not Just a Marketing Term. Even before economies around the world got into a bit of a bind, the term open source was growing more and more popular.
• Hippo CMS Team Inks Strategic Capgemini Partnership. Hippo, the makers of a Java-based, open source web content management system, signed an important agreement with Capgemini in the Netherlands.
• Report: Enterprise CMS Vendors Start to Embrace Mobile World. A new CMS Watch report shows the growing importance of Enterprise Content Management in an increasingly mobile world.
• Document Capture Market Grew to $1.9bn in 2008. If you’ve been following us closely, you know that in spite of the economic downturn many techie areas of business have seen substantial growth.
• Document Management Vendor KnowledgeTree Embraces CMIS. It was only a matter of time before a DMS vendor like KnowledgeTree jumped on the CMIS bandwagon (joining the many Web and Enterprise CMS players) and released its own implementation of the draft Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) specification.
• Sony Switches to ePub Digital Book Format to Adobe’s Delight. Move over Kindle, Sony is throwing its hat into the ePublishing ring.
• dotCMS Gets Groovy - and Ruby, Python, PHP and JavaScript. This time around the platform is opening up realms of new coding possibilities by way of a scripting plugin. The tool allows users to execute server side code directly from Velocity in PHP, Ruby, Python, Groovy, and Javascript.

Most Popular Articles

And these are the articles you couldn’t get enough of during the past week — if page views are anything to go by, anyways. So, what was your fancy? Egocentricity, the "Best CMS" hypothesis and of course, the future of this industry.

• New-Look Facebook App is Ready to Storm the iPhone. As the battle for social information on the go heats up, has Facebook hit the right note with its latest edition of the iPhone app?
• The Real Difference Between Google and Yahoo Yahoo’s customer is the advertiser. Google’s customer is you and me. That’s why Google has been more successful.
• Employers Use Facebook More Than LinkedIn for HR Screening. As it turns out, no matter how professional you may come across on your LinkedIn page, employers are getting the real dirt on you by checking out your profile on Facebook.
• Parsing Gartner’s 2009 Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management. This year, Web content management (WCM) was promoted to the Magic Quadrant level in Gartner-land.
• Clearwell Takes eDiscovery to the Next Level, Adds New Modules. Clearwell Systems, known for its eDiscovery platform, has announced the addition of three new modules to help users simplify the process by eliminating the need to move data across multiple tools.
• Skype May Soon Be a Casualty of Licensing War. Skype fans, we have something to tell you and you’re not gonna to like it: your Internet telephony service of choice may soon be defunct.
• Digitalus: A Web CMS Built on Zend Framework. The Digitalus CMS aims to empower PHP developers to create content on a solid, simple and extendable content management system that is based off of the widely popular Zend Framework.

The Economy is in the Dumps but Content Management is Booming

If you’re looking to advance your career, or if your org has got empty seats in need of savvy CMSers, you’re in luck. Catch the best fish of the season on our on our content management job board.

Featured Jobs:

• Master of Product Management at Rapleaf
• Senior News Registry Consultant (Contract Position) at The Associated Press
• Technical Writer at Recommind
• Web Architect Instructor at Sitecore
• Copywriter/Blogger at Fuhu
• CMS Product Evangelist at Kentico Software
• Amazing Software Engineer at Rapleaf
• Senior/Principal Software Engineer, UI & Services Development at Digital Reef

Whether Traveling or Virtual, There are Events to Attend

Wondering how to spend your time in the next few weeks or months? Attend a conference or maybe just a webinar or two. Have a look at our Events Calendar to see what’s happening in your area.

Featured Events:

• Webinar: Critical SharePoint Optimizations for Enterprise Infrastructure — Aug 26 (online)
• Day Software CQ5 Seminar with Andy Jacobs — Aug 27 (Washington)
• Drupalcon Paris 2009 — Sep 1 (Paris, France)
• X Change Web Analytics Conference — Sep 9 (San Francisco)
• IDEA Conference 2009 — Sep 15-16 (Toronto, Canada)
• Adobe MAX 2009 — Oct 4-7 (Los Angeles)

Additionally, we know that travel and conference attendance is down, and that virtual events are up, up, up. Are you promoting a webinar or seminar? We offer highly effective event promotion packages. Check out our media kit and then email or phone us to discuss your ideas.

Current Sponsors

• Ademero — Affordable document management solutions for small and mid-sized businesses.
• Bridgeline iApps Content Manager — A SaaS Framework for applications, content management, commerce and analytics.
• CMS Watch — The analyst firm covering and uncovering the details of the content management industry, including an in-depth SharePoint report.
• Day Sofware — Winner of the 2009 Infoworld Best Web CMS award
• Ektron — Makers of one of the leading .NET web content management systems.
• Ephox — Rich web content editing which blends ease of use with enterprise features.
• eTouch SamePage — The enterprise-grade wiki solution that combines the best of wikis and blogs to effectively support and streamline collaborative team efforts.
• Fatwire Content Server — Building engaging web experiences.
• Gilbane Group — Conferences, reports, webinars, consulting and more. Gilbane keeps the industry informed.
• JBoye Events — High impact gatherings for web practitioners.  Coming to Denmark in November.
• Open Text — Realize the full power of SharePoint via Open Text integration.
• Percussion — leading the charge with XML-based web content management.
• SDL Tridion — Enterprise web content management for the multi-lingual and international organizations.
• Sitecore — Enterprise grade web content management with a strong eye towards .NET friendly tools and APIs.
• SpringCM — A leading SaaS enterprise content management solution.
• Telerik Sitefinity — A light-weight, modular and accessible ASP.NET web content management system that pleases both the developers and the marketers.
• Vignette — A grandfather of web content management, soon to be called Open Text.
• …and of course dear old uncle Google

Learn more about advertising with us.

Perceptive Software (news, site) — the makers of  document management, workflow and imaging  products — has just released version 6.4 of its ImageNow product suite, only four days after it announced revenues for fiscal year 2009 of US$ 84M.

While it comes with a number of new, or improved, features including eForms, better workflow views and out-of-office workflow routing, according to Perceptive CEO Scott Coons, v6.4 collectively adds better functionality across the entire system.

The official Facebook for the iPhone 3.0 app is due for release on the App Store, once it has passed Apple’s review process. It has been over a year since v2 was warmly received (it is installed on over a quarter of all iPhones) but was hardly the revolution everyone was expecting.

Swedish content management provider Polopoly (news, site) has announced that it has integrated U.S. digital media giant’s Text Mining engine into Polopoly CMS 9.13.

Hardly a surprise given that Atex bought Polopoly last year with the specific intention of increasing its revenue directly from digital media (as opposed to software) to 50% of entire revenues by 2011.

With Polopoly v9.13 they may well meet that target, as the text mining solution should prove attractive to publishers with a lot of digital content lying around that could be making money for them if they could only get it organized.

And by that we mean Open Source for America (news, site), a movement to increase the adoption of open source technology in the U.S. Federal Government, is gaining some traction. The Linux Box, a company dedicated to providing customized open source software services, is the latest to join the flux.

In its quest to make all data, wherever it hides, available to Google’s monstrous search tools, the company has released a new collection of Connectors that help tie together yet more data that may be hiding in previously inaccessible corners of an enterprise’s systems.

Among the new Connectors is one for Salesforce which allows the Google Search Applicance to search any data in the salesforce.com CRM. As Salesforce is a big thing in many organizations, making that data available to users and help them find client information that may be stored in databases, spreadsheets and other resources.

Additionally, improvements have been made in the existing connectors for content management systems, including SharePoint, Documentum, FileNet. Notably, the SharePoint connector adds 64-bit Windows support, batch authorization and multiple site collection.

• Only allow the template_id parameter when the archive_type parameter exists.
• Force the template being used to match the archive type (e.g. if you’re trying to paginate category archives, the template you’re using has to be one that is producing category archives).
• Not allow the use of the template_id parameter when the extension is php or asp.
• Created a config directive (SearchAlwaysAllowTemplateID) that would always allow the use of template_id.  

Some other bits around the comment pagination javascript were fixed as well, and details can be found in the release notes here. Or you can just go straight for the download.

As the Movable Type team says, this release was almost entirely based on user requests and bug reports, so keep the ball rolling after you’ve upgraded to 4.31 by dropping your two cents here. 

According to research by Harris Interactive, that was commissioned by CareerBuilder.com and surveyed 2,667 HR professionals, found that 45% of them use social networking sites to research job candidates, with an additional 11% planning to implement social media screening in the very near future.

Of those who conduct online searches/background checks of job candidates, 29% use Facebook, 26% use LinkedIn and 21% use MySpace. One in 10 (11%) search blogs, while 7% follow candidates on Twitter.

The partnership is expected to turn the heads of law firms as it adds Omtool’s AccuRoute, a document scanning and distribution software tool, to IKON’s legal doc management portfolio. AccuRoute is designed to streamline the capture to archive process of both paper and electronic documents into information management systems.

“IKON is pleased to add the Omtool product to our suite of solutions to enable law firms to improve their document workflow and increase efficiency,” said Mark Davey, IKON’s Vice President, Legal Enterprise Solutions. “With the current economic conditions that law firms are facing, everyone is being asked to do more. Having the right tools available is more critical than ever.”

If this strikes a chord, you should hang around booth #400 at ILTA’s 2009 Annual Conference next week where both companies will be presenting. Check out our events list here for more information.

In fact, they have some of the longest product names in our Web CMS Report. Immediacy is now "Alterian Content Manager Corporate Edition," version 6.2; since that's too long to type more than once (let alone to fit in a tweet) the abbreviation is CMC. Mediasurface Morello has been renamed to "Alterian Content Manager Enterprise Edition," version 5.9; the acronym for that is CME. (Though I admit I much prefer Philippe Parker's suggestion to call it ACME. That would be one of the coolest product names in the industry, even if ACME products are largely known for inflicting pain, and Alterian strives not to.)

The main problem, of course, is that calling both products an "Edition" of "Alterian Content Manager" shrouds the fact that these are two very different offerings. Mediasurface Morello, now CME, has traditionally been a Java/Oracle product (also available in a .NET/MS SQL flavor), with Morello as a fat client for Windows. Immediacy, or CMC, is a much more straightforward, page-oriented .NET system. Even though they are starting to share some tools (like taxonomy management and the SharePoint connector), they each address their own scenarios, have their own set of partners and supporters. Because of that, we still evaluate them separately in our research.

Alterian is still catching its breath from integrating Mediasurface into its ranks (and Mediasurface hadn't quite finished integrating Immediacy yet). So I'll forgive them for over-simplifying the tools on their website as a generic "Content Manager" for now. But I do hope they'll start to be more transparent on the technical details of both tools in the near future.

In the meantime, if you're adding products to your shortlist and are considering Alterian -- make sure you specifically identify either CME or CMC, and know which is which. Because if you ask for "Alterian Content Manager," you're letting Alterian choose for you. In the end, that's something you'll really want to decide for yourself.

• WP.me is the only two-letter .me domain in the world.
• Every blog and post on WordPress.com has a WP.me URL now.
• These are all exposed in the <head> using rel=shortlink.
• it doesn’t work for any URL in the world, just WP.com-hosted ones.
• The links are permanent, they will work as long as WordPress.com is around.
• WP.me is spam-free

Though the concept is ultra basic, these days it’s still important to up your game if you can. We’re sure tr.im has some related stories; although they’ve been saved since the announcement, we all thought it was lights out for the service at the end of this year. Can you imagine all of those URLs linking to dead space? Terrible. WordPress’ own shortener attempts to nip sustainability-related disaster in the bud:

"WordPress links have the structure they do, which is longer, because they’re meant to be permanent and portable," explains Matt Mullenweg, WordPress’ founding developer. "Even if you weren’t using WordPress, the links contain no arbitrary IDs or other platform-specific implementation cruft so they should be trivial to serve from any system, even if you don’t use WordPress in the future."

If you’re a WordPress user, you can start using the new feature right now, right now by looking for the "Get Shortlink" button next to the permalink when you write or edit a post.

The acquisition brings Cloud Foundry’s Java platform-as-a-service offering front and center as it enters its first public beta.
 

While Alfresco is contemplating whether or not bigger really is better, Blue Fish will presumably be swimming in its decision to embrace enterprise open source. The openness of the platform comes with the support of a very large community, making it both easier to innovate with Alfresco and better serve clients at a lower cost.

“We’re very excited to have Blue Fish join our team,” said John Newton, CTO and Chairman of Alfresco. “Blue Fish has a track record of successfully delivering creative ECM solutions, building ECM user communities to share knowledge and solving challenging business problems for Fortune 1000 companies. They bring to open source ECM invaluable expertise based on over a decade of development on traditional ECM systems.”

