CMS Watch XML and Component Content Management Feed

A new (and wearable) Content Technologies Subway Map

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 14:55:00 -0400

A new season brings an updated vendor map:

We added a Yellow Line -- for XML & Component Content Management vendors, and reflected some other station changes.

And now, if you like what you see, you and your wall can wear it. Our new store at Cafe Press offers t-shirt and posters of various sizes, along with other CMS Watch tchotchkes.

Regarding the latter, perhaps you already own your fill of mugs and mousepads, but can you ever have enough beer steins? Bring it to the next event where we're speaking and we'll fill it up with the closest available brew. ;-)

Quark Acquires In.vision

rockley@rockley.com(Ann Rockley) — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 12:00:00 -0400

Today Quark Inc. announced that it is acquiring the assets of In.vision Research Corporation. In.vision is best known for its XML add-in for Microsoft Word ("Xpress Author for Word"). Quark is best known for QuarkXPress, a design and desktop publishing tool. The In.vision team will continue to be located in Florida, but the former In.Vision module will become "Quark XML Author for Microsoft Word."

In recent years Quark has lost ground to Adobe InDesign. There are many reasons for that, but from our perspective (XML & Component Content Management), Quark simply did not handle XML very well, and InDesign was more capable in that area. Quark began to signal an interest in XML when they announced the hiring of their new President and CEO, Ray Schiavone, formerly President and CEO of Arbortext, one of the frontrunners in XML-based authoring and publishing products. Schiavone brought a considerable amount of knowledge about XML to Quark and quietly hired a number of former employees of Arbortext that had left after its acquisition by PTC.

Quark more strongly positioned themselves in the XML multichannel publishing world with the launch of their Quark Dynamic Publishing Solution (DPS) in March of this year. DPS uses Quark Transformation Engine, essentially an XML rules-based engine, to convert content coming in from many sources to XML then renders it to multiple channels.

The acquisition of In.vision now takes the XML publishing process back to the content contributor -- Word of course being a ubiquitous authoring tool. While some would argue that QuarkXPress is an authoring tool, it is really oriented towards designers - few content contributors would ever want to work in Quark directly.

What does Quark gets out of the acquisition?

Integrated XML-based content contributor software, making dynamic multichannel publishing accessible to broader areas of the enterprise
Expertise and functionality in SPL (Pharmaceutical XML standard) and DITA (fastest growing XML standard)

What does In.vision get out of the acquisition?

Global sales force
Access to broader opportunities for the use of its products

But what does the customer get out of this? Well, In.vision and Quark have been working together as partners for a number of months, with some hand-offs to show for it. But the integration is not complete. For example, you can't just say "publish to DPS" from Xpress Author. DPS is treated much like a call to the DITA Open Toolkit. Round-tripping from XML to design to XML is possible, but not productized yet.

In the long run, customers may see some benefits:

Access to XML-based publishing software that allows not just simple layout, but full camera-ready layout
More DITA-based publishing for the enterprise

This acquisition moves In.vision from a small XML solutions company into a much larger realm, and this allows Quark to move closer to XML-based enterprise dynamic publishing. But full integration will take time. We'll keep watching...

Narrowcasting to your feed aggregator

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 15:39:00 -0400

We're pleased that CMS Watch now covers ten different technologies, but I suspect that many of you take an interest in only one or two families of tools. If that's you, here's a list of technology-specific RSS feeds that will just send relevant postings to your reader or aggregator.

