CMS Watch Digital Asset 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. ;-)

DAM industry rollup

tregli@cmswatch.com(Theresa Regli) — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 12:17:00 -0400

I recently wrote an article for DOCUMENT Magazine summarizing the state of the digital asset management industry. Readers of our DAM Report 2008 will recognize these as excerpts from the Report's executive summary, but if you're looking for something to put in front of your boss or CEO to give a quick overview of the state of DAM, here's the place to look. It's in a downloadable, print-friendly, magazine-spread format, too.

MAM by any other name: more alphabet soup

tregli@cmswatch.com(Theresa Regli) — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 10:13:00 -0400

Last week I wrote about Open Text's acquisition of eMotion, and may have added to the confusion over the alphabet soup of DAM, MAM, and MOM. Allow me to clarify how we use the acronyms, and then how they may be used differently by others.

DAM = Digital Asset Management
MAM = Media Asset Management
MOM = Marketing Operations Management

First, as with ECM, we must make the distinction between disciplines and technologies/tools. As my colleague Alan often points out, ECM is really a strategy or an approach that requires many different technologies coming together. I'd argue the same for Marketing Asset Management (sometimes also shortened to MAM) and MOM. Marketing Asset or Operations Management isn't a technology, it's a strategy, set of workflows, and often a suite of tools working together to achieve marketing goals. That might include a DAM system, a web analytics tool, and even a WCM system or a portal capable of personalization. All those technologies might manage marketing assets: brand materials, customer information, or the messages you want to target.

Now, we'll insist that tools alone don't make for a true ECM or Marketing Asset Management solution any more than a set of hammers, wood, and nails makes a house, so we're more specific about the MAM acronym and use it to describe technologies that specialize in certain scenarios. In our parlance, and in the lingo of many of the companies themselves occupied with the management of time-based assets, such as video and audio, MAM specifically describes the management of audio and video assets.

Corbis' (now Open Text's) eMotion is a hosted platform for general Digital Asset Management, largely used by marketers (and thus is called a MAM system in the Marketing Asset Management sense, as Open Text is pitching it). Open Text's other DAM platform, Artesia, offers both traditional DAM (management of digital photos and other marketing materials), as well as MAM (Media Asset Management) for time-based assets, one of the few vendors in our report that does both. In our universal DAM and MAM scenarios, we group ones related to marketing collateral and print production into one group, and the ones for video and audio production into a completely different group, given how vastly different the vendors are in their capabilities. Open Text's new combination of eMotion and Artesia means they're covering more of the whole range, in both hosted and licensed offerings.

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

Open Text continues acquisition trail, gobbling up MAM vendor

tregli@cmswatch.com(Theresa Regli) — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 10:38:00 -0400

On the heels of my colleague Alan's report of Open Text's purchase of Spicer, the next sign along the company's acquisition trail was posted yesterday with the acquisition of media asset management vendor eMotion.

eMotion's prior caretaker was Corbis, famous for their massive image library. eMotion, a hosted MAM service, was a natural compliment to Corbis' offering, allowing publishers, image and video production managers to host both their own assets, as well as pointers to ones licensed from Corbis, in one place.

There's several interesting things about this acquisition. First is that Open Text already owns a rather sizable DAM software offering, Artesia. This reminds me a bit of when Microsoft acquired FAST -- many asked why Redmond needed another search tool, when they already had several of their own. It comes back to scenarios and specific capabilities. Just as searching a public website vs. a SharePoint repository vs. your firewall-protected Oracle databases call for very different types of search technologies, so does managing digital imagery vs. time-based assets. Like Microsoft, Open Text wants to dominate more of those niches.

