April 29, 2004
How to Get Started with a Content Management Project
This presentation is from the session I moderated at the Seybold/Gilbane event in Amsterdam last week. Here is some perspective from Hans van de Rakt who is principal at the Netherlands-based consulting firm, MarketShare. Note that the site is in Dutch, with an English language version available here.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:53 AM | Comments (1)
April 28, 2004
New Article on eForms in the Seybold Report
I have a new article on eForms in the Seybold Report, "Suddenly, E-Forms Matter." To quote briefly from the introduction:
"Electronic forms have long resided in a sleepy corner of the content-management landscape, perched somewhere between scan-and-capture applications and records management. Indeed, only recently have content-management vendors and analysts broadened the definition of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) to include the comparatively fixed content assets in applications such as records management and forms processing. As a result, the feature set and functionality of electronic forms have never been high on end users' lists for content-management solutions.
This lack of interest has not been from a lack of work, however. Electronic forms are ubiquitous on the Internet-think e-commerce applications, site registration and search forms. Indeed, HTML forms are the de facto standard for interfacing people and processes on the Web, and Internet and intranet applications are replete with HTML forms for both user and administrative interfaces.
Moreover, content-management applications especially have relied on HTML forms interfaces. Many Web applications, for example, depend heavily on storing content in relational database tables. HTML forms are a direct and ready means of developing an interface for such tables, so developers have relied on them.
But just as people eventually realized that HTML was not a robust markup language that could glue applications together-leading to XML-so too have people realized that HTML forms are not the best method for collecting and validating data and content."
Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:55 PM | Comments (1)
April 27, 2004
DRM for Electronic Editions
One of the more interesting DRM and electronic publishing applications I have seen recently is the combined product and service offering from NewsStand, Inc..
NewsStand offers, essentially, WYSIWYG distribution of periodicals through a secure reader. They have some prominent publishers already, including major newspapers such as The New York Times and Boston Globe and high-value periodicals such as The Harvard Business Review.
For an indepth presentation about NewsStand from Michele Chaboudy, Chief Marketing Officer, please click here. This presentation was originally given at the DRM conference in New York City earlier this month.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:30 PM
XML and the Airlines
I have a new article in Transform magazine about how Contintal Airlines has used XML and Web Services to automate some routine publishing and document review tasks. To quote briefly from the introduction:
Aircraft maintenance is an especially content-centric process. The typical aircraft comprises thousands of systems, subsystems and parts, each with its own documentation. Moreover, these parts are often changed over time; an engineering change or new safety requirement may modify the part, necessitating a change in the related documentation.
Safety is paramount in commercial aviation, so federal regulations require that the documentation be comprehensive and up to date. Like other airlines, Houston-based Continental Airlines faced the problem of ensuring that its 4,000 maintenance personnel, spread over four hubs and 23 other maintenance facilities, receive and read critical updates to maintenance documents. In the past, circulating such changes to documentation was a largely manual, and thus time-consuming and costly, process.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:04 PM
April 25, 2004
The State of the eForms Market
I gave my opening presentation at the Seybold eForms summit. It went well, though I have to admit to being a bit in awe of the audience, which included many of the real thinkers and doers in the XHTML and eForms world. But my job was to lay the groundwork for the rest of the day, and the feedback was positive.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 1:30 PM | Comments (1)
April 22, 2004
Amsterdam...
...rules!
Top ten reasons to visit Amsterdam.
- The coffee. A four-ounce cup packs the punch of a half gallon of Dunkin Donut's
- The direct but polite people.
- The colors and the typography. Even pay phones are cool.
- Walking. Anywhere and everywhere.
- The architecture. I'm sure there are boring streets somewhere in Amsterdam, but I didn't see one.
- The bikes, everywhere. I saw more than one dog in a basket at the front of a bike, and easily 1000 children riding in front of their parents in boxes, baskets, and bikeseats.
- The trams.
- The beer.
- The Van Gogh Museum. Weirdly ugly on the outside; the second floor is wonderful.
- The canals. Obvious yes, but beautiful still.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:12 PM
April 13, 2004
New York City, on Foot
Walking in midtown Manhattan is, from my experience, different from walking in any other place in America. Try, for instance, crossing Broadway and 48th street at evening rush hour. I was walking downtown, in a light rain, and had the misfortune of carrying my computer and an overnight bag. I am a fast walker, and I don't like being encumbered. That the two bags slowed me a little and made me about 50% wider was all the difference between a brisk walk and a slow plod behind, well, thousands of people. (Maybe this is one of the reasons I like New York City so much—it withstands my tendency to exaggerate. I can say I was behind thousands of people and, goldarn it, I was!)
Crossing the wide expanse of 42nd Street, I almost stopped and laughed at the swarm of people crossing in both directions. 42nd is double the width of the surrounding streets and, of course, the hub of the theater district. The sidewalks too are extra wide there, so when the signal changed to "walk" the center of the street was suddenly—how to best say this— a crush of people. What was so striking, though, was how many people had umbrellas. Carrying an umbrella has the odd effect of making someone, at first glance, faceless—you can't immediately tell if someone is coming or going—so the center of 42nd street was momentarily jammed with people seemingly going in every direction at once. I found myself halting for a moment and nearly laughing before I caught myself.