Digital Asset Management: http://www.cmswatch.com/RSS/cmswatch.channel.xml/DAM

ECM Suites: http://www.cmswatch.com/RSS/cmswatch.channel.xml/ECM

E-mail Archiving & Management: http://www.cmswatch.com/RSS/cmswatch.channel.xml/E-mail

Enterprise Portals: http://www.cmswatch.com/RSS/cmswatch.channel.xml/Portal

Enterprise Search: http://www.cmswatch.com/RSS/cmswatch.channel.xml/Search

SharePoint: http://www.cmswatch.com/RSS/cmswatch.channel.xml/SharePoint

Social Software: http://www.cmswatch.com/RSS/cmswatch.channel.xml/Social

Web Analytics: http://www.cmswatch.com/RSS/cmswatch.channel.xml/Analytics

Web CMS / WCM: http://www.cmswatch.com/RSS/cmswatch.channel.xml/CMS

XML & Component Content Management: http://www.cmswatch.com/RSS/cmswatch.channel.xml/CCM

More ECM acquisitions for Oracle

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 11:00:00 -0400

Oracle keeps moving down ECM trail with two new acquisitions to add to their growing portfolio. Both Skywire and AdminServer are specialist vendors who have developed niche offerings for the Insurance and general Financial Services sectors. Oracle have already seen some success in Insurance, but the acquired technology -- and just as importantly the domain expertise -- gives Oracle a bit more heft against EMC and IBM.

Of the two acquisitions, the Skywire one is the more interesting. Skywire provides multichannel, component-level publishing software. Though currently selling mainly into the Insurance sector, under Oracle's ownership this could expand into the much broader CCM marketplace.

As with any acquisition, the devil is in the detail. Oracle appears to have bought a couple of strong offerings, but integrating such small niche firms into the huge mass of Oracle is will be a challenge, as will porting the software into the UCM and Fusion stack. As always it will take some time before things settle and we really see how this will all work in practice, and as always you can rest assure we will continue to evaluate the progress in detail in our ECM Suites Report.

Adobe and Alfresco

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 08:37:00 -0400

It's been a while since there was a big product announcement in the ECM world, but today's announcement by Adobe that they will be embedding Alfresco into their LiveCycle Enterprise Suite will doubtless garner a few headlines. Alfresco, the UK-based open source ECM company, has certainly done a great job of marketing themselves since their launch a couple of years back, stealing some limelight from more established and much bigger vendors such as Interwoven, Vignette, and Open Text.

The question we have to ask is whether this announcement is another marketing triumph, or whether it suggests something more substantial.

First off is the fact that it is a real OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) deal, and the technology will actually get embedded into the Adobe offering, so it is more than simply a paper partnership.

But let's think about what the Adobe offering is and why we do not currently evaluate it in our ECM Suites Report. Adobe LiveCycle Enterprise Suite is a product set built upon the acquisition of Acellio in 2002 (better known as "Jetform"). Though the user interface and underlying codebase may have changed a bit, the principle of this product remains the same: automating simple, usually forms-based, processes. The product excels as a point solution particularly in Government, where a form needs to be issued to the public, and the capture and subsequent business process needs to be automated quickly.

In theory the Alfresco repository adds some true ECM capabilities at the back end of the Adobe product set. Also the Alfresco solution will add some "Web 2.0" capabilities to Adobe, as Alfresco supports Adobe Flex. So in theory, the LiveCycle solution could be extended to build more complex applications rather than basic forms routing.

On a corporate note the OEM deal is intriguing, since of course Alfresco is a minnow compared to Adobe, and there are close connections between the executive teams. For example the Senior Vice President of this particular Adobe Business unit is none other than Rob Tarkoff, a close friend and ex-Documentum colleague of Alfresco CTO John Newton. Could Adobe be planning to acquire Alfresco? Who knows? But if the OEM is successful, an acquisition might appeal to both firms, if less so to Alfresco's current customer base.

In short then, it's an intriguing announcement, and we will be looking at demonstrations of the technology in practice later today as well as testing it out more thoroughly over the coming months. Like us, you should treat this new product arrangement with real caution until it has been thoroughly tested by customers. That is not a a slight against either firm, but an announcement is just that and no more. Time is always the true test.

CMS Watch Competition Winner

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Mon, 2 Jun 2008 09:45:00 -0400

You may remember a while back we launched our little competition to come up with a new name for our vendor positioning chart. We had some great (and varied) responses from all over the world. And it took quite an internal debate to decide on the eventual winner, but decide we did. And the winner is...Laurence Hart who offered us the name "Cross Check." Laurence, a bottle of champagne is yours.

Over the next month we will continue working with our designer to revamp the chart, and of course to rename it -- so look out for the Cross Check in all our report updates this year.

Vendor criticism of CMS Watch

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Fri, 16 May 2008 10:43:00 -0400

As you know at CMS Watch we write critical product evaluations to help you avoid expensive procurement and deployment mistakes. We write reports that detail both the warts and merits of big vendors like EMC, Oracle, Xerox and IBM -- through to smaller specialist vendors like Hyland, Autonomy and Nuxeo. Readers of our reports often ask me "what did vendor x say when they read that!" The assumption, sometimes correct, is that vendors freak out on reading such criticism.

In an industry whereby most of the "independent analysts" are heavily dependent on revenues from the very firms they claim to be "independent" of, it's unusual to see truly critical research get published. So it becomes a surprise to both buyers and sellers when they read such criticism. In our reports we widely distribute the compliments and brickbats -- if something is truly terrible we will tell you.

But most of the time it is not a case of bad technology versus good technology. Rather it is a case of good fit versus bad fit: a product that could become an outstanding performer in a larger legal firm may make a terrible fit in a mid-sized manufacturing and ERP-centric environment. Hence we urge you the reader to study all the alternatives and balance them out, rather than look at one preferred vendor in isolation.

Speaking of isolation, the marketing groups of some vendors seem to operate in in a kind of vacuum. I guess it's part of the job for them to drink their own Kool Aid, but some of them seem to think it's part of their job to attack and stop any criticism of their product or company. At CMS Watch we're often on the receiving end of that wrath; that stinks sometimes, but so be it. Just as it is the vendor's job to wax lyrical about the joys of their product, so too is it ours to unearth the reality. If you want to get an insight into this particular dynamic, whether you're a curious end user or a vendor AR (Analyst Relations) person, check out the article I published today.

Announcing the XML snd Component Content Management Report

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Thu, 15 May 2008 00:10:00 -0400

It's been a busy month at CMS Watch. Today we announce the release of another evaluation report, The XML & Component Content Management Report 2008. Developed in conjunction with The Rockley Group, the report evaluates 14 component content management vendors and 5 XML editor tools. From today's release about the report:

"Component Content Management (CCM) technology allows enterprises to manage text content as componentized chunks of information rather than whole documents or web pages. It has become increasingly important to modern enterprises, especially given the rapid emergence of the DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) standard. However, CCM technology remains largely the domain of a wide collection of smaller software vendors targeting narrower use cases..."

Subscribers will receive copy shortly; others can download a free sample here.

Readers' challenge - name our new chart!

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Sun, 6 Apr 2008 17:11:00 -0400

Since moving to the US in 2002 I have become a fan of The Atlantic magazine, and in particular the last page of each edition that contains the "Word Fugitives" column. In this column readers ask for new words to meet commonly demanded needs.

For example, in the most recent issue somebody requested a polite but meaningful phrase for a couple to use when they are trying to conceive a child. My favorite of the suggested responses came from Laura Whitman, of Redwood City, Calif., who wrote, "In our group when a couple is married and everyone is wondering what their plans are in regard to procreation, we always ask if they are in the product research or product development phase...early product development refers to your correspondent's criteria." You see there is always somebody out there with the right answer.

So to our current challenge, we have designed a wonderful (in our own opinion) chart that provides buyers of technology with an at-a-glance risk/opportunity review of the products we cover in a particular segment. We refer to this currently as the Vendor Risk Report -- and internally as the "VORP" (Vendor Opportunity and Risk Profile). Not exactly terms that roll off the tongue. Now some of you may be aware of similar chart like products from other firms, charts that have catchy names like "Magic Quadrant" or "Wave." Well we want a catchy name too but haven't thought of a satisfactory one.

So in the spirit of Word Fugitives, we are throwing the door open to you. Please send me your thoughts and ideas and we promise to publish and credit the best of them here on the site. And for the very best one we will send a box of gourmet chocolates or bottle of good champagne (your choice). The gauntlet has been thrown down, can you rise to the challenge?

Oooh...an XML fight!

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Fri, 4 Apr 2008 08:16:00 -0400

The world does seem to love an XML fight.

Yesterday Microsoft scored a goal by getting their OOXML standard ratified as an international standard through ISO (International Organization for Standards) -- a definite point score, since there were many other parties fighting tooth and nail to prevent this happening. OOXML is an important standard, with critical implications for the industry as a whole, and therefore represents a standard that we need to look at dispassionately to assess its true value and potential impact.

Passion is not lacking in this fight. I really don't think there is any company that can rally the opposing troops like Microsoft, a company that lurks across the IT industry and business world, seemingly playing the part of the arch evil robber baron in a 1920's silent thriller. Always ready to stab the hero in the back, always read to smile and make up -- then trip up their opponents. It's a reputation that has been well earned on occasion -- but this sort of good vs. evil drama really brings no value to any of us -- particularly when it comes to ratifying or rejecting standards. That said, this particular spat has been entertaining to say the least, if not comical at times.

To summarize the current situation, Microsoft proposed an open standard format for office documents (word processing, spreadsheets, et. al.) that would allow for interoperability between office application systems, a standard called OOXML (Office Open XML). Problem is there already is an open standard format for office documents called ODF (Open Document Format) that has long been around, and had already achieved ISO recognition.

The argument goes that ODF came out of the open source community and as such is backed by millions of regular folk (though it was in fact developed by fellow giant Sun Microsystems), and OOXML comes from the evil Redmond Giant. The long and short of it is that the Microsoft version got itself fast-tracked through the ISO process and trumped ODF. The battle between perceived good and perceived evil is now so acrimonious that lawsuits are being threatened and investigations and appeals loom on the near horizon.

But what of the actual merits of each format? Well again it's hard to avoid taking sides and finding yourself in the middle of a fight, but the reality from where I sit is that both formats have their merits and demerits. But regardless of the technical nitpicking we have to face the fact that Microsoft totally dominates the contemporary office environment (I say this as a long time Mac user), and as such an open standard coming from Redmond makes a lot of sense. Like it or not, most office documents will need to interface with and be accessible by, Microsoft desktop applications at some point.

On the other hand, for those who really want to avoid any involvement with Microsoft tools, there exists an alternative: Open Office. And by exchanging ODF files you can live totally outside of Microsoft's walls. Nevertheless, you will also almost surely need to convert to MS formats regularly, so life in the ODF world is immeasurably easier if all your colleagues also exist in a Microsoft-free world.

Today neither format works half as well as their relative supporters claim -- with conversions often missing crucial data such as formatting and decimal points -- but they are both getting close, and our friends over at Burton who know these things have long said that OOXML (the Microsoft version) is not only better but will win out in the long run (though they also shot themselves in the foot by first claiming that their analysis was not funded by Microsoft -- and it almost certainly wasn't, but then appearing side-by-side at a Microsoft press conference to discuss their findings- doh!).

But we are not taking sides, or rather we will take the side of common sense, for what is ultimately needed is some common sense. And it seems that despite leading the fight against OOXML, IBM is prepared to now step back a little and broker some kind of interoperability between the two interoperable standards (such sweet irony). Meanwhile, for you the buyer and end user of systems that create, process, or manage office document files, the status quo remains, despite the ratification of OOXML. If the two opposing sides never embrace the alternate format, we will all lose as a result.

SDL buys again, picking up Idiom

rockley@rockley.com(Ann Rockley) — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 14:26:00 -0500

Today comes news that SDL is acquiring Idiom, Inc. for US$21.7 million. Idiom was one of the first global information management systems (GIMS) to jump on the DITA bandwagon and they did it in a big way, forging partnerships with CCMS vendors Astoria Software and XyEnterprise CCMS, and authoring tools JustSystems XMetaL and PTC Arbortext Editor.

While SDL's GIMS and Idiom often went head-to-head as competitors vying for content management integration, when it came to XML-based content component management, Idiom frequently won because of it's strong XML and DITA support.

So in light of SDL's recent moves, SDL now supports a variety of different tools in this space:

Acquisition of Tridion (web content component management system)
Minority share investment in Trisoft (multichannel content component system)
Acquisition of Idiom (strong support of XML-based global information management)

Of course, as with most roll-ups, these products partially overlap as well. Customers should not assume an "integrated suite" here, at least not yet. But it makes me wonder...could an XML-based authoring tool be in the offing for SDL as well?

Independence and Industry Analysts

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Fri, 1 Feb 2008 08:38:00 -0500

Wall Street Journal columnist Lee Gomes wrote an interesting piece about industry analyst firm The Aberdeen Group. Gomes first wrote about Aberdeen in 2002, and that article contributed to the firm's collapse and eventual acquisition by Harte-Hanks. At the time, Gomes took issue with what he considered to be "pay-for-praise" analysis.

In this latest piece he revisits the issue and looks at Aberdeen's new "sponsored research" model. The full article and subsequent discussion is well worth a read, particularly if you are a buyer or consumer of analyst research. The fact of the matter is that the majority of industry analyst firms from the largest to the smallest are heavily dependent on vendor support to operate. They may claim to be independent, but we beg to differ on their interpretation of the word independent.

Why am I pointing this out to you? Simple, at CMS Watch we don't do "sponsored research" of any description. We do not consult to vendors. We do not write papers for them. We do not speak at their events. We don't even accept hotel and flights from them -- most large vendors cover analysts' costs to bring them to their user conferences -- we pay our own way.

This may not always make us popular with the vendors we write about, since many are used to having financial leverage over the "independent" analysts who write about them (though over the years we have seen more vendors come to value our neutrality -- once they come to understand it). Incredibly, much if not most of the research that you as a buyer of technology will pay for has already been funded fully or in part by the vendors. When you see a section in any evaluation labeled "challenges" instead of "weaknesses," you know something more than semantics is going on.

We think there's a better way. We write for you the buyer and user of technology, and only you, because in our experience, that's the only way to get the real story.

The world is your oyster, but is the Geo-web right for you?

tregli@cmswatch.com(Theresa Regli) — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500

We all have our computer time-wasters. For some it's games, for others, IM'ing with friends. For me, it's the geo-web. Just as I used to while away the hours with my beloved Rand McNally atlas as a kid, studying the roads and mountain ranges and imagining what it would be like when I got there some day, now I do it with Google Earth. These days I don't have to be as imaginative -- it's all right there on my desktop. Not only can I see the mountain ranges, I can preview the slopes I'll ski on my next vacation in the Alps (if the dollar ever stops being a toy currency). I can search for news stories that happened within a 5 mile radius of the hotel I'm booking, be it in Cleveland, Corsica, or Cape Town.

Web content management vendors Ektron and Escenic, as well as Australian enterprise search vendor Funnelback, are among the few content technology vendors that integrate geo-web map applications with their own. They're often spun under the rubric of "Web 2.0," given that's the moniker put on anything that might also be described as "cool" or "interactive," and vendors of course want to come off as both. Escenic has found a niche supporting news organizations, allowing users to search for news geographically. On the web, Flickr allows you to search for photos that are tagged geographically, simply by clicking on a map. As is often the case, these mashups are heavily reliant on good metadata, or a geographic taxonomy. In other cases, text mining technology will sift through your managed content, look for location-based clues ("London," "Eiffel Tower" or "SFO"), and then assign GPS coordinates to that content as associated metadata, which is in turn fed into the mapping application.

