Content Curmudgeon - Critical ECM Commentary

Social Media in the Cloud

2011-08-27T18:33:00.000-04:00

Here are some random musings as I wait for IRENE amidst the clouds and rain… and realize how to use Word simply to create my post for blogspot and yet retain style control... but now on to the post itself.

Most people don’t need to care and couldn’t find out anyway where their Facebook page is in the cloud. They just click on the link facebook/myfacebookname and voila: It’s there, ready for me to read my wall messages, upload some more pictures, or divulge personal information.

If however, you’re contemplating creating a corporate social media system like Facebook (whether inside or outside the firewall), cloud-based storage is appealing. If employees flock to it and upload vacation videos, you may need more storage than you expected and you can scale up rapidly. There is far less need for creating a complex infrastructure if you lease the cloud-space.

Cloud-based social systems outside the firewall can provide a myriad of benefits: Keeping closer to constituents, gauging outsider sentiments of corporate performance, and as a great public relations tool – especially in the face of a disaster such as the BP Oil Spill.

There are some concerns to consider before embarking on such a social media project however. As with any cloud-based application, know your vendor and consider vendor continuity. Is the vendor financially secure? And even if secure, how do you get your application (and more importantly, all your data) should the vendor get acquired and the new owner decides to eliminate that service? How will your system be backed up, and –if you want to pick up your social marbles and go elsewhere—what format will you get your data in? Will you get both the content and the information about the content? Metadata can be as important as the content it describes.

If you share the cloud space, can you guarantee privacy (if needed) and maintain control over the application and data? Can you assure that you can put sections “on hold” if you receive a formal eDiscovery request for information? Suddenly that fun social media becomes “Electronically Stored Information,” and you will have to decide which constitute records you cannot destroy and maintain free of changes. Of course this assumes you considered the records retention aspect of that media to begin with.

It is hard to decide which is more challenging: Setting up the social media application in the cloud, or deciding governance policies to oversee the cloud content. I guess that’s why they call it cloudy.

Email Dysfunction – Information Overload

2011-07-24T09:48:00.003-04:00

Dysfunctional email

How long did it take for automobiles to standardize somewhat their controls, the way you drive them? Although it was long before my time, Charles Duryea built a three-wheeled automobile in 1893. This was not the first automobile (in 1803 Richard Trevithick of England built and ran a steam-powered carriage, called the Puffing Devil). Antique cars today are generally considered to be those 45 years old or older. Still, if you get into an antique auto you can easily figure out how to drive it. Email of one sort or another has been around nearly as long as the automobile, if you consider digital Morse Code telegraph messages. You could consider the first widespread use of email to be Unix mail in 1972. I remember using a similar Data General email system in the late 70s. You could argue that the adoption of email is far greater than the adoption of automobiles. So why is each version so different? Comcast email does not look or work the same way as Google Gmail by a long shot. Delete one message in a related group ("conversation") and you delete the whole group. Use the Microsoft Outlook client, and things are even more dissimilar. Download Gmail to Outlook and you get lots of surprises – "sent mail" appears in the Outlook inbox. Use the Gmail Outlook client and things are similar but differ in important details. Are these differences due to each vendor wanting to maintain a competitive advantage? Why this dysfunctionality?

And all that just deals with usability. There are other "oops" events. Email vendors losing email. Differing SPAM policies so you either don't get email or you find it –well after it is of any use. Come on guys and gals, take a hint from the automobile industry (or kitchen appliances or house paints or… any modern product you can think of). You don't need to read the owner's manual to drive away a rental car. After nearly 40 years, this communication medium should be easier and consistent to use, and far more dependable.

And then there's information overload

I get about 200 emails each day. Some are due to "subscriptions" I never initiated; some are spam; most are authentic and worth reviewing. Fearing I may want to use some press releases, I create a full-text searchable collection every six months of over 1,000. SharePoint in my day job has become – to use AIIM's expression—a digital landfill. Government Computer News in October of 2010 wrote an article "You want the data? You can't handle the data!" GCN quotes a joint Avanade-Accenture study of over 500 C-level executives. 62 percent said they are "frequently interrupted by incoming data." 56% feel overwhelmed. Yet in the same study, 61% said they want faster access to data. How about those 20,000 search results from every Google query (delivered in .1 seconds, no less)?

A work colleague bragged to me recently that she had over 850 LinkedIn connections. I asked her if she was joking, and she said "absolutely not." She was proud of this achievement, and I'm guessing soon she'll be bragging that she has hit the millennium mark. My RSS reader shows 50 or so articles I might be interested in.

I think we are all addicted to information, myself included. There is no way we can consume all this information, much less pick out every critical needle in the haystacks. Luddite solutions may be part of the answer. I recently disabled text messages from my cell phone. At a recent company meeting, we were asked to vote on an issue via our cell phones, and those of us who couldn't do that were asked –a joke—to walk the "hall of shame" to come up and use a paper ballot. It was surprising how many fellow-luddites made the walk.

As with any addiction, curing it or at least making it manageable is painful. Maybe one way to start is to "just say no" to some of these information channels. We can always say we didn't get the email.

Thoughts on Enterprise Search Summit 2011

2011-05-24T08:59:00.003-04:00

It has been a couple of weeks since ESS 2011 in NYC, and I've had a chance to collect my thoughts about the conference.
The conference, as usual, was a don't-miss opportunity for anyone interested in search systems, search projects, or practical ways to improve search satisfaction. There were more attendees than last year. I found a surprising dichotomy among the attendees and vendors. As to the attendees, they were either new to search or long-time search professionals. Vendors included only one big name (Google, who else?) and many smaller vendors from both the US (such as Basis Technology, H5, and Vivissimo) to vendors from Europe and Australia (Raytion –Germany—and SpringSense –Australia).
As to the themes, they were many. Some could have been from a conference 5 years ago. The enduring themes dealt with such topics as Search projects, and bringing failing search projects back on track (my own presentation) to newer themes of integrating search with social media and search on mobile devices. I was very surprised and pleased to see eDiscovery as a topic and to see at least two vendors offering eDiscovery products and services (H5 and Clearwell).
About 1/3 of the attendees at my presentation requested a copy of Guident's free "Findability Checklist," now expanded with attributed quotes anyone can use in their own search presentation. I've expanded that to include general ECM quotes too. If you want one too, send me an email.
Other observations:

Google was somewhat cocksure about its position in the commercial search market. This is the second year in a row when I found their presentation hard to understand, hard to hear (speakers need professional presentation training), and as much marketing as new material. Nice water bottles at their booth though ;-). I still believe their search appliance inside the firewall is up against competition, from vendors small and large.
Improving Search user satisfaction. These systems must be intuitive, and in this respect, Google sets the standard.
No Bing. No surprise.
Delivering search on mobile devices, although that is still a nascent theme inside the firewall.
Personalizing search also remains a holy grail.
Search systems still have plenty of differentiation, and there is plenty of room for vendors (such as SpringSearch) to add value to others' systems.

Best of show, IMHO, was RealStory's "Search Vendors in 30 minutes." The only disappointment (and a big one) is that they did not make their presentation available after the show.
All in all, a show worth attending.

Electronic Discovery Reference Model –Production and Presentation

2010-12-10T09:12:00.000-05:00

Well we now in the final phases. You’ve identified, preserved, and collected all information relevant to the triggering event. You’ve winnowed it down to a potpourri of email, Office files, rich media, and highly complex things like CAD files . Now you’re in the final stretch, getting that Electronically Stored Information (ESI) that both sides in the lawsuit agree is relevant and must be handed over. If you’re lucky, both sides have agreed to have a settlement conference where the matter can end there. If you’re not lucky, you proceed with the two final steps.

How do you complete these last two steps, Production and Presentation? What unexpected hazards should you watch out for so you can be confident that you’ve done everything legally required and can step aside, letting the prosecuting and defense lawyers take over from here?

Production

Here is where opposing attorneys “meet and confer,” agreeing (among other things) on the format that the relevant material will be produced for presentation, how to preserve or select metadata, and redaction rules. Production of ESI is not as simple as you might think, for two reasons – one that is just emerging, and one that is obvious. Let’s take the obvious one first: Format. And to keep things simpler than they are becoming, lets restrict this discussion to email, Office documents, and complex design files. You may not be so lucky to be able to exclude social and rich media. Rich media can be everything from recorded voicemail to video. Social media means everything from Text messages to blog entries, and often is produced collaboratively.

For simplicity’s sake, the EDRM standard presents four options:

Paper (gasp!)
Quasi-Paper
Quasi-Native and
Native.

Essentially these options range from the easiest to produce to the easiest to use. Printing to paper may seem both archaic and easy. Paper is fragile but stable and usually easy to produce. However, volume can be an issue (think time and money), and paper is not easy to search with anything but eyeballs. Still, paper is easy to understand and often a favorite. However, if the information is not in your country’s most common format –- 8 and 1/2 inches in the U.S.—you will have to decide whether to tile information (hard to use) or find and pay for services to print non-standard sizes like architectural drawings. And if your firm is international, you’ll have to deal with several dimensions of paper. And of course if Computer-Aided-Design or other multi-layer artifacts are in the mix, “printing” the CAD file just got immeasurably harder. Tiling or printing on large format paper can make it hard to correlate the layers. And always remember: If the files can have attachments or links to other files, those other things are also in the collection you must produce.

Quasi-paper refers to a high-fidelity digital format that looks like the paper original but can offer the advantage of speedy production and full-text (or simple string) searching. The two most common forms of quasi-paper are TIFF for images, and Adobe PDF. TIFF can be slightly higher fidelity than PDF but does not allow for text searching. And TIFF –even when compressed—can be very large. Yet once again, problems arise that are similar to those of paper.

Even more easy to produce, and possibly easier to use, is “Quasi-Native” digitization. Quasi-native formats are often exports from databases to flat files, ASCII, CSV or similar formats. They have the advantage of not requiring the opposing attorney to scrounge up the application to match your particular database or other complex information. Yet clearly the export formats, while searchable, do not capture much structure and can be quite hard to use.

Lastly, the easiest format to produce and use, with limitations, is native format. This simply means the format –whatever it is—that applications containing the information normally use to create, edit and store the files. This is the most useful format of all, and may require the opposing side to acquire applications (of certain versions) that they do not have. Additionally, native formats may be impossible to redact or to select and extract “pages” from the native files for the case.

What else could go wrong? After all, you’ve covered the formats and earlier you secured those files. The biggest issues could be where those files are located. If inside a content management system, access controls could slow down the process. If inside an email backup file, they could be very difficult to selectively find and manage. Those examples are inside your firewall. Suppose, like many firms you’ve begun storing your files or using applications in a public or multi-tenant web cloud. Who cares? It’s the same data, right? Yes, but where is the cloud, are there many clouds, and what agreements with the cloud service providers do you have for eDiscovery?

If your firm is located in only one country, the job gets easier but can still be difficult. Let’s take the example of your cloud service being only in the U.S. There are many privacy laws that could be barriers to complete production. These could affect both you and your cloud provider. Examples include the Health Insurance Portability and Protection Act (HIPPA), the Gramm-Leach-Biley Act (GLBA) also known as the Financial Services Modernization Act. And if your information is kept internationally (or if your cloud vendors are), each country has its own privacy law counterparts, most different from the others.

Presentation

Finally, there is presentation, where the rubber meets the road. The definition provided by EDRM.NET is “Displaying ESI before audiences (at depositions, hearings, trials, etc.), especially in native & near-native forms, to elicit further information, validate existing facts or positions, or persuade an audience.” EDRM.NET decomposes this final stage as a series of processes, from start to finish: “Develop Presentation Strategy / Plan, Select Exhibits / Format, Prepare and Test Exhibits, Present Exhibits, and finally Store / Maintain Exhibits.”
You can think of this as the lifecycle of a CSI show, running from the initial script and production planning through the actual courtroom drama. And since the presentation materials may be needed in an appeal, or at least must be treated as an official record, you must keep and maintain them in ways that meet recordkeeping and legal requirements.

No wonder some defendants simply throw in the towel and agree to pay at the very beginning.

In Summary

The final two steps in the EDRM model depend on the quality and quantity of ESI collected in the earlier steps. There are many dimensions of risk, some of which are legal, organizational, and IT subject matter experts. Responding to an eDiscovery mandate requires many disparate resources and skill sets. The proverbial proactive ounce of prevention applies here. Having an ongoing, documented, and understood information management process at the beginning is key. Part of that plan, an up-to-date file plan, is also required. Do these proactively and you’ve invested an ounce that can become worth a pound of after-the-fact cure.

Electronic Discovery Reference Model - Processing, Review and Analysis

2010-11-24T11:07:00.000-05:00

Next Phases: Processing, Review and Analysis

Well we’ve made it half way through the Electronic Discovery Reference Model and are now at the stack of blue processes: Processing, Review, and Analysis. The triggering event has occurred, and it is now time to execute your eDiscovery plan as cost effectively as is possible.

What distinguishes this point in the eDiscovery process is its cost. Even though you’re half way through the model and nearly at the point where you’ve culled the content down to the point of increasing relevancy, this is the ouch point. Luckily you’ve culled the collection somewhat, because this review is labor intensive, considering relevance, privilege, confidentiality, and then tagging what you’ve found. According to Attorney Ralph Losey at the recent EMC Writer’s summit, the cost to process and review each digital file averages $5. With 16,000 files on average per gigabyte, that’s $80,000. Suppose there are 10 custodians (those responsible for controlling and granting access to enterprise electronic files and protecting them) and each is responsible for 50,000 emails with attachments. That’s a half million pieces of electronically stored information (ESI). You can see how costs can mount up.

Yet the processing phase is where lots of problems can occur and the money meter is spinning. IT (custodian for enterprise information) and attorneys speak very different languages. Information –in the gigabytes—are all over the place. Moreover, general purpose ECM systems in general do not manage email well – and email could provide a modern-day paraphrase of Willie Sutton: “because that’s where the evidence is,” the treasure trove for litigation.

Not to harp too much on the Information Management part of the model, but it is critical to prepare for triggering events by having a litigation response plan or LRP. Without a well managed Information Management plan, you will have too much information to deal with. You do not want to produce information that is outside the discovery timeframe (more time to process and potential legal exposure). You also want a credible, effective way to comply with the request for information in the triggering event. If you have been proactive regarding eDiscovery events, you already have a litigation response plan or LRP. Among other things, this plan includes a data gathering strategy for ALL your Electronically Stored Information. In essence, the LRP includes creating a map of all your information systems. Among other things, this includes network drives, content management systems, PDAs, cell phones, personal computers, email, even instant messages and text messages. You also need an efficient backup strategy that is more than just backing up email PST files once a week to tape. And of course, document all your LRP work and keep it up to date, saving each version so you can refer to the scope of the plan for the timeframe relevant to the triggering event. If it isn’t documented, opposing counsel may rightly assert that it doesn’t exist.

