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September 29, 2004

A Writing Community

For the writing group I am involved with in Melrose, I recently ordered and have been reading, Writing Alone, Writing Together, by Judy Reeves. My first take is that this is a valuable book, full of practical advice and also wisdom about building writing community. We tried some of the writing practice exercises, and it seemed like time well spent. I will report on this more as we progress, and I will share a few of my attempts at the exercises.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 7:34 PM

September 28, 2004

CM Professionals to Hold 2004 Summit

CM Professionals: A Content Management Community of Practice

CM Professionals, a group of content management professionals from around the world, will hold its first CM Summit in conjunction with the Gilbane Conference on Content Management Technologies, Tuesday, November 30, 2004 in Boston, Mass. (U.S.)

The CM Summit is a peer-to-peer meeting. Sessions will take the form of participatory discussions - no talking heads reading slide shows - facilitated by some of the world's top content management experts: Bob Boiko, Ann Rockley, Tony Byrne, Frank Gilbane, Erik Hartman, Mary Lee Kennedy, Brendan Quinn, Hilary Marsh, Bob Doyle, Scott Abel, and many others.

Sessions at the summit will be devoted to content management practices that have been selected by members from among 25 best practice areas, including:

--Content Strategy, Business Strategy and Business Cases
--Designing for Reuse
--Performance Metrics
==Auditing the Content
--Glossary and Resource Library

There will also be networking sessions, as well an open forum to discuss future CM Pros events and projects. "Birds-of-a-feather" sessions (informal gatherings of people with common interests) are planned for lunch at the Summit and for dinner at a Boston-area restaurant. Summit sessions will be videotaped and made available online to members who cannot travel to Boston.

Detailed program and registration information: www.cmprofessionals.org/summit/.

Fee is $100 for CM Pros members and $125 for nonmembers. Membership in CM Pros costs $50 per year.

CM Summit attendees who also register for the Gilbane Conference will receive a $150 discount on their Gilbane Conference registration.

Information on the Gilbane Conference on Content Management Technologies can be found here.

About CM Professionals
CM Professionals is the premier community of practice for people involved with managing content for electronic and other media. CM Professionals collects, develops, organizes and provides access to knowledge about content management through online resources, email interaction and face-to-face summits. By identifying, refining, publicizing and advocating for respected content management practices and models, CM Professionals educates and fosters interaction among content management professionals, enterprise leadership, product vendors and university educators. For more information, please visit the organization's website.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 3:31 PM

September 20, 2004

New Content Management Professionals Organization Announced Today

CM Professionals: A Content Management Community of Practice

Silver Spring MD, September 20, 2004. A group of thirty content management experts from around the world has announced the formation of CM Professionals, an international community of content management professionals whose purpose is to further best practices based on shared experiences of experts and peers.

CM Pros offers a members-only mailing list, a collaborative website, discussion forums, issue-oriented group blogs, knowledge wikis, syndicated web services, a job board, a professional directory and a calendar of face-to-face meeting opportunities.

CM Pros president Bob Boiko, author of the Content Management Bible and director of the University of Washington iSchool CMS Evaluation Lab, says, "As the first group of its kind, CM Pros is a membership organization that enables content management practitioners to share information, practices and strategies. This organization is needed to help move the discipline of content management forward, helping practitioners avoid the pitfalls and costly mistakes made by others."

"We also envision a variety of members-only services, including a newsletter, professional discounts and summit-type gatherings devoid of marketing hype," says Tony Byrne, CMS Watch editor and CM Pros treasurer.

"CM Pros will raise awareness of content management as an essential discipline that builds value, both financial and human, for companies and organizations," says Ann Rockley, author of Managing Enterprise Content and secretary of CM Pros.

CM Professionals will hold its first CM Summit, in conjunction with the Gilbane Conference on Content Management Technologies, Tuesday, November 30, 2004 in Boston, Mass. (U.S.A.).