The two teams will be  kicking off the partnership with a joint webinar on the 25th of this month. For more information about the webinar including a sign up sheet, move along this way. And while you’re at it, why not take a peek at our events list as well?

By adopting open standards for ePublishing developed by the International Digital Publishing Form, which are already supported by a growing number of major publishers and a growing number of reading devices, Sony will end its proprietary DRM software (that restricts how often e-books can be shared or copied) in favor of technology from the software maker Adobe.

Montreal-based Ixiasoft (news, site) has just announced the general availability of the new version of its DITA content management system. Version 2.6 comes with several enhancements to v2.1 released in October 2008, when Ixiasoft added two new important features: the CMS Project Manager and the DITA Map Editor.

This time around, they have focused on improving search and search results interface, as well as strengthening the relationship map editor and overall CMS usability.

This time around the platform is opening up realms of new coding possibilities by way of a scripting plugin. The tool allows users to execute server side code directly from Velocity in PHP, Ruby, Python, Groovy, and Javascript.

But if you don’t have a DAM system yet, are in the process of selecting a vendor or even if you have no idea what this DAM thing is and have been tasked to do some DAM research – don’t worry! Below you’ll find some great research and sources of information to help you make an informed decision.

As a digital asset management systems provider ourselves we are obviously a little bit biased, but we also realize that an enterprise DAM is not for everyone. Below are 3 top reasons, backed up with research and sources, of why people acquire a DAM system:


Reason #1:  It Supports your Marketing Initiatives

The top priorities of the Chief Marketing Officer for 2009, according to a survey from the Verse Group and Jupiter Research, are directly impacted by the deployment of a DAM System. In fact, 3 of the 5 of the top CMO goals translate into the top 3 reasons why companies invest in DAM, according to digital asset management research by the Aberdeen Group.

Top Priorities for CMOs and Senior Marketers in 2009:

1. Achieving measurable ROI on marketing efforts. – Why 46% invest in DAM – to Improve Return on Marketing Investments
2. Developing marketing programs that integrate online and traditional media.
3. Translating brand experience across different touchpoints. –  Why 46% invest in DAM – to manage brand consistency
4. Cutting marketing budgets without cutting performance.  – Why 66% invest in DAM – to improve operational efficiency
5. Optimizing portfolio of brands.

Reason #2:  You’re Wasting Too Much Time

Widen contracted with a third-party research firm this spring to conduct digital asset management research to examine a number of digital media management processes and practices among marketing and creative professionals.  According to the findings:

• 1 to 3 hours (29%)
• 4 to 6 hours (33%)

That’s consistent with Mark’s Digital Asset Management ROI blog last week reporting on GISTICS digital asset management research that creative professionals spend an average of 1 out of every 10 hours of their time on file management, mainly searching.

10% of a 40 hour work week is spent searching for files!  That’s a huge drain on productivity. What else could you accomplish in a day, week or month with 10% more time?

Making the problem worse for most organizations is how they are currently storing their digital assets. According to Widen’s third-party research, 41% had an internally developed system and 26% used an internal network folder. This means that 67% of marketing and creative professionals are searching for digital media stored internally by manually clicking through folder after folder, hoping they can still find it!

According to GISTICS Research, a DAM system will help cut the amount of time searching for assets down by over 85%!

Reason #3:  Lower Your Cost Per Use and Increase Brand Impressions

According to Widen’s third-party research, frequency of use was the #1 driver to the value of a digital asset.

According to GISTICS digital asset management research:

• The average creative person looks for a media file 83 times a week and fails to find it 35% of the time
• Research shows that digital asset management solutions will drop that figure to 5%

DAM systems make it easier to find what you’re looking for, thus increasing the ability to use it more frequently. The more frequently an asset is used, the lower your cost per use of the asset and the more brand impressions. (Plus, if you can find a digital asset, you have more opportunity to repurpose the asset. If you can find it, you don’t need to re-create the asset, thus lowering your cost to produce new assets.)
 

Blame the BlackBerry or the iPhone, but a generation of users are expecting all the data they are used to seeing on the desktop to be available on their mobile devices as well. This evolution in working style frames part of the 2009 ECM report from CMS Watch that highlights the move to mobile.

• Wikipedia Gets Its 3 Millionth Article
• If Twitter Was a Village
• FCC Starts on Twitter and Blogging
• Marketers Start to See Benefits of Social Media

Recently, Scott Suiter from Google stood at Times Square in New York and asked passers-by about their definition of a web browser, as part of the Google Chrome thing and all that. If you were into betting, then this might be a question that you could have a lot of fun with.

However, the answer is not really what’s important today (Suiter, by the way, claims only 8% of people could answer the question accurately). What’s important today is that Czech start-up Webnode (site) got all huffy over the question and has been telling people that the answer doesn’t matter.

Doesn’t matter that is, if you use their simple Web CMS/website builder, because Webnode is that simple you don’t have to even know what a browser is to use it. Ahem!

SubHub (news, site), a membership website platform provider, joined forces with Conduit (site), a provider of free SaaS web publishing platform. The new partnership will give SubHub access to Conduit’s 200,000 web publishers and 60 million users, while Conduit gets a  complete set of SubHub’s marketing tools they didn’t have before. What are the other advantages?

The firm is considering expanding their investment, including licensing MOSS. We discussed how they have a tremendous opportunity to do SharePoint "right" from the beginning, and avoid some common critical mistakes.

It occurred to me later, though, that the same advice I gave them could be taken to heart by existing SharePoint customers. Sure, it might mean "undoing" some work, but it's never too late to obtain better value from any SharePoint investment. Here are six basic things you can do.

1) Understand SharePoint's functional strengths and weaknesses
Microsoft markets SharePoint as an omnibus information-management platform, but like all software, it has meaningful strengths and weaknesses. People frequently label SharePoint a collaboration product, when in fact, it excels and some types of collaboration but virtually ignores other. SharePoint is useful for some Web Content Management scenarios, but poor at (many) others. It fits only limited (if promising) Business Intelligence use-cases. SharePoint offers integrated social computing functionality, much of which has been rejected among the customer base -- especially within larger enterprises. For more details, you can consult our SharePoint evaluation research.

2) Keep SharePoint Simple
SharePoint offers an alluring .NET development environment. As with any portal platform, you should tread carefully here, and adopt the KISS principle. The firm above decided to limit their development activity solely to configuration, rather than customization (You can still get into trouble with configurations, but that's another story.) This will make their SharePoint workspaces more affordable, maintainable, repeatable, and upgradable. Regarding upgrades, just check with the scores of enterprises rebuilding their custom SharePoint 2003 applications in the 2007 platform. Nevertheless, I'll also argue that you should not focus unduly on SharePoint 2010 and instead...

3)...Keep your eye on the 2007 ball
It's easy to get swept up in the excitement with SharePoint 2010. There's a lot of new terminology there as well as various indications of new functionality, but you'll want to measure your response to early speculation. First of all, SharePoint has a history of changing substantially from beta to general release. Unless you're a dedicated early adopter, you probably won't want to roll out SharePoint 2010 until some time in 2011. In the meantime, stay focused on maximizing the value of any investment you've made in SharePoint 2007.

4) Recognize the need for expertise and tools for enterprise-wide roll-outs
SharePoint was architected fundamentally for departmental use. At the same time, many if not most customers understandably want to standardize across enterprise deployments. This opens a new set of considerations around performance, security, administration, and cost. Many customers turn to 3rd-party tools from among the SharePoint ecosystem to help. An experienced SharePoint architect also becomes invaluable. (My colleague Shawn Shell is a very good one.)

5) Think in terms of workspace "packages"
Instead of launching generic WSS or MOSS team spaces, create standard configurations for specific business scenarios, like "community of practice," or "executive dashboard." MOSS actually ships with some good templates, but you'll likely want to revise them, and perhaps supplement them with other tools. Australia's James Robertson wrote up a nice case study of how one firm did this.

6) Make the most important governance decision
You can find reams of advice about governance for SharePoint. I've found that organizations with effective governance structures already in place tend to do well here. The problem is that SharePoint quickly exposes enterprises who haven't invested in information and IT governance -- and I think we can all agree that SharePoint doesn't in itself offer governance. The most important decision to make is controlling the provisioning of new sites. By disabling ad-hoc site creation, you can more effectively follow tenets #1-5 above. Note that this has implications for how you deploy (or not) My Profiles and My Sites. If you've already let the SharePoint horses out of the barn, it's hard to corral them back in. In the meantime, at least shut the door.

All this might give you the impression I'm down on SharePoint. I'm not. That firm I advised is primed to spend real money on it and get real value in return. SharePoint will not become their Intranet; it will become a part of their Intranet. Most importantly, now they have a plan.

So, what's your SharePoint plan? I'd love to hear how it turns out. Find me by e-mail or twitter, or comment below. And good luck!

At some point, techonology should remove the need for taxonomy projects, even if it hasn't -- yet.

Help is on the way, though -- assuming you have, say, $150K (plus or minus a Toyota) to spend. Today, San Francisco-based Recommind, Inc. (one of the vendors we cover in our Search & Information Access Report) is introducing MindServer Categorization, a software system that does just what its name implies: It analyzes content, discovers logical categories within the content, and auto-tags each content item according to category relatedness.

Although it's being introduced today as a standalone product, MindServer Categorization -- technically speaking -- is not new. The product has been sold in Germany for years, where major media companies have used it to auto-categorize news feeds. Today's release represents the first time MindServer Categorization has been localized into English and productized for a general market (i.e., not just media firms).

Recommind is not the only company with auto-categorization technology, of course. (Autonomy, often seen on shortlists next to Recommind, is a familiar source of such technology.) But unlike others, Recommind uses PLSA (Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis) as a basis for category discovery, which means, among other things, that Recommind's software requires no training: It doesn't need to be exposed to a "training set" (or sets), have access to a preexisting taxonomy, nor know about keywords. In fact, MindServer Categorization is not only self-training but language-agnostic. In theory, the underlying algorithms can discriminate categories in any corpus, regardless of what language the corpus is in.

Exactly how efficient the system is, you'll have to determine yourself by testing it against a corpus or two of your own. The rate of false positives and false negatives will vary according to the characteristics of the corpus and the tuning parameters you specify. (You can relax or tighten the system's "strictness" through config settings and a C++ API.) Don't expect this -- or any other -- auto-categorization system to be perfect, or anything close to it.

Notably, although Recommind does a lot of business with law firms and legal departments, who use Recommind's search software to categorize e-mail (as well as do more sophisticated kinds of things, such as divining who the domain experts are, in an organization, based on correspondence), some customers are content just to have Recommind's software separate content into two categories: garbage, and content that clearly should be saved.

If it's true, as some research indicates, that 1 GB of data can cost up to $20,000 to collect, process, review, and retain, then the $150K entry fee for MindServer Categorization would seem quite reasonable. (Bear in mind, maintenance is another ~$30K per year on top of that.) But one wonders how long it will be before entity-extraction software, auto-taggers, RDF extractors, and the like become commoditized through Open Source. Also, Recommind and Autonomy face a different sort of competition from the likes of Thomson Reuters, whose Calais project provides what amounts to semantic analysis as a service. (While it's true you might not want to send your entire corporate e-mail archive over the wire to the Calais service, nevertheless you might very well want to stream select RSS or Atom feeds through it -- and many people already do, apparently.) 

At the moment, the company with the greatest exposure (and therefore the most to lose) in this field is Autonomy, whose IDOL technology has cemented the company's reputation for intelligent information retrieval. It will be interesting to see whether upstart Recommind can put a dent in Autonomy's semantic suit of armor -- or whether the two companies are, in fact, destined to remain in separate categories forever.

Yet, when I parse the comments of technology customers in the midst of long-term vendor relationships, what I hear them asking for is predictability, rather than commercial zest. Sure, they want their suppliers to innovate, but since when is innovation a function of sales and marketing skill?

More pointedly, the "I want my vendor to still be around in three years" justification is usually a red herring. Of course this will vary circumstantially, but I think buyers tend to over-weight vendor financial success and underweight vendor (and product) stability.

Consider this poll of recent webinar attendees. I was presenting about the surprising placidity of the Social Software marketplace, and asked attendees about their own experiences with enterprise software. Here's the question and results:

"In the last three years, my enterprise has experienced the following with a software tool we licensed:"

Now, with less than a hundred respondents, I won't call these results scientific, but you get the idea. Vendors and products go away, but once they get enough traction such that analysts like us cover them, demise happens less often than most people believe. The biggest risk to predictability is M&A activity, and that tends to be more prevalent among large, well-established vendors buying each other.