I believe that, among other things, you need the right kind of tools to manage email. You also should have enterprise policies for using email that reduce legal exposure as part of an overall litigation response plan. You can’t overestimate the importance of that very first step, Information Management – getting control over all information, including email, to reduce effort and cost throughout the cycle. Ursula Talley of StoredIQ told me that eDiscovery is a systemic concern, and that “. . . proactive information management will reduce costs and time of eDiscovery” while providing better long-term results. Analysis requires the use of search systems, but this goes way beyond a Google Appliance. She suggests full-text indexing for relatively static content and “thindexing” (an index of metadata) applied to content such as email belonging to the custodians.
Even assuming you have somehow transformed your Digital Landfill (unmanaged and unmapped content of all kinds) into a digital Greenfield (managed and mapped), you must still be sure that any underlying eDiscovery tools you have to work through all your content is scalable. Andrew Cohen, EMC’s VP for Compliance Solutions, said to me that the critical functions for your eDiscovery technical solution include: The ability to scale across 100’s of Terabytes of content within your enterprise; the ability to apply that tool to all content repositories (even laptops and desktops), and a consistent set of policies managed by Legal and IT.

How much does an eDiscovery system cost? Assuming you’re merely adding to your technology stack from a single ECM vendor, the costs go way beyond product costs. Again, Cohen said that the cost breakdown over an eDiscovery implementation is roughly as follows: product cost (35% of the total), implementation costs (10%), planning/policy making (50%), and annual maintenance 5%.

In Summary

Efficient, credible processing, reviewing and analyzing your electronically stored information requires a litigation response plan, developed collaboratively with your legal, records management, and IT organizations. The more conscientious you have been in the earlier stages, the less costly will these phases be and the more likely you will survive the eDiscovery challenge. It is expensive and time-consuming to clean up your digital landfill and step-by-step get it under control as a virtual Greenfield, those costs pale compared to the costs of ad hoc reaction to eDiscovery events.

Electronic Discovery Reference Model – Identification through Preservation and Collection

2010-10-17T18:07:00.005-04:00

Information Management – Essential Beginning for Identification, Preservation and Collection

In my earlier post, I provided an overview of the eDiscovery process and emphasized the critical nature of the very first step: Information Management. Information management can leverage the value of IT processes and increase stakeholder satisfaction. Information management is also key to an effective records management program, which itself is fundamental to an effective eDiscovery program.

Information management is one of those concepts that every organization salutes, but the devil is always in the details. Do you have guidelines or governance for using email, including commonly overlooked items such as “Send links to content in your repository; do not send the content itself”? Do you have guidelines for using your information repository –hopefully a formal document management system—to assure that there is always one version of the truth, one single document or file that always represents the most current version of that file, and is easily found by all those with rights to view or modify it?

Most organizations do not manage content to that level, but are happy to be able to guarantee that they have a rational backup and restore strategy, assuring a credible, dependable strategy to routinely save and restore network, repository, and email files. However, complete information management goes way beyond that, including managing policies for information sharing and discovery.

Many organizations have a duty to share information, such as federal agencies responding to the Freedom of Information Act. However, the difference between disclosure and discovery is that there is no underlying dispute (or threat of one) with disclosure. Both disclosure and discovery require effective information management policies, procedures and processes. And remember, a so-called “triggering event” requiring eDiscovery processes to be activated include not only a judicial order, a formal discovery request, but even knowledge of a pending or future legal proceeding likely to require information to be produced.

Let’s take a look again the EDRM Reference Model, with both it and the IMRM model repeated below courtesy of EDRM (edrm.net). I discussed Information Management in my previous posting, but it is still central to the next three steps in the EDRM model.

Notice the two sloping lines, “Volume” (yellow) that decreases as “Relevance” (green) increases through the model, left to right. Volume is greatest at the start of the model, while Relevance is greatest towards the end. When you get to the processing-review-analysis phase, you want as all relevant documents, but as few others, as possible, to reduce the costs of work in this step.

At EMC’s recent “Writer’s Circle” symposium in New York City, attorney Ralph Losey asserted that it costs from $3 to $10 just to review files as part of an eDiscovery effort, and that it can cost $500,000 to review relevant files, including emails. And that’s at the point in the EDRM model where volume is decreasing and relevance is increasing (i.e., you’ve already culled lots of the volume). Losey and his colleague have created an incredible You Tube video about the problem of information overload in general and eDiscovery efforts in particular spiraling out of control. You owe it to yourself to view this 7 minute video. You’d never guess (until you get to the end) that a lawyer crafted this gem. More about Review in an upcoming blog posting, but Losey’s insight makes it clear how important the early steps in eDiscovery are to the whole process.

It’s easy to see why an information management program to reduce redundant files benefits not only your backup and archive processes, your records management program, the legal and compliance departments, and other members of the enterprise business community. And of course it also facilitates action when your organization receives that inevitable triggering event to supply relevant information.

EDRM and the Information Management Reference Model (IMRM)

EDRM.net shows Information Management as the first process in its separate EDRM model, when the volume of information is at its greatest. However, EDRM (edrm.net) also refers to the IMRM Model for the next 3 steps in its EDRM Model: Identification, Preservation, and Collection.

“Information Management” seems like a no-brainer, yet its meaning depends on who is using the term. This prompted the EDRM group to sponsor a project to fill out the details in the IMRM model. In fact, much of the EDRM model simply refers to IMRM, for details concerning the first four steps in the EDRM model: Information Management, Identification, Preservation, and Collection.

Identification, Preservation, and Collection

The duty to preserve information, and thus first to Identify it, begins when there is a triggering event. This can be a judicial order, discovery request, or merely knowing that a pending future legal request is likely (think BP Oil Spill).

According to one vendor I spoke with, Craig Carpenter, VP and General Counsel of Recommind, the most important stages for reducing cost and risk are Preservation, Collection, and Review. “Increasingly, however, enterprises are realizing that the more they do to effectively manage information, the easier and cheaper eDiscovery is to handle further down the process.”

The scope of the data to be preserved or disclosed depends on the subject matter of the dispute and other legal issues. If data is at all likely to be relevant to the dispute, it is discoverable.

After you’ve identified the likely data (its location, those responsible for it), your organization has a duty to preserve it from change. You may not even be sure you have it all identified, and so you must identify a team to anticipate change and have procedures in place to capture any new information that may be deemed relevant.

You can’t preserve the information if you aren’t sure where it is. Thus a critical part of your litigation plan is accurate and current knowledge of the company’s information repositories, including network drives, content repositories, and –of course—email, both current and archived. And don’t forget rich media – even voice mail can be subject to the duty to preserve.

Having identified the data in all its forms and locations and preserved it, you must then collect it. This means having (or developing) a data collection strategy, preparing the collection plan which includes the methods you’ll use to collect it, and then executing that plan.

Notice that to make all these steps work, the IMRM shows governance surrounding the entire organization. The model shows a unified governance plan, highlighted with benefits to each (and not just for eDiscovery): Legal (reducing risk), Records Information Management or RIM (reducing risk), IT (achieving better efficiency), and other Business areas increasing profit for the enterprise.

But what is governance, just another fancy way of saying “managing your information”?
EMC Corporation, one of the 80+ participants in the EDRM effort, created and sponsors the Council for Information Advantage, with C-level members from large organizations. Click here for more information about this initiative. These members – in EMC’s words are —“an advisory group made up of global information leaders from ‘information-advantaged’ enterprises. In its first report, released in 2009, the group defines governance as “an enterprise-wide information … policy to control how information is kept, shared, and used.” Governance assures transparency in business processes, allowing everyone to work together, as information flows through the lifecycle –paused by legal holds—from its creation through its eventual disposition. Note that the process includes an appreciation for the asset-value of secured information, key to sharing and reuse.

When you apply the IMRM model to your enterprise, as a continuously improving business process, your organization positions itself to get midway through the eDiscovery model, starting with Information Management and extending through Preservation and Collection. With the right planning, you’ll be able to identify key documents, preserve and collect them in response to an eDiscovery trigger. Managing information will also promote both more effective response to litigation events but also better day-in/day-out use of corporate information assets.

In Summary

In summary, managing enterprise information throughout the information lifecycle has benefits going way beyond responding to eDiscovery events, although it is critical for eDiscovery. Every organizational group benefits from good governance and good information management: IT (which has to back up and archive fewer files), Legal, Records Management and everyone trying to find and use information wherever it resides. While eDiscovery is the stick, gaining an information advantage over corporate knowledge assets can be the carrot.

Using MS Word to Create Blogger Posts

2010-09-28T21:07:00.004-04:00

Using Microsoft Word and Google Docs to Create Blogs and Post

Them to Blogger

I have been having a deuce of a time trying to use MS Word as the word processor for blog posts to Blogger. Google no longer supports the Word blogger add-in, and Word reports simply that it can’t publish the blog (if you started in Word to create a document of type blog). This started happening just this week for me, although research tells me it has been going on for some time for others.

I am posting this so if you want to use MS Word to create posts for Blogger, you can see how to do it. Too bad Google doesn’t have the grace to post this for all of us earlier.

Start with an MS Word .docx File

This title is actually a Heading 2 style (the start of the blog uses a Heading 1 style).
This document originated in MS Word, was saved-as an MS Word .docx document with graphic picture placed where you see it now. That’s me, several years ago, with my Superman suit. Quite a few years ago, actually. You could just as easily have used a “.doc” file instead of an Office 2007 version of Word.

I then uploaded it to Google Docs, selected all (by highlighting the whole thing), then CTRL-C copied it (copy doesn’t work; it simply creates a link), and pasted it into a new Blogger blog (the one you are now reading). Bottom Line: You can use MS Word in .doc mode to create blogs, then post them to Blogspot via Google Docs.

Table Test

I was curious if an MS Word table would survive the process. As you can see, it did.
Here is a test table, 2 columns x 3 rows, with the first row a heading and shaded:

Heading 1	Heading 2
Row 1 column 1	Row 1 column 2
Row 2, column 1	Row 2, column 2

The shading didn't show up really well, but you can see a difference.

Graphics Test Too

Here’s a picture test to see whether it would survive the trip to Google Docs, and then a copy/paste to Blog. You can see that it did. This is much better than the old “paste a picture to the top of the blog, then try your darndest to move it where you really want it to be placed.”

Bottom Line

This process works, not perfectly but it works, although I don’t know what happens if I delete the Google Docs version of this document and the accompanying in-line picture. For now, I’ll leave well enough alone.

If you are as frustrated with Blogger as I am when it comes to creating blog posts with Word, I hope this helps. For now, I'll leave well enough alone.

October 22 2010 update:
This funky procedure that worked a month ago now fails. I've posted many questions to Blogger support about how to use Word as an editor for Blogger blog posts, but have heard nothing.

Beginning of iPad Buyer's Remorse

2010-09-25T18:25:00.003-04:00

Well, it's been several months now since I bought my iPad and in many ways I love the device. 15 seconds for a cold boot; very easy to get to my email and to the web. However, some things are not
quite as smooth as I'd hoped.

First, email. I have 2 personal email accounts, one via Comcast and one Gmail. I create folders in both to store email I want available online, but I can see folders on only one (Gmail). So I've forwarded all Comcast email to Gmail; so far that seems to take care of the folder issue. Moreover, although I really
hate the 'conversation' feature in Gmail (delete parts of a conversation and you may lose what's in your inbox), but it appears to work with my iPad better by far than did Comcast.

I love eBooks, and the promise of being able to view and view and manage digital content on a single
device no matter what the content's format or where it came from. There, as I said in my previous post, the iPad has a long way to go. Not only does iBook do a poor job of presenting PowerPoint files, an
(unfortunate) staple in the business world, but the other reader app I bought, GoodReader, is better
but not much better with PowerPoint in that regard. Still a bargain, but getting its WiFi drag-and-drop feature (from PC to iPad) is problematic. Then there is the Kindle app, a nice free way to download Amazon eBooks with the ability to comment on them, synchronize them with my PC, etc. Except you shouldn't try to
read Kindle books on the iPad in natural light; the shiny touch-sensitive screen produces so much glare that you simply can't use it to read eBooks(or use it in general). And when all is said and done, I have 3 places to store eBooks of various types, instead of one; three interfaces to learn; and three different sets of functions to learn how to use. This isn't "Usability 101."

But photos, there's a kind a rich media that Apple has mastered, right' Well yes, after you get them on the iPad, but getting them there is quite a trick. Using iTunes (a weird application for general purpose transfer of files) is one way, but why not buy the Apple Camera Connection kit, then just transfer files
to your iPad directly via USB cable or maybe memory card? What could be simpler? Nothing is simple I've found, and unfortunately the kit doesn't work. I have 3 digital cameras. I stopped trying after the second one.
My first camera, a Polaroid digital with USB port, could connect to the iPad. I got two device errors
after connecting twice: 'This device uses too much power' (hey, it has 4 AAA batteries; try them!) and 'Device not supported.' The memory card fit one of the two connectors in the kit, and I could easily transfer pix from the card. However, camera #2 is my Sony camcorder, with a memory stick for stills and low-resolution video. The memory stick doesn't fit the Apple connector, so l tried using the USB cable; that works flawlessly with Windows. Nada. No error message from the iPad, no message (and no photo transfer) at all. So one card fit one connector; neither USB cable worked with the two cameras.

Apple deserves credit for vetting applications before it allows them to be sold, but Apple clearly has a long way to go with standards (like USB) and quasi-standards (like FLASH). The iPad remains an engaging device, but not as simple or as functional as I'd hoped.

eDiscovery - Your Next Crisis?

2010-07-24T09:58:00.006-04:00

Litigation has a long tradition in the US. Now, as firms and enterprises increasingly shift from paper to digital knowledge assets, that litigation trend is also moving into the digital arena. Ediscovery is a broad term applying to one of a series of responses to a "triggering event." That event starts begins an obligation to preserve and disclose data that may be due to a judicial order, or even the mere knowledge of a future legal proceeding that is likely to require preserving and finding relevant information stored in your electronic documents. In the Ediscovery world, these assets are now called Electronically Stored Information or ESI. Ediscovery is a relatively new concept. You could be excused if you are not familiar with the term. In the US, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure or "FRCP" issued rule 26, and related rules, in December 2007. This update to the FRCP made all ESI "discoverable" just as non-electronic information, usually paper, is discoverable. ESI, eDiscovery, FRCP… these and related acronyms are enough to make your head swim. But keep your head above water and pay attention, because if you are not ready for eDiscovery, you could be in for some serious pain, both to your organization's bottom line and to its reputation.
In my view, eDiscovery is built on a series of tools and best practices that should be present in every enterprise and that everyone should proactively follow. Sadly, few actually are prepared, because these tools and practices are often seen as optional, a distraction from the main business activities. The tools I refer to are Enterprise Content Management (ECM), Records Management (RM) and Search. The best practices relate to the processes and procedures you follow to oversee all your ESI, records and non-records.
So how do you get started? Meet EDRM, the Electronic Discovery Reference Model, and its sibling, IMRM, the Information Management Reference Model. I told you this wouldn't be simple.