A few blocks before this, I had one of those moments I seem to have all the time in New York City. Stopped at the 46th street light, I caught the glance of a guy, my guess a local, who was clearly impressed with something. I followed his gaze to the woman next to me at the light, who, I suddenly realized, was beautiful and underdressed. The rain had been really coming down for a minute—anyone with an umbrella had raised it—but here she was, leather jacket open, shirt open several buttons, and her magnificent cleavage catching as much of the rain as the biggest of the umbrellas. She was talking with a guy whom I can only describe as an aging,vaguely cleaned-up version of Ratso Rizzo. Picture Ratso, later in life, in a bad suit. I glanced long enough to catch her eye, then his, and offered what I hoped was the perfect, brief ironic look, as if to say, "It's raining, I had a moment here at the light and glanced at you, but don't read anything more into it than that. You have your business and I have mine." Mercifully, they kept right on talking, I turned to face front again, and the light changed. The local guy stumbled off the curb a step ahead of me—he was drunk I now realized, which explained his momentarily extra long look at the couple. Had I read his condition more quickly, I wouldn't have followed his glance.
Navigating a Manhattan sidewalk can involve many such quick and important judgments. Somehwere below 42nd St, for example, I found myself behind an impressively large black man. I would guess he was at least 6'4 and 250 pounds, and he was leading a girl, no more than 5 or 6, by the hand. The remarkable thing was how quickly and how deftly he was moving, without making her sprint and stumble to keep up. This wasn't new to him, or to her; she knew what it took to keep up. They were right in front of me, and I saw my chance to make some headway through the crowd. He was wider than me, even with my bags, and the two of them together, hand in hand, were perhaps double my width. I quickened my pace and got right behind them.
If you have walked in midtown Manhattan, you know there are two fates for a pedestrian—walk or be walked over. I always note that it takes me about 24 hours in Manhattan to go from a stumbling, halting, gosh-forgive-me, oops-excuse-me idiot to a confident, striding Titan. People do not get out of your way or yield even an inch on a Manhattan sidewalk unless you show purpose. Clearly, the man in front of me exuded purpose. The sidewalk seemed to part before him, and we breezed along for about four blocks this way. When I broke right and he and the girl broke left at 34th, I resisted the urge to thank him.
I wondered for a moment what led people to give him as much berth as they did. Was it merely his size? Was it his size and the color of his skin? I was hoping that it was neither of these, that instead it was the presence of the young girl at the end of his arm. "She is so little!" I imagine them saying. "And look at her! So good following her father that way. They have places to go. He is a serious young man and he is guiding her through this maze of people. Let's give them a little extra room."
I wonder too what she is thinking. How her father's massive hand swallows hers, and how she knows that if she just keeps pace, just concentrates and turns and meaneuvers as he does, that everything will be fine and they will get to where they are going.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:41 PM | Comments (1)
Brief DRM Conference Report
I am at Bill Rosenblatt's DRM conference, and it is a big hit. Excellent crowd, excellent content. I moderated a session on the e-publishing market, which went well.
I was very interested in a session on legal issues that ended up being mainly about compliance, and the need for DRM in the enterprise. One of the speakers, Nick Ackerman from the law firm Dorsey & Whitney, made some excellent points. I was especially glad to hear him not define compliance narrowly, as in just Sarbanes-Oxley or just HIPAA. He made the point that compliance is an enterprise-wide problem, requiring an enterprise-wide solution, i.e., DRM.
George Everhart, CEO of DRM vendor Sealed Media, then took this a step further, saying that compliance should be viewed not as the final goal for an enterprise DRM strategy, but as the catalyst for a broader "information lifecycle management policy." This has DRM cozying up to records management in some ways, but also suggests that organizations need to look at all organizational information—and develop policies for all of it.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 4:58 PM
New York City
I stepped out of Penn Station last night into a steady rain, but was lucky to have a cab pull up to the curb just as I did. Because of traffic and the rain, what should have been a 5-minute cab ride turned into 20 minutes. I was tired, it was late, the cab was hot, and the air inside the cab was close. This is normally a recipe for misery for me, but the driver knew where he was going, so I didn't feel like I had to back-seat drive and could fall back into my thoughts.
As soon as we pulled from the curb, my driver started talking over his radio. At first I thought it was simply a call into his dispatcher, but then I realized he was speaking into one of those cell phones that also act as radios. He held the phone open and a few feet from his face and spoke at great length, in Hindi. I could barely hear the response from his listener, but she was clearly female, and she said perhaps 5 words to his 500.