DAM and MAM used to be quite separate, and different vendors "grew up" focusing on one domain or the other. As we learned in our research for The Digital & Media Asset Management Report 2008, there's few vendors that do well managing both images and video. Artesia's MAM capabilities are quite strong, compared to other vendors that grew up on the DAM side of the equation. Still, pure-play MAM companies like Blue Order, for now, continue to get the bigger share of the broadcast company MAM pie. Open Text's latest acquisition blurs the line between MAM and DAM even more, and shows they'd like to reach futher into both their core client base of marketers and advertising agencies as well as to the snazzy movie studios in Hollywood and beyond. Whether that can happen with two very separate technologies, Artesia and eMotion, will be interesting to see.

Also of note is that eMotion is a hosted or "On Demand" solution, whereas Artesia is strictly licensed softare. Several other DAM / MAM vendors have recently debuted hosted offerings as well. We've written in the past about the ambiguities of what a vendor is really offering when they say "On Demand", so proceed with caution. Open Text already markets a mish-mash of disjointed and loosely integrated ECM tools. This latest purchase is another reason for you, the buyer, to remain meticulous about understanding what each part of the pie really does.

Bam, WAM, thank you, DAM!

tregli@cmswatch.com(Theresa Regli) — Wed, 9 Jul 2008 15:36:00 -0400

Late last month I had the pleasure of attending the Henry Stewart Digital Asset Management Symposium in London, UK, where I presented a summary of our research recently published in The Digital & Media Asset Management Report 2008. It was interesting to contrast this event with Henry Stewart's other recent DAM event, in New York City, held in early May. While many of the challenges faced by digital asset managers on both sides of the Atlantic are similar, few vendors find success on both continents. Though most of the vendors in our report claim customers "worldwide," a true presence (meaning more than a sales person) beyond the headquarters is usually lacking -- oftentimes, the software is simply pushed by resellers abroad, with minimal success.

Unlike last year, Canadian vendors North Plains and Nstein had their footprint on the London show floor, while Artesia ( who was there last year) was notably missing. Otherwise, ADAM, Vyre and other smaller UK and Europe-based vendors continued to fulfill the need of their local markets, and look to expand. As I noted along with my colleague Alan at Internet World UK back in April, there's no shortage of small to medium-sized WCM vendors doing well in the UK market, either, and many have yet to venture even into continental Europe. For every vendor that's acquired an gobbled up, two or three new ones seem to emerge, fulfilling ever more specific micro-niches. Perhaps the "Go Local" trend isn't just about food anymore, but technology suppliers as well.

But talk in the conference rooms was more about the business challenges of broadcasters, designers, marketers, and publishers than it was about the tools and vendors themselves. What echoed most frequently at both conferences was the idea of DAM not just as an asset repository, but a set of workflows leading to an end product (be it a brochure, catalog, or 60-minute broadcast). Each step along the workflow should add value, be it metadata enrichment or some artistic or editorial improvement. And yet, as we've pointed out before, most tools fall short of allowing licensees to truly automate and expedite the often complex publishing processes required by typical DAM scenarios.

It's in this spirit that Chris Glynne, who recently started his own consultancy called Bold Visions, pitched the concept of WAM, or Workflow Asset Management. While the last thing we all need is another acronym, if we're going to take DAM beyond the concept of a digital library, focusing on workflow, and the automation of steps along the typical DAM path is one key way of making that happen.

Digital asset managers asked me a lot of questions about non-pure-play DAM vendors' DAM capabilities. From Alfresco to Microsoft to Oracle, conference delegates wanted to know if they really needed a pure-play DAM tool if they already had SharePoint or Oracle's UCM. That question is not easily answered without delving deeper and understanding your needs and business scenarios. Do you have digital assets that are larger than 5 MB? Do your assets require you to manage both individual and composite assets, such as an product image, and then a brochure where the image might be used, and subsequently a 250-page product catalog where it might be applied as well? Do you need to manage and use the same asset at various resolutions, for both the Web and print? Then SharePoint sure as heck won't do the trick, and you'd be stretching other non-DAM-specific tools. Specialized DAM vendors raison d'être is to fulfill needs like these.

I'll share more leanings from these two DAM events as the summer continues; feel free to email me with any DAM or MAM questions you may have as well, as we continue our research into this fast-changing technology.