Reference Models

The EDRM group, responsible for both these reference models, is a consortium of vendors and other interested parties wanting to develop comprehensive guidelines, standards, and tools to reduce the incidence of eDiscovery nightmares, or provide ways to cope when they occur. The Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) provides guidelines, sets standards, and delivers resources to help those who purchase eDiscovery solutions and vendors who provide them, improving the quality of the tools and reducing the costs associated with eDiscovery. IMRM, related to one part of EDRM, complements that model.

IMRM

IMRM, shown below and courtesy of EDRM.NET, aims to "provide a common, practical, flexible framework to help organizations develop and implement effective and actionable information management programs. The IMRM Project, also part of the EDRM industry working group, aims to offer guidance to Legal, IT, Records Management, line-of-business leaders and other business stakeholders within organizations." This project within the EDRM group suggests ways to facilitate a common way among these different groups to discuss and make decisions on the organization's information needs.

Although this diagram has the ring of endless numbers of PowerPoint slides you've seen on a variety of topics, it re-iterates some basic, commonsensical ideas that all should adopt but most ignore. I won't go into details about this, but the general themes are obvious. These various different business units, often at odds and seldom understanding each other's language and values, must work together to manage ESI, whether records or not. The result could be that eDiscovery nightmare. Some key takeaways: Decide and oversee the ways your organization creates and saves information. Throw away what isn't needed, keep what you must – all within the corporate requirements for both records and other ESI. IT will benefit (less to back up, archive, and index for search); Legal will be happy you are reducing risk; Records Management will appreciate getting all the help with ESI it can get; and business profits will be shielded somewhat from the risks of bad information management practices.

EDRM

Now what of the EDRM model itself? Again, this is not an easy concept but still critical to prepare for that inevitable crisis. To understand this model, courtesy EDRM (edrm.net), read left to right and notice how the process sifts through huge volumes of ESI and aims to focus on the important, most relevant pieces. EDRM has eight ongoing projects to fill out the details of their goals to "establish guidelines, set standards, and delivering resources."

IMRM is related to the left-most process, "Information Management," but don't view it as a picture of Information Management itself. Instead, think of IMRM as a way of promoting cross-organizational dialog– always important, critical if that eDiscovery request comes a knocking.

So those two models give you the grand overview. In upcoming posts I'll look at some of the elements of these models in greater detail. I also spoke to several leading eDiscovery vendors recently. I'll also tell you their views and my impressions about . In my next few posts, I'll tell you their views and my impressions about vendor involvement with EDRM in general. Sure, each vendor has an element of self-interest. That's understood. Are these guys just out to make a buck on the "next big thing," or are they up to something truly useful , for eDiscovery and maybe more in this collaborative effort?

In my next post I'll look at the first element of the EDRM model, Information Management. You'll see what vendors had to say, and I'll give you my assessment about whether their participation in this is just vendor smoke or indeed a way for you to get started preparing for that next crisis.

Exploring the iPad: First Impressions

2010-06-01T22:14:00.002-04:00

Well, like 2 million other folks, I bought an iPad (WIFI, 32 gigs of memory). Like others, I couldn't resist the allure of this seductive device, and I'm suffering from Windows weariness:

Bloat

Security issues

Complexity

Slow performance

Reliability issues

Battery life between charges

Lack of openness to standards

Etc…

Why did I buy the iPad? Primarily as an e-book reader but also as a quicker, lighter web access tool. What do I think of the iPad as an e-Book reader? Marginal, but more about that assessment later. First a few words about my first impressions.

The iPad is seductively beautiful and I don't find the 1.5 pounds to be excessive; it is about the weight of a hardback novel. Getting used to it, if you are not a Mac-head or don't own an iPhone though, is difficult. Using Safari and the iPad is a little like joining a club where you haven't been told the secret handshakes. HELP isn't built-in, although there is an iPad help site automatically listed in your web favorites. After a while I learned to use two fingers to pinch or spread the screen; tapping twice in the middle of the screen enlarges and centers the page (unless you tap on a link that happens to be there). How you do a simple string-search "find" –CTRL F in most other browsers—I still haven't figured out and am beginning to guess that features is just missing.

I'm also realizing that I've traded one vendor's nose-thumbing to standards (or de facto standards) –Microsoft—for another vendor acting the same way: Apple. You'd be surprised, for example, how many sites you cannot use since Apple refuses to support Flash. Forget Hulu and most news video clips from major news sites. They almost all use Flash since it is ubiquitous and has a light footprint.

If you have a Windows PC (I have several), how do you get files from it to the iPad for viewing? First, I was amazed how little the Apple folks (both in the local Bethesda Apple store and the online Apple geniuses) know about --or maybe even have thought about—working with Windows machines. The store rep told me I could use iTunes and essentially drag and drop my files, or just email them to myself. Or I could subscribe for the fee-based MobilMe service to store these files (no thanks). Email all 500 files? No thanks to that either. Drag and drop? Sorry, I misunderstood. It turns out that you can drag-and-drop –as always, there's an app for that. The surprise was that it was built into an inexpensive app I already purchased to supplement the iPad's mediocre eReading abilities: GoodReader.

The notion of using iTunes to get files over to the iPad is itself revealing. I'd never used iTunes before, but its name rightly suggests music, tunes. So you can get your downloaded MP3s etc. to the iPad, and it will also transfer photos. But how about transferring a PDF file, or a folder of PDF files? No, but there's an app for that. Matter of fact there are many apps for that, some with 1 star ratings, some with 4 star ratings. Buy one and try it out. If that doesn't work, buy another and try that one out (I have no idea how you uninstall apps, but presumably I'll learn the secret handshake for that after I've bought several redundant apps.

And remember: I bought the iPad as an e-book reader, a reader for all my Microsoft office, Open Office, e-Pub, and PDF files. I also plan to compare it as an e-Reader to Plastic Logic's Que Pro. How well does the iPad work natively as an e-book reader? What about the app I picked? Details about that later, as I begin learning more. Full details in an upcoming review comparing both products. Assuming I get my hands on a Que, which appears again to be behind schedule.

NOTE: Unfortunate Plastic Logic QUE ProReader update. As of late June, and announced on Que's LinkedIn group, Que has stopped shipping the ProReader due to changing market realities. I pointed out a couple of those in my interview with their Marketing staff: Lack of color (not a complete Que-killer IMHO), and lack of support for any browser (a REAL Que-killer). The lack of browser means you must purchase subscriptions for online products such as the WSJ even if you already have a subscription. And if you have subscriptions to some niche publication for which they don't offer a Que version, you're out of luck.

I wish Que luck, and I'm told I'll get an eval hardware copy when it is ready, but the rumor on the street is that this could be several years in the offing. As I said in my recent column, "the clock is ticking" and –in this case—time is not Que's friend.

But back to the iPad.

Here are a couple sneak preview pictures. First, here is a screenshot of one slide from a recent presentation I gave.

And here is how it look rendered on my iPad (with both the native iPad viewer and with the $1 app). Picture isn't great but it was an early Sunday morning shot in natural light with my Canon EOS. (Figuring out how to do iPad screenshots isn't easy; I found out by Googling. Once you know the multiple secret handshakes, it is easy.

What's wrong with that picture? Quite a few things as you can see.

I'll try to ratchet down my curmudgeon index a bit before my next iPad post.

I Hate Comcast

2010-06-01T21:24:00.003-04:00

Oh, did I mention I hate Comcast?
Unfortunately I must have broadband even if I'd gladly give up their cable "services." Rich media is also content, and it is really unfortunate to be at the mercy of this cable company for accessing that content without constraint, including adding our own (subscription-free) devices to use it.

I spent 4 separate days waiting for them to fix the problem they caused with their little "digital to analog" gadget.

Do you hate Comcast too?

Believe it or not, there is a Facebook page devoted to (and named) just that: I hate Comcast. If you'd like to read the details of my rant and those of others, click here.

About all any of us can do is to press our elected senators and congresspeople to vote FOR Web Neutrality. Reduce cable strangleholds as much as we can. I'd do the same, but unfortunately --living in DC-- I have no senator or representative.

More Great “8” posts from AIIM

2010-05-06T08:40:00.006-04:00

AIIM's Mancini has done it again. Here are some great "8" thing posts for anyone who thought that Social Computing and Enterprise Content Management don't mix.

Each bullet is clickable.

8 Things You Need to Know About Social Computing and Content Management

8 Ways to Garner Adoption for Social Computing in Your Company

8 Ways Your Organization Can Collaborate and Stay Safe

8 Essentials to Consider for Social Computing and Collaboration in Business

8 Reasons Why You and Your Organization Should (NOT!) Be Afraid of Social Computing

8 Ways to Make Sure that Collaboration Adds Business Value

8 Ways to use SharePoint for Social Computing

8 Ways To Benchmark Your Collaboration Strategy

8 Things You Need to Know About Twitter and Business

8 steps to getting started with Twitter

8 Things You Can Do with an Enterprise Wiki

8 things we learned along the way to Twitterville

8 reasons Google Wave may (or may not!) kill e-mail

E-Books, E-Readers, and Peak Oil

2010-04-11T09:35:00.002-04:00

Huh? Isn't this kind of like mixing oil and water? Not really.

For related reasons, having to do in part with resource constraints, the cost of print subscriptions continue to rise, even sometimes becoming prohibitive. After 40 years as a continuous WSJ print subscriber, I canceled my print subscription. It cost nearly $400/year, and I already have an online subscription that costs around $100. The WSJ is great, but not $400/year great, especially in this economy, when I also have the online edition. So I cut the cord and went completely on-line. With online access I can of course search, save articles, print them to PDF, the way I used to clip print articles. My paper press archive goes back 30 years, but PDF lasts forever, right? Another advantage of online news: the news is always fresh. Besides I'm helping save the environment, or at least I hope so. I reduce the number of plastic bags (that you can't recycle); I eliminate the need to recycle the paper itself. There is even a potential business advantage to the right e-Reader: It can preserve into the indefinite future the opportunity to view important documents. What could be nicer?

Well, there are advantages to print. Print never crashes. You can read print even when broadband is down or out of reach. You can fall asleep in a chair, drop the newspaper, and not have to buy a new one. Can't do that with a laptop. Print is very easy to read, indoors or out in bright sunlight. And print graphically rich, uses color, and is still more familiar and comfortable. Spouse says "I miss the WSJ print edition." Oh Oh.

I tell her to wait, I'll find an e-Reader that is nearly as good or even better than print. It will meet my kind of Turing test for print: doesn't crash, very portable etc. but also preserves the benefits of online: Searching, always current. iPad is here; Plastic Logic's Que reader is coming. We'll find something (but haven't bought anything yet). Now the limitations begin to appear, both from others' reviews and my own discussions with vendors.

iPad is ever so cool, has Apple's trademark usability, color… what could be better? For one thing, it tries to be everything a netbook can be, way more than just an e-Reader. I don't care if it can run my iPhone apps because I don't have an iPhone. In fact, I don't want to be nickled and dimed (more like dollared) to buy lots of little apps to fill in iPad's gaps (like being able to print or use a USB). And iPad doesn't run Flash, which is commonly used on many web sites, including the online WSJ. This feels a little like the "microsofting" of Apple. You can run anything, but not without add-ons that may not play well together. So I can buy another iPad-custom WSJ subscription, right? And do I do that for every subscription? Oh well, at least iPad has a (downsized) browser, so I can get to the WSJ in some fashion if I decide to spring for an iPad. But what about the other constraints? Early reviews say that that beautiful 1 and one half pound product begins to feel very heavy after a while, even can make your wrists hurt. And what kind of netbook wannabe is only single-threaded?

So I've now talked with a marketing rep from Plastic Logic about Que, and expect to get an evaluation device as soon as they become available. Yes, I know it will not display color (hey, the WSJ didn't start using color until it became common in other print editions). And it is very light and also cool in its own way – even has a screen that is more book-like, roughly 8 ½ y 11 inches. It reads virtually every document format known to humankind, and has huge amounts of space for all my books. But wait: It doesn't do flash either, and apparently has no browser, not even a limited one.

Maybe I misunderstood. And maybe when I finally get my hands on Que, I'll discover other advantages that cancel out the negatives.

Or quite possibly there is no perfect e-Reader. I'm guessing that's the case, since this is the real world. And if that's the case, I have to figure out exactly what a document is, and what attributes are optional (like Flash). That is no easy decision, since it requires peering into the future and guessing exactly what I'll be willing to do without.

And that's where the similarity with Peak Oil comes in. Liquid fossil fuels provide 95% or so of the world's transportation fuel needs. Yet liquid fuels will eventually run out, and before they do, they will become erratically less available and more expensive. So we'll also have to figure out which transportation options are critical, which optional. I'm guessing SUVs are optional, and public transit is critical.

And this may even have some bearing on e-Readers: they depend on electricity and broadband. Those are critical resources too, right?

What's your guess, about which transportation choices are critical and which are optional?

What's your guess about what constitutes the essence of a document, so it can be preserved and read generations hence?

Justifying eDiscovery Systems

2010-01-18T20:18:00.002-05:00

As I said in my Information Insider October 2009 column, "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." Given the nation's increasing litigiousness, and the exploding amount of electronic information everywhere that could be subject to subject to 2006 FRCP rule 26, I am surprised how little we've heard about such litigation. Is it simply that our attention is elsewhere (whether the US Health Care debate, 2 wars, Global Warming –or is it Global Cooling?, the earthquake in Haiti…)? Or is eDiscovery yet another ticking time bomb that will burst onto the news when we least expect it? Well the vendors supplying eDiscovery solutions have plenty to say about that.

And what is special about eDiscovery? Why not just buy the very best search system available, and use it to do all the "e-lectronic" discovery that you want? After all, isn't it all about "search"? I spoke with Ursula Talley, VP Marketing of Stored IQ, to gather expert opinions on this subject. Here are excerpts from her comments about this, which I find pretty illuminating.

First, "Enterprise Search and eDiscovery Search technology do share a set of core capabilities, specifically crawling, indexing and searching data across a multitude of various applications and storage systems. Enterprise Search is designed to assist knowledge workers with information access and retrieval. The end result is that a user can find some files with information that can help that user complete a task." So what's the difference? Ursula went on to say "eDiscovery Search is designed to support a workflow that can be legally defended in court. The end result is a set of data files that is preserved (saved to a new, target location without any changes to the metadata and recording every system and location for each data file was originally located)." This kind of quarantining of content goes over and above what you can do with any enterprise search system. Moreover, she says that search performed by eDiscovery systems must also be very robust. Such eDiscovery searching can require queries with between 25 – 300 search terms. Moreover (for those of you who have ever posed a complex query on an enterprise search system, then went to have a cup of coffee while you waited for the result to return) eDiscovery search must be able to copy large volumes of content that has been found, "if necessary hundreds to thousands of gigabytes, without disrupting user productivity."

While it's at it, robust eDiscovery systems such as those from StoredIQ can provide de-duplication of email and user files (saving space and attorney time pouring over the same redundant files), while keeping a record of every location where those items originally resided – in case the judge asks. Lastly, searching just email systems can be a real pain, since they are so big and are threaded. Even the best search often is like sorting through low-grade ore, tons of it. eDiscovery systems also can extract both metadata and content from email and export this into a database format that can be queried and re-used into legal document review applications.