Let's look at the Web CMS marketplace, forever slated for "consolidation." Quick: how many WCM products have gone away due to lack of sales and marketing success? I don't mean acquired by another firm and still living, but outright disappeared. INSO/eBT's Dynabase evaporated when the founders took their money and went home. Serena Collage looks like it will die a slow death (albeit self-imposed). That leaves another 40+ WCM vendors chugging along happily for the past decade or more.

The really big implosion -- the one that's causing pain from Auckland to Geneva -- is the demise of Microsoft CMS, replaced in 2006 by SharePoint. Microsoft is not a company known for poor sales and marketing abilities. Mega-rollup firm Open Text has also euthanized (no, "merged") a couple of WCM products it acquired some years ago. FileNet bought small WCM vendor eGrail in 2002, then ignored it for several years before IBM delivered the coup de grace. That's right folks, you have a greater chance of getting screwed by a large, financially successful vendor than a small, struggling one.

Open source platforms offer no guaranteed panacea here. The key indicator of long-term viability lies not in the slick marketing of commercial open source vendors, but rather, the maturity of project governance (for which there are many different models).

Bex Huff is right that a vendor's business skills and model do matter. In our evaluations we ding some vendors as "quirky," or "inconsistent," or "QA-averse." This is less because we fear them driving the company into the ground, and more because running a solid business contributes to the kind of operational predictability that customers crave.

People who highlight a vendors' sales and marketing prowess are fundamentally cheerleading. You see this primarily among investors and equity analysts, but also major technology analyst firms. You know their traditional complaint: Vendor X has great engineering, but poor marketing savvy."Gearheads!" Interestingly, when we run into seriously disappointed technology customers, that's almost never their complaint. More typically they complain of poor engineering masked by savvy marketing and fawning commentators.

What do you think?

Meantime, if you're a subscriber, you'll receive your updated edition shortly. If not, and you want the inside story on ECM vendor pros and cons, you can purchase the report here, and you can always check out a free sample first.

In itself this isn't all that dramatic. The vulnerability allows anyone to reset the password of the first user in the database (which will usually be the administrator). The only result is that a new password will get mailed to the administrator; it's mostly very annoying, not (in most cases) a real problem.

And in general, the fact that security issues and bugs in WordPress are discovered and patched quickly is a testament to the agility of its community. This is partly because it's open source, so it's easy to find and fix bugs (no security by obscurity here); and also due to the fact that so many people use the software.

Last but not least, in recent versions the software introduced an "auto-upgrade" feature, which means that for many implementations, this will be a relatively painless one click upgrade.

That's the positive side of things. The nagging bits are that, first of all, exactly because WordPress is so popular and so open, leaks are often discovered and massively exploited by black hats even faster than they can be fixed. I've seen plenty of hijacked WordPress blogs. This isn't helped by the fact that the codebase horrifies many PHP developers (anyone who has built templates for WordPress will probably already have a sense of that).

Secondly, yes, in the admin UI there's a simple link to click that will automatically upgrade you to the newest version, but whether it works can be touch and go: much depends on having set all the permissions correctly on your webserver. Because WP is so easy to use, paradoxically, this is often a bit too specialized for most WordPress admins to get right in the first place. Do you really want to chmod all your files to 0755? Could you explain why? (Bonus question for those who do: what do you do if your hosting provider runs HTTPD and FTP as different users or groups?) So in many cases, the feature either doesn't work, or permissions have had to be set less secure than ideal (which opens the door to hackers once again). At any rate, it'd be smart to backup the database first. Easily done using phpMyAdmin's SQL export feature, but I'd love to see a poll of what percentage of WordPress users have ever even heard of that.

Assuming that you, or your admin, are quite knowledgeable, there's still the Sword of Damocles of the next update hanging over you. It could come out tomorrow. Or next week. Likely, quite soon -- but always when you least expect it. A short history:

• August 2009: 2.8.4
• August 2009: 2.8.3
• July 2009: 2.8.2
• July 2009: 2.8.1
• June 2009: 2.8
• February 2009: 2.7.1
• December 2008: 2.7
• November 2008: 2.6.5
• October 2008: 2.6.3

Most of these have release notes highlighting "security release," "security release, upgrading is highly recommended," or "XSS vulnerability." One of my favorites is the jump from 2.6.3 to 2.6.5, "to avoid confusion with a fake 2.6.4 release that made the rounds" -- something which has actually happened before.

Now I, myself, am certainly not one of those knowledgeable WordPress admins, but I help out a couple of people with their personal blogs and they really like the software. Unfortunately, I don't think this is a hobby I can afford to keep much longer. I may have to replace it with something a little less time consuming, like, say, playing World of Warcraft.

All of this is unfortunate, since our research indicates that most WordPress users are content with the interface, usability and general intelligibility of the software. I wish this wouldn't be such a rare trait among the products I review, but WP really stands out in that respect. So much so, that people using it for a blog have started to use it as a more general purpose web content management system. There are some rather annoying limitations when using it as such (which is why I wouldn't recommend using it for a site larger than a couple of dozen of pages), and addressing those limitations would probably mean UI sprawl (and with it, loosing the unique selling point). But still, I can see why they'd want to.

Right now, though, WordPress is threatened by a fickle release cycle; you'll probably need more experienced helping hands than you'd expect with software this user friendly. Making it easier to upgrade is symptomatic treatment; if you want to use it for something slightly more mission-critical than the occasional blogging, it needs to stop mollifying admin's headaches with Tylenol.

So how much does storage cost? Well, it's like the answer to the question, how long is a piece of string....."it depends." But a better answer may be "more than you might think." In many cases much more, and quite often more than the cost of the application software and associated services will cost you.

The variables here revolve around the type of content you manage.  If it's mostly html files, then the volume will not likely be too high. If on the other hand, it is typically Office files, or worse still Rich Media (such as video files) then your storage needs will shoot up. These days Terabytes of data are the norm; typical ECM installations have 25-50TB of content, and some run into the multiple Petabytes. And these numbers are only likely to grow as rich media and ever richer documents become the norm.

Another factor that can seriously impact your storage costs surrounds the issue of lifecycle management, and version control.  If redundant files are moved off the live system to an active archive as and when they become redundant -- and in turn are destroyed when they reach the end of their lifecycle -- your storage costs will become more manageable.

If on the other hand, you just keep everything, the costs will skyrocket. In previous consulting engagements for large enterprises I have found less than 4% of the content sitting in file servers to be relevant: the vast majority of the content is out of date, duplicated, or not even business related (porn, recipes family photo albums, and the like). Good content housekeeping is just common sense.

So how much does storage cost? Well depending on your media of choice, 25TB will cost you anywhere from just under a $100k per year for a hosted service to $350k if you were to buy, install and manage the hardware in-house. If you get into the Petabyte category then you are in the millions to start the discussion.

You of course need to look at all the storage options, and understand that storage costs are not just as simple as calculating disk space. There are trade offs in terms of access, performance, and price between Direct Attached, SAN, and NAS options.  You will likely end up with a mixed environment.  Just as you also need to consider the cost and need for Disaster Recovery, Back-Up, and Archiving in addition to your primary requirements.

Likewise you will need to consider the physical distance between consumers and stored data.  Don't let anyone kid you -- a file accessed in Tokyo sitting in a file server in New York will take longer to render than one sitting in Kyoto...

And yes, just in case you are thinking about it: to back up one Petabyte, you will need another Petabyte at least....soon adds up doesn't it?

There is a myth that storage is cheap; it's not cheap. Just because you see 1GB flash drives going for a song at your local store, does not mean that enterprise storage costs have plummeted.  They haven't. Moreover, they are not going to, since our needs remain insatiable and are only set to grow. So next time you are considering investing in a system like SharePoint, FileNet, Artesia, or MediaBin, make sure you think through your storage needs carefully, and cost them realistically from the outset.

Consider the following:

• Despite the labyrinthine complexity of the US healthcare system - somehow it "works" and has done for years, so why change?
• The healthcare system in the US consists of two equally complex meta processes - insurance/billing & patient care - so where to start?
• Standards and agreed procedures are not uniform across the United States: Federal, State, City and Local entities all have to have a say
• The healthcare system is so highly fragmented, that there is in fact no "system". Instead there is a loose amalgam of public and private entities all with vested interests, and interests that often conflict
• Patients have the temerity at times to live to beyond 90, change state residency, insurance companies, employers and sometimes go without coverage at all

I am only scratching the surface of issues above.... though the ECM sector is getting very excited indeed about billions of dollars coming available from Federal government to help with EHR (Electronic Health Records). The lessons from the UK's National Health Service suggest that though lots of money will undoubtably be spent, not that much will change.

For sure there will be some 'state of the art' hospitals using joined up and impressive ECM systems, just as there will be adventurous local clinics that will sport staff with tablet devices. But fundamentally paper records will be a mainstay of the US health system for many years to come, and will likely run alongside electronic records for decades.

My advice to the buyers within healthcare is to cautious of the snake oil salesman. Those who come to you with grand visions of unified information systems across regions should be treated with great caution. Those who offer transitional routes via the use of imaging and scanning systems, and who support and will work with you on simplified standards and processes, should be given a little more ear time.

Despite the Obama administration's efforts to move EHR along, I would wager that the targets being set will be missed time and again. $20 billion sounds like a lot of money, because it is a lot of money. But it will not fundamentally change the current situation, though it is enough money for a start. Like all ECM projects that go wrong, the focus is currently on EHR and the technology that supports EHR, when the focus should in fact be on the processes and process transformations that will need to be managed and changed across a wide array of conflicting and disparate working units.

EHR, just like ECM is a process of business change utilizing some underlying and supporting technologies. Any project that sees it the other way around is doomed from the start. I fear that is sadly what has already happened here.

One tendency is revealing. Many of Gartner's "strengths" and "cautions" have to do with a vendor's "marketing effectiveness," "messaging," and "awareness." Things that matter to investors and other vendors, but not so much to buyers. We are about to publish a short statement on sixteen principles behind CMS Watch's methodology. Principles ten through twelve seem relevant here:

10. We do not rate vendors' "market leadership," which is vague and typically not germane
11. We do not evaluate vendors' sales and marketing acumen, except inasmuch as different sales tactics may be meaningful for buyers to understand
12. A vendor's "story" doesn't matter; what they actually do matters

Let's contrast what Gartner says with a sampling of what our research says about Web CMS vendor CoreMedia.

There is one other difference. Our research costs money, and this MQ is free.  Or rather, it's been pre-paid for you by Oracle. (Note the URL: mediaproducts.gartner.com/reprints/oracle/...) This tweet from an an Oracle employee -- "Oracle WIN!" -- suggests how useful the MQ is for them.

So, vendors can win (and lose) at this game. But what about you the customer? Before you start researching which tool to adopt, first figure out your requirements, starting with what sorts of website(s) you publish. Oracle might suit your Intranet, but perhaps not your public sites.

Gartner's observations are arguably more strategic. CMS Watch was founded on the notion that in vendor selection, the nitty-gritty matters. A lot. You see, whatever tool you ultimately select will bring tangible strengths and weaknesses -- probably more of both than you ever imagined-- that will impact your business. Software developers make trade-offs all the time. Which ones do you want to make?

I'd just been pondering that question when Dion Hinchcliffe published a nifty little graphic.

Source: Dion Hinchcliffe - Click to enlarge

There's a lot to like about this chart: it's comprehensive and makes a nice division between content management and social computing vendors. Unfortunately, the chart does not tell a prospective buyer some important details, like what the products actually do, the size of the vendors, and what it's like to work with those vendors or tools.

Here's our simple division of the enterprise social software and collaboration marketplace, into six categories. I don't claim that this is a complete list of vendors -- just a categorization of the most important ones on enterprise buyers' short lists today. It also does not confer any "leadership" status; a magic sextant this is not. But it does tell you where a vendor resides on the landscape.

Click to enlarge

For a deeper look at what's happening in the marketplace, we turn to a different type of chart, a "Cross-Check."

Click to enlarge

This chart shows the intersection of product and vendor evolution, so that prospective buyers can make risk/reward judgments. It really struck us after completing this exercise how much the broader social software and collaboration marketplace has become almost placid. Contrast this with some other Cross-Checks we've released recently, e.g., ECM or Portals. I think for enterprise customers -- especially social computing technology buyers -- placid is good. For a longer explanation of the chart, check out today's release about it, or view the brief slidecast.