PDF now has a standard home, but whither XMP?

kthomas@cmswatch.com(Kas Thomas) — Mon, 7 Jul 2008 16:28:00 -0400

Until a few days ago, Adobe's Portable Document Format was an open format in name only. The specification was freely available, to be sure, but PDF's development and direction remained firmly under the control of one entity (namely, Adobe Systems). That changed on July 2, 2008, when the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) officially took over the PDF specification from Adobe. PDF is now an authentic industry standard, maintained by a real standards body. (It is officially ISO 32000-1, and you can get your very own copy of it for a mere 370 Swiss francs.)

Adobe is to be commended for making good on its commitment (announced in January of 2007) to turn the PDF format over to an independent standards body. Everybody benefits from this move. Adobe no longer has to bear the burden of maintaining single-handedly what has grown to become a breathtakingly elaborate format specification (over 1300 pages long), and the PDF developer community no longer has to wonder whether the format will forever remain quasi-proprietary.

Adobe needs to do the same thing now with XMP (the eXtensible Metadata Platform), the XML metadata format for images (and other asset types). As readers of our Digital & Media Asset Management Report 2008 already know, XMP is seeing widespread use in the DAM and MAM spaces (and getting more popular by the day). It is supported by virtually all Adobe products, and is an integral part of many subvariants of PDF (such as PDF/A), some of which have been ISO standards for years, ironically.

XMP has been under Adobe's control since it made its first appearance in 2001 (as part of the Acrobat 5 release). It's an important standard, one that needs to evolve quickly, in response to community needs and under community direction. (The last revision of the XMP standard was published in 2005.) Adobe is pushing the XMP standard ... at Adobe's pace and in ways that benefit Adobe. (The parallels with PDF are numerous and obvious.) There are lingering technical issues waiting to be solved, however. Issues whose solutions shouldn't have to be dependent on Adobe's needs only.

Let's cut to the chase. If Adobe wants to demonstrate its commitment to openness, it should do for XMP what it has already done for PDF: Put it in the hands of a legitimate standards body. Right now it's open in name only.

DAM vendors coming up short

tregli@cmswatch.com(Theresa Regli) — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 00:02:00 -0400

As the Henry Stewart Digital Asset Management Symposium kicks off in London, we comment in today's press release on a few areas where DAM vendors are coming up short, based on our recent research for The Digital & Media Asset Management Report 2008.

In our interviews with customers, many lamented their investments in DAM systems failed to meet their needs for workflow and rights management. My fellow analyst Kas Thomas and I were often surprised to find that what many vendors call a workflow application is no more than a thread of e-mails. You can read more details in the release, and of course, our DAM Report.

North Plains and Interwoven offer DAM SaaS service -- or do they?

tregli@cmswatch.com(Theresa Regli) — Wed, 4 Jun 2008 16:03:00 -0400

Software-as-a-Service has an especially strong case in the area of Digital Asset Management, where the buyer is often a marketing manager or creative team with a fixed monthly budget and little to no IT support. But not all SaaS is created equal. Granted, we've pointed this out before, but after my experience on the analyst panel at Henry Stewart's DAM Symposium last month, I can't help but warn again that this term means very different things depending upon who's using it.

On the panel, during a discussion regarding the value of SaaS-based DAM, one analyst cited Interwoven's MediaBin as a SaaS option. I immediately retorted that Interwoven didn't offer MediaBin (or anything else) as SaaS, as a member of Widen's marketing team shook his head simultaneously in the audience. Still, there was continued disagreement on the matter, thus I went straight to MediaBin's product manager after the panel to make sure I hadn't missed this as an offering. In fact, Interwoven offers 3rd-party hosting and management of MediaBin, if you'd like. Sure, that I knew. But I'd never, ever call that SaaS, and to their credit, neither does Interwoven.

Why? To quote my colleague Tony Byrne, "contracting with a supplier simply to host and customize traditional software is not the same thing as working with a well thought-through, 'native' Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution that was built from the ground up by a company dedicated to providing such a service. There is a case to be made for outsourcing application hosting and support, as well as a case for true SaaS. Just make sure you know the difference -- and know what you're getting in either case."

Widen, a pure SaaS vendor through and through, had a right to be shaking their heads in the audience. Like WCM vendors Crown Peak and Clickability, Widen's philosophy is that service is just as important as technology -- an attitude that very few software vendors seem to have. Most software companies are out there to simply sell licenses, and it shows in the poor customer service ratings that many vendors receive in our reports.

The latest DAM vendor to jump on the SaaS bandwagon is North Plains, which debuted a new SaaS/"OnDemand" service that same day at the Symposium. North Plains' new service is closer to Interwoven's under-the-covers offering than it is to Widen's, as there's 3rd-party hosting involved (from NaviSite). North Plains says its client support team has been "fully trained on serving the needs of TeleScope OnDemand clients," and that additional support resources have been added to meet the 24x7 demands of true SaaS. But one has to wonder how many, and if more SaaS-based support will be a cause or an effect of people choosing the new service.

As we point out in our Digital & Media Asset Management Report, ClearStory is one of the few vendors that's seen success with both approaches. Still, I remain skeptical of traditional software vendors jumping into SaaS, mostly because I've found such a significant difference in the corporate culture of the pure SaaS vs. non-SaaS companies I've watched over the past several years. It's not that one is necessarily better than the other, but just be sure to know which is right for you, and understand what a vendor is really offering when that term "SaaS" gets thrown around.

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.

Open source and Digital Asset Management

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Thu, 22 May 2008 13:30:00 -0400

Joseph Bachana recently posted in these pages an excellent article on the Digital Asset Management (DAM) marketplace. I disagreed somewhat, though, with his conclusion:

In the end, it may take the harnessed fervor of the open source community to bring all these threads and more together in the marketplace over the next 24 to 36 months.

There's no doubt that a more visible and active open source DAM project than what's out there now would help spur greater competition and innovation in that space. It has certainly done so in other technologies we cover.

But if you are looking to implement DAM technology, don't wait for an open source package to arrive deus ex machina to resolve the challenges you face selecting among the wide array of mostly smallish DAM vendors (see our report for more detail here). It's tempting to think that harnessed fervor will tackle the very substantial technical challenges that DAM tools try to address, but I'm skeptical here.

As Bachana's article points out, the shadow of Adobe looms large here. Much the same way that open source document management platforms get hamstrung by their arms-length relationship to Office and Windows, I think open source DAM tools will have a hard time embracing Adobe and its raft of proprietary tools and protocols. I'll still stay hopeful, and we'll keep watching, but don't hold your breath on this one...

Adobe woos Sun recruits to the Flex cause

kthomas@cmswatch.com(Kas Thomas) — Sun, 18 May 2008 06:14:00 -0400

In an earlier post, I commented on the (undeclared) "VM war" that seems to be shaping up between Adobe and Sun Microsystems. If Adobe has its way, PC users will soon be running web-friendly desktop apps in a secure Virtual Machine environment built on Adobe technology. If Sun has its way, we'll all be running JavaFX apps. (And if Microsoft has its way, we'll all be using some combination of .NET and Silverlight.)

Sun appears to have overslept the alarm this time, however. The company announced its JavaFX-based RIA strategy a year ago to relatively little fanfare. And although the technology was touted at the recent JavaOne show, the fact still remains that few people outside the Java developer community have ever heard of JavaFX.

Adobe, unlike Sun, hasn't been hitting the snooze button. Earlier this month, Hans Muller surprised fellow contributors to the Swing Application Framework when he announced that he was leaving Sun to go to Adobe to work on Flex. (Muller simultaneously gave up his role as spec lead for JSR-296, the Swing Application Framework.) This comes on the heels of another recent defection of a Sun GUI expert: Back in February, Chet Haase (coauthor, with Romain Guy, of Filthy Rich Clients) left his job as client architect in the Java SE group at Sun to go to work for Adobe...also in the Flex group.

Eventually, starting later this year, we expect to see Web CMS clients begin using Flex technology as a way to bridge the platform divide (and the Web-vs.desktop divide). EMC Documentum, for example, is known to be building a Flex-based DAM client.

Client proliferation is (and has been) an ongoing problem in the Web CMS space, where it's not uncommon for a product to have thick and thin clients for multiple platforms, browsers, and use-cases. AJAX (for all its other virtues) has done nothing to solve this problem. Getting to a single-client future will be next to impossible without something like AIR, Silverlight, or JavaFX.

May the best technology win.

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.

DAM's growing pains

kthomas@cmswatch.com(Kas Thomas) — Thu, 15 May 2008 14:26:00 -0400

Digital Asset Management may not constitute a huge slice of the ECM pie, but it's a fast-growing slice. That was the consensus of several experts who spoke at the Henry Stewart Digital Asset Management show in New York earlier this week. The generally accepted estimate is that the DAM market worldwide presently accounts for a yearly spend of between a third of a billion and half a billion dollars; and overall spending is increasing at the rate of twenty-something percent per year. If true (and one never knows...) that's a pretty healthy clip.

With any expanding technology there are bound to be "growing pains," and this is certainly true of DAM. In talking to vendor CEOs and CTOs, their customers, consultants, developers, fellow analysts, and other cognoscenti at the Henry Stewart conference, I heard certain concerns raised over and over again. I'll summarize the major ones quickly:

Silo proliferation: Many large enterprises have gotten to the point where multiple media repositories are being supported internally for multiple uses by multiple groups. Consolidating assets across a balkanized DAM landscape is often difficult for a variety of reasons. The challenge is to unify the media cloud with some sort of federation technology.

Media sharing across geographies: An organization headquartered in London has artists in Paris, editors in Montreal, and videographers in New York. How do the various offices collaborate on the processing of shared resources (including very large video files), without unacceptable latencies or bandwidth exhaustion?

Metadata handling: Which files, under what circumstances, should have XMP metadata embedded in them as opposed to being passed separately in a sidecar payload? How do you apply access control to metadata at the attribute or element level? How can you secure metadata against tampering (and detect tampering when it occurs)? How can you encrypt metadata so that unauthorized individuals who gain access to an asset can't see the metadata? If an asset with embedded metadata gets passed back and forth between DAMs, how do you keep one system from overwriting the metadata created by the other? (Ingestion rules may cause collisions.) These are just some of the metadata-related issues that "enterprise DAM" customers are struggling with.

Integration with enterprise systems: The typical DAM product was not designed with interoperability in mind and represents "yet another proprietary silo" in an IT environment. To address this, most vendors have added Web Service APIs to their DAM products. But as Jason Bright (founder and CEO of MediaBeacon) points out, all this does is open up a few peepholes into what's basically still a crazy-quilt of vendor-specific API methods. It doesn't really solve the problem.

Systems take too long to implement: Enterprise DAM projects are complex, expensive, and risky, typically involving a "cast of thousands" (many stakeholders), with a high potential for paralysis by analysis. Customers as well as vendors are desperate to improve the "time-to-value" proposition. This may account, in part, for the recent trend toward SaaS-based DAM. (North Plains Systems announced its entry into the SaaS fold at the Henry Stewart show this week.) Nevertheless, SaaS isn't for everyone, and DAM "in the large" requires serious research and advance planning, regardless of supplier model.

Of course, I should point out that you can shorten your research time considerably with the aid of The Digital & Media Asset Management Report 2008, our 275-page guide to the DAM market, containing no-nonsense evaluations of DAM and MAM products from 18 established vendors. (You can see a free online sample here.)

The challenges around Digital Asset Management are daunting and grow by the day. But the same can be said of the attendant opportunities.