So how do you go about justifying the purchase of an eDiscovery system? Not by claiming you can add features to an existing or new Enterprise Search system. Instead, focus on the other features that you'll need if a lawsuit comes a calling. Unfortunately, getting your eDiscovery house in order may be like getting your electronic records management house in order – really hard to justify until after the lawsuit. Still, at least you can avoid the trap of thinking that Enterprise Search can do all you need to find and quarantine your information for a credible eDiscovery defense.

And Now For Something Completely Different

2009-10-06T17:54:00.015-04:00

... actually 8 things. What is different is that I normally use this blog for details that I couldn’t squeeze into my eContent Magazine column, Info Insider. The eight things I’m referring to are in AIIM’s recent (free) e-book describing the eight reasons you need a strategy for managing information.

John Mancini has a knack for writing simply, and this e-book (free for the downloading here) is well done. Although it is 95 pages long, don’t be put off by that; the pages are small ;-). Not only that, but the content, distilled from various “8 things” blogs, provides truly useful perspectives on Information Management. Here’s one gem from the section “Tidal Wave of Information.”

“A study by IDC a few years back concluded that there are currently 281 billion exabytes of information in the Digital Universe. So how much is this? Well…an exabyte is a million million megabytes. Thanks a lot. To put it in a bit of perspective, a small novel contains about a megabyte of information. So in other words, the Digital Universe is equal to 12 stacks of novels (fewer if the chosen novel is a big fat one like Harry Potter 6 or one of those Ken Follett Pillars of the Earth deals) stretching from the earth to the sun. So it's a big number, whatever it is.”

Go ahead, download a copy and enjoy the read.

It's TAXonomy Time

2009-05-05T21:05:00.006-04:00

TAXonomy Time – Why the interest in Taxonomies?

I'm hearing the word “taxonomy” more and more often in ECM projects, often uttered by business people in the same sentence as “metadata.” Can it be that business people are becoming comfortable with these terms? If you know you've got a serious information overload problem, where do you start with taxonomies to tame and organize your content? Everybody starts with Excel for metadata and Visio or similar graphical tools to sketch out taxonomies. Those tools are available, sometimes free, and well understood. But they are fundamentally static. Do you need more? What are some best practice and alternatives?

As part of my latest column “It's TAXonomy Time” in EContent Magazine, I spoke with Carol Hert, PhD., Chief Taxonomist and Consultant for Schemalogic Inc. to get her take on trends in taxonomy projects. Here are my questions and Hert's responses.

1) What is the state of client awareness of the value and urgency of developing taxonomies? What is the trend – use the Gartner “hype cycle” stages if you’d like. Do you see increasing interest in taxonomies, and –if so—why? Is the “information explosion” itself motivating this interest?

We typically work with large corporations that have already developed and deployed multiple taxonomies across their organizations. These companies are well aware of the cost and limitations of trying to manage these taxonomies in a dynamic environment that includes many consuming systems. Some of the organizations we work with are focused on taxonomy harmonization-integrating single-use taxonomies into one or several related taxonomies that can be utilized enterprise-wide.

We continue to see increased interest in taxonomies with the further proliferation of SharePoint and other collaboration systems, the need to increase the efficiency of the information worker, and the continued interest in enterprise information findability. Also the need to meet compliance requirements for large amounts of unstructured information continues to increase the need to govern and manage information more effectively.

2) What are typical approaches to taxonomy development:

a. Use an existing taxonomy only

b. Build on existing taxonomies

c. Enterprise versus single-application (tactical) approach

d. Use tools not available from current application vendors (e.g., EMC Documentum) for possible use with multiple vendors, or vendor-specific tools?

Our customers usually have multiple taxonomies deployed across their organizations. They have issues with managing and coordinating multiple taxonomies, especially in a dynamic environment. The first thing we do is to collect these multiple taxonomies and model them in our metadata management platform. We can then work with the customer to connect and optimize these taxonomies and then extend them as well. Some of our customers approach this from an enterprise wide perspective, while others choose to focus on a single department, function or business process and then expand.

Because complexity increases as number of business stakeholders expands, most organizations are working to achieve a balance between the optimal goal of enterprise-wide taxonomies and single-application taxonomies. All our customers use SchemaLogic’s metadata management platforms to build and manage their taxonomies. Our systems are designed to allow customers to model enterprise-wide taxonomies and publish those taxonomies to multiple applications such as SharePoint and Documentum and well as to search engines such as FAST or auto-classification systems such as Teragram.

3) What trends do you see in the evolution of taxonomy development? In supporting technologies (such as SOA or SaaS)

There continues to be a need to manage taxonomies in a more dynamic way. The need to collaborate across the enterprise, locate and share information, and improve information governance at the same time is putting pressure on organizations to develop a more flexible approach to managing information. The distributed nature of SOA and SaaS architectures puts further pressure on companies to establish a enterprise with taxonomy that can be accessed by multiple applications.

4) What are best practices for developing taxonomies? What are some approaches to avoid?

Books could (and have been written on this topic), but a short list of Best Practices might include:

Understand the ultimate uses to which the taxonomies will be put (there is no one perfect taxonomy).
Incorporate business and technical stakeholders in the development process to assure that the final product will met requirements.
Conduct a “taxonomy”audit prior to developing any new taxonomies to understand what already exists and might be leveraged.
Consider taxonomy maintenance and governance during development processes to assure that the taxonomy is able to be maintained and there are clear lines of responsibility.
Look for externally available taxonomies but be cautious as they have not been designed for the particular goals of the organization in question. Participate in industry-wide organizations where taxonomy development efforts might be occurring.

5) Are there any emerging or existing standards other than ISO 2788 for developing or expressing taxonomies? Is ISO 2788 relevant (I gather it is oriented towards human indexers) and who tends to use it?

ISO2788 is relevant in terms of providing extensive guidance into term forms, and other such matters. Since most organizations work in networked environments and want to transfer taxonomic information electronically, most will need to explore approaches to structuring taxonomic data for electronic transmission. Some of the standards to be aware of are RDF, OWL, Topic Maps, and SKOS. Additionally, since taxonomies might reside in metadata repositories, standards such as ISO 11179 may be relevant.

6) What are some common exports from taxonomy tools (e.g., Excel)? Are there any common formats for importing existing taxonomies or developing them in taxonomy tools? For example, are there XML DTDs or Schemas?

CSV is a good common base line as some organizations still manage a number of their taxonomies in Excel. Some taxonomy management vendors have XML formats (such as we do) but these may be proprietary and need some translation into an XML format another application could use. Standards such as RDF, OWL, and Topic Maps might be used in this context as well.

7) Can you provide client case studies?

Yes. We have published several customer case studies and would be happy to work with you on additional case studies in the future.

Now About Tools

1) What are typical costs for acquiring and implementing taxonomy products?

The costs of taxonomy products varies greatly based on the particular application. Simple taxonomy modeling tools can cost less than $1000. While enterprise wide taxonomy management and governance systems can cost over $500,000. These larger systems provide highly scalable modeling capability, complete change management and governance, integration to full suites of enterprise applications and metadata compliance monitoring. We have deployed systems that range in price from less than $50,000 to over $1M.

2) What are three key features in taxonomy tools; what are three unique features in yours?

Three key features:

1. Support for a variety of relationships between terms (should at least be able to support the term relationship types specified by ISO2788).

2. Allow unlimited hierarchical structures.

3. Provide import and export features.

Three unique features in ours:

1. Extensive change management component that enables changes in taxonomies to be automatically subjected to governance.

2. Set of productized connectors that automatically can provide updated taxonomy information to consuming applications. In addition, the ability to create custom connectors.

3. Ability for end-user administrators of the interface to create custom properties on terms and taxonomies.

3) How would you assess the current state of the art for automatic classification features?

Auto-classification systems continue to improve, but still lack the precision and accuracy provided by a managed taxonomy. Taxonomies have been found to be useful frameworks upon which an auto-classification system can be developed rather than have the auto-classifcation tool start from scratch. A combination of taxonomy management to provide structure and manage term relationships combined with auto-classification methods has proven to be the most effective solution.

4) Do you provide “connectors” to work with enterprise content management systems such as EMC Documentum and Microsoft SharePoint?

We provide connectors that allow our customers to publish taxonomies out to subscribing systems such as Documentum and SharePoint. We also publish taxonomic metadata to search engines, auto-classification systems, portals, and other enterprise applications

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So there you have it from an expert. And if you happen to use -- or be interested in using Documentum or SharePoint (or both), here's a way to move beyond graphical tools and spreadsheets to manage and leverage your taxonomies.

CMIS - EMC's role and vision for the future

2009-03-08T17:40:00.003-04:00

First off, what on earth does CMIS stand for and why should any content management person care? Here's the easy part, what it stands for: "Content Management Interoperability Services." What is promises is a way for customers (vendors, and others) to begin allowing useful sharing of content between different vendor repositories. That is a huge thing, since right now most companies have several, maybe hundreds (and maybe they don't even know how many) different document repositories they have under their enterprise roof.

To write my column on this subject ("Building Content Bridges") I interviewed EMC and Day software. The former one of the original writers of the specification; the latter a vendor that is keenly supportive of content management standards. The following notes are taken from my EMC interview.

On the 23 ^rd of October, 2008, I spoke with two representatives from EMC about the emerging standard CMIS: Patricia Anderson, Sr. Marketing Manager, Documentum Platform Marketing, Content Management & Archiving and Dr. David Choy, Sr. Consultant. "CC" below refers to my comment on statements in the interview -- "Content Curmudgeon."

I was curious about the timeline for CMIS to be implemented (assuming it succeeds), and why CMIS is important either to EMC or to the content management space in general. Following are my notes from that interview.

Dr. Choy: Nobody knows how long the process will take, but about a year or more for a full-fledged standard. There were eight companies participating with validating the current version of the CMIS spec for interoperability (IBM, EMC, Microsoft and five others). The eight proved that the spec could be used to assure interoperability. After that the team sent the proposed standard to OASIS. The formal process for discussing the standard takes time, but in the meantime for EMC we intend to make the prototype available for the public to play with.

Security has administrative issues (mechanisms proprietary to each vendor) and also in the runtime space; security policies reign. CMIS security and access control is out of scope at this point. Each vendor has its own security model. In the near term, that is outside the scope of CMIS. Security policy is now reduced to the lowest common denominator (CRUD), but every vendor supports those.

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CC: By CRUD, Dr. Choy means the basic four operations, Create, Read, Update or Delete. Every content management system provides at minimum those same operations. How they determine who can do those things is a separate issue, and CMIS assumes each system manages its own security in its own way. If the administrator of a CMIS-compliant system gives you one of these rights, then from your own CMIS-compliant system you can access and perform operations on content in that system.

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Patricia: One of the questions is “ what caused the need for this standard in the first place?” But organizations would set up more than one repository platform, perhaps departments or as the result of M&As. We realized that it was difficult getting to this other information. This also hampered development that was cross-divisional or cross-platform. Then with Web 2.0 mashups, it became even more difficult to leverage use of information. ECM folks realized that it was a hindrance that affected all vendors. We looked at different standards but wanted a standard that was platform-agnostic and services-based, to unlock information in different repositories. Serious discussions began in October 2006. Other committees like IECM tried to develop such standards, but they needed to start fresh.”

David: iECM is an AIIM consortium that tried to create something similar to CMIS. That group wasn’t set up for highly technical interoperability standards. Very little concrete results occurred. iECM is still looking at best practices and standards, not technical areas.

---

CC: Clearly you need both and without either there is no bridge between the repositories.

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Patricia: For users, CMIS can expand the available applications and open the market for developers to write cross-repository applications. It is an open protocol and supports all repositories that support the standard. This provides customers lots of investment protection.

David: Enterprise Content Integrated Services is an example of an application that can facilitate cross repository work. Federated search, mashups, business process workflows across repositories.

Patricia: This is the first and only web services standard. An insurance company could have separate subsidiaries across the world, and writing to a standard would enable access and update to the repository information. A distributed environment such as a franchise would also facilitate sharing of information outside each organization.

Patricia: The 3 originals were the first tier; then we included others such as Alfresco (participated), Oracle, SAP, OpenText; now Day Software. This standard is comparable to what SQL did for databases years ago.

David: The importance is how widely a standard is adopted. The spec is publicly available. Interested parties (after technical committee is formed) can send comments to the technical committee. They’d need to join the technical committee. Enterprise customers (the first group) can benefit from CMIS and need to tap into different repositories. The second group is between repositories and vendors, allowing them to access each others content. The third group interested in CMIS is Independent Software Vendors.

Patricia: Another way customers benefit is from having a broad suite of applications for their vertical markets, since a developer could develop for all.

David: Road maps for CMIS are difficult because CMIS is not a full-fledged standard yet. My rough guesstimate would be about a year, after the standard is released. We do intend to make prototypes available for the public before then, and those would be built on Doc Foundation Services. So those interfaces are close.

Patricia: This proposed specification is already 2 years in development and vendors have done interoperability testing. We didn't just send paper to OASIS, working prototypes. “What should I do today?” When you are evaluating the specification, when you go to your next purchase or RFI, ask if vendors support that standard.

Enterprise Search Summit Program

2009-01-10T15:54:00.007-05:00

Do any of you feel like you can't keep up with the latest trends in search, or you just feel like you could wring more value out of your investment but aren't sure how? Or maybe you don't get the connection between Web 2.0 and Search? Whether you are responsible for your Intranet, your commercial site, or the various repositories inside your firewall, I heartily recommend the annual Enterprise Search Summit to be held this May in NYC.

I've attended this in the past, as a paid attendee (my "day job" employer considered it that worthwhile!), not gratis as a columnist for eContent magazine which is part of the Information Today Inc. portfolio. Michelle is the editor for eContent and designs/runs the Search Summit. I like this conference a lot. To learn more, click here.

XML 10th Anniversary

2008-09-07T20:15:00.008-04:00

In an upcoming Information Insider column, I invite XML to an intimate party where we can celebrate its 10th anniversary. I also invited Alexander Falk, CEO of Altova, and an XML aficionado if ever there were one (here's his blog http://www.xmlaficionado.com/ Here are some of the questions I asked Alexander as background for the column. I hope you'll find this interview interesting. After all, celebrating a "double digits" anniversary doesn't happen often. Alexander's responses to my questions are shown in blue text.

Question: The XML Recommendation is now 10 years old. XML led to hundreds of additional specifications, yet its adoption rate in publishing and word processing software (and XHTML in web pages) seems slow. What is your assessment of XML adoption, and what do you see for the next 10 years?

Ten years is a mighty long time to make forecasts for – my crystal ball is only rated for 2-3 years max… 
What we’ve seen with XML over the last 10 years is a huge adoption in all areas that are data-centric, rather than content-centric. XML has become the lingua franca of data exchange and interchange and has made a whole class of enterprise applications possible, because you can now move data fairly freely between disparate systems.

The benefits of XML in a pure content-creation scenario – be it publishing, word processing, Web design – are only realizable if you have a large amount of content and use it with some content management system. That is not something that most small- or medium-size businesses would do, and that has, I believe, let to a somewhat slower rate of adoption in those areas.

Question: OOXML is essentially “ rich text format” expressed as XML rather than leveraging existing XML standards such as MathML. MS Office is expensive; OpenOffice (based on ODF that leverages other XML standards) is free. MS Office maintains office share. What gives?

This is an interesting conundrum. From a purely academic perspective I would agree with your statement that leveraging existing XML standards is desirable. But the reality is that 95% of the world’s office documents are MS Office documents today, and people want to continue working with those documents – and want to reuse the content that exists in those documents in other applications, and by opening the file format up and having them be XML-based rather than binary format, such reuse is now possible. I can tell you from our experience that we have received countless requests from our customers that they want to be able to work with OOXML documents, and not a single request for ODF. Also, when I look at e-mail that I receive from others, I have yet to encounter a single e-mail that came with an ODF attachment. I don’t necessarily like Microsoft’s near-monopoly on the office market, but to deny its existence and standardize on a file format like ODF that nobody actually uses in the real world doesn’t make much sense either.

Here we disagree a bit; my question to Alexander followed by his response.

Question: OOXML (which today looks like it will become an ISO Standard) is still essentially just an XML expression of Microsoft’s internal word processing format, “Rich text format.” What value does such a use of XML provide to potential applications?

Actually, I need to disagree on that one. OOXML is not just RTF in disguise. OOXML includes separate and distinct markup languages for expressing word processing documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. The wordprocessingML is somewhat related to RTF because it is based on a similar concept (runs of characters with styles applied to them), but that is where the similarity ends. We found that it is very easy to use XSLT (or XQuery) to extract content from either wordprocessingML or spreadsheetML documents in OOXML that were created in Office 2007 (or other OOXML compatible apps), and likewise it is very easy for us to generate OOXML content in both of those formats from our applications. For example, our data mapping tool MapForce makes it very easy for people to map data from a variety of data sources (including EDI, databases, Web services, XML, etc.) into spreadsheetML documents that they can then open with Excel 2007. Likewise, our stylesheet design tool StyleVision, makes it very easy for people to produce stylesheets that render reports from XML or database data not just in HTML or PDF, but now also in wordprocessingML for use in Word 2007.

Still, what is new in OOXML that didn't exist in earlier editions as Rich Text Format? And if 2007 simply uses XML as a replacement for RTF, I don't see the added value. Sure, you can search for table captions (if you want), but the richness of ODF is not there and won't be (can't be, due to compatibility with earlier versions).

Question: HTML 5 seems like a step backward from XML and XHTML. Is this a sign of eroding support for XML? One reason for HTML 5 (to quote the W3C) is “new elements are introduced based on research into prevailing authoring practices.” Wasn’t XHTML sufficient, or maybe too difficult for “ prevailing authoring practices”?

I’m afraid that the reality is that a lot of HTML is still created by hand: people creating some HTML in Web-tools like Dreamweaver or other HTML editors and then going into the HTML and messing around in it in text editing mode. Since those tools have been very slow to enforce XHTML compliance, people continue to generate sloppy HTML pages, and so there is unfortunately a real need out there to at least standardize on what authoring practices exist in the real world.

The much better approach is, of course, to generate XHTML by means of an XSLT stylesheet from XML source pages, which is what we do, e.g., for the http://www.altova.com/ Web site.

Question: XQuery is a standard co-developed by the developers of SQL. What’s your prediction for widespread adoption and use of XQuery?

I initially thought that XQuery had a lot of promise, too, which is why Altova was very quick to provide an implementation of XQuery in our products, including an XQuery editor, debugger, and the ability in our mapping tool to produce XQuery code. However, we’ve found that the adoption of XQuery in the real world is happening much slower than we and many others had anticipated. I think that one of the issues is that there isn’t yet a clear and consistent XQuery implementation level and API across all database systems that people can rely on. The beautiful thing about SQL is that – for the most part – you can throw the same SQL query against an Oracle, IBM DB2, SQL Server, or even MySQL database, and you will get back the same result. The same is not true for XQuery yet, and until we reach that level of wide-spread adoption in the database servers, it has no chance to be as widely adopted by database users and application developers.

The reality is that we see a lot more interest in XSLT 2.0 from our customers than XQuery.

Sad but true Alexander. I had high hopes for XQuery but I don't hear much about it these days.

Question: Will XBRL be one of the “next big things” leading to a major use of XML by investors via a new set of prosumer applications? Enterprise processes and financial systems? What role will XQuery provide in these contexts?

I do indeed see XBRL as being the next big thing. The fact that both the Europeans and the SEC are mandating XBRL for financial reports from publicly listed companies will be a huge driver of XBRL adoption on a global scale. I am convinced that XBRL will be essential in financial systems and will find its way into enterprise applications fairly swiftly. When it comes to the use of XBRL by investors as prosumer applications, I’m a little bit more skeptical. It is certainly clear that investment professionals will use XBRL to better compare data between different companies in a certain market and to derive some key financial figures much easier than before, because the financial reports don’t have to be re-keyed into their systems. But I don’t think that this effect will transcend the investment professionals and become easily available for consumers anytime soon. As to what role XQuery will play: it might play some role, but I’m thinking of XBRL more as a standardized data transport mechanism and am expecting investment firms to map the XBRL into their internal decision-making and analysis applications and do the querying there.

On this we agree. This might be XML's first great opportunity to transform significant amounts of content -- and the processes to generate that content -- outside the tech doc arena.

Question: I know some subscribers to online financial services are wondering if they will be able to supplement (or even skip) certain of these services by analyzing sets of XBRL files themselves. What are the practical limitations to such analysis? Is there an inherent limitation to max numbers of XBRL files that can be XQueried at once?

There aren’t really any limitations that I’m aware of. The problem is more one of: how will you use the data? An investor who is very accounting-savvy can probably easily use XBRL to extract some key financial indicators for a company and compare several possible investment candidates in an industry group. But most investors I know rather want the key financial indicators automatically calculated by somebody else rather than directly work with the raw XBRL data. So I am skeptical that individual investors will be able to skip their subscriptions. Augmenting them is, however, a possibility and I indeed see the ability for some people to get a more in-depth look at some numbers than what they can currently get from Bloomberg or similar services.

Update on Office 2007 Compatibility etc.

2008-02-16T20:54:00.004-05:00

Julie ("funnybroad") has updated her slide show about her Office 2007 compatibility findings. Here is an excerpt from what she said:

I've replaced my original Office 2007 Compatibility Mode Confusion paper on slideshare.net with an updated version. I had to delete and re-create the existing one, so the link to it from your blog is now broken (click here for Julie's updated info)....everything has been re-tested with Service Pack 1, and sadly, compatibility still sucks. So go to the new link, not the older one.

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While I'm on the subject of Office 2007, when I tested and reviewed the product I was happy to see a weird longstanding behavior removed: You print a document, then exit and are asked if you want to save changes. Most people simply "yes," fearing they forgot whatever change they'd made and don't want to lose it. Others say "no" thinking they made a change inadvertantly and don't want it to stick. Well, I was happy to see that dumb "feature" removed, but recently --several automated patch upgrades later, I guess-- I see the "feature" is removed. So we've got compatibility with pre-2007 suites, but this is one compatibility feature they could have dropped and it would have made the product better.

How Green Are Your Documents

2008-01-21T11:42:00.001-05:00

Over the past 6 months, I've seen some of my hunches about growing awareness of environmental issues and concern about fossil fuel supplies (and prices) confirmed. Although oil never did close at $100/barrel, prices are sky high by anyone's estimate. In the autumn of 2007 I tried a different theme in my Information Insider column – one that I believe has never been done. I laid the groundwork for this series with the EContent 100 annual issue, in a column titled “ Content 2.0 Converges.” I titled the follow-on column in this series “ How Green Are Your Documents?” (the editor since changed that to “ It Ain't Easy Being Green” -- a fine alternative). I sent out queries to a variety of vendors for any thoughts they had about their products and the green theme, and waited. And waited. And began to think that this was the craziest idea I'd ever had and wondered how I'd meet the deadline with a different (unplanned) column in case this didn't pan out. Then the vendors began to respond, all except Google, but I blame that on the difficulty of finding the right contact there rather than Google's lack of interest – since Google is indeed showing itself to be very green indeed.

Who did respond? Adobe, MarkLogic, and Olive Software – the latter a vendor I'd never heard of but found (yes) with a Google search. And it was an avalanche of interest.

Let's start with Adobe. One obvious Adobe product is Acrobat, which has become a default electronic document standard, bulked-up with collaborative features in version 8 with Acrobat Connect, formerly Macromedia’s Breeze web conferencing but now integrated with Acrobat. I get the idea that web conferencing can cut down travel and thus save travel and carbon costs, but I was looking for more, and Adobe provided it. First, they've done as Google and now Microsoft have also done: begun adding online documents to their product set. In this case, Adobe acquired Buzzword, a web-based text editor. Interesting, but not the green lead I was looking for. Then it got interesting.

Adobe's new AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) lets web applications run offline – key, IMHO, to assuring the acceptance of online, collaborative documents and reducing the use of paper (with all the energy savings that implies). AIR is a cross-OS SDK, a mashup of Flash, HTML, Ajax, etc. AIR can target applications to the desktop and get the rich abilities expected in local clients plus the web. The key here is that you get persistent presence on the desktop, offline/online with re-synching of web content when you go back online. Traditional media has been moving to the web for some time; now the web is also moving to the desktop, with traditional functions on a browser or paper migrating to the desktop. All financial documents for example could give you reports, etc. and also perform applications that would require paper, such as loan applications required swapping excel spreadsheets, etc.

Developers (not end users) are beginning to develop AIR-basedonline-offline catalogs --that bane of the mail box. You download the application that would include the catalog, navigate through them, sort and search, flag them within the application and get notifications when available (reminders when back in stock). As you walk through the catalog, you could add electronic notes. You could share them with friends etc., send them an email with the relevant information. Collaborate on different desktops. Adobe says that Linux support for AIR is coming.

A 10 MB PDF catalog could be the whole size of the AIR application, and with progressive images or assets on demand, could make the “catalog application” smaller than the PDF.

Hot AIR? Yes, but in a good sense – reducing global warming in its own way.

Office Suites and XML - Vendor feedback

2007-07-09T22:05:00.001-04:00

In my latest Info Insider column, I mentioned contacting two vendors to get their take on the impact of the two major office suites, OpenOffice/Star Office 8 (ODF) and Microsoft Office 2007 (OOXML), using XML internally. The vendors I contacted were Altova and MarkLogic. Here are the questions I asked them, followed by their responses.

Now that OpenOffice and Office 2007 both use XML natively, what new opportunities are there for analyzing or transforming Office documents?

Do you have any examples of customers using your products (or those of your technology partners) to analyze or transform OpenOffice/StarOffice or MS Office 2007 documents, leveraging their use of XML?

In essence, both vendors seem poised to provide ways for customers to extract extra value from
their document repositories, although the current state is a “ chicken and egg” problem. For now, there are no office document repositories, so there is no rush to buy new products to extract this value. However, sooner or later the enterprise chickens will be forced to lay the XML eggs (see below).

MarkLogic

Following are the responses from MarkLogic, specifically John Kreisa, Director of Product Marketing for MarkLogic. Regarding opportunities for analyzing or transforming Office documents (whether ODF or OOXML), John says:

"Microsoft’s choice of XML as a core form for Office 2007 means that everybody using Office will be authoring directly in XML – Office becomes a direct means for creating XML content. We believe there is a significant opportunity for customers to leverage the ever-increasing amount of XML content by combining Office 2007 with an XML content server, like MarkLogic. Doing so will allow users to exploit the XML within the content in two ways. First they can combine all their content into one common repository, which is the first step to getting more value from the content. Then second, they can build content applications to repurpose the content, dynamically publish the content in new ways, and perform analytic functions they haven’t been able to do before.

Loading all of their content into a content server lets organizations analyze their entire content in new ways including understanding the term frequency, word counts, page counts etc, and understand the relationships within the content like citation analysis between articles and many other areas of analysis. What we typically see is that once organizations take a platform approach to their content they immediately find new ways to exploit it and generate new business opportunities."

Of course this begs the question “When will there be enough XML content to put into a repository, since adoption rates are currently low even though as users upgrade to OOXML or switch to ODF, they will generate documents for this repository. And in the case of OOXML, if users decide to stick with Microsoft they’ll have no choice but to upgrade, since sooner or later Microsoft will stop releasing free security patches to its earlier office products.

Kreisa confirmed the problem of the current adoption rate in his response to my second request for examples of customers using MarkLogic products (or those of your technology partners) to analyze or transform OpenOffice/StarOffice or MS Office 2007 documents, leveraging their use of XML:

"While Mark Logic does not currently have any customers using MarkLogic Server with MS Office 2007, we do anticipate that as adoption of Office 2007 increases, our customers will leverage the XML content they create with Office 2007 by combining it with MarkLogic to create new content, repurpose existing content into multiple formats, and republish this content, and to mine the content to find previously undiscovered information.

Our senior VP of products demonstrated our Office 2007 related capabilities in a general session at our User Conference in May, and the audience were very impressed – lots of nodding and clapping. When people see what we can do it generates interest in upgrading to Office 2007.

We have not heard much from our customer base regarding OpenOffice. However Mark Logic’s fundamental value proposition remains the same. We can load, query, manipulate and render the XML from StarOffice in the same manner we do for Microsoft Office 2007.

In response to your question about how presentational XML facilitates text analytics in Microsoft Office, it really depends on the goal of the user. Highly marked up XML can complicate or confuse tools that are not capable of handling this kind of deep XML. MarkLogic Server, on the other hand, can easily handle this kind of content and separate the markup from the text. For example, if a user wants to know how many places a certain word is in bold or how many words are tagged as <title1> style, we can help with that kind of analysis. We see this as potentially relevant for technical documentations organizations, for example, who want to make sure that they have consistency across their different documents."

Altova

Altova is the vendor who created the famous XML Spy product line, providing lots of ways to create, analyze, and manipulate XML on desktop PCs. Here are responses to the same questions from Alexander Falk, President, CEO and Co-Founder of Altova.

"Organizations save vast amounts of information in Microsoft Word documents and Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, but until now, that content could not be re-used in an extensible, programmatic way. With the Open XML document formats, that data is now standards-based; and the new capabilities in Altova XMLSpy allow developers to extract, edit, query, and transform XML data from within documents that use Office Open XML Formats - the new file type used by the 2007 Microsoft Office release - to make the data highly interoperable and easy to process. This provides huge advantages to business people and application developers.

Because XML Spy's support for Office Open XML was released only a few weeks ago, its too early to provide feedback."

I followed up to ask about the issue of XML quality in the two office suites, and whether or not one offers greater potential for leveraging the new XML internals. Office 2007 is almost exclusively presentational, while OpenOffice goes beyond that with support for additional standards, Scaleable Vector Graphics, MathML and XML Forms.

