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Breaking News
Posted 09 Feb 2010
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Posted 29 Jan 2010
News Features
To try to address the range and scope of its clients' conversion projects, LuraTech on February 1 announced that it will launch DocYard, a software platform enabling clients to build their own production-level document conversion and capture environments out of a series of modules designed to integrate a range of in-house needs, from different formats and source materials to outside software and even human resources.
Government visionaries filled the The Walter E. Washington Convention Center for the first Open Government & Innovations (OGI) Conference, held July 21-22. Many came from agencies using social media tools and Web 2.0 technologies in new and exciting ways, but there were many more "enthusiasts" who weren't yet allowed to use those same technologies, hoping to hear change will come.
From recent college graduates to veteran employees, there are four generations in the work force today: Traditionalists, Baby Boomers, Gen X-ers, and Millenials. With each of these groups comes a different opinion on how to best get the job done. More often than not, these different views on productivity collide and affect more than just the process—they affect the results. As technology advances, it is difficult to reach all four groups effectively, but it is essential for productivity to reconcile generational differences and get every employee, regardless of his or her generation, on the same page.
The holidays came early to 125 high school students when Microsoft gave Zune players to students in exchange for research data, in hopes of expanding its products into schools across the country. Devices were given to 100 Fort Sumner High School students in New Mexico and 25 at South Valley Junior High in Liberty, Mo. The idea was for students to watch videos and listen to podcasts recommended by teachers and fellow students with the expectation of enhancing their educational experience.
WikiProteins, which went live in early spring, has adapted the ubiquitous Wikipedia model in an effort to aggregate biomedical information from a collection of databases and resources into a single portal.
Featured Stories
At one time, knowledge management (KM) purely encompassed the library-style research-and-documentation endeavor required to organize knowledge-primarily for companies that trade in knowledge, such as law firms and consultancies. Early in its life, KM was defined by Thomas A. Stewart in a Fortune magazine article entitled "Mapping Corporate Brainpower," as "Efforts to transmute the accumulated knowledge of individual employees into a corporate asset." Today, KM has grown well beyond these original boundaries, and its tenets are leveraged by organizations of all kinds to manage information and intellectual assets.
If you're thinking of writing the book on Enterprise 2.0, drop your plans right now. The man who first coined the term in 2006, Andrew McAfee, has already written it. What is expected to be the definitive work on the subject will be published in December by Harvard Business School Press.
Bigger, better, faster-for more than a century we have been driving toward greater efficiency by creating routine or automated processes that cut time, costs, or both. While this single-minded focus has spurred continual growth, it has also blinded society to where the true value lies. Moving forward, perfect processes will not be of paramount importance. Future progress and prosperity may well hinge on the ability of our organizations and institutions to connect the right people with the right ideas at the right time.
In today's challenging economic times, organizations are trying to do more with less. This effort is proving a strong selling point for the implementation of digital forms processing solutions. Through the design, creation, and management of digital forms, companies can improve efficiencies across all aspects of their organizations—both internally and externally.
Social networking sites and online collaboration tools make it easier for employees to collaborate and share their knowledge. Add email and instant messaging (IM) to the mix and the result is a knowledge-sharing system that can bolster communication and productivity throughout an enterprise.
Product Reviews
GroupSwim is a reasonably priced software-as-a-service-based social media collaboration tool. It has enough features to please enterprise users in organizations of any size. It's easy to set up and simple to use with many of the features one would expect, as well as some interesting advanced features. Yet, markedly, it lacks a blogging tool.
I appreciate one of NoteScribe's taglines: Save a Forest, NoteScribe It! because it advocates saving paper by taking and storing notes online. But I'd add another phrase: Save your Sanity, NoteScribe It! because this excellent program allows you to organize your notes by categories, keywords, and sources; add files from a variety of formats; and find your notes quickly and painlessly.
There's a lot to like about this online project management software. Wrike is reasonably priced and easy to use, but without offline capability and lacking in some basic functionality such as recurring tasks and the ability to add a time to a task, it still has room for improvement.
Clearspace is a collaboration platform built for the largest applications but is also suitable for small and medium-sized groups. While many collaboration platforms emphasize a specific functionality, Clearspace offers a variety of tools, including excellent support for blogs, wikis, documents, and discussions. A superior, customizable user interface makes Clearspace a very attractive and useable platform.
JabberNow provides an easy way—for both IT staff and end users—to include secure instant messaging in your organization’s arsenal of communication and collaboration tools. With impressive flexibility, Jabber packs potent presence-awareness and enhanced teamwork into the small form factor of its JabberNow appliance.
Columns
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 was recently blogging about a conference presentation I was preparing, and, being a conscientious info pro, I was planning on tagging my blog post (and, heck, my Twitter Tweets too). And suddenly, I realized I was channeling my grad school Cataloging 101 professor: Am I going to be doing descriptive tagging or subject tagging?
Imagine for a moment that your company has built a factory and filled it with machinery. Or perhaps your company has built a large, new office building with a sizeable parking lot and a good cafeteria. These additions represent considerable investment. Now, imagine that they have forgotten where they built the factory and where the office is located. Beyond imagination, you say. No company would be that incompetent.
Working in groups with free online tools has become an American passion. In his great 19th-century, two-volume work Democracy in America, Alexis deTocqueville estimated that there were more independent associations in America than there were individuals.
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.
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EContent BEST PRACTICES
Technology providers who not only recognize the necessity and difficulty of the local and global content marketplace, but are there to help: From analytics to location awareness, content management to translation management, translation services to language specific search solutions, there are a range of solutions that will enable organizations to adapt to the needs of the new consumer.
Appropriate and effective content management solutions not only enable ease of use, effective interactive communication, and dynamic marketing experiences, they deliver what all organizations seek: measurable return on investment.
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CONFERENCES |
| Buying & Selling eContent 2010 April 18 -20th 2010, Marriott's Camelback Inn in Scottsdale, AZ |
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| Buying & Selling eContent, the content industry's premier conference and networking event, returns to the Marriott's Camelback Inn in Scottsdale, AZ from April 18-20. Register now to hear and take part in discussions with leading content execs.
Every registrant who signs up before December 31 will receive a FREE iPod Touch*! |
| Search Engine Meeting, April 26-27, 2010 • Hyatt Regency Boston • Boston, MA |
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| Join your colleagues at the cutting edge of search!
Search Engine Meeting, now in its 15th year, brings together people interested in the domain of search and retrieval. It attracts those with a professional interest in search engines—such as search engine developers and designers—and those interested in applying search engines in their own work environments. |
| WebSearch University, April 26-27, 2010 • Hyatt Regency Boston • Boston, MA |
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| WebSearch University will be co-located with Search Engine Meeting in Boston this spring! Join your colleagues at this unique educational opportunity. Bring your search skills to the next level. WSU is where searchers learn the latest developments that affect their internet research activities. The curriculum is packed with information on search techniques, collaborative technologies, mobile search, personalization, alternative search engines, and current awareness tools. This year we’re adding sessions on rich resources for specific topics such as sci-tech, competitive intelligence, international, and legal. WSU will also have some new faces on its faculty. |
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