In the end, there's no perfect way to visualize such a complex marketplace, although I hope these three charts begin to point you in the right direction. There's also no substitute for getting the real story on any solution before you make an enterprisewide commitment. Our evaluation research could save you time and money. Drafting a solid RFP certainly helps. And then, as always, be sure to test before you decide.

But it’s the history of web analytics that I find truly fascinating. For an industry that is about 13 years old, there’s been a lot going on in terms of technology and company evolution. In a way, the irony is that the industry evolution has occurred far more quickly and dynamically than the use of the tools themselves.

So, with this as background, I am really looking forward to the Web Analytics Founding Fathers key note presentation at the upcoming X Change conference in San Francisco from September 9-11.

This is going to be a lot of fun (if you’re into web analytics). For the first time, Matt Cutler, co-founder of NetGenesis (first generation log file analysis) and now on the management team at Visible Measures (video measurement); Bob Page, co-founder of  Accrue Software (first generation packet sniffing analysis) and now head of analytics engineering at Yahoo; John Pestana, co-founder of Omniture, and now co-founder of ObservePoint (page tag auditing),  and Brett Crosby, co-founder of Urchin, and now Group Manager of Google Analytics will be together and talking about where web analytics has been and where they think it’s going.

I’m also looking forward to some of this year’s sessions…notably James Robinson’s (from the NY Times) on  Creating a Metrics Driven Organization, and Greg Dowling’s (from Nokia) on Measuring the Mobile Internet.

If you’re thinking of coming, it’d be great to see you at the advanced training workshop I’ll be teaching on Managing Web Analytics on a Shoestring, where I’ll be talking about how you can maximize your web analytics impacts within the organization when you’re short on time, resources, and budget.

Hope to see you at X Change. CMS Watch readers get a 15 percent discount on the conference and training by using the promo code: CMSWATCH

Consider the RFP process. Mind you, I'm no expert on Requests for Proposals (or tenders, as they're also known), but after you read enough of them, it's clear that nobody else is, either. Every RFP is different, and almost all are seriously flawed in one way or another. No one seems to know how to write a "good" RFP, perhaps because "nobody knows anything."

And yet, most of us cling to the Quixotic belief that the RFP process is essential. Going through the exercise of creating an RFP (or better still, an RFI) is worthwhile, one could argue, because it helps crystallize thinking around the business drivers behind a project. At the same time, it stimulates dialog on how operational needs intersect with the sundry technological (and other) considerations that go into the selection of products and vendors. Even if you never show your RFP to a vendor, chances are you'll have learned a great deal just by going through the exercise of creating it.

But banish the notion that you're going to create the "perfect tender." Your RFP will be flawed. The point isn't that it's flawed but that you learned something while creating it.

Before the RFP gets written there's usually a needs-analysis of some kind. Once "needs" (which are often actually wants) are assessed, they ultimately get translated to requirements, which in turn find their way into the tender, or RFP. This is already a treacherous path. Needs assessment is a tricky thing in and of itself, but even assuming you can get a good handle on your needs, you should be clear on the fact that needs aren't necessarily the same thing as selection criteria. After all, the point of the RFP isn't to identify products or vendors that can meet a given set of feature requirements, but the one(s) that best address your business problems.

Even before you start down the slippery path of needs assessment, though, you should take the time to create a glossary. Until everyone agrees on vocabulary, it's impossible to have a meaningful dialog. That sounds obvious, doesn't it? But think how many terms there are in this business that mean different things to different people:SOA, roles (versus groups), security, integration, "content reuse," template, compliance, workflow, Web Services, "REST API," reporting (which many people seem to think means logging), scalability, performance. Minefields all.

Not long ago, I was reading a vendor's response to an RFP (for a WCMsystem) in which some 200 or so requirements had been enumerated by the customer. The vendor's response to the majority of the 200 challenges was "Our solution natively provides this capability." That phrase occurred over and over. (Someone did an awful lot of cut and paste.)

How do you avoid this type of situation? Well, for starters, don't phrase things along the lines of "Do you support XYZ functionality?" unless you want to hear (over and over again) the Obama campaign slogan "Yes we can."

Likewise, don't ask "How will you be able to handle XYZ?" unless you're willing to tolerate answers like "Our standard user interface allows a user to do this" or "our application programming interface allows the product to be easily extended so as to accomplish this."

Instead, write a user narrative or concrete scenario for every one of your key requirements, and demand a narrative answer in response. For example, rather than ask whether a product natively supports delegation of authority in workflows, compose a concrete user narrative. "Cathy, the Managing Editor, has the necessary rights to designate authors for stories and reassign stories from one author to another in her department. Cathy will be traveling frequently on business, and in her absence she wants her assistant, Bill, who does not have Managing Editor rights, to be able to assign and reassign stories in her stead. Describe the steps that Cathy would need to carry out before she goes on vacation, including any GUI features Cathy would use, to delegate the necessary authority to Bill for a period of N days. Describe any administrator or developer interventions that might be necessary. Describe what actions Bill will have to take in order to act as Cathy's proxy."

It may turn out that all the vendors on your short list say they can support this scenario. But the details could be quite telling. Vendor A might simply say "Cathy should give her log-on credentials to Bill until she returns from vacation." Vendor B might say "The administrator can temporarily assign Managing Editor rights to Bill." Vendor C, on the other hand, might say: "In Cathy's preferences tab, there's an 'Assign Proxy...' button that brings up a dropdown menu populated with the names of people in Cathy's department who have a privilege level equal to or higher than Cathy's. There's also a special field where Cathy can override the dropdown list by manually entering the user name of any person in her department. And there's a date-picker control that lets Cathy specify a range of effective dates through a point-and-click gesture."

For most cusotmers, Vendor C has a much more compelling answer to this use-case than Vendors A or B. But the point is, you'll never get this kind of information if you merely submit a list of "checkbox" requirements that invite short, meaningless answers.

Of course, writing user narratives takes time. You probably won't have time or resources to write hundreds of them. But that's good. Most RFPs are grossly over-specified. Reducing 200 or 300 "requirements" to 40 or 50 well-considered narratives (covering only the most important use cases) will bring clarity to the selection process by putting the focus on real-world user needs and business priorities. Also consider that user narratives can become acceptance tests later on, if you write them with that in mind.

And by the way, don't lose sight of the fact that when you're selecting a product that's mission critical to your business, your vendor becomes (in essence) a new business partner. Thus the RFP becomes a kind of interviewing tool. Standard interview techniques apply. Which means anything goes. You're perfectly free to insert brain-teasers in an RFP -- questions for which there's a "trick answer," or no answer. Likewise, feel free to pose an open-ended question (an open-ended "requirement") and see what you get in reply. "If I migrate your software to a more powerful machine and see server-response times deteriorate, what are some likely causes and how will I proceed to troubleshoot it?" The vagueness of this kind of question practically demands that the respondent ask questions back. You'll learn a great deal from those questions -- and the dialog that ensues.

One final thought. After your project has finally rolled out (months after the selection process), bring your stakeholders together again and do a post-mortem on the entire selection process, including the RFP itself. Ask: How much value did the RFP end up bringing to the process? Was the RFP you finally produced appropriate (in size, scope, and quality) to the task at hand? Could other groups in your organization use your RFP as a starting point for their own RFPs? (Is it resuable, in other words.) Were the user narratives useful for acceptance testing? And of course: What would you do differently, if you had it to do over again?

With any luck, you might be able to prove William Goldman wrong.

(Note: A different version of this post originally appeared at E-TechnologyManagement.com.)

An article in yesterday's Wall Street Journal plumbed IBM's success at converting business advisory to tech consulting, and consulting to software sales (but not, ultimately, hardware sales). To quote:

"'We look for the consulting arm to lead our entry to the client,' driving sales of other products, says IBM Chief Financial Officer Mark Loughridge."

It's old news that IBM's Global Services arm has become a bigger part of the company with each passing year. But what sometimes comes under dispute is whether IBM consultants actually push IBM technology over those of competitors. "We do more [BEA] WebLogic implementations than [IBM] WebSphere," one Global Services consultant protested to me a couple of years ago, in an attempt to compare his employer to the likes of Accenture. I took him at his word, but all the anecdotes that cross my path seem to suggest otherwise. (Check out, for instance, this oldie but goodie from 2005.)

I won't begrudge IBM its success. And other major consulting firms can exhibit serious conflicts of interest as well. But you the customer have to remain alert to the consequences. Consider the following hypothetical sequence:

• Your executives bring in IBM for some business re-engineering (perhaps you've seen the commercials)
• At some point -- for better or worse -- this devolves into a technology program
• Your organization makes a big investment in WebSphere-based middleware
• Your web team gets forced to use WebSphere's bundled Web Content Management tool

If you want to know what's wrong with that last step, you can consult our Web CMS Report. Of course, some version of this sequence can happen with Oracle, EMC, and Microsoft, too. (And the particular travails of accepting a WCM tool from an ECM vendor are well-known to some Alfresco customers.) But the larger point here is that IBM has evolved sales-via-consultant into a science, particularly with its emphasis on initial "business" consulting after its PriceWaterhouse acquisition.

In the end, let's ditch that old canard about "not getting fired for going with Big Blue" and admire their big profits instead. Then let's also acknowledge that you need to take firm responsibility for making the right technology choices for your enterprise, regardless of the consultants you hire.

When last we wrote about Day, the financial news was, at best, mixed. As you may recall, we reported back in February that Day Software experienced a net loss in 2008 of CHF 12.0M on 27.8M in income, versus a net profit of CHF 7.0M on 25.0M of income in 2007. Corresponding, as they did, with the timing of the worldwide economic downturn, those numbers were not terribly surprising.

But the recession appears to be over, for Day. A public company (SIX:DAYN, OTCQX:DYIHY), Day Software says it saw total revenues increase by 33% (to CHF 17.0M) for the first half of 2009 versus the same period in 2008. Pre-tax net income was a respectable CHF 2.0M, although 235K of that was foreign-exchange gain.

License revenue, which for most software companies has been shrinking as a percentage of total revenue, accounted for a healthy 42% of Day's top line, at CHF 7.2M, an increase of 26% from 1H2008. At CHF 5.4M, support and maintenance revenue constituted 32% of Day's total first-half revenue (up 23% from 1H2008), with services accounting for CHF 4.4M (up almost 70% from the prior year).

Day attributes the sunny financial performance to a variety of factors, including 18 new customer deals in Q2 (among them, "a major new win at Adobe"), and "significant reorders" as a result of uptake of DAM and Social Collaboration offerings by Day customers. In addition, the company points to major investments in its sales organization and operational efficiencies from earlier restructuring efforts.

Let us not forget, though, that Day released a long-awaited (and we do mean long-awaited) major upgrade to its flagship CommuniquÉ product late in 2008 -- perfect timing for creating a rush of income in 2009. There have also been major and minor upgrades, in 2009, for the CQ DAM offering. 

Whatever the reason(s), numbers are numbers and profits are profits. And it looks like Day and its shareholders have legitimate cause to break out the party hats and champagne, at this point. Or whatever it is they break out in Basel, when the going gets good.

I find myself increasingly using a term Bob invented in that book: "Metator." We're also beginning to reference the metator function more often in our evaluation research.

Metators are really contextualizers. They look beyond the item of information itself to understand things like its relationships, impact, trajectory, findability, alternate formats, and potential consumption profile.

I've been thinking more about the term lately in connection with the web teams I debrief or consult with. Contemporary web publishing operations have become, of course, much more than shoveling an HTML file into a subfolder. Instead, most web teams deal with disembodied content items that might need to appear in multiple different contexts, on different sites, potentially across multiple different formats. Their Web CMS hopefully supports this work, but trust me, it also requires human intervention -- if only to monitor whether all-important tags got applied correctly. This is actually what the old "webmaster" role has come to: still part traffic-cop, but more so enterprise librarian and web consumer advocate.

Metators are not just found among corporate web teams. Records managers have been dealing with metadata for decades. Now, you might think of your enterprise records manager as some corporate ninny who makes you clean up your virtual bedroom. In reality, she is organizing and processing large volumes of information on behalf of the enterprise, its customers, and ultimately for you, too. She is, in short, a metator.

Metators don't need to be full-time information managers. In every department in your firm, there are some people who just know "what's going on," or who see the bigger context. KM specialists call them "connectors" and "collectors," the glue that holds things together. This makes them very powerful and surely very important, if not in title, then in practice.

In fact, metators are increasingly important to every enterprise technology we cover, from Search (for sure!) to DAM, to ECM. And also Social Software, that erstwhile bastion of crowd-sourced information organization. What is a wiki gardener, if not a metator?