"Yes, that is an old argument. In an ideal world, the content authors would be motivated to create content with semantically meaningful tagging, e.g. Docbook or DITA. But the reality is that in today’s world most content is created in Office documents, so it is better to be able to extract and process that content with Office Open XML, than to continue to wait until all content creators use semantically meaningful tags. Furthermore, the Office 2007 Open Office XML formats are not just for Word documents. Extracting data from the millions of Excel spreadsheets that get created and processing it further in XML opens the door to a huge opportunity for information reuse and repurposing."

So there you have it. OOXML will likely have the largest installed base. In fact, the Massachusetts Information Technology Division (ITD), (the agency that essentially stuck its finger in Microsoft’s eye) has released a new draft of its Enterprise Technical Reference Model This draft now includes OOXML as an acceptable open format. The discussion period will end on 20 July 2007, but I’m betting the draft will become approved. 20. For an expert insight into the issues with the Massachusetts ITD, go to:

http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/article.php?story=20070702101415578&mode=print

And there are still persuasive arguments that OOXML is fundamentally inferior to ODF, and how that plays out over the next several years will be abstractly fascinating to watch -- if only the future of our office document content weren’t so important. I’v e got my opinions on the XML quality issue, expressed in my Information Insider columns at EContent Magazine for some time. Here is O’Reilly’s take on the issue.

http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2007/06/14/achieving-openness-a-closer-look-at-odf-and-ooxml.html .

It is right for both the above vendors to profess no preference over one format or the other, since both suites use XML and their products can and will work with each. Still, quality and openness matter. We’ll see how this plays out.

Office 2007 Packaging

2007-04-03T21:22:00.000-04:00

This weekend, I received the official MS Office Professional 2007 package, the same that consumers or SMBs would get when they buy the product. Now I admit I have trouble with contemporary packaging of all sorts -- razor blades, anything that is meant to prevent shoplifting, or the electronic equivalent of bootlegging software, especially anything with the Microsoft label. I completely sympathize with Microsoft's aggressive stance vis-a-vis bootlegged software. However, I've seen a couple of things lately --including the packaging for MS Office-- that I think goes a bit over the top.

First there was the prompt to download important security updates. It turns out, that that was a piece of software to determine whether or not my copy of Windows was genuine. Of course it was, since I was using review software that I'd received from Microsoft, but I think that procedure is a bit devious.

Now on to the more physical side of security: The package I received containing MS Office 2007 Professional. There were two sticky labels, one on the top and one on the body, indicating I should pull the one on the top and then somehow open the package. Problem was, pulling the top tab looked like it would damage the license key that was firmly affixed to the top. So I tugged and pulled, did my best not to damage anything, then moved on to the main seals. After much tugging (and using heavy-duty shears to cut what looked like a pop-rivet on the side), I realized that this package is intended to swivel downward, getting you to the software and manual. Inside and attached to the inside packaging was a set of graphics about the contents (Excel, Word, etc.) with a headline "Manage analyze and communicate..." I can't tell you exactly what the rest of the headline was, because to read it I'd have to bend and maybe break the outside plastic shell that houses the swivel-down housing with the CD, manual, etc.

Truthfully, this packaging looks like it was built by a committee, and "Security" got to veto "Ease of Use."

HELP - online only?

2007-03-18T19:49:00.000-04:00

So far as I can see, there are two ways to activate HELP in Office 2007 applications: The tiny little question mark in the upper right side, and the old standby F1. Both seem to get you only Microsoft online help. What happens if I lose (or temporarily do not have) an online connection? Am I stuck?

Actually, this de-emphasized HELP suggests to me that Microsoft believes the new ribbon interface is so clear that you won't need help. And secondly, that if you need help, you always have a broadband connection. I'm not sure both assumptions are true.

Anyway, here is the answer to the question I received from Microsoft's rapid response team:
"...the question mark button does, by default, take the user to Microsoft Office Online for Help. But if you click on the “Connected to Microsoft Office Online” button at the bottom of the box, you can choose to “Show Content Only from this computer” and that allows the user to see help content when not connected to the internet.

Super Tooltips, a feature of the Microsoft® Office Fluent™ user interface in the 2007 Microsoft Office system, integrates Help topics into the product in a new way to make the experience easier for new customers. One of the main problems that people have with Help topics today is that they don’t know the terms used to describe features. Super Tooltips are integrated help tips that provide quick access to information about a command directly from the command’s location in the Office Fluent user interface. One of the biggest innovations that began with version 2003 was the opportunity to get feedback on our Help. We use this feedback to drive the development of new content and to update current help topics as needed. We also use the feedback to identify trends that assist us in creating better Help for new features. The 2007 Office system Help was developed with the benefit from having feedback from thousands of Office customers."

So if you think to go to the bottom of the HELP box, you'll figure out how to get information without being online.

The right brain, aesthetic side of Office 2007; the Left Brain view of PowerPoint

2007-03-18T07:42:00.000-04:00

I've been so caught up in looking at new features, or where my old Office features now reside, that I've overlooked one important point. Microsoft has clearly expended a lot of effort to achieve two important benefits: truly elegant set of styles (themes) along with some new fonts, and much improved consistency between the various Office programs.

Across all the Office programs, there is a new, softer look that subliminally suggests you can approach the new system comfortably. That new friendliness is true across all the applications, from the Outlook email program through Word, Excel and PowerPoint (the only applications I'm currently evaluating in Office Professional). This right-brain improvement in all the applications isn't something you'll see in feature checklists, or if you do it may sound like marketing hype. But seeing is believing.

On the consistency side, one of my past pet peeves with the Office suite was inconsistency. If I created a table in Word and imported it into PowerPoint, or vice versa, I'd always get something different. And if the direction was from Word to PowerPoint, I'd get a "dumbed down" table because that's all PowerPoint could handle. Now I've found that you can create complex (and beautiful) tables in PowerPoint with all the horizontal and vertical cell merges you want, and export them accurately into Word. Not only the power of the new table model, but this consistency across applications, is a very strong inducement to work with the new Office 2007.

Now it is Sunday evening, and it appears I spoke too soon about how well PowerPoint uses styles and its consistency. It appears that if you have existing objects (e.g., bullets) and change the bullet styles via the master, it doesn't apply those changes to the existing bullets, only to new ones. In fact, PowerPoint Help confirms this: "It is a good idea to create a slide master before you start to build individual slides, rather than after. When you create the slide master first, all of the slides that you add to your presentation are based on that slide master. However, if you create a slide master before you start to build individual slides, some of the items on the slides may not conform to the slide master design."

Thus IMHO, PowerPoint styles miss the point: A truly styles-based system would let you change your mind about the look and feel of a particular kind of object, then apply your change to all the objects of that type.

One last observation: Your editing view of PowerPoint slides, where you can see and edit the objects, is called "Normal." Why not "Draft," since Microsoft changed the name "Normal" to "Draft" for MS Word. Another inconsistency. Naughty naughty.

Interchanging documents and email between 2007 and Office 2003

2007-03-11T14:36:00.000-04:00

Here I have very good news. When Word or Excel open a document you created in an earlier version of Office, I found absolutely no errors. I stress-tested the process with some very complex Word documents and some equally complicated Excel spreadsheets. Everything worked exactly as it should in 2007.

I also interchanged email, calendaring appoints, and the like between Outlook 2003 and 2007. Again, interchange worked flawlessly.

Other little Installation Issues -- and a side reflection on Acrobat

2007-03-11T14:27:00.000-04:00

As I said earlier, I hadn't planned to remove my earlier versions of Word, Excel, etc. -- only to install the new products so I could test each on the same machine. One product I had hoped not to install was Outlook, but the installation process gave it to me anyway. In some ways that was a good mistake, because there are some minor advantages to the new Outlook -- for example, adding a sender to your safe sender's list so you don't have to download graphics (a give-away to spammers that they've caught a live email account). However, there were some downsides to the Outlook install that I experienced and you will too, or may experience comparable issues. First, I found my Palm device no longer synchronized with Outlook. That's a strong suggestion that the format of the PST file is different. However, the new PST file is not appreciably smaller than the one it replaced, whereas the Compressed XML formats for the other main Office applications provide significantly smaller files. Palm, to its credit, quickly updated their synchronizing software so that now works fine.

Another thing that stopped working was my Acrobat 8 plug-in to Outlook, and with it the ability to select an email folder and PDF the entire contents. (Likewise, the PDF plug-in to other office products also stopped working.) I contacted Adobe about this, and they said they were working on it.

One disappointing Adobe Acrobat side-note: Months ago I got tired of Internet Explorer and switched to Mozilla. However, there is no PDF plug-in to Mozilla/Firefox that Adobe has built for IE. That's a real disappointment; "PDF Capturing" a site within a browser is a facility I used frequently. You'd think that with its commitment to openness, Adobe would provide the same Acrobat plug-in for Mozilla that it does for IE.

Client Side or Web-Based Editing -- interesting observation

2007-03-11T14:13:00.000-04:00

I am working on several different PCs as I write and print my Information Insider review of Office 2007 (and companion column). I have to; Office 2007 doesn't run under Windows 2000, which is the system that my printer is attached to. So I work at each and try to keep track of the latest versions, names of files, and where they are. This is not easy.

So with this review, I've decided to reverse things a bit. In the past, I've used this Blog as the place for my "cutting room floor" -- a place to put materials that I thought were important but didn't fit in the printed versions of my work. Now my strategy is to put all my observations in a single place (this blog) and select from the blog whatever I want to put into the final review.

That suggests one element of the strategic decision about office tools: Whether to use client-based tools (residing on the computers where you work) or to use on-line tools as I am doing here.

Exploring Word 2007

2007-03-11T13:52:00.000-04:00

While Outlook 2007 is quite similar to Outlook 2003 (and thus getting up to speed was almost effortless), Word 2007 is significantly different from its predecessors. If you consider yourself a quick study of PC applications in general and a power user of earlier versions of Word, you will still find "ramping up" to your former competence a real challenge. Here are some of my initial findings.

The format painter didn’t seem to work when I tried to apply a margin setting to a bullet. The source bullet was under a level one heading and more deeply indented; the destination text-and-bullet were under a deeper level heading. I couldn’t undent (or move the bullet margin leftwards) even with the usual tool. Moreover, since I hadn’t yet figured out how to recover my “normal” (now “draft”) view of documents, I couldn’t fix the problem.

Microsoft obviously spent a lot of effort changing the user interface. In some cases, the changes are an improvement. In others, I have to say it seems like change for change sake. Once you've mastered the old interface, it becomes the "devil you know" and awkward or not, you know how to use the tool.
It is curious that Word offers no bundled help for those familiar with the earlier product. In fact, the "Help" icon itself is reduced to a small "?" in the upper right hand side, as though you probably don't need it anyway since the interface is deemed to be so self explanatory.
An example of "new interface" versus old feature is "Word Count." How do you determine your word count? Searching HELP for “Word Count” returns you lots of results (no surprise there), but getting a simple answer to how to count words didn’t come easy. There was lots of information about the Word Home page, counting words in a selection, counting words as you type – but finding how to perform the old standby of counting words in the document isn’t obvious. Answer: you can’t do this anymore, and you don’t need to: The information is at the bottom left of the screen as you type. Still, it would be nice to know that the old word count facility has been replaced and is no longer needed. Then when you catch on, the word count is always on the lower left-hand side of the window. Nice touch, but if you're not expecting you may miss it. Besides, getting reading level analyses used to be part of the "word count" facility; how do you do that? Go back to the HELP system to find out.

“Normal” views have disappeared, and I couldn't find where they'd gone until I went to a Word discussion group and learn that “Normal” is now “Draft.” Looking in Help for “Normal view” doesn’t get you anywhere. Instead, I went to a Word discussion group and learned that draft view is the new name for Normal and that you can set the styles view through Word Options (Alt, T, O, A), and then scroll to the 'Display' part of Advanced settings here (as in earlier versions of Word) you can set a width greater than zero.
I went to HELP and looked for "style window, " and received 100 hints (none of which seemed relevant). This seemed to be a pattern with HELP; if you try to find information about a feature whose name is new in Word 2007, you get no guidance. Working on your own, I think it will take a very long time to acquire a deep understanding of the new Word.
Here's a peculiarity of earlier MS Word that thankfully has been fixed.: Whenever you printed a Word document in the past --nothing else but print, mind you-- and exited the document, you used to get the message "Do you want to save the changes?" My very first reaction, that took a long time to get over was "Huh? I don't think I made any changes, but I guess I'd better save it anyway in case I did." The message comes because you've inadvertently associated a printer to the document. If this warning were such a great idea, then why don't the other Office suite tools, such as PowerPoint and Excel, work the same way and give that message too?
One big complaint I've had with Word from the DOS days was its limited table model. WordPerfect (and HTML) always allowed you to merge table cells horizontally as well as vertically. Word did not; it would "fake" a horizontal merge, but exporting that or looking closely showed that it wasn't a merged cell. Can you now merge cells vertically in Word? Yes. I exported a table to HTML and inspected it with Dreamweaver to confirm this. I wonder if (and hope that) PowerPoint's and Excel's tables will work the same way.

Exploring Outlook 2007

2007-02-24T08:37:00.000-05:00

So far, Outlook has been the easiest of the applications to learn how to use; it appears to be very much like earlier versions of Outlook, with some convenience security features like adding a sender to your “safe list.” This lets you download graphics automatically from email that you’ve put on that list. I easily exchanged meeting requests and acceptances between Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2003 systems.

There were some quirks and disappointments however. First, my Palm Pilot no longer synchs with Outlook (Palm is said to be working on a Hot Synch upgrade for Office 2007). My Acrobat 8 plug-ins to convert email or email folders to PDF are no longer available. Adobe is working on that.

Although the new office.x file formats are compressed and thus about half the size of the earlier versions like .doc, Outlook's "PST" mail file remains its old bloated self. Not only that, but MS has added a feature to make "search" of email at least marginally useful (it never has been useful IMHO before), but that requires indexing the whole mail box. OK; I'm good with that. But how big is this index file and can you perform periodic maintenance on it to keep it trim (e.g., remove the big gaps in the index from deleting email). I see no information about index maintenance anywhere -- and, for that matter, as of a day later (after admittedly putting the laptop in snooze mode) Outlook hadn't yet finished indexing my email. (My PST file is about 100 MB). If/when it does finish indexing , I'll try to figure out where they hide the index to see how big it is and whether indexing makes email usefully searchable. Not that I now (or ever) have had a choice. Click "search" and you can do nothing until you index the email. The older search by sender/date etc. isn't apparently available anymore.

If you highlight a PDF email attachment, Outlook says it cannot preview the file because there is no previewer installed for it. There is a link to browse for previewers on the Microsoft site, but there wasn’t one for Acrobat. Earlier I’d installed (via a separate download) the PDF export tool for Office, but I have no idea what plug-in is missing here.

So far I am disappointed not to find some truly useful new features or bug fixes:

1) It would be nice if you delete junk mail entries that Outlook would put them onto its junk mail list automatically.

2) I still can't assign tasks to another Outlook user. This never worked for me in Outlook 2003. When I tried assigning a task from an Outlook 2003 user (myself on another system) to myself on the Outlook 2007 system, the assigned task arrived only as email in the assignee’s inbox. This is the same and not-very-useful way it was handled in Office 2003.

Installing Office 2007

2007-02-24T08:22:00.000-05:00

In a nutshell: Not as smooth as I’d hoped, with lots of surprises along the way and after installation.

My environment: An HP/Compaq laptop running XP service pack 2, 1.4 Ghz with xxx memory and sufficient disk for the installation. Since Microsoft does not make IE version yy available on Windows 2000, I decided some time ago to standardize on Mozilla Firefox on both the older machine and my laptop where I performed the Office 2007 testing and review.

I specifically requested a custom, limited installation (not an upgrade) so I could keep my Office 2003 applications to develop test documents to test with Office 07, and vice-versa. I selected the default office shared features and office tools (Microsoft Office Graph and Microsoft Document Imaging) although I still am not sure what they are. I was careful to check “do not remove older versions,” although (see below) although they were not removed, they were hidden. Moreover, when

The installation required 1.3 GB and took about 25 minutes to install on a 1.4 Mhz Windows XP laptop. After installation, the system suggested I go to Office Online for updates. After about 5 minutes I thought I was downloading updates when I received a message: I must use Internet Explorer at least version 5.0 (I switched to Mozilla Firefox several months ago). I downloaded “OGAPlugininstall” and installed it from my local machine. NOTE: This automatic download to update Office does not include the ability to save files in Acrobat PDF format. For that you must search, download, and install the “SaveasPDFandXPS” file. I saw no sign of a compatibility plug-in to open and save documents in the OpenOffice document formats.

Before you can install these, however, you must “activate” the Office applications. This took three tries, but when I succeeded I received a “Welcome” message that recommended I also download a file that allows periodic updates to track and solve crashes and other system failures.” I did that.

Microsoft Office lists as a feature about being able to "save to PDF or XPS"... but that facility doesn't come with the Office software package. You have to Google to find it on the MS site, download it, install it separately...

From start to finish, it took me about ¾ hour to install Office, and I got more than I wanted (more about that later).

Office Professional 2007 Installation Notes:

Initial total disk space: 20,651,000,000 bytes; after installation 19,346,000,000 bytes – 1.3 Gigabytes taken.
I selected the option to install only Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. What I ended up with was those plus Outlook, MS Access, and MS Publisher.

Installation Lessons Learned:

Be sure you have at least 1.5 spare gigabytes of storage before you begin. Updating your old copy of Office (replacing the old applications) will reduce the total net storage you will use.
Be very careful to select only the components of Office that you want due to compatibility with other systems or devices (e.g., Palm Pilots). I was careful but I didn't get what I expected, and I don't dare "go home again" -- uninstall Outlook 2007 and re-install Outlook 2007, since I expect the format of the .PST file is different (thus the problem with my Palm Pilot synching).
Plan about an hour to install Office, and then plan several hours to learn how to use each applications.
I seemed to “lose” Word 2003; couldn’t even find it after a search through the whole hard disc for “winword.exe.” Rather than risk uninstalling the unwanted applications and attempting to install their Office 2003 counterparts, I left things as they were. However, when I click on a shortcut for Word 2003, I periodically receive a message about “installing…” and Word 2003 starts up. This isn’t normal behavior. (I didn’t receive the same “installing” message with Excel, at least not yet.)
Tried again later to open a “.doc” file with a double-click – assuming I’d managed to retrieve WinWord for Office 2003. Sorry, I received a very long “configuring” message and Word 2007 took control again. Then later when I tried opening the “.doc” file, Word 2003 took over. Later a double-click brought up Word 20003. This was very confusing to say the least.
Likewise with Excel 2003 (“office 11”) and old files with the .xls extension. Clicking on them brought up Excel 2007, even after trying again to specifically associate files with extension “.xls” with Excel from Office 2003. Excel 2007 would open the spreadsheet, in “compatibility” mode. Similar issue with .xls files; if I open Excel via its shortcut, I could then open .xls files with it. Lesson: apparently the new Office preempts the old extension names and openes them in "compatibility" mode. That seems reasonable, but I still don't like the occasional "installing..." message nor the time it takes to finish.

Microsoft Office 2007 Review Begins!

2007-02-24T08:18:00.000-05:00

Well, I received my review copy of Microsoft Office 2007 Professional, and have begun the long process of installing, learning, and testing it. I am going to post all my unvarnished findings here -- if you read this and think I've gotten something wrong, feel free to tell me. I am also writing a companion Info Insider column exploring the strategic issues involved with selecting a new Office system --whether client side (new or an upgrade to Office 2007), Open Office / StarOffice) or web based (like Google Apps).

So here you'll see my findings as they occur, good, bad, and always honest.

Web 2.0 - Content 2.0

2007-01-26T20:54:00.000-05:00

2.0
OK, it's been a while since I've posted any curmudgeonly thoughts. Been busy writing about Acrobat 8.0 and its consistency with Content 2.0.
What's "Content 2.0" you say? Well, you have to be living under a rock not to have heard about Web 2.0, and since the yin/yang of the web is application/data, I thought it was important to point out that the yang-side of things - content - is in the midst of its own birth pangs.

What are some distinguishing characteristics of content that are undergoing transformational change, the "2.0" thingy? Like Web 2.0, I see a parallel set of attributes in the content side of things:

1) Truly structured (XML-based) content, the question being how comparatively descriptive the structures are. See O’Reilly – “Data is the next ‘Intel-Inside’

2) Web standards applied to content

3) Social, cooperative, collaborative media

4) Delivered anywhere, anytime to any device (re-purposing

5) Combined in new and unexpected ways (re-use

6) Unexpected “mashup’s” providing new content possibilities (e.g., SVG and FlashPaper as alternates to PDF

7) Highly visual

Unlike the content world before OpenOffice (and its cousins StarOffice etc.), and Office 2007, content was pretty much whatever you wrote and laid out on a page... just like static web pages. The words were important, but the tools were presentational -- they helped you add visual appeal to the words, but the words were pretty much a continuous stream of text separated by spaces and punctuation. Now things are changing. Although Office 2007 appears (I'll know more after I get my hands on a package) to merely translate the old "visual layout of text" --Rich Text Format-- into XML, still it is a giant step in the right direction. It helps to be able to search for a figure caption or table caption, for example, while excluding paragraph text.

Now there's too much to think about in Content 2.0 to lay it all down here, but suffice it to say that Adobe has taken a similar step forward with Acrobat 8.0 in adding flash-based collaboration to the formerly electronic reader capabilities of Acrobat. And just before I submitted the column praising Adobe for that feat, I learned that --like OpenOffice and Office 2007-- Adobe had its own initiative to transform Acrobat's internal structure to XML -- the "Mars" project. So that makes another heavy hitter signing up for Content 2.0.

One nit-pick about Acrobat 8.0 though --it's open but still isn't completely converted to the "open source" religion. I was very disappointed to see that there is no Adobe writer plug-in to Mozilla, no "web capture" if you will that preserves the links. Still, Adobe is taken some distinctly forward steps in Acrobat 8.0 and deserves credit for that.

Secret to Content Longevity?

2006-07-24T20:48:00.000-04:00

The Wrapper, not the Gum
One goal of FDsys is to preserve content for future access and repurposing. So naturally the questions are: 1) Are you using XML? and 2) If so, what DTD or schema? I was expecting to hear "WordML" (Microsoft Word's XML standard, which is really more an XML expression of its RTF or Rich Text Format; I was also hoping to here OpenDocument, the rich XML office standard on which OpenOffice is constructed. The answers surprised me, but in retrospect should not have. FDsys's plan is to take the content in whatever format it arrives --preferably in a reasonably small number of common formats-- and to concentrate on the metadata wrapper itself, for accessibility. Here's what Mike Wash said.

"We have developed requirements for the information packages that will
exist in FDsys. FDsys architecture is based on the Open Archival
Information System (OAIS) model which develops the concept of
submission, archival and dissemination packages. The excerpts from the
Requirements Document will help you understand our approach to
structuring submission packages and dissemination packages."

And now the details, obviously too much for my 800-word Information Insider column. By "RD" Wash means the FDsys "Requirements Document.

"Page 31 in the RD 2.0 Document
3.2.3.1 Submission Information Packages (SIP)
This section specifies the packaging details for the Submission
Information Package (SIP), and describes how digital content and its
associated metadata are logically packaged for submission to FDsys.
A SIP contains the target digital object(s) and associated descriptive and
administrative metadata. It will be the vehicle whereby content packages
are submitted to FDsys by Content Originators. The concept of the SIP in
the OAIS (Open Archival Information System) model provides a starting
point for the specification of content and associated metadata, but it does
not specify how it is packaged. It is necessary that a SIP follow prespecified
rules so that FDsys can validate and accept the content for
ingest.

Associated with the SIP are three types of information:
* Content Information (digital object(s) and Representation Information),
* Packaging Information, and
* Descriptive Information.
Packaging Information is the information that binds or encapsulates the
Content Information. To accomplish this, a SIP will include a binding
metadata file (sip.xml) that relates the digital objects and metadata
together to form a system-compliant SIP. The Metadata Encoding and
Transmission Standard (METS) schema shall be adopted as the encoding
standard for the sip.xml file, and GPO will specify profiles for METS to
drive its implementation for FDsys.

Descriptive Information is the metadata that allows users to discover the
Content Information in the system.

All file components of the SIP will be populated within a structured file
system directory hierarchy and are then aggregated into a single file or
entity for transmission and ingest into the system."

Wash elaborates further:
"Page 42 in the RD 2.0 Document
3.2.3.4 Dissemination Information Package (DIP)
Dissemination Information Packages (DIPs) are transient copies of digital
objects, associated content metadata, and business process information
that are delivered from the system to fulfill End User requests and Content
Originator orders. As necessary, DIPs should follow the concept of a DIP
as outlined in the OAIS (Open Archival Information System) model.

The DIP is created as part of delivery processing and digital objects may
be adjusted based on orders and requests to support the delivery of hard
copy output, electronic presentation, and digital media.

The DIP should include all digital objects and/or metadata necessary to
fulfill requests and orders. The DIP may also include a binding metadata
file that relates the digital objects and metadata together to form a
package. The Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS)
schema has been adopted for the SIP and AIP and may be used as the
encoding standard for the binding metadata file, if a binding metadata file
is created."

Standardized, format neutral, and concentrating on the information about the content rather than the content itself. That is the long view, because when you are dealing with a very large (and unpredictable) number for format types, you have to concentrate on the access and delivery of these things.

More Q&A to follow soon.

Future Digital Systems - FDSys... Complete Q&A

2006-07-20T21:15:00.001-04:00

Cutting Room Floor -- Mike Wash Q&A - GPO, FDSys
My next InfoInsider column describes an initiative at the US Government Printing Office that surprised me by its breadth, vision, and implementation pace. That initiative is called Future Digital System (or FDsys). FDsys began with strategic planning in July 2004 and developed a strategic vision for the 21st Century. This vision provides a plan to provide printing and electronic delivery services to the three branches of federal government, 1250 Federal Depository libraries (providing protection from disastrous losses), and to the general public. FDsys is packaged into six phases, is currently mid-way through phase 4 (implementation planning), and expects a full system implementation in October of 2007.

For the past several months I've posed questions and received responses from Mike Wash, GPO's Chief Technical Officer. Due to the size constraints of my column in eContent Magazine, I could only summarize my questions and Mike's answers. If you've read this far, I assume you'd like more details. Here, in this and succeeding posts, are the details of my interactions with Mike.

Question: Ever the IT guy, I asked "What are your broad systems acquisition strategies:
a. Best of Breed versus integrated systems?
b. Proprietary versus Open Source."
Since we're talking about essentially loosely structured content, by "Proprietary" you can easily infer "Microsoft." By "Open Source" you can equally infer "OpenOffice" or "StarOffice 8."
Answer: Here were Mike's answers.
"FDsys will be focused on meeting customer needs;
therefore, GPO is taking a best of breed approach to acquiring
and integrating the technology components that will comprise
FDsys." and "FDsys is a standards based system."
My comment: Since the federal government is "by the people," --all of us-- I think he did a pretty job of stating a preference for standards while not specifying exactly which standards he was referring to. OpenOffice became an ISO standard in May.

More on the Enterprise Search Summit

2006-06-26T21:15:00.000-04:00

ESS - more thoughts

Expect more vendor consolidation, and there are many instances of it already:

* Autonomy bought Verity (an oil-and-water team, IMHO).
* Oracle bought TripleHop (great product that combined Autonomy’s statistical search with Verity’s keyword approach).

Not only that, but due to the "camel's nose in the tent" phenomenon, if you've already picked a major vendor that you trust for a major collection of services (Microsoft for ASP/email/Visual Source Safe... or Oracle for databases....) you may be tempted to go with that vendor's search solution --for better or for worse. Doing that will lock you in for a long time. Vendors may see "search" as a way to lock you into their other more profitable solutions.

Enterprise Search Symposium

2006-06-25T21:07:00.000-04:00

Well, it's been about a month since I attended this conference in NYC. I wanted to let my first impressions sink in before relaying my conclusions about enterprise search and this conference. After a month, I have to say I am as ambivilant in many of my conclusions as I was in May. Here are some of those conclusions.

First, the conference was surprisingly well attended. I'd estimate there were from 800-900 attendees, way above the total last year (I'm told). So maybe this finally is the year of Enterprise search. On the other hand, several conference presentors reminded us that IBM developed enterprise search software in the mid 1960s --that's right, about 40 years ago-- and the fundamental capabilities haven't changed a whole lot. Moreover, the market for enterprise search is less than a billion dollars, a relatively small size. So is this the year Enterprise search finally takes off? Or is this a little like Lucy's football?

More thoughts on the way this week.

MS Office Irritants

2006-04-02T15:59:00.000-04:00

Microsoft Office has been with us for a long time. In particular, Microsoft Word's DOS version was available at least in the early 90s. I will give the latest version of Office 2007 (aka "Office 12") a fair and impartial review when there is a stable version to review. In the meantime though, Microsoft, listen up. Although I'm writing this blog, believe me there are many other folks in the "silent majority" of users who feel as I do but just suffer in silence.

I like MS Access and Excel, but there are lots of things I hate about Word and PowerPoint. I hope you'll endeavor to fix these in Office 12 and not simply tart up the old products with a new interface. First, here are some particularly annoying things about Word. Let's start with stability. This product has been around for 15 or so years, and it still is buggy -- as in "Word has experienced a problem" and then the whole thing hangs. Maybe you'll be able to save what you've done, maybe not. But shouldn't this product be bullet proof?

Then there's the infamous "Do you want to merge changes" message when you open a document attached to an email. Everyone's first (second, third) reaction is "huh?" Yes, I understand how to get around that, but I shouldn't have to.

Here's another bogus feature: Whenever you print a Word document --nothing else but print, mind you-- and exit the document, you get the message "Do you want to save the changes?" Again, a big "huh?" First, second, third reactions are "I don't think I made any changes, but I guess I'd better save it anyway." The message comes because you've inadvertantly associated a printer to the document. If this warning is such a great idea, then why don't you apply it consistently with PowerPoint and Excel too?