Click here for more information on the Gilbane Conference on Content Management Technologies.

As CM Professionals grows, Boiko says, "We will work closely with other organizations that share many of our goals. We will coordinate our thinking about recommended standards for best practices with these organizations, and we hope to work closely with graduate schools that are training the next generation of information professionals."

Posted by Bill Trippe at 1:47 PM

September 9, 2004

AIIM Survey on BPM and ECM Trend

Take the AIIM Industry Watch survey focused on user perceptions of Business Process Management (BPM) and Enterprise Content Management (ECM) technologies. The survey is being co-sponsored by AIIM, Transform, and ebizQ.net. The deadline for participation in the survey is Friday, September 17.

You can link to the survey at www.zoomerang.com.

The survey is designed to explore implementation trends and overlaps between these two technologies. Participants will receive a free copy of the survey results for use in your own internal benchmarking. In addition, we would be happy to provide copies of recent AIIM research reports as a thank you to participants. Details on receiving the following publications can be found at the end of the survey.

* The Current State of Information Management Compliance: A Summary of Findings from User Research on Compliance and Information Management (400+ end users).
* Back to Basics: The Search for Efficiency and Compliance-A Summary of Findings from User Research in Six Countries (1800+ end users).
Electronic Records Management Survey: A Call To Action (2000+ end users).
* Managing Email in the New Business Reality: A Summary of Key Findings on Email Policies and Practices (1000+ end users).

AIIM will be sharing the results of the survey with respondents.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:55 AM

September 7, 2004

I Could Cry in My Beer...

... but I won't.

I cowrote an SVG book with Kate Binder a couple of years ago, and there are plenty of copies of it out there for very little money. One company has it listed on eBay for $1.00 (though with $4.95 shipping and handling). I bought one just out of curiousity, and it arrived in good shape. It had what looked like a remainder mark on it, but was otherwise fine.

I still like this book, and feel that it is a very good introduction to the topic for nonprogrammers. You can check out low-price copies on eBay or Amazon . I also have a number of copies of it if you would like to purchase it from me directly.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:27 PM

Would like Feedback on Planned Workshop

I will be giving a workshop at the Gilbane Conference on Content Management, which will be held at the end of November in Boston. (For general information about the conference, please click here.)

The workshop is entitled, "Content Technology Choices for Technical Communicators," and you can see a description of it below.

Since it is still very early, I would love to get some feedback and ideas on what I should cover in the workshop. What topics would you like to see covered? What are some important existing and emerging technologies you would like to see discussed?

Any and all feedback is welcomed. Please feel free to post here, or to email me.

Workshop Description: Content Technology Choices for Technical Communicators

The need for single-source publishing has led technical communicators to implement many authoring, publishing, and management tools. At the same time, organizations have been implementing enterprise content solutions, as customers and partners demand instantaneous access to all kinds of product-related content and data.

* How can technical communicators best leverage all of these new technologies?
* What are the potential uses and best uses of critical technologies such as XML and PDF?
* What role does metadata play?
* Can content systems and tools be integrated with other critical systems such as call tracking?

This tutorial will provide attendees with a current understanding of the state of content management technology for technical communicators, and will highlight best practices for integrating single-source publishing tools within the enterprise.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:05 AM | Comments (1)

September 5, 2004

Privilege Management & Rights Management for Corporate Portals

Frank Gilbane has quietly made back issues of The Gilbane Report available to the public. If you go to the back issues page, you can see which issues are available in full text, and which only allow you to see the PDF introduction to the article.

I have a number of past issues I really like, and will highlight a few here over the next couple of months.

I really like an article I helped contributor Larry Gussin and former associate editor David Guenette write about security, digital rights management, and portals. I think it remains one of the few articles that addresses how DRM fits into the larger enterprise secuirty picture.

An excerpt of the article follows, and the full text can be found here.

From, Privilege Management & Rights Management for Corporate Portals

With the quickly growing demand for intranet-based enterprise information systems, as well as for extranet extensions, the enterprise information portal (EIP) is becoming the primary emerging solution to the problem of intelligent user access.

Enterprise information portals extend Web content management (CM) solutions by delivering both enterprise and commercial content and core enterprise and industry information through a single, unified, and usually browser-based interface. An EIP may present Web sites, documents, databases, email, and other information types from multiple servers, and allow users to access this information through its portal server. The key EIP goal is to provide more efficient access to business-critical information for employees, customers, suppliers, and business partners.

With content management and portal technologies emerging as a new, robust framework for enterprise and extranet information, the traditional enterprise security solutions, which are predicated on online network sessions and on providing document level access, may no longer be adequate or efficiently manageable. IT managers should wonder, for example, how these firewall-based solutions will be able support the potentially huge emerging requirements for extranet, offline, and more granular access to information.

Equally important is the question of how information access security can be managed. If the rise of EIPs reflects the need to address the growing number of information resources found within enterprises, these information resources still require security decisions from their business line managers. With the numbers and types of users of these information resources also growing in number, as well as being potentially tied to multiple locations and access relationships, the information access management challenges become even more daunting.

With all this complexity, enterprises must address important infrastructure requirements before they can enjoy the benefits of extending enterprise information internally among their business units and departments, and externally among their business participants. Two of these requirements address questions of how enterprise managers can ensure that:

--Users effectively access the information they need.
--Business rules govern how and by whom information is used.

Two distinct solution categories exist that can address some part of the extended enterprise's need for information and content security control: privilege management and digital rights management. The solutions available today are still caught up in their cultures or origin, but the real-world needs of enterprises may be answered by the right combination of these solutions. Such a combination of approaches would effectively manage both online and offline access to content, and provide a persistent protection and control of information throughout its lifecycle.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 3:16 PM

September 3, 2004

Is InDesign Gaining Traction?

For an upcoming Seybold Report article, I am looking at InDesign and where it seems to be gaining traction against QuarkXpress. This was definitely a theme at the Seybold conference, where I spoke to several large book and magazine publishers who are in the middle of making the switch.

I will be interviewing some folks from Adobe next week, and have put together the following list of questions so far. Any others you would like to see asked?

GENERAL

First, what is it about the CS release of InDesign that has convinced companies that this is the version to trust for production? Is this a matter of CS having the right feature list? Stability? Performance? Platform support? Integration with other tools (InCopy, Illustrator, PhotoShop)?

FEATURES

Second, how does InDesign compare with QuarkXpress in terms of core composition and pagination features? Is it fair to say that InDesign CS is competitive with QuarkXpress on a feature-by-feature basis? If I were to create a matrix of composition and pagination features (or examine ones from Adove and Quark), how would the two products stack up? Where does Quark still lead the way? Where does InDesign lead the way?

XML

Coming at InDesign more from the editorial side, two things seem to be attractive about it: support for XML and ability to integrate InDesign in a workflow where text needs to be "roundtripped" through a lot of editorial iterations. Can you comment on these things? Specifically:

-- How does InDesign support XML? Does it maintain XML throughout the process? If so, does it handle any XML schema? Only a single one? Same questions for InCopy.

-- What are some of the workflows involving XML? Are customers using XML in the editorial process and then publishing through InDesign where InDesign is kind of a black box? Are they using XML in the editorial process and then publishing through InDesign in a more iterative process where there is a lot of export in and out of InDesign back to XML?

EDITORIAL WORKFLOW--INDESIGN AND INCOPY

-- What about InDesign and InCopy? Precisely how do the products support iterative design and editorial work where both tools are used? What underlying data structure is maintained for the text and other elements while all of this editorial work is going on?

-- What about the combination of InDesign and InCopy with third-party content management platforms, such as those from Managing Editor? Do some of these questions of workflow and XML maintenance and support get answered by the third-party tools?

INDESIGN AND MULTICHANNEL PUBLISHING

-- The above questions go to the point of InDesign/InCopy as a "hub" for multichannel publishing. Publishers who have iterative and design-centric workflows have been "locked in" to tools such as QuarkXpress, where the "master" version of the content is locked into a complex, design-heavy, and proprietary format. In such a workflow, only the print can be most efficiently done, and the other formats--HTML, wireless, syndication format--lag in the process. For some types of publishers, these other formats have proven to be expensive and cumbersome to produce, even as they become increasingly important to the business (or, worse, not! where they are "must have" additional formats that do not neceassrily bring additional revenue).

(long windup to the question...)

-- So does InDesign solve this problem? Can it be a better "hub" for multichannel publishing? Why?

PLATFORM SUPPORT, INTEGRATION

-- What about platform support? Mac vs Windows? What impact is this having?

-- What about integration with the rest of the Adobe creative suite? Does this differ materially from what people can do with Quark?

-- What about the programmability of InDesign? I hear from developers that InDesign has better support for programmers who want to automate steps in the workflow? I even heard at one point that InDesign's APIs are designed in a modular fashion, allowing developers to address individual elements of the InDesign functionality? Is this true? In general, how does the programmability of InDesign compare with QuarkXpress?

PERFORMANCE, PRODUCTIVITY

-- What about performance, support for humongous files, creating PostScript/PDF, other areas that heavy production users would worry about?

OTHERS?

Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:37 PM | Comments (1)

New Article for The Seybold Report

I wrote an article for the most recent Seybold Report about an effort by power tool company DeWALT to automate their catalog production process by using XML. The following is a brief excerpt from the article, which is only available by subscription.

DeWALT Industrial Tool Company of Baltimore manufactures and markets high-performance power tools and accessories for woodworking. A growing company with a growing product line, DeWALT's tools are used in residential and industrial construction, professional remodeling and woodworking. Chances are, you have a DeWALT power tool or two in your workshop, and it's almost certain that something in your home was built with DeWALT tools.

In the early days of the company, DeWALT produced a single, all-purpose product, the universal woodworking machine known as the "DeWALT Wonder-Worker." Times have changed since the 1920s, of course, and woodworking has changed along with it. DeWALT now makes more than 200 specialized machines, with more than 800 accessories and thousands of parts.

It's no wonder that for a product company such as DeWALT, timely and efficient production of catalogs has been an increasing challenge. In recent years, as the
product line grew, DeWALT found itself doing more tailored and segmented marketing. As a result, the company's small graphics department has had to produce more catalogs tailored to different markets and audiences. This targeted marketing has led DeWALT to look even more closely at automating and gaining efficiency in the catalog production process.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:23 PM

September 2, 2004

Fishing

I am not a fisherman, but I have experienced what I imagine to be the perfect moment in fishing. Imagine casting your line, and having a strike each and every time. And I don't mean a nibble or a bite. I mean a strike--a brace-your-feet, bend-your-back strike, 14, 15, 16 pounds of bluefish hitting your lure at full speed, firing into the air, and twisting and turning at the end of your line.

And then it's back in the water, fighting me and me fighting it. I am up to my thighs in the ocean. It's high tide on Buzzard's Bay, a perfect June evening, the waves are big, and the water is abnormally warm. As I fight the bluefish back to shore, the waves are crashing around me. One moment a wave is slamming me at the waist and the next the wave is retreating, water and sand and rocks sucking at my ankles, my heels digging deeper in the sand.

I really don't know enough about fishing to compare a bluefish to anything else, but I know it to be a sporting fish. I also know my oldest brother is an experienced fisherman, and he regards bluefish warily. As I pull fish after fish back onto shore, he is ready with a gaffe, a short club with a heavy metal end. He gaffes each blue at least once before extracting the lure from its mouth, and then he tosses it onto the cooler full of ice. In minutes, the cooler is full. "Keep casting," he says. "We'll throw the rest back in."

What he doesn't say is, keep casting, because it will never be this good again. He doesn't say it, but his smile does. A smile from my oldest brother is a rare thing. This is a serious man. A big-time litigator for a 900-lawyer firm, he has been working 16 hours a day, 7 days a week since he was in diapers. His avocations are few--golf and fishing--and he normally golfs and fishes with the same gritty joylessness with which he prepares for his next trial.

But this one evening in June is a rare moment. He has invited me along to fish. I am using his rods, his reel, his tackle and bait. And now, in this moment of fishing nirvana, he is doing all the scut work, leaving me in the warm water to my waist, casting like I have never cast before, watching bluefish after bluefish strike my line, hurtle through the air, and flash and wriggle at the peak off its jump to signal that the battle was on.

I was thrilled of course, but I was also keenly aware oh how unusual this was. I could count on one hand the things my brother and I had done one on one. We were far enough apart in age to almost represent different generations, and we were far enough apart in temperament to almost represent different species. He was Ivy League, Republican, and wingtips to my state school, liberal Democrat, and Clark Wallabies. But I was at a low--my marriage had fallen apart in the past few months--and he had reached out. "Come fishing," he said in his usual, clipped way in a surprise call a few days before. "Just bring clothes. I've got all the gear."

And have the gear he did. He was next to me now, a few yards down the shore. He was a masterful caster, perfect form again and again. But I am taller and more athletic. Most of my casts were erratic and off my mark, but the few I did well were spectacular--long, arcing casts that landed 40 yards and more from shore, the lure perching on the crest of a wave for a split second before a bluefish slashed thought it, jerking it and the line 10 feet in the air.

"Unfuckingbelievable!" I exclaimed again and again. In truth, my heart was bursting with emotion and the word was all wrong. But this was my big brother, and I had to play it cool. I also knew his vernacular--he had always been caustic, and being a lawyer certainly didn't break him of the habit. Everyone was a cocksucker, and everything was a piece of fucking shit. "Unfuckingbelievable" was, to my thinking, how I should thank him for this joyous moment.

And so what if it was the wrong word, I thought to myself, the water whirling around my legs. I was Ernest Hemingway on Cuba. I was a young man fighting the elements, willing fish after fish onto shore. For one moment, my legs in the warm water felt better than any baseball I had ever hit, any goal that I had scored in hockey, any race that I had ever run well. I cast again--a long perfect cast. I watched it arc high over the incoming waves. I dug my heels deeper in the sand, leaned back, and waited for the next fish to strike.

Posted by Bill Trippe at 1:48 AM

Little Crush

You have no way of knowing this,
but I have silently catalogued
every observable, erotic detail
about you.

It begins with the wisps of brown hair
that have escaped your braid
to make little swirls on the back of your neck.
One thicker strand curves in thoughtful counterpoint
to your hooped earring.

It is a perfect day to catalog you.
It's going to be hot and humid,
and you have dressed accordingly.
The neckline of your summer dress
droops just so—to the lovely shelf
at the top of your breasts.
I could be crass and pause here,
but I won't.  It's the small things about you
that matter.  Accessories, for instance,
are everything, but sparseness is key,
so I am delighted to trace your unsleeved arm
down to three slender bands of silver
cascading around your wrist.
Perfection!

And suddenly motion—the banded wrist rises—
and your tanned fingers absentmindedly
find the thick strand and return it to the braid.
Your lips purse, you exhale slowly,
releasing the first of the day's heat,
and your wrist returns to your side.

With all the world's expectation,
my gaze returns to your braid.
I have to get off the trolley at the next stop,
but the wayward strand is already pulling free again.
There is time still, my dear,
to capture the next detail,
to record the next delicious gesture.

        — Bill Trippe

Posted by Bill Trippe at 1:43 AM

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