Like many tools that vendors pass off as completely their own, many of the geo-mapping mashups you might see in WCM or enterprise search demos use OEM'd products. Sniffing backwards along that path, I recently chatted at length with the folks at MetaCarta, whose raison d'être is integrating content and maps, delivering what they call "geographic value" to unstructured content. MetaCarta combines text and geographic searches, then plots the results on a map. Smartly, MetaCarta is "map agnostic" -- meaning they'll use Google's, Microsoft's, or anyone else's mapping system to show the results. Note how it works on the Reuters news site; news is automatically plotted on the canvas of Microsoft Virtual Earth.

As a result of such software, a whole new layer of geo-specific data is added to our content. Standards are emerging to support this geographic tagging, including Google's Keyhole Markup Language, or KML and the Open Geospatial Consortium's GML. If your car or your cell phone has GPS technology, you are creating content just by moving around, or going to pick up milk at the corner store. An interesting new company called Socialight has set up a geographic-based social network letting mobile phone users attach "sticky notes" to locations, so that the next person who drops by can "pick it up." A brave new world of geo-data is emerging, and you will have to manage it.

While this is surely a growing piece of the 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle that is Enterprise Content Management, there's not necessarily a practical business application for the geo-web in your enterprise. Don't be too quick to be dazzled by the demo; after all, do you really need your CMS to tell you where the local pizza joints are? MetaCarta claims that 74% of documents on the Internet are "geo-relevant," or plottable on a map. Is the same true of the content in your enterprise? Will plotting your documents geographically add value to the experience, or enable you to manage or find content more effectively? Perhaps, but as with any software that may look cool on the surface, be sure to assess your real business needs before you invest.

SDL invests in Trisoft

rockley@rockley.com(Ann Rockley) — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 11:50:00 -0500

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

Content components facilitate translation through content reuse (write once, use many; translate once, use many), decreased cost of preparing translated content for multichannel publishing, and improved cross-channel translation (content is no longer siloed based on format such as HTML, Quark, etc.). DITA provides additional support for translation not found in traditional XML. However, with the translation of components rather than full documents, there does come an increase in the complexity of translation management as there are many more "chunks" to manage.

This is just an investment, not an acquisition, and I expect SDL will continue supporting its partnerships with Astoria, Vasont, and XyEnterprise. But I think that SDL's investment (along with EMC's X-Hive acquisition last August) signals greater attention to component content management and XML among larger vendors.

Welcome, Barbara...

tregli@cmswatch.com(Theresa Regli) — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 22:12:00 -0500

We'd like to welcome Barbara Feldman, our new Customer Relationship Manager, who joined us on January 2nd. If you have a question about any of our reports, subscription packages, or services, don't hesitate to e-mail her, or give her a call at +1 617 763 5336 (800 325 6190 in North America). Barbara has more than 20 years of experience in customer service for software companies, and thus is familiar with the types of situations you, the buyer of content technology, might find yourself in.

You can also our meet her at our booth (along with many CMS Watch analysts, who'll be dropping in and out) at the upcoming AIIM Expo, so please swing by and introduce yourself!

Siberlogic Announces SaaS Version of SiberSafe

rockley@rockley.com(Ann Rockley) — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 15:13:00 -0500

SiberLogic recently announced a SaaS version of their component content management system, SiberSafe On-Demand. This brings to three the SaaS options in this market. DocZone.com was the first to announce their product, DocZone, which is only offered as a hosted service. Astoria Software was the second with their move from client-server to hosted with Astoria On-Demand.

The availability of SaaS options is a welcome sight in the component content management space. Often the customers that need CCM the most do not have the budget or the technical resources required to support a client-server product. SaaS is particularly appealing to global teams with global content because it can facilitate 24x7 access and translation linkages.

The SiberSafe product has been one of the few lower-cost solutions in this space, and a SaaS alternative presumably makes it even more affordable, but the effectiveness of any hosted offering is also heavily dependent on customer service, not one of SiberLogic's strength in the past...