More interesting was the rhythm of his voice. He was speaking rapidly, not quite as quickly as an auction caller but faster than a Catholic priest moving through the most rote portions of the Mass. He was also clearly repeating himself at times, not, it seemed to me, out of nervousness but in the way mobile phone users do when they suspect they have hit and returned from a dead cell. Of course, I had no idea what he was talking about. He didn't seem particularly upset, but nor was he amused or bored. I wondered, with how quiet his listener was and how musical his speech was, if he were perhaps reciting something or offering some kind of blessing.
Often when I am in a car I like to imagine the passing scenery as the opening scene from a movie that I will one day produce; this works especially well when I have the right music playing—the right soundtrack. New York City has perhaps been the setting for more movies than any other locale, and it's easy to see why. I never tire of looking at the streetscape in Manhattan. The tumble of high-brow and low-brow—Smith Barney meets The Metropolitan Opera meets Chip's Bagel and Brew—and the 24-hour flow of people and cars. Listening to my driver, I begin to think that perhaps New York City, now East 51st Street now Lexington Avenue, is the opening scene in some movie he is envisioning. The neon signs alone seem as if they could light the world, and his voice is urging me to understand this.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:32 PM
April 10, 2004
eBooks Show Life
Remember when everyone thought eBooks would be the next big thing? The apex of the hype was the fall of 2000 when there were two e-book conferences in New York one week apart. At the same moment speakers were trumpeting the advent of a billion dollar market, someone at the other end of the hall was already calling in the sell orders to their broker.
Here we are more than three years later, and there is, in fact, en eBook market. It is smaller than hyped of course, but it has proven to be some nice incremental revenue for some of the trade publishers. The Open eBook Forum (OeB) reported that retailers enjoyed $2.59M in eBook revenue for the quarter ended September 30, 2003 (their latest public numbers), an increase of 37% over the same quarter the year before. Not billions clearly, but modestly good numbers that are trending in the right direction.
I also like the latest news from OeB, their decision to produce a monthly eBook Bestseller List. The first published list is notable for how much it looks like any other bestseller list, and also where it differs. Thus we have books such as The Da Vinci Code (#1, go figure!) and Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies, which came in at #8. However, you also have books that don't often appear on general bestseller lists, such as Peter Hamilton's space opera, Pandora's Star, at #3.
More significant to the list are the refererence books—a bible, a dictionary, and a thesaurus. We all know bibles to be perennial good sellers, but so too are staple reference works such as dictionaries. Everyone has to have a dictionary in their home, and I like the idea that many people apply the same rule to their computers and PDAs. There is room in these devices for other reference materials as well.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 6:13 PM
XML Forms and XML Editors
Quick thought.
Where do XML-based eForms end and XML-based editors begin?
There is clearly some overlap. Certain kinds of content entry are well served by electronic forms—we wouldn't have built all of these industrial-strength Web sites if this weren't true. Indeed, HTML forms for content entry are the most common interface for many content management systems. As the world trends toward XML, will XML editors become the predominant GUI for content entry and editing? What about XML-based eForms? Will they dominate instead?
There are some things that XML editors clearly do that eForms were simply not designed to do—entering and updating lengthy documents comes to mind. But with InfoPath supporting a rich text interface and must-have editorial features such as spell checking, will full-blown editors only be required when length is a factor?
I would love to hear your thoughts.
Bill Trippe
btrippe@nmpub.com
Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:33 PM
April 7, 2004
Wonderful Things
I am guilty of liking movies that border on sappy, especially when they involve Sicilians. Thus, I would count movies such as Cinema Paradiso, Three Brothers, and Il Postino among my favorite "sappy movies that involve Sicilians." (Conveniently, there is usually an astonishingly beautiful woman in each movie to play to the cheap seats of my heart. Consider Maria Grazia Cucinotta in Il Postino, arguably the eighth natural wonder of the world, and the ethereal Agnese Nano in Cinema Paradiso, who appears on screen for all of eight seconds. There is a part of me that would see the movie again just for those eight seconds.)
There is a wonderful scene near the end of Il Postino where the hero, Mario Ruoppolo, goes around his island recording the sounds of the things he finds beautiful—the ocean waves, the wind. It is a beautifully expressed song of praise representing all that Mario has come to love, and, all the more poignantly, what he has learned to articulate. Mario is wise enough to know that, even though he has found his own voice, it is sometimes best to let wonderful things speak for themselves.
In a similar vein, there is a great mining exercise in The Poet's Companion where you declare what you believe. In the spirit of poetic license, I combine Mario's list and the mining exercise and list here some things that I have found to be wonderful.
- Cape Cod through the eyes of Joel Meyerowitz
- Baseball played well
- Swimming in just about any temperature water at Ferry Beach
- Greg Brown singing just about anything
- Bobby McFerrin leading the crowd in Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes
- Playing cards (the activity) and playing cards (as in, a deck)
- Being on the Acela, drink in hand, watching out the window as it rounds a bend in the Rhode Island woods at 150 mph
- A smooth touch down in your home airport after a long trip.
- Fresh, cold canteloupe and a hot cup of cream-silkened coffee.
- Robert Duvall acting, as opposed to Robert Duvall talking politics.
- Astonishing, one-of-a-kind books like The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake