Content Management News

Wolfram Alpha launching new pro version

Ron Miller — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 07:53:38 -0500

Wolfram Alpha will be launching an intriguing new professional version this week that provides some compelling features for people looking to use the power of Wolfram Alpha custom data and images.

Wolfram Alpha, you may recall, is the data-driven search engine that launched in 2009. Since then, it has made some great strides with perhaps its biggest coup being that it is the underlying database that powers the Siri voice search on the iPhone 4S.

When it launched in 2009, I wrote a piece called "Wolfram Alpha Doesn't Impress Me." The problem was the answers you got depended very much on whether the engine understood your query, and if it was seeded with data to give a reasonable answer to that query. When I tried it today, I found the same problems I had back then. It didn't understand my queries (or I didn't understand how to enter a reasonable one).

Yet when Wolfram Alpha works well, it gives you some very interesting data.

And starting this week, you can plug in your own data or even drag in images (of a chart for example) and let Wolfram Alpha find interesting data points for you, ones you might not have found on your own. In an example described in a New York Times article, if you drag and dropped a table of the gross domestic product figures for France for 1961 to 2010 into Wolfram Alpha, it generated a color-coded bar chart, which you could download in different document formats.

As with the previous version, the NYT article noted it didn't always understand the data, but when it works well, it can give you some interesting results and you can save those results in a variety of formats.

The service will cost $4.99 a month, $2.99 for students.

For more information:
- see this Search Engine Land article explaining the features of Wolfram Alpha Pro
- see this Verge article with an in-depth explanation and video walk-through of Wolfram Alpha Pro

Guidance Software buys CaseCentral for eDiscovery one-two punch

Ron Miller — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 07:31:11 -0500

Guidance Software announced yesterday it was purchasing CaseCentral giving them both an on-premise and cloud eDiscovery solution with the stroke of a pen (on the purchase and sales agreement).

Guidance EnCase, its flag ship eDiscovery product provides the on-premise piece giving customers legal hold, identification, collection, preservation and processing functions on-premise, while CaseCentral provides a cloud solution that lets teams that might not be in the same location share and process data in the cloud.

As you can imagine, Guidance president and CEO Victor Limongelli was pleased at the prospect of having CaseCentral in his arsenal. "We will deliver the best of both worlds to customers by offering complete, integrated and innovative software in the eDiscovery market," he said.

And the power of this combined organization wasn't lost on him. "The combined organization will be the largest pure-play eDiscovery software company, with nearly 500 total employees, and thousands of users," he said.

Guidance will initially pay $17.1 million for CaseCentral, but if CaseCentral meets revenue goals over the next three years, Guidance could pay as much as an additional $33 million in cash.

The deal makes a lot of sense bringing together two companies that work in the same market from different angles, filling in a clear need for Guidance without forcing it to develop its own cloud solution.

For more information:
- see the Guidance Software press release

eZ launches cloud content management solution

Ron Miller — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 12:58:05 -0500

eZ Systems announced this week it was teaming with Finland-based cloud solutions provider Ixonos to launch a cloud-based version of its open source web CMS, eZ Publish along with set of cloud platform services. The new product is called eZ Cloud Elastic. The idea is to provide the resources you need to run your website such as elastic server requirements to deal with fluctuating traffic. Ixonos will supply the cloud platform aspects of the solution and eZ Publish will provide a cloud-based version of eZ Publish Enterprise. For more information, see the press release.

Apps make gains on browser, but usage remains essentially even

Ron Miller — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 11:03:36 -0500

Although apps made impressive gains in the latest comScore mobile data report, they remain in a virtual deadheat between folks who use apps versus those who use a browser.

In fact, comScore reported that for the period of Sept. 11, 2011 through Dec. 11, 2011, 47.6 percent of mobile users downloaded an app, which was up 5.1 percent from the previous report. Meanwhile, 47.5 percent used the browser, up 4.6 percent from the previous reporting period. That's a statistical dead-heat for all intents and purposes.