Here's another: Unhelpful HELP. If you want to know how to prit to fit a paper width or a certain number of pages, Word's help says "If your work doesn't fit exactly on the number of printed pages you want, you can adjust, or scale, your printed work to fit on more or fewer pages than it would at normal size. You can also specify that you want to print your work on a certain number of pages." Great. And how do we do that? Your HELP system, like Word itself, has grown lazy and bloated.

And don't even get me started with security and "leaking" of personal information inadvertently.

These are just a few examples of simple things Microsoft could have done long ago to improve this product. I've got hundreds more but I'm getting carpal tunnel just from resaving my Word documents after printing them...

Getting more value from Office Documents -- XQuery

2006-04-02T15:14:00.000-04:00

Since documents by definition are created by and for the world-wide masses, there is a wide variation in the value of these documents. By value I mean both the quality of what they contain (are they true? accurate? interesting?) but also in their value as assets that can be transformed or reused. Microsoft Office 2007 will be XML-based; OpenOffice and StarOffice 8 are XML-based. You can argue whose XML is richer and more useful (so far I give that award to OO and SO8 for a variety of reasons that I'll explain later). But it is still hard to do much with that XML unless you use the right tools. I've used Altova's "Spy" for some time as a suite for some XML management like schema development and analysis and been generally happy with that suite. Increasingly, however, styling and transforming the content is becoming the best way to derive value from investments in XML content. That means using XSLT and XQuery, and I'm increasingly believing that for serious use of those standards, you need a different tool: Stylus Studio. To learn more about this alternative suite, check out Larry Kim's Stylus Studio blog.

Watch this space... StarOffice 8 Review in earnest

2006-04-02T15:04:00.000-04:00

Well I've gotten the green light to review StarOffice 8 in eContent magazine, with a very short timeframe. So watch this space for details that will be unavailable in the review, or even too "edgy" for a printed publication. In this blog I can be as candid and opinionated as I wish... after all, I am a curmudgeon.

Star Office 8 - Writer - More Findings

2006-01-17T20:42:00.000-05:00

More StarOffice 8 Findings

I’m using StarOffice 8 (SO8) as my default word processor now, and two general impressions about StarOffice Writer continue to amaze me:

1) How easy it is to learn how to use, its familiar feel for MS Word users.
2) How it has improved many of the annoying shortcomings of MS Word.

Although I’ve read the reviewer’s guide, I find myself generally not needing the HELP system. It is as though I’m interacting with a twin –not an identical twin, and not the evil twin, but with the better twin.

Little annoying things with MS Word that SO8 has fixed:

1) First and foremost, the table model. You really can join (merge) cells vertically, and it isn’t just a “fake join” (one where the cell boundary has simply been hidden, as in MS Word); you really can vertically center text within a vertically merged call.
2) Second, when you use the format painter to paint table cell attributes, you paint not only the text font attributes but also the cell attributes (like borders and cell shading). This should be an easy fix for MS Word. We’ll see.

So though I’m still in the honeymoon phase, do I notice any blemishes on SO8’s Writer? Well a couple. Here’s what I’ve found so far:

1) Unexpected hang while initializing the templates for first-time use. I sent a message to SO8 support about this. This has happened only once.
2) And speaking of the format painter, sometimes it doesn’t seem to paint formats. Several times, especially with text copied from a web page into a Writer document, you can try as you will to format paint but it doesn’t seem to work. I’m not sure why. I’ll bet I could edit the XML text contents to fix the problem (as I might have done with WordPerfect reveal codes a decade ago), but haven’t gone to try that yet.
3) There is a lovely little anticipated text completion feature as you type into Writer, and sometimes it cleverly guesses the right word, but I can’t figure out how to accept its suggested completion. I’m sure I’ll figure that out; the feature is too nice not to be documented there.
4) And speaking of XML, I examined the “content.xml” piece of a saved document, and then I opened it in Altova XML Spy to see if the document was valid. It wasn’t (although it was well-formed). I’m not sure why; there are schema references; perhaps they’ve changed. Anyway, SO8 comes so close and I wish there were a way to get that validity check to work.
5) Last and minor to some folks but not to me, I dearly wish that the text analysis functions were a bit beefier. I find the thesaurus to be somewhat better than MS Words, but there is no way to run a reading level analysis the way there is in Word. I’m sure that will come; maybe there is even an add-on somewhere that I don’t know about. But I do miss that reading level analyzer.

As I said, working with Writer has an uncannily familiar feel, so trying to figure out what to test next is in some ways difficult. It is almost like the experience of saving all your laptop Windows settings before getting the thing re-imaged, then using the updated laptop with its settings. You tend to find little differences and things missing as you work.

What do I plan to check next in Writer? Much as I dislike MS Word’s “fields” capabilities for a variety of reasons, I’ve grown comfortable with the way they work. One feature I especially like (and need) is the ability to display a “last date and time saved” string in a document footer. I use this even in document management systems, since you never know which version the printed copy you’re looking at is.

StarOffice 8 - Installation and first impressions begin

2006-01-10T21:40:00.000-05:00

Installation (and registration) went smooth as silk. Unlike typical MS applications, StarOffice8 offered (but didn't default) to be my choice for opening MS Word, PowerPoint, and Excel.

Jumped right into the Writer, created a table, and tried right away to do a couple of things that always bugged me in MS Word:
1) Using the style painter to copy cell background from one cell to another... worked like a charm.
2) Joined cells horizontally and vertically... worked fine.

#2 is something that WordPerfect for DOS in the early 90s could do, but MS Word hasn't mastered it yet (fakes the vertical join, but doesn't really do it).

Bonus surprise: I could save the table in native Writer or many other formats... including DocBook. Fantastic!

How to Eat the Review Elephant?

2006-01-10T21:00:00.000-05:00

Well the StarOffice8 CD arrived yesterday, along with lots of reviewer hints and overviews. How to go about assessing this office suite? What criteria that I can also apply to Office 12? Here are SOME of the review dimensions that I will be considering the following criteria; can you suggest anything to add?:

Overall Package Considerations

Cost

Licensing options, including List price/ street price, support options, ease of installation, disk space consumed, memory required. Overall value.

Ease of Use
Intuitiveness of screens, HELP, click efficiency, importing/exporting others formats?

Import/Export
Accuracy, robustness (e.g., styles included?), complexity to perform. Interoperability with MS Office. Evaluate:

Automates the analysis of documents to identify potential migration risks?
Calculates the cost of migration
Compare migration options in different Office Package editions (Migration Partner, Enterprise Edition in StarOffice 8)
How well does it migrate Macros?

Installation

Ease of use, ability to uninstall.

Performance

How long does it take to perform simple and complex procedures (such as updating a TOC or index, inserting a graphic).

Data Management

OLE? Live data from databases? DB queries as source (which ones)? XML Sources?

XML Support
Schema and DTD?
Format versus meaning?

Tags for formatting only?
Support for external XML models?

Forms Support?
Which forms schema? XForms.

Extensibility? Allow use of "alien attributes"?

Functionality

How robust is the office package? What does it contain? Consider these modules:

Word Processing (emphasized here)
Spreadsheets
Presentations
Drawing packages (vector/raster)
Database
Others – Chart, Math, integrated tools

Word Processing Capabilities

Styles
Supported in presentation tool? Robustness in WP?

Robustness of table model

Technical document Support

Desktop Publishing (layout intensive) Support

Header/Footers

Tables Of Contents, Indexes, Hyperlinks, Cross References

Writer Support

Spell Check, Thesaurus, Word Count, Reading Level

PDF Support
Which Acrobat version compatibility?

Clash of the Titans -- over CONTENT in 2006

2005-12-28T13:47:00.000-05:00

Those of you who read my Information Insider column on EContent Magazine (http://econtentmag.com) know my views about the importance of content and how well XML supports the creation, reuse, and repurposing of content. Hand-in-hand with content and XML is the value I place on open-source software, software --like the XML family of standards themselves-- have been peer reviewed.

If I am not mistaken, 2006 will be the year of the "Clash of the Titans," not only Microsoft and Google but somewhat lesser but important players too, including Sun Microsystems, Corel, Adobe, and a host of others who have decided to strike at Microsoft's jugular: Microsoft Office, the product from which Microsoft derives about 1/4 of its revenues. In fact, EContent Magazine will be publishing my column with this same title in early 2006.

In mid-year, I will begin writing a software review of Microsoft Office 12 (assuming a reasonably stable product is available by then). I will also be including a sidebar comparing Office 12 with two open-source products: OpenOffice and StarOffice. Since these latter two products are already available, I will begin writing my comments about these products in the first quarter of 2006, as a preparation to compare them with Office 12.

Others have in a sense beaten me to the punch: The Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the European Union, and many other foreign countries. By that I mean that they have already announced either deep skepticism about the "openness" of Office 12 and/or have pledged their support for OpenOffice or StarOffice.

Let the games begin!

OK... so what's a document?

2005-08-22T20:24:00.000-04:00

What is a Document?
If we’re going to discuss document (or content) management systems of various sorts, we have to frame up the discussion with what may seem like a trivial question: What is a document? Most of us have moved beyond whether or not a document is only paper, lambskin, or papyrus, but when you expand the definition to include electronic content, the answer to what constitutes a document gets fuzzy. So here’s how I define documents and document content.

First, a document is any piece of meaningful content –often with some of the look-and-feel of physical renditions like paper books--, whether public or private. Books are merely physical instances of electronic documents. “Meaningful content” extends beyond mere words, and includes video and audio. If you had to take a chance that every IPod download would be random static, you probably wouldn’t bother buying the device or repeating the download. And these days, multimedia content usually comes with its own metadata – information about the content, such as its author, when it was created, and so on.

But wait, you ask: Catalogs are books, and catalog content these days is usually found in a database. So are databases documents too? No, although I assert that the reverse is true in a way: “documents are data too,” a nice little bumper sticker thought.

I see document content as existing in a spectrum, ranging from databases (the most highly structured form of content) to highly structured content (increasingly expressed in XML) to forms to documents that are more-or-less subtly structured. Note I don’t use the term “unstructured documents” as many others do. To me, “unstructured documents” are an oxymoron: Either they have structure of some sort (and therefore have use and meaning) or they do not. “Unstructured” means “random” and randomness is not useful to purveyors of content. Even a well laid out advertisement has structure. Although the advertisement’s electronic format may not make it easy to discern its structure and pitch, human eyeballs readily do (or the sponsor won’t re-run the ad).

Why the brouhaha about “subtle” versus “un”-structured? Because if you don’t understand the difference you give up any chance of using whatever mechanisms to structure a document –such as styles—that are available to you. Or you give up and say “hey, it’s unstructured, no wonder I can’t repurpose or transform the document to be or do something else.” And that would be a pity. We invest a lot in our documents and deserve to get the most out of them that we can.

So to summarize, documents are book-like containers of information, regardless of their format. Databases aren’t books (but can be used to produce books). The organization of documents ranges from subtly (or loosely) structured (like restaurant menus or a child’s book) to highly structured (like a form). Moreover, the binary format of documents, most commonly that of a word processor or page layout system, does not yield clues easily to its structure but structure it has or it wouldn’t be useful. Word processors and page layout programs’ structure is pretty darned loose, however, and that is one reason why the publishing world (that would be all of us) is ever-so-slowly moving to more explicit structure, XML.

Interestingly, Microsoft may actually be putting its cash horde where its mouth (support for XML) is. Press teasers coming out of Redmond suggest that Office 2006 will not only replace its binary format “RTF” with “XML,” but may in fact begin supporting the content (not just the look-and-feel) with arbitrary XML.

So curmudgeon point number 1: No document is unstructured. All documents (and document formats) have some structure, ranging from subtle or loose to very rigid. But please stop using the “unstructured” adjective, OK?

Why a Content Curmudgeon? What's Content Anyway?

2005-08-19T12:49:00.000-04:00

In this blog I'll be providing critical commentary about issues of interest to anyone who produces content of any any sort, but primarily the written kind. And if you create content of any sort, sooner or later you become interested in managing it... filing it, editing it, sharing it, maybe deleting or archiving it, and certainly being able to find it.
All these "lifecycle" issues surrounding content apply especially to words... I feel so strongly about words that my vanity plate simply has one word on it: WORD. Moreover, my website is http://my-words.org.

And why the curmudgeon part? Because there is a lot of BS surrounding the way we create, value, and manage our content --especially our words. I deal with document management and search vendors frequently --and we all use a word processor and alternately curse and sigh at our word processors, especially MS "Word".

This blog is a critical and frank look at words and the tools to manage and create them. Although I also write a bi-monthly column, "Info Insider" for eContent Magazine, this blog is where I'll put the franker stuff.

So if you're interested in Content (or even Knowledge) Management, from A-Z, from creation through deletion, and all the tools in between-- stay tuned.

Content Curmudgeon - Critical ECM Commentary

Social Media in the Cloud

Email Dysfunction – Information Overload

Dysfunctional email

And then there's information overload

Thoughts on Enterprise Search Summit 2011

Electronic Discovery Reference Model –Production and Presentation

Production

Presentation

In Summary

Electronic Discovery Reference Model - Processing, Review and Analysis

Electronic Discovery Reference Model – Identification through Preservation and Collection

EDRM and the Information Management Reference Model (IMRM)

Identification, Preservation, and Collection

In Summary

Using MS Word to Create Blogger Posts

Using Microsoft Word and Google Docs to Create Blogs and Post

Start with an MS Word .docx File

Table Test

Graphics Test Too

Bottom Line

Beginning of iPad Buyer's Remorse

eDiscovery - Your Next Crisis?

Reference Models

IMRM

EDRM

Exploring the iPad: First Impressions

I Hate Comcast

More Great “8” posts from AIIM

E-Books, E-Readers, and Peak Oil

Justifying eDiscovery Systems

And Now For Something Completely Different

It's TAXonomy Time

CMIS - EMC's role and vision for the future

Enterprise Search Summit Program

XML 10th Anniversary

Update on Office 2007 Compatibility etc.

How Green Are Your Documents

Office Suites and XML - Vendor feedback

MarkLogic

More Evidence of Content 2.0 - Blogging with StarOffice 8

Office 2007 Packaging

HELP - online only?

The right brain, aesthetic side of Office 2007; the Left Brain view of PowerPoint

Interchanging documents and email between 2007 and Office 2003

Other little Installation Issues -- and a side reflection on Acrobat

Client Side or Web-Based Editing -- interesting observation

Exploring Word 2007

Exploring Outlook 2007

Installing Office 2007

Microsoft Office 2007 Review Begins!

Web 2.0 - Content 2.0

Secret to Content Longevity?

Future Digital Systems - FDSys... Complete Q&A

More on the Enterprise Search Summit

Enterprise Search Symposium

MS Office Irritants

Getting more value from Office Documents -- XQuery

Watch this space... StarOffice 8 Review in earnest

Star Office 8 - Writer - More Findings

StarOffice 8 - Installation and first impressions begin

How to Eat the Review Elephant?

Clash of the Titans -- over CONTENT in 2006

OK... so what's a document?

Why a Content Curmudgeon? What's Content Anyway?