May 23, 2004

The Role of XML in Content Management Solutions

Paul Hermans, Lead information architect at Amplexor in Belgium was one of the featured speakers at Seyold Europe. He spoke about the role of XML in content managent systems, something I often speak about. Paul gave a great presentation, touching on many of the same topics I often do; however, he gave more consideration and time to some of the editorial issues tied to bringing XML to a publishing process. This makes sense, given Paul's past experience at editorial giant Wolters Kluwer.

Among the points he made: XML in itself does NOT offer the solution. XML doesn't do anything; rather it allows you to describe your information as precisely as possible: hierarchical containment/structure, metadata, human-oriented semantics. (Paul also made the interesting caveat that some XML vocabularies DO something (MathML, SVG) if used with 'understanding' software.)

Most importantly, Paul notes, XML needs the help of both a good modular writing methodology ("It doesn't make sense to structure spagetti") and a good XML-aware CMS which offers:

Please see the presentation for more of Paul's insight.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 1:58 PM | Comments (2)

May 22, 2004

eForms Resources

I updated my eForms Resources page with some new articles and other links. There is a rapidly growing body of material out there, which is a sign of a healthy marketplace.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:09 PM

XML as a Tool for Getting More Value from Your Content

Publishers with marketable archived content have an opportunity to market the content on the Web. In this presentation from Seybold Europe, Aimee Potter, co-founder and COO of Paris-based Rosebud Technologies, presents an interesting case study of how a consumer publication is using XML to help profitably market archived content via the Web.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:08 PM

The Annual Spaghetti Harvest

One of the great things about the Internet is that all kinds of quirky and specialized content is no more than a Google away. Consider the BBC's April 1, 1957 broadcast of the bumper Swiss Spaghetti Harvest. My favorite line has to be, "The spaghetti harvest here in Switzerland is not, of course, carried out on anything like the tremendous scale of the Italian industry. Many of you, I'm sure will have seen pictures of the vast spaghetti plantations in the Po valley. For the Swiss, however, it tends to be more of a family affair."

Posted by Bill Trippe at 5:59 PM

May 21, 2004

Digging In

When I am writing about content management for publication, the most useful thing to be able to convey to readers is how end user organizations are actually implementing technology. What problem are they trying to solve, and how have they actually done with the technology they have chosen to implement.

Getting end users to talk about their projects has always been a challenge. To begin with, these are busy people. Plus, it isn't necessarily in their interest to discuss what they are doing. In some cases, it may be competitively sensitive. They may be building out some functionality that is to their competitive advantage. Indeed, the very fact that they are spending money on a certain technology is, at the end of the day, their business and not necessarily ours.

It appears that end users now have a new reason to be tightlipped. Larger companies, especially, seem to view public comments about technology efforts to be too much exposure. While no one has come right out and said this (I think), some people seem to view public comments about technology efforts to be material to the operations of the company.

Needless to say, the larger community would benefit from more information and not less. So I have been thinking of an idea.

Government efforts to implement content management technology should be spotlighted more. My presumption here is that, except in cases like the Defense Department or the intelligence agencies, government operations should all be an open book. I would love to see someone blog a major installation of content management technology at a government agency. Soup to nuts. From the earliest point in the project through to its conclusion. In all its detail--what has gone wrong, what has gone right, what decisions had to be made, what decisions had to be amended along the way.

Has this been done?

Posted by Bill Trippe at 6:35 PM | Comments (1)

May 19, 2004

The Big Unit

Randy Johnson pitched a perfect game last night, only the 17th in the history of major league baseball. Johnson, known as The Big Unit because of his extraordinary height (6'10"), is also, at 40 years old, the oldest pitcher to ever throw a know hitter.

I love baseball for a lot of reasons, but one of them is its quirkiness. As recently as a few days ago, people were wondering if Johnson still "has it." Clearly he does.

Here's to people in their 40s achieving perfection.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:12 PM

Acrobat and XML

Here's a sentence I wouldn't have found myself writing a couple of years ago.

I am finding the latest version of Acrobat to be helpful in some XML work I am doing.

It's a simple thing really, but I have been taking some consistently styled Microsoft Word files, publishing them as PDF, and then using the "save as XML" feature in Acrobat 6.0. (I know that I could use the "save as XML" feature in the latest version of Word, but the machine I happen to be using has Word 2000.)

The Acrobat-produced XML is OK. Not great, but more than workable, which is what I need for this particular project. It's nice to have this kind of option, especially since there is no shortage of PDF documents out there.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:09 PM | Comments (1)

May 18, 2004

Steady Growth Ahead for Book Publishers

According to the Book Industry Study Group, book publishers will see modest growth over the next several years, with the educational segments of the market promising the healthiest expansion:

Annual consumer expenditures for books will reach $44 billion by 2008, according to Book Industry TRENDS 2004. Trade, mass-market and professional publishing revenues will rise roughly 10 percent between now and then. Revenue growth will be higher still for university press and college publishers, but the most significant growth will be in the elhi and standardized-test segments of the industry, with respective increases of more than 20 and 45 percent.

This larger trend seems to track with my own observation that educational publishers are in a spending mode on technology. This is good. As they experience growth, the technology investment can help them maintain and perhaps even improve on profitability amidst the growth.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:15 PM

Reasonable Request, Don't You Think?

A poster to TECHWR-L wrote today:

My company is considering moving our documentation to an xml-based content management system. However, we are having a hard time finding tools that are easy to learn and reasonably priced (it must cost less than $12,000 to get 10 users up and running, but is expandable to 100 users). Our requirements are:

* wysiwyg xml authoring tool that was created for writers (not developers)
* includes xsl stylesheets for creating HTML help, Webhelp, oracle help
* includes workflow, version control, check in/check out
* can be used with sql and/or oracle databases

While a few of the details are a little out of place to me (e.g., why specifically mention SQL and Oracle?), I like the writer's focus on a price point for a fixed number of users. I always like thinking of technology rollouts in terms like this (getting n users to get up and running with x and y functionality).

I have to wonder how many solutions there are for the author of this post. ArborText Epic is too expensive, and a lower-cost, general-purpose, XML-aware CMS solution like that from Ektron would likely require some work to support output of chapter- and book-length material to PDF. Also, another poster has already correctly pointed out that the necessary XSL style sheets would require a fair bit of work.

Still, isn't it reasonable to assume you could launch basic single-source publishing for $1200/user?

Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:55 PM | Comments (1)

May 17, 2004

Playing Catch

Our backyard is a small area for two boys and a dad to play catch with a hardball. If you are off by even a few degrees, or a few feet, your throw will rattle off a screened window or hit the clapboard with a decisive thud. The house is 120 years old, and, really, it deserves nicer treatment than this. So I go to great pains to aim most of my throws at the far corners of the yard, where the grass grows higher along the fence, and the house is safely behind me.

At least once per game, I will send a long, arcing throw just over the fence, and watch it disappear into thick groundcover. When this happens, we leap into action. My younger son, unbidden, will scale the fence, and his brother and I will race to the spot where the ball dropped, and supervise the hunt. We play catch nearly every warm, dry day from May through September, and only lose two or three balls a season. We like to think we are doing well.

Because of our limited playing field, the beauty in this game--the real challenge--is for me to make my throws difficult enough for my athletic, growing sons to be challenged--yet at the same time--and this is the key--respecting the practical limits of our little backyard. The perfect play, for example, is to send my older son--his back to the fence--reaching to all his height to pull in a soaring pop-up as it drops from the sky. A foot too long and it is over the fence and we are scurrying to retrieve it. A foot too short--and really--this is worse, he eyes the ball, his shoulders slump, and he steps forward and nonchalantly catches it. He punctuates his disappointment at these moments by firing the ball back at me. At 11, he already throws harder than I have ever been able to. And his throws have an alarming snap and movement to them--one diving toward my sandaled feet as it nears me, the next skipping on some unseen surface and zooming up suddenly at my face.

My younger son has his own requirements. First and foremost, he wants to catch the ball in motion. His favorite throw is a line drive, to his right, and a little over his head, that he can snare with a leaping backhand catch that ends in a tumble. If this results in a "snowcone"--the effect where the top of the ball is visible over the webbing of his glove, I get extra points. Like his older brother, he also shows his displeasure when my throws fail to test him. Luckily, he is far more tolerant of slightly bad throws on my part. Really, I can only get the perfect throw about once in every five throws. He seems to know, without saying it, that his requirements are a little more stringent, and he shouldn't grouse about a game but ineffective try on my part.

But, if in a moment of laziness, I simply lob a throw to him--a mere toss--he will hurl the ball back at me and seemingly himself with it. He releases the ball with a grunt as he charges toward me, and while he doesn't produce the Thor-like bolts of his bigger brother, his throws pop into my glove, the snap of leather on leather somehow growing louder every day.

We tinker with the minor rules of the game all the time. Most recently, my younger son has prohibited compliments after all but the most spectacular of catches. Gone, then are the days of my endless, fatherly patter--"nice catch"--"way to go"--"that's the way to follow it into your glove." I miss this, of course, but I know better than to force it or make too much of a point about it.

Besides, I have a delicious secret. If I leave them alone to catch, I will hear my older son say these very same things to his brother. For certain, their game can just as often end in a fight, but I have more than once retired to my hammock and nodded off to the rhythm of popping gloves and the voiced reassurances of love.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:56 PM

New Legs for SVG?

This is an entirely unscientific observation, but it seems as if there is a good deal of activity around SVG lately. I get several email lists about SVG, and they have all been busier. And while there are some false positives, you get 1.57 million hits when you google SVG, which compares favorably with 2.73 million hits for TIFF, which is a much more mature technology.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:53 PM

May 10, 2004

Grandpa Cleans Up

This is the story as it was handed down to me.

It's early in World War II, early enough so that the United States is not yet in the battle. Along the East Boston waterfront, an uneasy truce is being played out between the visiting British sailors and the Italian-American workers who are building, rebuilding, and fixing their ships. The irony that many of these British ships were damaged by Italian submarines is not lost on anyone.

One day at a diner, my grandfather Giacomo and my Uncle Joe watch as a British sailor badmouths an Italian waitress. This is precisely the spark all this ready tinder needed.

Within seconds, my grandfather and Uncle Joe are tossing British sailors around this diner. It is our two against their eight, but it is by no means a fair fight. Grandfather Giacomo, only 5'4", is built like a cinder block. This is a man who walks five miles each way to work, and then spends the day working, basically, as a human fork lift. I forget the Italian word for his job, but it loosely translates to "lumper" in English. His job was to move massive, awkward things around construction sites. A 150 pound bag of cement here, a four-foot square fieldstone there. This squadron of pasty Limeys is simply no match for him.

The MPs arrive with the fight in full swing. As my uncle would explain years later, the MPs apparently make a quick decision that the best thing was to get the sailors out of there. So they do, restraining Giacomo long enough to hustle the sailors into a wagon. They race off.

Now Giacomo wasn't what you would call a cerebral guy. Indeed, he labored to make himself literate in English over many, many years. But somehow he knew, in an instant, where that wagon was going and how to get there faster on foot than they could by wagon.

I knew my grandfather much later, as an old man, but I have seen pictures of him as a young man. He was never built for speed. But, so the story goes, he was waiting at the brig for that wagon-full of sailors. And when they let them out the wagon door, he proceeded to finish the beating he had started at the diner.

I have heard different endings to the story. In one version, Giacomo and my uncle Joe end up in the brig instead of the sailors. In another, the young waitress ends up as my Uncle Joe's bride. (And in a poignant but unconfirmed related detail, the story has my future aunt bailing uncle Joe and Grandpa out.) In still another version, it is the sailors who finally end up in the brig, begging to be put there to be kept safe from my grandfather. Who knows really, what happened. It was so long ago, and Grandpa has been gone for almost forty years. Even Uncle Joe has passed, and my aunt--always my favorite by the way, with her big warm smile bearing flaky chocolate cannoli--is frail and forgetful.

Still, thinking back on my grandfather, the solid little man with his thickly accented and broken English, I can't begin to doubt the gist of the story. I can see him now, his face darkening when he hears the sailor's curse, stubbing out his little black cigar, rising from the lunch counter with death in his eyes.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:39 PM

Sometimes I Wonder...

...if computers really save time. I do not want to log the time I have spent in the last week dealing with:


Though I have to say I love wireless networking. I now have 3 machines running on a small wireless network at home, and the setup has been very easy. Of course, once one of the existing machines was wired, it promptly got a virus. Then I was a good boy, and began downloading all of the Windows upgrades in preparation for adding a firewall. Halfway into the upgrade, the hard drive failed.

As I write this, I look over my shoulder at another (older) machine I am trying to reclaim only to see the following error message:

Operating System Not Found.

I don't think that is a good thing.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:28 PM

May 6, 2004

The Headlong Rush

Imagine being young, fit, passionate, and outfitted as if for battle. Helmet, face mask, thick padded gloves, expensive glistening skates, every square inch of your body covered with thick padding--elbows, knees, shins, and shoulders bolstered with hard plastic.

Stick in hand, I watch the mad rush up and down the ice, the puck ricocheting off the boards, pinging high off the glass. First one, then the next, and then the next skater and the puck somehow all meeting at once, crashing together, and then spinning off again in whole new directions.

I might have only been on the ice a few times, but I am already soaked through with sweat, drinking water in great gulps. I glance at my nearby teammates along the bench, and I know I too am steaming like a draught horse.

"Trippe! Perry! McGinness!" The coach calls out our names. He doesn't move or take his eyes off the action on the ice. Everyone knows what to do. Players shift up and down the bench, allowing me and my two linemates to move next to the coach. "You're on," he says, indicating we will go on the ice as soon as he can flag the other players off. With that, we are ready--mouthguards back in, gloves on, helmets snapped back in place. Ready? Fuck, with his next words, we would jump out of a plane or off a cliff if there were one nearby.

The momentum on the ice shifts. The other team starts to change up, leaving our defensemen free to begin carrying the puck up ice. My linemates stand on the bench, and I join them. This is a new tactic we have come up with on our own, and so far the coach hasn't nixed it. Rather than climb over the dasher onto the ice, we have taken to leaping from the bench, over the dasher, and onto the ice. Done right, this has a spectacular effect. Rather than awkwardly clambering over the boards, this allows us to hit the ice in stride, landing and streaking forward like invading marauders.

And we do. One by one our teammates crash into the boards and clamber off. And each incoming projectile is met with an outgoing one, my two linemates first and then finally me. In my mind's eye, my linemates--shorter, more solidly built than me--are incredibly graceful and land perfectly. I on the other hand, am all limbs, 6'2 and 155 pounds, and my body seems to require a dozen or more in-flight corrections between the moment I push off the bench and the moment first one skate edge and then the other catches the ice.

But I make it in stride--a rush in and of itself but then I hear my coach's voice, "Get 'em, Spider!" This is my teammates' nickname for me, and somehow I know all at once that this is the first time he has used it to address me and his decision to do this is purposeful. It's momentous.

I reach the opposing blueline just in time to see one of my linemates take out a defender with a shuddering check. What happened next was nothing short of pure hockey perfection. The puck slides out to me, on a line, flat as a pancake on the ice, and directly to my stick side.

Thank God I didn't have time to think and undo the moment.

Instead I did what I have done thousand of times on rinks, on frozen ponds and puddles, on frozen swimming pools and tennis courts, in driveways and on streets. I raised my stick and fired a slapshot in stride.

The puck was in the net before I finished my follow-through, and I saw the red goal light go on at the same instant someone leveled me with a stick check to the head. But the check didn't matter. Flat on my back on the ice, I was gone, screaming at the top of my lungs, an incomprehensible stream of syllables through my mouthguard that were met again and again as my teammates reached me, pulled me to my feet, and cuffed my head, punched me, pushed me, and jostled me as we skated back to the bench.

I'm back on the bench, facemask tilted up, downing water again in the same great gulps. Part of me is reliving the previous moment, part of me is basking in my teammates compliments and affection, part of me watching the new action break on the ice. "Spider," I hear again and again. "Way to go, Spider!" "Way to go!"

Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:52 PM

PureEdge Announces New Platform

XML-based eForms vendor PureEdge Solutions announced a new version of their software earlier this week.

They continue to innovate with an XML-centric focus to their products. One of the interesting aspects of the new release is their support of the open-source eclipse rich client environment. PureEdge will be supporting eclipse as both an IDE and a rich client, with the PureEdge Viewer embedded within the eclipse client.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 1:43 PM

May 2, 2004

Moving!

Hello all,

As of May 1, New Millennium Publishing has moved to a new office. Please note the new address below. I will be sharing office space with Frank Gilbane of Bluebill Advisors, Lighthouse Seminars, and The Gilbane Report.

For the time being, my primary phone number will be 781-526-2564. You can also leave me voice mail at 617.497.9443.

I think this new, more central location will allow me to work more efficiently with my clients. It will also provide a more convenient location for people visiting the Boston area on business and looking to meet with me.

Bill

-------------------------
Bill Trippe
New Millennium Publishing
763 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02139
btrippe@nmpub.com

See http://nmpub.com/blog/ for "Ideas in Technology and Publishing"

Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:35 PM

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