Who are the metators in your organization? And what are you doing to support them?

• DAM Library of Photo Archive
• Basic Brand Management
• Multi-Lingual Brand Management
• Marketing Asset Production & Distribution
• Ad Production

• Periodicals Production & Distribution
• Multi-Channel Publishing
• Catalog Production
• Rights-Managed Syndication & Distribution

• E-Learning
• Video Ad Review & Approval
• Short Form Video Production
• Broadcast Video Production

Photographic Capture

Specializing in tabletop and lifestyle digital photography, particularly for the apparel industry, Widen is able to reduce photography time and costs by capturing only a neutral color garment of a particular style instead of photographing every color swatch needed to bring that product to market.  This method dramatically reduces photography costs and model time because it greatly reduces the amount of products to shoot.  Products are captured according to the client’s pre-determined product display standards.  For example with these apparel garments, Widen photographers shoot three-quarter front and back views of the item on a mannequin.  Captures are tagged and instantly delivered to Widen’s digital production team who then create the full line of products. 

Digital Production

After the captures are taken, Widen color retouching specialists apply the necessary colors and special markings according to the client’s technical specifications, thus creating all color swatches and product variations.  This process is formally referred to as “digital sampling” for the apparel market.  This process is manual versus automated for the purpose of producing superior quality hi-resolution images that accurately represent the physical product.  Final images are created for both print and web use.  Benefits derived from this process include: reducing physical sample cost by marketing digital samples without physically producing all of the products, improving time to market with a process that previously took weeks or days to one that now takes only a couple of days to a couple of hours.  Intangible results for the client include improving brand consistency by accurately displaying all products available for sale in addition to improving market penetration by marketing the full line of products.

Web-based Collaboration, Management & Distribution

Widen also develops web based digital asset software for collaboration, approval tracking, management and distribution of digital files, an industry defined as digital asset management (DAM).  Widen speeds the approval process by allowing clients to instantly review the digital samples (digital assets) online and make comments, annotations, and order immediate changes.  Once the digitally produced file is approved by the client, they are available in a web-based, password protected, client-branded website where key internal marketing teams and external sales / distribution channels or retailers have access to download official product images.  Based on the level of permissions, users can download hi-resolution CMYK images for print use or lo-resolution RGB images for the web.  All files are instantly converted to the necessary output type from one master file type so that multiple formats of the same file do not need to be stored.  The Widen online DAM system is equipped with a number of features to manage images rights and access levels.  One of the hottest features and trends is publishing digital samples to online sources using digital asset embed links where the master file displayed online is referenced in the Widen DAM, which is the master repository.


 

1. It is the content, not the media the media that drives content classification, retention, and disposition. The best practices and policies that are slowly being adopted in Enterprises around email can be used to evaluate the use of new social media applications as well.
2. Don't wait for a problem to arise. Get out in front of the adoption of social media applications within your enterprise to develop policies for acceptable use, retention and disposition and eDiscovery. Developing the policies will provide the ability to evaluate new Social Media applications to understand if they are right for your organization.

1. Photograph neutral color physical apparel samples
2. Digitally create all color swatches according to league approved team colors
3. Apply team and league graphics according to Adidas supplied technical guidelines
4. Upload final digital samples to web-based digital asset library for retail access

How Apparel Digital Sampling Uses Consumer Buying Preferences

Notice how the Reebok and Adidas apparel styles are displayed with the three-quarter front view of the apparel sample on a mannequin.  Widen assisted a Reebok research study to understand consumer buying preferences for apparel sample images displayed in print and web media.  Widen compared which views were most preferred by sports apparel consumers and the three-quarter view was most preferred over the full frontal view (as displayed above in the DICK'S Sporting Goods email template).  By running reports on image distribution and access through the Widen image tracking system, Adidas is able to measure what styles are most popular.

Official Championship Apparel Samples Created by Widen

Displayed below are Reebok and Adidas hot market digital apparel samples (created by Widen premedia services and color retouching experts) for all three major sports champions declared in 2009: NFL Super Bowl Champion Pittsburgh Steelers, NHL Stanley Cup Champion Pittsburgh Penguins and NBA Finals Champion Los Angeles Lakers. 



For more information about Widen apparel marketing technology and services, check out the Widen Digital Sampling webpage.

Aberdeen recently surveyed over 130 companies to understand how organizations justify investments in digital asset management for marketing. This study highlights Best-in-Class practices for managing marketing assets and further validates 2008 Aberdeen research on marketing asset management, which revealed that digital asset management technology is vital to Best-in-Class performance in return on marketing investment, brand consistency, and time-to-market. Access the Aberdeen Group Benchmark Report: The Marketers' Guide to Justifying Investments in Digital Asset Management

Five Compelling Facts from the Research, Providing Actionable Benefits for Readers:

1. Best-in-Class companies are 7.1-times more likely than Laggards to improve annual revenue. On average, Best-in-Class companies improved annual revenue by 18%, compared to an average decrease of 28% amongst Laggards.
2. Sixty-nine percent (69%) of Best-in-Class companies improved annual customer satisfaction levels, compared to 10% of all others. The average performance increase for Best-in-Class companies was 28%, compared to a 1% improvement for all others.
3. Best-in-Class companies are 11.8-times more likely than Laggards to improve year-over-year conversion rates. On average, Best-in-Class companies improved annual conversion rates by 12%, compared to a 15% decrease amongst Laggards.
4. Best-in-Class companies are 393% more likely than all others to shorten sales cycle times. On average, Best-in-Class reduced the length of sales cycles by 22%, compared to a 13% increase in sales cycle time amongst all others.
5. Best-in-Class companies are 5.9-times more likely than Laggards to reduce the cost of content creation. On average, Best-in-Class companies reduced content creation costs by 17%, compared to a 10% increase amongst Laggards.

A few key points that came out of the session included that businesses who focus on producing goods or services that fit these concepts tend to do well in the 'free' economy. Our session was only 70 minutes long, so if you have others you think should be added to this, I'd welcome your input.

• Rarity of the finished goods
• Difficulty of ‘assembly'
• Accessibility of the goods
• Aggregation of materials
• Neutrality of the Source
• Application of Intellect/Analysis

1. Photograph 1 neutral grey apparel sample
2. Digitally create all color swatches according to league approved team colors
3. Apply graphics according to Adidas supplied technical guidelines

• Accelerated search and retrieval time
• Increased real-time collaboration of assets and approvals
• Cost savings through the elimination of physical delivery
• Elimination of the cost of lost or misplaced work
• Reduction in time-to-market through digital delivery

How does this relate to content workflows and federation of tasks? While I realize that picking up a little robot and pointing it the right way as it rolls down the sidewalk is very different from preparing a piece of content for multi-channel delivery, there are three main lessons I take away from the experiment:

• Intuitive, Efficient and Streamlined User Interface
  Users must immediately be able to grasp what can/should be accomplished, and how to accomplish the task(s) with the interface provided

  It is important to enable the people performing your tasks to go from thought to action quickly. There were no instructions on the TweenBot-- as a passerby you could immediately grasp how to interact. At every step in a workflow, the UI needs to be streamlined to help the operator accomplish their task(s) as efficiently as possible. It should present the user with as little information, and as few tools as are necessary for them to be able to successfully accomplish their task. There are a wealth of ways to provide task and context-specific user interfaces with today’s technology tools, so it is worth spending time and effort optimizing the UI to make the team more efficient.

• Atomic Task(s)
  Task requires no delegation/interaction with other stakeholders, task(s) can be easily/quickly accomplished, and next step(s) are immediately apparent at the handoff point

  When looking at each step in the workflow, it is important to make sure tasks can be meaningfully completed without needing to travel back up or down stream. Even in iterative processes (such as editorial workflows) it is important to structure the process so that every touch point somehow captures the work done, enriches the content and thereby limits repetition and re-work. If there are steps that require significant input from multiple parties, it might be worth breaking them down into subtasks, and doing some soul-searching to determine who the ultimate stakeholder is for a given component, and assign the task (and authority over the task) entirely to them. This will help eliminate bottlenecks in the process and make sure the team’s time and efforts are optimized.

  When looking at tasks, it is also important to make sure to capture all possible outcomes. In the TweenBot example, a passerby could redirect the robot’s path, or if they saw the robot heading for peril, they had the ability (and authority) to redirect it out of harm’s way. It is important to consider all possible outcomes and the next step(s) that can follow, and to give the team member responsible for that point in the workflow the ability (and authority) to take any possible branch away from their task. The better you can plan in advance for what the possibilities are, the less time you need to spend figuring out what comes next.

• Capture the Power of Crowds
  Many hands make light work, and every touch point in a workflow can (and should) enrich the product, and contribute to a successful outcome

  Finally, take advantage of the tools available to capture the work people do. This applies at any step in the workflow, from content creation all the way through user consumption. For example, if a photo editor does a select on a huge photo set, decides the short list for print, and has a few ‘maybes’, make sure to capture that information. Better yet, present them with a UI that lets them quickly add keywords and/or set some metadata values that will make that content easier to find, more easily reusable, and thereby more valuable. Likewise, leverage your end-users. Give them content tagging abilities, let them comment or share content, or if those don’t fit your business objectives, analyze (and capture) their consumptive behavior so you can track how your content is being used and measure that against your business goals.

There’s plenty of room to drill down further and take this ideas to specifics in different business environments, and we’ll explore these in the weeks to come. In the meantime, though, think about how a TweenBot lost in the streets of New York can help you more efficiently reach your goals.

Usually in the early stages of system evaluation a product is measured by functionality against a set of requirements. Products that look good on paper are then evaluated in Web-based or in-person demos.

Once the end users get chance to see the product in action, user experience begins to trump functionality. In discussions with clients after a demo hear things like "I really liked how simple and easy to use that system seemed" or "Everything on that system seemed complex and disorganized." Of course, much of the user experience on display during the demo has to do with the skills of the presenter (Author note: I'm working on a blog about the importance of giving a good demo).

It's true that a simple, sleek and easy-to-use interface will help in training new users of the system. It can also allow users that have not been trained to easily pick up and teach themselves how to use the system. The speed at which you can train new users and increase adoption of a new system presents an opportunity for a change management win.

If you choose a system based primarily on user experience, the lack of additional functionality may become an issue after the training and adoption phase. You might start hearing things like "If only the system could do X" or "It really annoys me that the system does this instead of this." Feature requests start pouring in and custom development costs begin to rise.

Conversely, implementing a new system that has tons of bells and whistles but lacks on the user experience can take longer to implement and can become more of a change management hurdle. The features are all there but it could take extensive training to show users how to do the various tasks in their workflow. If the system isn't intuitive, users may not use it.

So can you have it both ways? Can you have all the features and functionality while still having a great user experience? The answer is yes, but is usually more expensive.

Additionally if you find that you are faced with the choice of functionality vs. user experience you should ask a few key questions to your vendor finalists: How many customer-based feature requests have you integrated into your core product over the last year? How customizable is the user interface of your product?

How do I relate my Camera RAW image asset to my Hi-res RGB JPG? How do I relate my main image to another image that is of the same subject but at a slightly different angle?

While most Digital Asset Management systems will have some form of version control, the ability to characterize and relate these different "versions" of the same image is less typical and is something that should be considered in researching or selecting any DAM system.

Below I will explain what the difference is between Versions, Variations, and Renditions and where each of these different relationships might be used in your DAM image workflow.

Versions

Version management is your edit trail. Rather than constantly performing a save as and renaming your files, most DAM system have a check-in check-out system that automatically versions and stores your documents. You would want to version your image when making edits that would be considered "permanent" i.e. removing dust, scratches, red-eye etc.

Original Image 

Main Image - Retouched and color corrected version

Variations

Slight differences in an image such as focus, lighting, angle, or composition could be considered variations on an image. Variation image many times are a subset of a larger set of outtakes that could be used online or in a publication, but would not be considered the "main" image. 

Main Image Variation 1

Main Image Variation 2

Renditions

A single image may be saved multiple times for various uses. Resolution changes and color space changes will require a new file to be saved, but it is of the same image. These different formats of the same image would be considered renditions. You could have the RAW rendition, the black and white rendition, the cropped rendition, the 72 dpi PNG rendition.

Main Image - Black and White Rendition

Main Image - Lo-Res Rendition

Main Image - Cropped Rendition 

If the Digital Asset Management system you are looking at does not have distinct ways of supporting the relationships above it could make for messy searching and confusion on when to use which asset. Ideally you want to run a search and find the main image and depending on your access controls have access to the different renditions and variations of that image.