Interestingly, I wrote a post last year about the apps versus browser argument saying it was a non-starter because it really didn't matter. You would think though that most people who buy smart phones would use a lot of apps, but it turns out that the data suggests otherwise (and so did the comments).

I actually find on a personal level the two are hardly mutually exclusive. I find myself using both depending on the task. Sometimes, as with my Flixter movie app, it's easier to open the app and see all the movies playing in my area in one place, rather than looking up each theater and dealing with a variety of mobile web experiences.

Yet other times, I use my browser, certainly for searching, which I still do plenty of on my phone, and sometimes as with Flipboard, I start with an app, move to my browser to read an article, then move back to Flipboard--and it's designed to make these transitions easy.

But regardless of how you might feel about the browser or apps (and there appear to be strong feelings on both sides), apps provide a convenient container for delivering certain types of content, and if these numbers are any indication, it's a method which seems to be gaining ground--even though the numbers remain very close.

For more information:
- see the comScore press release

Socialtext teams with NetDocuments for social cloud content management

Ron Miller — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 17:30:53 -0500

Socialtext announced this week a partnership with cloud content management vendor NetDocuments that brings together social content with content management in an all-cloud solution.

One of the key features of an enterprise social system is the ability to collaborate and share documents and other information in a social way, but in order to take advantage of that content at some future date, it requires a content management layer. And when you have both solutions in the cloud, it means that users can access that information from any connected device at any time.

Sarah Nichols, director of knowledge management at ClimateWorks, a customer of both companies' services says the combination is very powerful for her distributed workforce, allowing them to share content and ideas across the world. She called the combined services "a unique solution that allows our hundreds of end users around the world to create, organize and share content, and to collaborate on projects."

It gives users the ability to share documents in a social way by accessing them through Socialtext, while maintaining the management functionality of the NetDocuments system.

The Socialtext-NetDocuments partnership is part of an overall strategy by Socialtext to provide a way to integrate Socialtext into tools a company might be using already--and this is a very reasonable approach that combines a couple of related technologies in a useful way.

For more information:
- see the Socialtext press release

Feds plan to destroy MegaUpload data

Ron Miller — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 09:49:06 -0500

Word came out this week that U.S. prosecutors in the MegaUpload case plan to destroy all of the data stored on the company's servers by the end of this week--in spite of the fact that there is plenty of legitimate content mixed in with some of the allegedly stolen stuff. If my data were on there I would be mad as hell.

Last week, we ran a story about the MegaUpload case and suggested that it wouldn't have an impact on enterprise cloud services that store data. As CEO of Box Aaron Levie pointed out, while they occasionally get a DCMA, or Digital Millennium Copyright Act, take-down notice, enterprise services are very different from consumer ones like MegaUpload.

That's true, but the problem as I see it involves public perception. If the federal government follows through on its threat to destroy all the data, the only thing that most people will understand is that the government shut down an online storage service and destroyed the data. Many folks won't have the sophistication to understand the difference between enterprise and consumer services.

That's bad for cloud computing in general on a couple of levels. First of all, it promotes the perception that all online storage is in danger of the same fate. Secondly it puts forth the idea in the minds of less sophisticated users that all file sharing services are havens for copyrighted content.

It's worth noting that the Electronic Frontier Foundation is working to help users retrieve their content.

While this case shouldn't have any bearing on cloud computing in the long run, it could tarnish its reputation, at least in the eyes of some users in the short term and that would be unfortunate if that were the result.

For more information:
- see the Mashable story on the government's plan to destroy MegaUpload data

Infragistics buys SharePoint mobile tool company

Ron Miller — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 08:31:59 -0500

Infragistics, a company that bills itself as a user interface development tool vendor, announced this week the purchase of Southlabs and with it, its mobile SharePoint application.

As users grow increasingly mobile, with many bringing their own devices (BYOD), it becomes increasingly important to provide tools for mobile users to gain secure access to enterprise content wherever they are.

Infragistics CEO Dean Guida says Southlabs' mobile SharePoint tool, SharePlus, addresses several issues for mobile enterprise users.

"Strong authentication and centralized deployment ensure that corporate data remains secure. The intuitive user interface dramatically improves upon the mobile browser SharePoint experience. The simple configuration eliminates IT resource drain, as time spent configuring devices and training users is minimal," Guida said.

There are three versions of the product: SharePlus Lite, SharePlus Pro and SharePlus Enterprise. Enterprise users will be most interested in the latter which provides enterprise security options such as multi-factor authentication and the ability to remotely wipe a device of SharePoint content.

Pricing varies starting with the free Lite version. The Pro version is $19.99. The Enterprise version pricing depends on your requirements.

SharePlus is available for iPhone, iPad, Android and Blackberry.

For more information:
- see the Infragistics press release

Content Marketing could be supplanting the traditional corporate blog

Ron Miller — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 17:17:16 -0500

A UMass Dartmouth study appears to show that corporate blogging is declining, although the data is somewhat inconclusive in this regard. In fact, researcher Nora Barnes who has been following Fortune 500 company blogs since 2007 found that overall blogging remained steady at 23 percent among Fortune 500 companies between 2010 and 2011.

Although the numbers are very close for the last two years, she still interpreted this to mean that corporate blogging has peaked, and companies are moving on to other social media tools such as LinkedIn and Facebook.

Barnes defined blogging as she has always done dating back to 2007 when she began looking at the data. "A company was counted as having a blog if they had a public-facing corporate blog from the primary corporation with posts in the past 12 months."

Fair enough, but I think perhaps how we define corporate content and how marketing departments in general deliver content, could be changing and that could account for the difference, however slight it might have been.

When I sent the report to Jeff Cutler, a Boston-based blogger who has written blogs for many corporate clients, he had this to say, "With a focused message, we're doing more content marketing than just 'blogging.'"

It sounded like Barnes was referring to a public facing corporate blog as opposed to a focused content marketing project that Cutler was referring to. It would actually be difficult to have the social media presence these companies seem to desire without some sort of content to drive the strategy. Whether you call that a blog or some other type of content, it still requires content to drive the marketing effort.

So it may be that corporate blogging has begun to wane, at least within the scope of Barnes' definition, or it may be that we are just not looking at it as blogging in the pure sense anymore. Whatever you call it, social media efforts require content.

For more information:
- see the UMass Dartmouth report

Joomla 2.5 offers promise of multi-database support

Ron Miller — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 15:06:12 -0500

Last week Joomla announced its latest version, 2.5, with what it called multi-database support, natural language search and notifications when updates to Joomla or an extension are available.

For now, as Apoorv Durga writes on the Real Story blog, the database compatibility is limited to Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) SQL Server with Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) support said to be coming down the road.

The automatic notification system, which WordPress has been providing forever, gives you a message when updates are available. This is not exactly an earth-shattering addition, but I'm sure it will be welcome by site administrators who up to now had to read about updates on sites like this one.

The search capability is off by default, but you can turn it on and have a search tool available across a site, which I'm sure will be a welcome addition by users and administrators alike.

Durga points out that these moves do help in establishing Joomla as a more solid enterprise web content management choice, but he says to some extent, it's going to depend on the developers who create plug-ins for the Joomla open source system to implement these changes and provide access across to the system.

In spite of Durga's critique, Joomla is an extremely popular open source web content management system with over 1.6 million installations including large enterprise and government customers like Citibank, eBay, General Electric, Harvard University, Ikea, McDonald's, Sony and many large nations. Joomla claims it's running 2.7 percent of the world's websites.

For more information:
- see the Joomla press release

Perceptive Reflect brings analytics to BPM

Ron Miller — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 14:04:10 -0500

Perceptive Software introduced a new product last week called Perceptive Reflect that lets companies visualize business processes in order to identify bottlenecks in the process. The idea is to provide tools that let you visualize each step of the process and find ways to improve it. You can even use this to identify transactions that fall outside your business rules to refine them or make sure that exceptions don't fall through the cracks. For more information, see the Perceptive Software press release.

AIIM study finds enterprise social software improves sales and marketing communication

Ron Miller — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 08:33:06 -0500

Over the last 6 months, AIIM has been working with Andrew McAfee, the man who coined the term Enterprise 2.0, to see what impact enterprise social software has on productivity in the enterprise. What they found was mostly positive.

AIIM invited McAfee, who is principal research scientist at the MIT Sloan Center for Digital Business to study social software in the Enterprise. The culmination of their work is a three-part white paper series, titled "When Social Meets Business Real Work Gets Done."

If you cover Web Content Management, or any area that involves marketing, one of the consistent refrains you hear is that communication between marketing and sales tends to be bad or non-existent. That's why it's significant that the AIIM study found that 60 percent of firms in the study that invested in building social software infrastructure reported "big gains in knowledge sharing and communication accuracy between marketing and sales." That in itself is remarkable given the tension that seems to exist between these two crucial departments.

As you would expect, given these results, AIIM is recommending that more companies use social software to facilitate better communication between marketing and sales.

The report was authored by McAfee but was based on the work of a task force that included 18 executives from social software and content management companies. The task force also looked at Open Innovation and rewards-based enterprise Q&A. The white papers are available now for free download.

For more information:
- see the AIIM press release

MegaUpload case likely has no impact on enterprise cloud services

Ron Miller — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 16:49:27 -0500

When cloud file-sharing service MegaUpload was shut down by the U.S. federal government last week, an article from PCMag Online pointed out that when the feds closed down the site, they took illegal and legal files with them--and left some unhappy users in their wake.

That had to leave some IT Pros wondering if that kind of take-down has any implications for their relationships with cloud services. While it's impossible to say with absolute certainty, chances are if your service is used mostly for business purposes, this type of situation is not likely to come up.

When I questioned Box.net Chief Executive Aaron Levie about this he said services focused on business were ultimately very different from MegaUpload. "On the spectrum of cloud sharing services, Box is at the opposite end compared to consumer publishing tools. We're focused on powering information management and collaboration for large enterprises, and consistent with that focus we see an infinitesimally small amount of content take-down requests," Levie said.

But it's certainly worthy of a discussion because most any online service with a storage component probably has some content which major content owners--as in big media companies--might object to. Most people use these services for both business and personal reasons and it's not out of the realm of possibility that across the spectrum of human behavior, some are storing content that they probably shouldn't.

As Levie pointed out, though, that's the user's responsibility. "Ultimately, users are responsible for being thoughtful about where they put their data, and providers are responsible for complying with DMCA [The Digital Millennium Copyright Act], and acting in accordance with that standard when copyright issues arise," he said

Overall, I'm inclined to agree with Levie that as long as you use enterprise-class services, you shouldn't run into the kinds of problems that users of MegaUpload encountered when they lost content.

Survey finds many users blow by SharePoint security

Ron Miller — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 10:38:51 -0500

A new survey of 100 SharePoint users across a variety of business sizes and job categories found that users were surprisingly cavalier when it came to maintaining SharePoint security requirements. Survey participants were attending the UK SharePoint Saturday conference and the survey was conducted anonymously.

The survey, which was conducted by Cryptzone, an IT threat mitigation company, found that when asked if they understood that taking content out of SharePoint made content less secure, 92 percent answered in the affirmative, yet when asked if they were willing to take it outside of SharePoint, fully 30 percent were willing to take the risk for the sake of convenience.

Further when asked if they had access rights to see a document they knew they shouldn't look at, a third said they would look at it, and another 10 percent said they weren't sure what they would do.

When asked what unauthorized documents they were most likely to take a peek at, 23 percent said salary details and another 34 percent said "other employee details." In other words, information they had no business looking at because it was HR-related and personal.

But it got worse. When asked if they ever copied sensitive documents from SharePoint to a USB or other personal drive, 18 percent answered they did so regularly and another 27 percent said they did so sometimes.

Finally, when respondents were asked why they took sensitive documents out of the safety of the system, 43 percent said because they needed to work at home (which makes sense), but 55 percent said because they needed to give it to someone who didn't have access to SharePoint.

I always point out the inherent bias in vendor-driven surveys. There is a tendency to show data that puts your business in the best light and the sponsor is an IT security company, but any way you look at this data, the results are fairly shocking and show that either IT needs to provide ways to protect documents better, or they have to find ways to make it easier to share with different parties inside and outside the company when needed in a way that allows IT to have an audit trail.

For more information:
- download the Cryptzone survey (.pdf)
- see the Cryptzone press release

Apple needs to step up for textbook plan to succeed

Ron Miller — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 09:56:39 -0500

Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) made a controversial leap into the K-12 textbook business last week and the response has been varied.

The textbooks are interactive, update automatically and at $15 or less a pop, they are clearly cheap. What's more, Apple lined up the three biggest textbook publishers in the United States, but there are critics aplenty.

First of all, it requires you own a $500 iPad and according to a post on MSNBC that could be a huge barrier to entry--and Apple didn't announce any plans to subsidize the cost. In conversations I observed across the social Internet, most folks said their school systems could not afford that kind of cost and I can tell you that from personal experience in my own state of Massachusetts, it's highly unlikely that most school systems could afford that (or that the State is any position to help).

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols writing on ZDNet predicted that this could lead to a digital divide in which some children have access to these high-tech text books while others are left further behind.

Meanwhile tech journalist Ed Bott wrote that Apple was sabotaging the open EPub textbook standard it helped champion the last two years.

My feeling is these books have lots of appeal, at least on their face. Apple is providing tools to make it easy for authors to create engrossing content. They've gotten the right people involved. However you feel about their licensing and distribution agreements, this is a fascinating approach to K-12 publishing.

But make no mistake, the barrier to entry--the cost of the iPad--is not a trivial matter, here. Unless Apple steps up and uses some of its many billions of dollars to create a generation of iPad users, there is no way this going to fly on its own. Beyond a few of the wealthier families, this will remain out of reach for most families and communities.

It's on Apple to rectify that situation or this announcement will go down as nothing more than a compelling experiment in text book publishing.

For more information:
- see the Apple press release

Pew: U.S. tablet and eBook reader ownership jumps

Ron Miller — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 09:08:29 -0500

Recent data released by the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that eBook reader and tablet ownership increased dramatically over the holidays driven by cheaper offerings from Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

In fact, Pew found that ownership of both types of devices nearly doubled from a similar survey taken just prior to the holidays, in December. Pew reported that there was very little movement from the middle of last year into the early Fall, but the introduction of these lower-priced devices clearly had a huge impact on sales.

And a closer look at the numbers shows that both the eBook reader and tablet market--after developing slowly over the last couple of years--really took off this holiday season. In November 2010, the eBook reader market was at just 6 percent of adults, by mid-December 2011 it was up to 10 percent and the most recent figures for mid-January, ownership jumped to 19 percent.

Similarly, tablets stood at 5 percent in 2010, 10 percent in mid-December and the most recent figures were also up to 19 percent.

If this trend were to continue, and there's every reason to think it will, that means approximately 40 percent of U.S. adults could own one of these devices by this time next year.

Pew's results are based on a phone survey of 1000 adults from Jan. 5-8 and another 1008 adults from Jan. 12-15. Pew states there is a margin of error of +/- 2.4 percentage points.

To view all the results and breakdowns by age, income, education and ethnicity (all are interesting):
-see the Pew report