Articles Index: Info Insider
Like many of you, I read voraciously. My nightstand is always overflowing, and I'm running out of bookshelf space. Meanwhile, the cost of print publications continues to grow. So how do you cope? One approach is to use an e-reader, but which one?
Avi Rappoport: "Over the years I've been part of many enterprise content management initiatives. I've seen each repository grow, usually isolated from the others. The result is often an ecosystem of different, disconnected enterprise knowledge assets. An emerging cross-vendor standard called content management interoperability services (CMIS) offers to connect some of those repository dots."
Once in a while, I get asked what I call a "Flat Earth" question: "Prove to me the earth isn't flat." Then, I stumble to find good answers. So it was in a recent taxonomy modeling session, when a line-of-business participant asked me: "Why do we need folders anyway?"
In my annual review of XML, two events or trends stand out: First is the Aug. 23 injunction by U.S. District Judge Leonard Davis of East Texas against Microsoft (MS) selling Word products "that have the capability of opening a .XML, .DOCX, or .DOCM file (‘an XML file') containing custom XML." Secondly, there is eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) and tools emerging to leverage it.
We all recognize the twin trends of exponentially growing electronic content and more litigiousness. The landmark 2006 Federal Rules of Civil Procedures Rule 26 and its updates make all electronic stored information (ESI) subject to legal discovery, and ESI continues its unbridled growth. Yet cost controls are tighter these days than they were a decade ago, so we increasingly react to problems rather than nip them in the bud. If you already have an enterprise search system (or, more likely, several targeted search systems), do you really need anything else to respond to a civil suit requesting information stored anywhere in the enterprise?
I'm still searching for e-readers … but I'm getting close. Last year in my column "It Ain't Easy Being Green," I noted the problems newspapers face and the benefits of "going green." Since then, subscription costs have continued to rise and newspapers now need their own bailouts.
In April, when this column is printed, Americans will be engaged in the annual ritual of calculating and paying state and federal taxes. Although tax activity is most intense in April, we all pay taxes daily in many forms, such as sales tax. Just as taxes have always been with us, so too have taxonomies. Like dealing with taxes, taxonomy management is an evolving process that never ends. There are many definitions of "taxonomy," but I view them as merely the various ways we categorize and manage groups of things so we can find them, whether they're dishes in a cupboard or scrolls in the ancient library of Alexandria.
Mergers and acquisitions are all too common, as are company reorganizations. SharePoint is an increasingly popular repository option. The increasingly common end result: More and more enterprises have important content in at least two incompatible content management systems, and most users cannot access all the systems. Even if you know what's on the "other" system, getting there is usually a hassle.
As anyone with kids—or a good memory—knows, when you cross the "double digits" birthday threshold, it's a big deal. This year, XML crossed this threshold on Feb. 10, and this got me thinking about questions that I might ask this 10-year-old in order to gain perspective on its past and future. I know I'm late, but XML is nothing if not flexible. It assured me that even a belated party is better than none.
I knew that price wouldn't last, but I became hooked and since then I've renewed every 2 years, including the digital edition. However, this year's bill gave me a case of sticker shock at nearly 30 times the original teaser price. I've already switched several of my other print publications to digital, and I suspect pricing is going to strongly encourage more digital switching.
Are you sure that the search system you're using will satisfy the requirements of the Federal Rules for Civil Procedures (FRCP) regarding electronically stored information (ESI)? If your first reaction is "not more acronyms," I feel your pain. Vendors create acronyms faster than they upgrade their products. So let's start with the meaning of the FRCP, focusing on the amendments regarding ESI that went into effect on Dec. 1, 2006.
The vast majority of the clutter on local and network drives may contain records, but most are drafts or orphans that nobody recognizes and nobody dares to remove.
The Pulp and Paper Products Council reported recently that more than 900,000 tons of newsprint were produced in June. In the U.S., 55 million newspapers are sold each day. That’s a lot of trees to cut down, process, print, and deliver, with lots of fossil fuels consumed in the process. What is the alternative—move everything to the web? Broadband isn’t always available (certainly on the DC Metro), so this would limit content access. Web delivery isn’t completely eco-friendly either. Estimates of our total national energy bill devoted to information technology range up to 14%. Unlike your laptop or refrigerator, web servers must run continuously.
What a difference a year makes. Since my column in last year’s EC100 issue, content applications of all types have been showing their 2.0 stripes, increasingly blurring the boundaries between web and print, and where their content resides. As “Web 2.0” has become part of our vocabulary, Content 2.0 parallels are blurring web-based and non-web-based content.
The long awaited use of XML in office suites has arrived. OpenOffice was the first to migrate to XML, StarOffice 8 provides an extra layer of support for OpenOffice, Corel WordPerfect was an early XML adopter and will soon import/export to other XML office suites, and Microsoft Office 2007 is built on XML. OK, the future has arrived. Now what?
Internationally, the talk about moving to ODF is widespread. Meanwhile, Google and others are offering web-based alternatives. Corel WordPerfect is offering both an online office suite and promises to work interchangeably with Microsoft and ODF office suites. What’s going on here? Massive confusion and change, and this is just the beginning.
As a teenager in northern New Hampshire, I worked after school and on weekends in a small country store. I calculated retail prices, stamped them onto cans, then stocked the shelves. I also worked the checkout register, carefully entering each item’s price into the register. This was before the use of UPC bar codes—indeed, before the ubiquitous use of microprocessors.
Like its web counterpart, Content 2.0 is emerging in rapid fits and starts. There will be an evolution of electronic formats (and extinctions) via marketplace natural selection. Fundamental structural change is occurring in office documents, containers of 80% of all information. This happened first with ODF in OpenOffice and StarOffice 8, and now through OpenXML in Microsoft’s Office 2007.