Bonus points to those DAM systems that have out of the box solutions for managing other related images and outtakes to the main image!

What to look for when selecting a software vendor?

• Proven success in your niche
• Cultural fit between organizations
• Complete package vs. custom technology
• Future functionality requirements
• Training and user adoption

After reading the article and dissecting the main points I had an “Aha! Moment” recognizing that these are all reasons contributing to the popularity of Software as a Service (SaaS), particularly in this economic climate where it is difficult to justify large capital expenditures on software, hardware and a reallocation of IT resources.

Successful SaaS providers grasp these points and are the reason why they continue to be the answer to software questions in this economic climate...

1. Proven success in your industry and with people in similar roles
2. Cultural fit as an extension of your business and/or functional areas
3. Configurable package options without heavy need for customization
4. Shared transparency of future product roadmap to align with the goals of the customer
5. Widespread user adoption achieved through proper training, marketing support and ongoing tech support

These factors are what drives the ongoing success of a software implementation at any company dealing with restricted budgets, too much on the” to-do list,” increased demand of specialization and fewer resources to focus on the core business.  Whether you’re looking for an enterprise digital asset management system or hosted DAM software for your SMB or agency, consider these factors for any marketing or creative software.

Countless times we have started a project with a client to determine content strategies, data warehousing strategies, and digital asset management strategies and they all have one thing in common. The client will usually mention an implementation of FileMaker that they are looking to replace. "We need a way to migrate from FileMaker." "We have multiple FileMaker systems that we need to either eliminate or integrate with."

The problem is that because FileMaker can be so easy to setup and configure, that it is often integrated as point solution, or a solution to hold you over, a quick fix. The trouble then starts a few months after you get that FileMaker system up and running. It becomes embedded in your every day work, and the system outgrows it original intent. The reasons for implementing a FileMaker system simple. You need a database to hold information and it is easier to setup a FileMaker system than to create a data model, have a database administrator set it up, and create an interface for managing and editing the records. Because FileMaker can be updated so easily, every time a change is needed there is little thought on what the impact of the change will be on the data model.

When it comes time to migrate from, or integrate with a FileMaker system there can be a multitude of challenges in determining how to organize and normalize the data that is either stored in FileMaker, or will be integrated with FileMaker.

Next time you are considering implementing FileMaker, think about what the problem is that you are really trying to solve, and then ask yourself if you are looking for a quick fix, or a solution that will scale to meet future needs. Regardless of wether you decide to create a FileMaker system or not, careful data modeling and planning is essential to make sure that if you need to integrate or migrate from systems in the future, that rework is reduced to a minimum.

What are your thoughts on using FileMaker for for large data management projects? Are there other point solutions that you see implemented all the time as a quick fix?

 There was some stimulating dissent on that page, and since the commenting module appears not to work on that site, I took the liberty of posting my rebuttal here. Will get my comment up on that site as soon as they chase out the issue.

@ScottPaley: Scott, DPCI does implement Drupal solutions, but we also implement Joomla, Day Communique, SharePoint and other solutions. We have also been asked to do formal procurement sessions for companies looking at a wide range of products. In my view, Drupal is the best fit for the financial strictures of small publishers. If I retired tomorrow, I'd still say the same. Since you are affiliated with The Plone Foundation, does that mean your opinion on top CMS should be taken with a grain of salt? I'd listen carefully, but mostly because you are a fellow Brown grad (as well as someone that has interesting opinions I'd want to hear).

@Jon (last name): I don't mind being disagreed with, but if you're going to make fun of my last name as well as attack me, you should think about using your own last name and your affiliation. Making blanket statements like Kickapps and Lithium are jokes is easy to do when you're anonymous. How about identifying yourself so we can get down to it? WRT those two products, I don't resell them, I have no financial interest in either product. I have noticed that a number of small publishers in the past 6-9 months want to get community sites up rapidly and they're going this route. This is a short cut. I AGREE with you that ceding already-small ad revenues is shortsighted if you can't pay the monthly hosting costs of those two solutions. However, for a quick fix (which is what some of these companies are trying to do), if you've got the monthly fee (ranging around a few thousand dollars) and if you pay attention to the legal agreement you sign to ensure you retain ownership of all content on that community site, you can migrate away once (if) you implement your own platform.

My pick would be Drupal Organic Groups module, but as you say, there are other open-source solutions out there that people should explore. By the way, that customer for which we integrated Lithium, we actually helped them port away data from that solution to an in-house community solution that they implemented. Was a pretty straightforward migration, minimal if any technical issues.

@DanRomanchik, I like what you have to say -- I was a little skittish about participating in this article since I knew that a 'top-3' for either was going to look like this was the short-list. Picking any software platform should ALWAYS be preceded by careful requirements analysis, along with looking at what kind of technologies you can support, what your infrastructure can bear, and what kind of vendor and support team you need.

I like what you wrote about strategy, maintenance and support.

With regard to this article, I never said in the interview that these solutions would be cheap or cost only thousands. If anyone has just a few thousand to spend, they'll go to a SaaS model solution like Clickability (again, I have no business affiliation with that company either, @Scott).

For a more customized implementation of Drupal (or Joomla or Plone, etc), those solutions can cost in the tens of thousands for the technical implementation alone.

In comparing that to the hundreds of thousands of dollars companies have spent in the past on proprietary CMS platforms, that is RELATIVELY inexpensive.

OK, so you’ve just installed Drupal... Now what? When faced with a fresh install of Drupal, many people say: "OK, what the heck do I do now?". It doesn’t look like there’s much to it -- no flashy icons, no slick buttons with polished-glass backgrounds, no sample content, no WYSIWYG editor (what-you-see-is-what-you-get editor, or Rich Text Editor... think of "Word toolbars for this web form's text box")... Just a bare-bones shell with a bunch of text links, and always in the top left corner, a blue water droplet with a smirk on his face, as if to say "OK, buddy, now try and figure me out." For some, this is no problem at all, for they are familiar with web technology and can easily adapt to the environment. For the majority, though, Drupal loses them at "hello world".

We've pretty much identified the problem: Drupal's administrative interface is so frugal and bare-bones to the point of detracting from its user-friendliness. I know I'm simplifying here a lot, as there are many facets to this problem. But rather than overwhelm ourselves, let's just look at one particular issue: Drupal's welcome screen. Have a look:

Not very exciting, is it? To someone like me who's set up a Drupal site before (countless times) it actually is exciting. It's a blank slate, and there's virtually infinite possibilities... But, to most people, this is not exciting at all, and doesn't do a good job of guiding them thru the process of setting up their new website. If you browse drupalusability.org, you'll see feedback that the relatively new Drupal Usability team has gathered from usability testing performed at the University of Baltimore earlier this year. Many participants felt that this page was somewhat anticlimactic and ineffective in successfully initiating them into the world of Drupal. If you spend the time to read this welcome page, it's pretty informative and actually points you in the right direction with text links. But, let's face it, reading gets boring, and furthermore, different people are creating different kinds of sites, so the four steps will not apply to everyone's needs.

So, how could this page be made better? Perhaps strategically placed icons? Perhaps a different layout? Perhaps customized messages depending on the type of site being created? Perhaps... well, what? That's one of the many things that the Drupal Usability team is working on... Drupal.org itself is even being redesigned with better usability and user experience in mind, and the progress is looking great.

Now, I don't think that Drupal should "bend over backwards" for people by dumbing things down or turning on more functionality by default. I don't want that at all, because what's great about Drupal is its leanness... However, I do think Drupal can do a better job of meeting people in the middle...

Here at DPCI, we work with our clients so that, well, they never see this welcome screen at all... We create Drupal sites that are customized and tailored to our clients' needs, so that by the time the site gets to them, everything's set up and all the "guess work" has been taken out of the equation.

I would love to hear what you have found difficult or confusing about Drupal. What do you think could be done differently to make the learning curve a little less steep? Leave a comment!

The question came about from the New York Times article in early February of this year Digital Archivists, Now in Demand.

Here’s part of the distinction I can offer between Digital Asset Management and Digital Archival…

Archival is just one of the four main phases of DAM and the digital asset life cycle – creation, management, distribution and archival.  We link in Creation phases with DAM to quickly realize the value of the digital asset by achieving faster time to market and tightly integrating that with the management and distribution functions.

Here’s a list of the typical functions within each phase of the Digital Asset Life Cycle:

There are obviously several roles / players in any one or a combination of phases to DAM.  Typically, a DAM admin is involved most with the Management & Distribution phases, but there’s a great deal of cross-over and roles vary by organization.  Even different vendors specialize in some areas more than others.  I say this as Widen performs the functions on the creation end of the digital asset life cycle while also providing the software technology, infrastructure and service (personnel) to blend all four levels.

A digital asset is truly an asset when it is leveraged to maximize its intrinsic value to the organization it is serving, commonly for the purpose of driving brand value and revenue.  It seems to be the job of the digital archivist to recognize who/what/when/where/how the asset is to be applied to maximize its value and then again control when it is time to relinquish that value.

I’m interested to learn more about the roles of people performing each function these days as the economy has forced marketing operations and creative departments to reallocate and reposition resources.  Please share.

Search – Whether you’re a marketer, designer, web developer or salesperson, when you need a file – you just gotta have it now.  You can’t wait for someone else and you can’t waste time sifting through file folders or legacy systems.  Google has trained us to search by keyword and get the most relevant search results.  It’s expected.  Shouldn’t your rich media be the same way?

Preview – So now you got the file in front of you – print brochure, hi-res image, PowerPoint presentation, audio / video clips – don’t you want to actually see it.  It’s no good to you if all you get is a small thumbnail preview.  You want the whole DAM thing.  The ability to preview files saves you the time of waiting for a file to download, unzip or pull down off an FTP site. 

Transform – After you find the asset you’re looking for, you’re going to need it in different formats.  No marketer is running a single channel anymore.  You’re assets must be available for use in web pages, print pieces, catalogs, emails, blogs and social media.  Moreover, they're being consumed on a whole variety of devices.  You can’t always depend on a designer to convert the files for you or having the right software to handle every single file processing need.  Wouldn’t it be great if you could automate file transformation services?

Apply that mindset to a whole organization whose team is dependent on the ability to access, share and repurpose your digital assets – they all just gotta have it.  For those that don’t (or shouldn’t), a digital asset library gives you the ability to control rights, access and usage levels.

When it comes to producing and repurposing digital assets, a web-based digital asset management system offering the ability to access what you need, when you need it satisfies the hunger for “I gotta have it.”

Quoted from the article, “The biggest challenge facing the software-as-a-service industry is educating the marketplace on why installing software and using internal IT (information technology) resources to manage that software is significantly more expensive than using a SaaS provider…The total cost of ownership is more manageable and the value received is greater in the SaaS model because customers are subscribing to software (typically through a web browser) and sharing in the core technology used by other organizations.”

Now, I’d like to take this opportunity to expand on how software-as-a-service keeps the complexity of software manageable.

First off, it is both timely and timeless to mention that service is king.  If a software company is to provide a useable product and expects to develop a long-term relationship with its customers, it starts and ends with the last “S” in SaaS.

Here’s the core areas in which DAM SaaS keeps the complexity manageable:

Install and Control – From the technical requirements to resource allocation for the implementation, Widen Project Management staff serve as the “head wranglers” to align appropriate resources with the goals of the project.  In marketing speak, the team of technical and project management people is what helps customers with enough other projects on their plate “get up and running” as efficiently as possible.

Next, it comes with the training of the client administrators to use the system and coordinate the ingestion of content, organization and the setup of user roles and access levels. 

The last key ingredient to a successful implementation is user adoption.  This comes in several ways, but a SaaS provider is well equipped to work with the client administrators and project managers to setup the appropriate controls, train and educate users on the functionality and purpose of the software, and is able to make it as easy as possible to promote the existence and “the big shift” of the software to all users – usually in stages – both internally and externally with channel partners and affiliates.

Live and Grow - A successful implementation is not only measured by the launch of a system but by the use. ROI is driven by USE.  What differentiates the SaaS model?  The ability to scale and adapt with and throughout the enterprise (and external partners) while being nimble enough to accommodate growth and a changing business climate with resources guided by a company whose core competency is the creation, management, and distribution of digital content.  Internal IT resources remain dedicated to maintaining the business operations, while a SaaS provider is there (sometimes when internal IT is not) to assist in adding more infrastructure or provide more service.  What happens when you have a question?  You want to be able to get an answer, right.  A SaaS provider dedicates trained people to both staff a help desk and consult with the client on ways of making it work – usually supplying more than one right answer.

Be Real & Work - A SaaS provider is not a software company that hires a bunch of software developers to live on an island and write code.  A SaaS provider is equipped with several teams who are responsible in meeting with clients, interpreting their needs, delivering solutions that really work, and being able to quickly change the solutions as needs change.  This is where Widen typically has a heads up.  We’re not just a software company.  Widen is a developer and a user of our own technologies. 

What’s more, we are part of a process – as a whole – for and with our customers.  We serve to aid in the creation, management, and distribution of digital media.  Not all of that is achieved with automation, some of it comes with skilled labor – the color production stuff that represents how your products and brand looks and represents itself in the marketplace.  As a part of the process for our customers, we understand the importance of speed to market, increased quality, and reduced costs when it comes to creative workflows and marketing execution.  As a part of that process, Widen understands how the advancement of marketing operations and brand management drives top line business growth by maximizing market penetration and brand value.  In that process, our solutions and methods must work and must co-align with the goals of our customers in order to succeed. 

What’s the key to all of this complexity?  The short answer: make it manageable.  How? Choose your strategic business partners wisely. More to come… 

What’s driving the adoption of Digital Asset Management solutions?  Moreover, how do you justify the purchase of a DAM system in this economy? 

Did you stop creating digital content?  No.

Did you shift the way in which you deliver content?  Likely.

Do you need to continue supplying the digital content that is the lifeblood of commerce and marketing to those that use and repurpose it to help your brands sustain?  Absolutely.

Do you need to do that in a way that minimizes cost and maximizes effectiveness in the areas that drive revenue?  DAM, you’re good.

Enough of the Q&A.  Let’s get into what’s big in DAM in 09. 

SaaS – While it’s hard to lose sight of the current economic conditions, let’s bring SaaS to the forefront.  Service is King… right?  In this economy, SaaS is not looked at as an alternative, but as the answer.  You’ve already answered the questions above, but how about these:

Do you have the financial resources for hefty capital expenditures on infrastructure costs?

Do you have the human resources (IT) to devote to “just another marketing project?”

Since SaaS is quick to deploy in a time when ‘time is of the essence’ and resources are limited, a cost-effective monthly subscription that can be budgeted for looks like a clear choice.

Widen understands the objection that sometimes you just need your digital content to be on-site.  The Widen Answer:  The Widen Appliance – an extension of the SaaS model with managed services on the client site.  Local access (for the creatives) and business continuity (for everyone). 

Let’s get a little more SaaSy with some highlights from an article from business technology publication ZDNet, SaaS model here to stay, say vendors. 

• SaaS solutions can be deployed without ramping up skill sets and infrastructure.
• Why deploy an installed solution that may take 12 months if it’s out of date by the time it goes live?
• Economies of scale and scalable resources.  You’re renting the infrastructure, but you own the content. 
• Stronger security, redundancy and reliability than most companies can achieve on their own.
• Not limited to simple applications, but a way to kick start a complex deployment.

Moving off the SaaS train to one of the hottest topics today...

Video - With the rise and popularity of consuming video – online and via mobile devices – organizations must look for video management solutions.  Not to the level required by traditional media companies, but lighter weight solutions for the marketer looking to publish videos on web sites and social media outlets.  Widen has added functionality to preview and transcode video assets, embed links to centrally control and globally repurpose and consume the most recent video asset, and cloud computing resources to scale with the demand.  
 
Collaboration – The new way of saying “Teamwork.”  Organizations are not siloed, or at least they want to break the habit of operating independently.  Creative, marketing, web, sales… they all need to be on the same page.  People want to be involved closer to the creation end of the digital asset life cycle and approval processes continue to be complex.  A web interface into the collaboration process is critical to teams both internal and geographically-dispersed.  With project collaboration comes workflow and reporting capabilities to streamline processes and hold people accountable. 

Recognizing the demand for creating efficiency in review and approval workflows, Widen created Backdrop, a web-based tool to automate the complex photography routing and approval cycles behind the scenes for photographers and creative approvers.  Separately, the Widen Project Collaboration application for the front-end of the digital asset library supports online reviews, annotations and versioning in one central repository to keep it all together and hold people accountable. 
 
Social Media – 70% of online adults use social media.  With the popularity and opportunity of rich media and social media together, organizations are inquisitively anxious and excited about how to use and manage rich media within social media. 

DAM supports marketers wanting to get into social media much the same way it’s used in the traditional sense, however requires stronger consideration over managing access levels, digital rights, and what happens when an assets leaves the system?  One solution Widen brings to the table, again, is embed links.  Another trend to watch is how social media will shape how DAM and other software solutions work by creating a stronger sense of community and more variety in the way digital media is published and delivered.
 

Drupal is the superior CMS.

That said, I want to be clear that Joomla is definitely a great product, and I mean it and its community of developers no disrespect. Joomla has many strengths and powers many great websites. However, when it comes to building a robust, feature-rich website, Drupal wins, hands down.

Before I compare the major features of Drupal and Joomla, I would like to address probably the biggest complaint about Drupal: it has a steep learning curve and requires a lot of work to get a site up and running. I agree and can sympathize with those who feel this way. However, believe me when I say that once you get over the initial “hump”, Drupal is a joy to work with and ultimately provides a truly flexible and scalable CMS solution.

Less is more

On the surface, Joomla is feature-rich and out of the box, it is fairly easy to get a basic Joomla site up and running. Drupal, on the other hand, is more lean, and to really get your site going, there are more steps you need to go through. While this seemingly limited feature-set appears to be a weakness, it uncovers a distinct advantage of Drupal. Being built around principles of frugality and necessity, Drupal's codebase focuses more on its extendibility, allowing developers to easily hook into core functionality. Thus, Drupal doesn't try to pack in every little feature, rather it includes the essentials and elegantly exposes itself to enhancement.

Add-ons

Because of the advantage described above, Drupal functonality addons, called "modules", are significantly more powerful than their Joomla counterparts. Joomla's addons, called "extensions" (more specifically: "components", "modules", and "plugins"), because of Joomla's rigidity, tend to "hack" Joomla core functionality in order to achieve their purpose. Furthermore, every extension is a "different animal", and they often don't play nice with one another.

Hive mind

Drupal code, whether core code or module code (written following Drupal's well-documented coding standards), looks like it came from the same person. Furthermore, Drupal's core and its contributed modules and themes live in one central CVS repository, there is peer-review of code and a security team that constantly reviews both core and contributed code, and there is an efficient system for notifying site-owners of new releases (of Drupal's core and contributed modules). These provisions organically ensure a high qualtiy of standards.

Joomla's contributed extensions, on the other hand, each bear the handwriting of the code's author. While this isn't inherently bad, more standardized code breeds efficiency. Also, while there is a great Joomla Extensions Directory, the extensions packages themselves are downloaded from sites external to joomla.org -- again, less standardized.

Look and feel

Joomla has many great templates available in the community, and in this area, Joomla has the advantage over Drupal -- it's easier to find a professional-looking template to skin your Joomla site than it is to find one for your Drupal site. That's not to say that great Drupal themes don't exist or that it isn't possible to develop a great Drupal theme. Just the opposite. The themeing level of Drupal is very powerful, and exposes Drupal core functionality more effectively than the templating level of Joomla takes advantage of its core functionality.

The bottom line

The line is there in the sand, so to speak, and I've taken a big step to the side of Drupal. It is a joy to work with. To be clear, I'm not saying Joomla is bad. Although I haven't touted it's many strong points, I welcome debate from the other side. For I believe that from this debate -- this competition between the two leading open source CMS solutions -- that both will be strengthened, and the community at large will only learn and benefit.

As a businessman who helps organizations devise strategy around how to use technology and digital marketing techniques to channel and monetize their content, I am relieved that major players in the publishing/media/entertainment industry (which now includes Google, ironically) are acknowledging the need for a new way of doing things. This new system will allow all publishers of content, both large and small, to have a centralized place to store their work that is protected by a neutral organization who's primary purpose is to facilitate the channeling of content and document its use.

As an attorney who focuses on helping artists and business owners achieve monetary objectives, most often by developing and nurturing some sort of proprietary intellectual property or business idea, I am pleased to see a more intense focus on protecting the rights belonging to those who dare to be creative and exhibit their work for the public to appreciate.

As a musician, I am delighted to see some much needed changes in the way that digital rights are stored and administered. Taking the executive power out of the hands of a few and giving it back to the artists themselves will promote more creativity and innovation rather than forcing artists to work with a few profit-driven corporations who have the exclusive means and relationships for promotion and distribution. A new era of artistic independence, both in the creative and business processes, is upon us.

Beyond the proposed Book Rights Registry and the model derived from the litigation with Google, Mr. Rosenblatt touches upon business models contemplated for the future. All signs seem to point to a more fragmented publishing market (i.e. "long-tail") in which independent and self-promoted publishers and content creators are able to enjoy the same protections and rights management mechanisms that were previously only available to "major" artists and creators. In this new era, where blogging is rampant, recording music has never been easier, and new channels to promote artistic freedom are created everyday, it's time to get organized. I commend the book publishing industry for taking these first steps, and I hope that others in similar industries quickly follow suit. As for the artists, the days of relying on others to "break" our work is over. I can't wait to see what we come up with.

What if there was an easier way?

If you're using K4, there is.

Much of the information that needs to be tracked is already in K4 as metadata, the rest can be configured as custom metadata. With all of the information maintained in the database, it's as simple as creating a query to return these results and organize them for you. If you need a physical document to bring to a meeting, K4's "Make Document from Query" functionality can be used to generate that document.

Here's how to do it:

The first step is to check what data that is tracked on the run sheet already exists in K4. Some examples of things that may be tracked on a run sheet are Story Name, Author, Editor, Researcher, Status, Deadline, amongst others.

Some of these values are not default fields in K4 and therefore must be created. The K4 Admin page is used to add Metadata fields. After logging in to the K4 admin interface, click on the metadata link under Administration > Publication. Clicking Find will show what custom metadata has been configured.

Clicking find will show all custom metadata fields that have been configured.

To create a new piece of metadata, click on the Metadata link again and click New. Use the form to create a new piece of metadata. Name the field appropriately, for this example we will create the author metadata field. Since we are creating a run sheet to track articles, we want our metadata to only apply to articles, so articles are selected next to Used For. In the Data Type Interface drop down there are several options; a simple entry field, a pop up menu, a checkbox or entry field, a decimal number, or a date, time or date and time. For the Author field we want to use a controlled drop down list of our known authors so that we can get easy and accurate search results. If we allowed individuals to enter their own names, misspellings or variations could throw off our search results. We add these values in the value list box separated by a pipe (ex: Author 1|Author 2|Author 3)

   Fill out the form to configure your additional metadata fields.

Repeat the process for any other fields that you will need on your run sheet (IE Deadline, Editor and Researcher fields)

The next step is to configure an advanced query to locate the items on the run sheet. This is as easy as going to the fly-out menu in advanced query mode and selecting New Query.

Create an advanced query that will locate the articles that should be on the run sheet.

In the New Query dialog box, enter your criteria. If the run sheet covers the entire magazine, you can create a run sheet query for the current issue. If the run sheet is for only a section of the publication, you could create a query that returns results only for that section. The important thing is just to create a query that returns all of the items that would normally be on your run sheet.

Once the results have been returned, you can create a set of column settings to display and sort the information appropriately for the run sheet. All of the extraneous columns can be hidden by right clicking (or ctrl clicking) and selecting hide from the menu that pops up. Then the columns can be ordered left to right so that the information is displayed in a logical fashion. Next, sort the columns by clicking on the header of the first column you wish to sort by. Then shift click on the next column to sort by that column next. You can sort out up to 5 columns if you so desire. So for example, you could first sort by Status, then by Section, then by Assignment. Clicking the small icon that appears in the header bar next to the column name will change the direction that the sort is performed in.

Once the column settings are set appropriately for your run sheet you will want to save them. Do this by following the header row over to the arrows all the way to the right. Click on them and then choose New Setting. Call it column settings

Once the columns have been adjusted and sorted appropriately for the run sheet, they can be saved so that they can be called by the query.

Now go back and edit your Run Sheet query to call the Run sheet column settings. When you choose the Run sheet query from your query drop down the correct column settings will automatically be set.

  Edit your Run Sheet query so that it calls up your new column setting.

The final step to utilizing K4 to manage your run sheets is to use the make document from query option so that you can print out the run sheet for meetings or to send out updates. This is as simple as running the query, then from the fly-out menu on the query panel selecting Create Document from Query. This will open a new document with a table with your query results in it. You can now print this document, create a PDF of it, or even check the document in to K4.

Select Create Document from Query from the Query Panel Fly-out menu.

An article will be created in table form of the data in the query panel.

Using the above methods is just one more way to utilize the K4 publishing system to simplify and automate a tedious daily task.

The Home Page – We’re proud to be working with a wide range of companies that are doing some tremendous things in the marketplace and applying our solutions and services in different ways, so we wanted to showcase our customer wall.  Be sure to check out the stories or watch the videos (look for the video camera icon in the top right of select images for InSinkErator, Motorola, ZDO, St. Mary’s and Sub-Zero and Wolf). 

Using Digital Asset Management – Digital Asset Management can be looked at as both a practice and a technology.  It is most effective if you deploy the right strategies as a practice and the right technologies as a solution fit for your organization.  The sub-sections to our Using DAM section highlight our seven different products under the Widen family of digital asset management solutions for marketing and creative people. 

• Find Digital Media – Core Digital Asset Management
• Access Assets On-Site – Widen Appliance client site extension
• Manage Videos – Video Asset Management
• Approve Photos – Backdrop Photography Approval System
• Route Projects – Project Collaboration
• Create Promotions – Dynamic Media Building
• Publish Catalogs – Catalog Publishing 

The Widen Media Collective is our suite of web based DAM solutions and the Widen Appliance is our on-site client extension.  Altogether, Widen brings you 100% DAM SaaS – the Software as a Service delivery model and software with service, as in Customer Service and Technical Support.  One of our most popular features that we’re highlighting and using on the new site is our Digital Asset Embed Links. 

Premedia Services - Next, we have an all new Premedia Services section that covers our premedia / prepress services offering.  If you’re confused about the meaning of “Premedia Services,” it’s likely because you’re used to the term “Pre-Press.”  However, “Premedia” (although it may be our own term vs. an industry term) truly represents the work we do here from photography to color retouching in preparing files to go to press or for the web and other electronic media channels.  Be sure to check out the portfolios of our sample work for digital photography, color retouching, digital sampling and catalog production.
 

The Widen Advantage - The third major addition to widen.com is an all new section on The Widen Advantage, which features Customer Interviews, Customer Service and Software as a Service sections.  What is the Widen Advantage?  As hard as it is to articulate on a website or blog, it comes down to a few main points related to serving the creative and marketing functions of creating, managing and distributing digital media: 

1. A foundation built upon 60 years of serving our customers in over 120 countries
2. A strong commitment to technology and innovation to achieve the goals of our customers
3. Software development resources and technology to  automate premedia processes,  providing quality work with fast turnarounds and competitive rates
4. Software as a Service with technology solutions proven over 16 years of internal testing and evolution as a result of customer feedback

Last, if you’re looking for a place with all  the right digital asset management resources in one place, our Resource Center has videos, whitepapers, analyst commentary, free trials, implementation info and key links to the WidenCollective.com product site and DigitalAssetManagement.com industry resource site.

Please be sure to check back soon to see our new sections on Industry Solutions, Solutions by Function, and Widen solutions for the Salesforce.com Appexchange – Digital Media Organizer and Marketing Template Creation.

Designers also need to make sure to eliminate any overset text that will not print and to check that there are not too many colors used for the job specified. Yes, a print designer must verify many things before sending to press. Because print mistakes cost money, this quality assurance and attention to detail is usually part of every job sent to print.

Desktop publishing software such as InDesign and QuarkXPress have built-in tools to assist with checking and pre-flighting documents. If you look to the other end of the publishing spectrum, you will find link validation tools and WC3 standards, among other tools, to help Web designers ensure their sites will work and display consistently the same across browsers.

A number of recent cross-media publishing projects have me thinking about ways to not only pre-flight a print layout, or a Web page, but how to pre-flight content for multi-channel publishing. Right now, many difficulties and roadblocks are in place that make achieving a cross-media content publishing workflow complicated. First, you have to determine where the content originates from and in what format it is written. Next, you have to determine how to configure that content into a neutral XML format, and then figure out how to integrate that XML content into different publishing mediums.

Each publishing format treats the content differently, but the main difficultly in these integrations is making sure all the necessary content and metadata exist and are properly tagged for publishing across media types. But what if there were ways to prepare, or "pre-flight," your content to ensure a less bumpy ride whether publishing with an XML first or XML last workflow?

A majority of content in books, magazines and newspapers is started first in Microsoft Word, and is unstructured. Some publishing workflows incorporate XML editing applications or use Adobe InCopy or even XML editors like Oxygen, but Microsoft Word still remains the de facto standard. Preparing this content for multi-channel publishing often involves much copy-pasting, manual tagging, element labeling and content structuring by an individual who is usually neither the author, nor the editor. This task usually falls upon a developer, a Web editor or someone else in a Web production role.

What if the tagging, the structuring and the metadata properties were complete and correct by the time you wanted to publish this content?

We recently built a set of InCopy and InDesign scripts for a client to help pre-flight content before exporting to XML. The goal of these scripts is to ensure that all necessary copy elements are included and properly tagged, and to call out any elements on the page that are not tagged for XML export. By running content through these Web pre-flight scripts, the client could ensure that the content was ready for import into its Web content management system on the first try.

While this pre-flight system was built for checking items prior to export, the same principles could be applied to the content further upstream. Writers and editors could help by clearly structuring their MS Word draft documents. Calling out keywords and using a consistent set of MS Word style-sheets would also set up the content for easier cross-media publishing.

Using the XML schema validation tools in InDesign and InCopy and the newly extended Pre-flight panel in CS4, I can imagine some new, interesting ways of pre-flighting content for multi-channel publishing that we will be exploring in the coming months.

Let me know your thoughts below in the comments area. Is "pre-flighting" content for multi-channel publishing a major burden in your workflow? Could you ever envision your writers and editors using some sort of validation tool to make sure their content is highly re-usable?

Flex applications can be rapid to develop and deploy across platforms. Like any development work, poor coding can lead to performance issues, so the ease of development and the relative newness of the technology may be contributing to this perception that Flex is not ready-for-primetime.

Flex can be a great opportunity for organizations to quickly build user interfaces that allow them to do specific actions meaningful to their own use cases. These apps can be built right on top of their WCMS/ECM product. So, since so many companies actually don't care for the form factors that vendors can present, the end user org can in fact build their own UI's much more quickly, saving $$ in vendor implementation costs and licensing fees for these Air/Flex 'client' applications.

Obviously, this approach wouldn't work if there's low/no adoption of the technology. For instance, I'm involved in a global deployment of an ECM right now which is atop the Microsoft stack. While the requirements beg for a rich Internet app supporting Mac and Windows, the customer won't even glance at what Adobe's offering. They'll probably have us build a front end using .NET and AJAX/Telerik RAD controls to support IE on Windows and Firefox/Safari on Mac (Windows as well)...not sure they'd even look at Silverlight.

Perhaps these next gen rich Internet app tools are ahead of their time, but there's plenty of early adopters that are reaping the benefits. Lets see if Tony eats his hat in 2010 :-) In any event, he makes some remarkable points that are countered adeptly by Duane Nickull of Adobe directly underneath the blog in a comment post.

Follow this link to get to Tony's blog.

The interesting part of this is that 8 years ago that very advertising agency was our customer, and I pitched the idea for them to build a very slick multi-channel platform for their customers to be able to deliver high-quality, segmented marketing messages to consumers throughout the United States across different media delivery channels.

 The agency never implemented said system.

The customer now HAS that infrastructure themselves. Who do you think holds the power in the relationship now, the customer or the agency?

One could argue that the customer always has, now and in the past. However, that isn't entirely true. Large organizations have been somewhat beholden to agencies if they need to have masses of customized materials that are versioned for different market segments, different geographies, different demographics, different affinity segments, and so forth.

Exceedingly, companies that built that infrastructure for themselves are less bound to the agency to get the work done. In fact, the enterprise can do it themselves, but they look to the agency as a partner to get high-quality creative (visual, textual, etc) work done and take the logistical busy work out of the equation on the price, legal disclaimer, imagery, and other versioning considerations.

So how come the particular agency I refer to didn't implement the solution back in 2000/01 when we pitched the concept to them? I told them at the time if they got ahead of the multi-channel distribution platform curve, they would have a strategic advantage, and customers would be able to leverage their solution. Two things happened. First, they didn't believe me. Second, as many in the ad agency industry know, they didn't have a customer funding the expensive and time consuming initiative, so those that would champion the solution could not get executive support for funding.

So today, that agency received training on the customer-built solution and they in essence were in a submissive situation to the customer's dominant one. That agency will likely be judged by the quality of their creative as well as their turnaround/project management, cost/scope balance, and general account management disciplines. The logistical work has been simplified and made less expensive, making the agency 'replaceable' if need be. Of course I wish them the best, since they had been a customer and can hopefully serve the needs of the enterprise customer with great quality.

There's so much more that ad agencies offer clients, of course, so I'm not trying to diminish the role of the agency in helping build brands. However, in the case of multi-channel delivery of content, very few agencies have really stepped up and developed modern, state-of-the-art solutions, and that is forcing their customers to build such solutions. More and more we get called upon to help enterprises with those types of media-independent content delivery platforms, and this trend is only accelerating now that enterprises are cutting staff and looking for greater automation as well as optimized marketing message delivery.

Which brings me to my next big point, which is who is spending money right now, and how's DPCI doing?

Back in October I wrote a blog on "When the Going Gets Tough" where I talked about how we were doing at the time. I wrote about how we were built optimally, how we were doing pretty well, but I didn't know what the future would bring (like everyone else).

Today the picture seems clearer. We are still doing well. We have acquired more new customers in the past few months than we have had in years. The customers seem almost desperate in some cases. Almost all of them have had layoffs or some cost-cutting measures going on at their organizations over the past few months and as recently as the past few days. Several of them are on the sale block.

So what is driving their spending with us?

First and foremost, companies that are late in building their digital brands are moving quickly to implement more state-of-the art, nimble content technologies. If they don't, they realize they may not have a brand or company in a very short time. While companies don't exactly know that building the digital brand will even help (media companies, for instance, are still struggling mightily with the business model of ad revenues online in comparison to print advertising revenues, which far exceed those of Web). Since DPCI has been implementing content technologies for a decade, we are in a strong position to help these kinds of customers. There are other companies like us in the marketplace, which is good since customers need choices. I imagine that those consulting firms are also doing well at the moment.

Second, companies are realizing that they need to deliver content to multiple channels (print, Web, mobile, e-reader, etc) and that they need to repackage offerings in custom ways to satisfy the tastes of the consumer. In order to deliver across channels and to package or mashup offerings, organizations need to get those offerings (content, goods, services, etc) 'chunked' into elemental form and separated from any presentation medium. This kind of work has also been core to DPCI's capabilities for this past decade.

So how, in the midst of cost-cutting measures and deep layoffs, are these new and existing customers of ours actually spending more money on content technology platforms?

My feeling is that the customers are falling into a few groups. The first, hard-scrabble, competitive organizations that are getting hit by the recession but who are digging deep into the till to build their brands and get more productivity out of the staff resources they've got. They're also looking to get more nimble with their content, and to do that you've got to invest in the right platform and delivery mechanisms. These companies may or may not realize the cost, time, or degree of intellect it takes to forge ahead with digital content strategies, but they're on the path and finding their way.

The second are companies that are out for blood. I speak with C-level executives fairly regularly, and some of them that are pretty well positioned on the Web and with multi-channel solutions are now investing further to "crush the competition", "seal the deal", "dominate the market when things come back." These ultra-competitive executives want to win verticals and to do so, they're spending strategically and doggedly to achieve their ends.

There's a third group of companies I am seeing out there. I get called in to speak to executives who can't seem to get funding, or don't quite understand how the pieces fall together on a content strategy. These companies seem to have been as heavily affected or more so by the current recession. The challenge and heart break of this is that it may be too late for them. Without a Web brand or value proposition, without the ability to be nimble with content and to deliver the right offering to the consumer's tastes in a manner that suits the consumer, I don't believe that companies will make it in the next economy. Perhaps they'll go out of business, or get acquired, or break up into smaller companies that actually can be more nimble. But I just don't see them surviving as-is for very long.

If you have gotten this far along in this enormous BLOG, thank you! I've had a lot to say on this subject, and, like anything, these thoughts are subject to change as the recessional economy evolves. Things could stay the same for us, or improve, or get worse. I don't know. I just thought I'd write some thoughts about what I'm seeing right now, and hope that it is helpful to the reader.