Thoughts on how to do your DAM homework

kthomas@cmswatch.com(Kas Thomas) — Tue, 13 May 2008 07:13:00 -0400

Yesterday at the Henry Stewart Digital Asset Management & Marketing Operations Symposium in New York, I sat in on a DAM "best practices" talk given by onetime independent consultant Linda Tadic, now an Adjunct Professor at New York University teaching classes on digital archiving and related topics. As a former Manager of the digital library at HBO, Digital Projects Coordinator at J. Paul Getty Trust, and Director of Operations at ARTstor, Tadic has been involved first-hand in a number of large DAM system rollouts. She's learned some interesting lessons along the way. Here are a few quick takeaways from her talk:

"DAM isn't a system; it's a workflow." Don't think statically about a DAM system. It's not some cryogenic tank that you dump bits into for longterm storage. There are processes associated with every asset in the system.
"Allow six months for initial research." Don't even think you're going to initiate any kind of discussion with a DAM vendor within the first six months. You need to spend that time doing basic DAM research; identifying and talking to stakeholders; getting buy-in from sponsors; assessing your current situation with regard to assets, metadata, and IT resources; and so on. ("Take whatever time you've budgeted for initial research," said a panel member in an earlier session, "and just triple it.")
"Identify all of the different types of users you'll have." You need a taxonomy of users. Why? Because you can't begin to know your requirements until you understand who all the actors are that might use your system, and in what capacity they are going to use it. (Note that more than one speaker emphasized the need to write "user narratives" instead of, or in addition to, formal system requirements.)
"Interview users of all the different types you've identified." Develop personas. Capture them as user narratives.
"Metadata should contain information about the asset's chain of custody back to the beginning." For every asset, you want to be able to find out: Who created it? Who has owned it? Who owns it now?
"Granulate your metadata." Most metadata isn't fine-grained enough. You want to be able to run reports quickly and easily, without spending a lot of time parsing the metadata just to get at certain bits.
"Allow for the idea that you may need to restrict edit rights on metadata at the field level." This is difficult to do with most systems. But the key intuition is, you don't want someone who rightfully needs "write access" to one or two fields of the metadata to be able to overwrite all fields.
"Insist on owning any code produced by anybody who helped implement your system." Ditto for any documentation associated with the project.

All great advice.

Now more than ever, reading is not believing

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Tue, 13 May 2008 00:06:00 -0400

As a content producer, it has been fascinating to watch the evolution of channels where technology suppliers talk to technology customers -- the trade press and industry conferences in particular.

Take conferences. In the go-go 1990s, prospective speakers were busy making money, and conference organizers (of which there were many!) aggressively courted panelists and often paid them to speak. During the last recession, most conferences stopped paying speakers (except for keynotes and training). In fact, in many venues the pendulum has shifted towards pay-to-play, and you see more exhibitors on conference panels than ever. Not surprisingly, when this happens the quality suffers apace.

The trade press has not been immune from this trend either. Still, I was shocked last week when a UK-based IT publication asked one of our analysts to pay the publisher to run an article that the magazine itself had solicited. This was not a "sponsored white paper," but a regular article in a regular trade publication. Everyone knows the 4th Estate has fallen on hard times, but I didn't realize it was that bad, and in any case one would hope that basic ethics don't get lost amid shifting business models.

I think these trends reflect a broader phenomenon: There is more marketing money than ever chasing finite buyer attention. You see it at conferences that are longer on exhibitors than attendees. And webpages that are longer on ads than content. We've written previously on the substantial conflicts of interest baked into traditional analyst industry models.

What does all this mean for you the customer? It means you need to be more skeptical than ever. At some level you already knew that, but it's possible that your colleagues helping you to make technology choices do not. That's why you need to hard-wire careful, hands-on testing into any software procurement. Surely, there are products and vendors out there that really could offer a good fit for your needs. But in the end, experience really is the best selector.

We think doing proper advance homework is essential, or we wouldn't sell evaluation reports for a living. But now more than ever, you need to trust your own judgments. Base those judgments more on actions than words.