As we started 2006, I saw the “Clash of the Titans” metaphor as a way to view the struggle to dominate our content tools: Google and Microsoft were the titans, locked in mortal combat.
Most of us—even we pack rats—must deal with the practical limits of magnetic and physical storage space. Like it or not, we have to be selective about what we keep and what we delete. While on the corporate side, the threat of litigation might provide incentive to toss stuff as soon as possible to avoid preserving content that could be the target of discovery in a lawsuit, there are also requirements that some things be maintained.
A subtle shift is occurring in the way we value and manage our office content—those files that constitute 80% of the investments we all make in our mainstream office work: text documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. Today there are tremendous legal pressures to ensure that we abide by various mandated schedules to keep documents as long as the law requires (but no longer). On the flip side, practices are emerging to selectively destroy many of our documents that we need not keep at all. Destruction provides a measure of protection from widely cast subpoena nets.
Up to the mid-’90s, managing content was easy. Records managers cataloged documents, locked them up, and when their retention period expired, destroyed them. The main threats were fire and water. Today, content comes in thousands of electronic formats, including email. Content’s central importance is attracting a new threat: patent litigators, the modern Willie Suttons, because—as Willie famously said about robbing banks—that’s where the money is.
Vendors always compete for your computing desktop. Some competition takes a whimsical form, like “Flying Toaster” screen savers. Some competition is strategic: operating systems, browsers, Internet services, and more recently, desktop search. Another big battle is brewing for your desktop. This time, it is about content—specifically, office documents: word processing, presentation, and spreadsheet files. The titans this time are Microsoft and Google, with assistance primarily from Sun and OpenOffice, and with lots of lesser players also getting into the act. Office products account for a large portion of Microsoft’s profits, so I believe this will be a Battle Royale.
It seems like an eternity since the initial promises of XML, and many have faded from memory. Remember any? Pay the considerable cost of using XML to structure your documents, and they would pay you back by providing ways to convert, reuse, reassemble, or analyze them. Invest in structure now; get dividends soon. It’s been a long wait, but interacting with documents may be just around the corner.
I’m not humming a tune about Google, but that company rocks, and its engine is very popular. On the content side, Adobe can claim universal acceptance of Acrobat and its built-in search. Most large firms have made long-term commitments to a single enterprise CMS from the likes of Documentum or FileNet, or to a single database vendor like Oracle. Each such commitment is also an indirect commitment to that vendor’s search system.
From the start, Adobe fine-tuned Acrobat with releases every 18 months or so. Most releases offered stunning new features, often with a modified interface, and an increasingly heavier client footprint that took correspondingly larger amounts of storage and time to load. Some versions seemed perfunctory; others offered significant new capabilities. Acrobat 7 falls into the latter camp. After letting the new 7.0 release settle down with the inevitable service upgrade, what is really new about Acrobat 7.01? More important, given Adobe’s acquisition of Macromedia, is it time to fundamentally reconsider your use of Adobe and Acrobat?
Maybe it’s because I have always had more stuff on my PCs than most of my peers, and as such, I have trouble finding things, that I was a very early adopter of desktop search. I really loved a $99 product called QuickFind from a small company named Softscape. I found it so useful that I wrote a review of it in 1998. QuickFind indexed and found all major files you created on your PC. In those days, “networking” meant “dial-up,” and my home PC was essentially standalone. PC viruses were almost unheard of. You found worms only in your garden and Trojan horses were the stuff of Greek mythology.
I am one of many who rode the XML content roller coaster up: high hopes for the use of SMIL in multimedia; SVG for graphics; create-once and reuse many times for everything from office documents to highly-disciplined technical documentation. And down: Microsoft ignored SMIL and SVG; few office workers ever mastered using MS Word styles that could provide additional document structure. What hope was there for the discipline and promise of XML?
While the word may cause eyes to roll, organizations may find that taxonomy also causes blood to boil.
Among the chores people hate most is filling out forms—paper or electronic—and vendors have struggled to make usable eforms for years. Three recent attempts show promise.
You may have invested a great deal in site design and maintenance yet still have a silent majority of frustrated Web visitors. Help might help.
Several times this year I’ve read proclamations from journalists and consultants that 2004 will be “The Year of Search.” Didn’t search already arrive?
Without trying to convince you that monitoring every XML-related occurrence is good for you, I will explain why I monitor the W3C and other sites. Perhaps you’ll see how stewards of econtent might also find it useful and even develop a taste for it.
2003 has been the “year of content,” and 2004 promises even more excitement. By content I mean a “book-like collection of related information objects;” “book-like” because nearly all content carries some of the attributes of books.
For nearly 10 years, Adobe Acrobat’s Portable Document Format (PDF) has remained the undisputed standard for visually-faithful electronic renditions of print documents. With such momentum, what more could Adobe do? Not rest on its laurels.
If you work with STM publishing, sooner or later you’ll need to produce mathematical expressions, which seems simple until you try to bridge the gap between authors and production.
What happened in the past five years to divert XML from its original use, and how does this affect plans for your content today?
You know a concept has gone mainstream when you find that related products are frequently out of stock at your local discount warehouse. For me, that epiphany was prompted by—as unlikely as it may seem—paper shredders.
Let’s look at taxonomies, categorization, product creep, and XML as further differentiators in selecting a single search solution for knowledge management.
Knowledge Management is one of those terms that periodically goes in and out of favor. Whatever name you give it though, consistently capturing and reusing intellectual assets within an organization that values information-sharing is a critical
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