Are we reaching the limits of UI buildout?

By Kas Thomas, Analyst
CMS Watch, 28 July 2009

As you can imagine, in the course of covering more than 200 software products, my colleagues and I get to see and touch a lot of different user interfaces, and one thing we've all noticed lately is the trend toward larger and larger interfaces. To put it bluntly, many products (particularly in the WCM and DAM spaces) now have client UIs that are just plain enormous. By enormous I mean busy and option-rich, with tons of controls, and often with a super high-resolution monitor required just to see the whole UI.

In the WCM world, products like Alterian Morello, SDL Tridion R5.3, Sitecore CMS, and TYPO3Canto Cumulus and Mediabeacon R3volution (among others), which have seen UIs grow in tandem with product functionality. (among others) have seen their user interfaces grow to the point where even power users find it challenging to learn the product -- and then stay current on it. The same is true, in the DAM world, for products like

UI sprawl is not limited to any particular tier or type of product, of course. Creeping featuritis has led to bewilderingly complex UIs for Microsoft Word, Adobe Photoshop, and countless other familiar software tools. In the Web CMS world, the problem seems to be compounded by a recent trend toward re-centralization of control and consolidation of roles in web publishing (just the opposite of the trend toward decentralization and specialization that was so common a few years ago) -- whereby power users dominate systems activity, and often system selection.

Looking forward, it's clear that "UI buildout" cannot continue much longer. For many products, cognitive overload is no longer a threat, but a reality. How many toolbars, tabs, nested menus, and clickable controls (not to mention nav-trees in which you have to scroll horizontally as well as vertically to find things) can a mere mortal handle? If a cognitive limit exists, I think we're pretty much there.

The question is, what can be done about it? Is there a way forward?

As a stopgap measure, simply hiding controls based on role can be useful. Many vendors make at least a token attempt to give you control over the visibility of important UI pieces based on a contributor's permissions.

As a whole, though, the industry needs to do a lot better in giving system implementers and admins the power to custom-configure task-based interfaces for different system personas. It can be very difficult (even impossible) in some systems to make a given command just not show up. It's hard to understand why that should be. Not everyone needs every command. Why put controls in a user's face if you don't have to? As noted UI expert Aza Raskin says, "If you notice the interface, that means you're thinking about the interface and not the thing you're trying to do."

It's been said that something like 45% of the features in a typical software system are never used, while another 19% are rarely used. That means the majority of executable code in a product seldom, if ever, executes. Clearly the opportunity exists to scale back UIs. The problem is, products with super-lean UIs don't demo well. In any featuritis arms race, the product that can stand up to the most overspecified RFP has a big advantage.

Maybe there are lessons here for all of us.

Vendors: Strip the UI to a skeleton and make it easy for implementers (and/or administrators, and/or power users) to add functionalities back one by one.

Customers: Stop "requiring the world" in RFPs and PRDs. This only exacerbates the featuritis arms race. And make sure non-tech-savvy casual users (not just power users) are properly represented on product selection teams. It's your non-techies who will push back hardest on hard-to-learn systems -- and ultimately decide the success or failure of the system.

We say it throughout our reports, but: Take time to do some usability testing of your own. Find out up front if a product's UIs are going to be a problem for your organization, and don't assume you can fix the problem with training. Training isn't the answer for users whose tired brains are already, even before you roll out the system, saying, Don't make me think.

More @ http://www.cmswatch.com/Trends/1652-UI-Bloat?source=RSS

The boondoggle that is software maintenance fees

By Tony Byrne, Analyst
CMS Watch, 28 July 2009

Annual software support and maintenance fees are something every customer loves to hate, and yet, for the most part we keep paying them. Technology managers fear "going naked," right up until they replace the package. Meanwhile, the underlying economics keep vendors keen to promote what has become a major profit center for most.

And which vendor has perfected the maintenance fee profit engine? You guessed it: Oracle. InformationWeek's Bob Evans explains in an excellent column, "Global CIO: How 22% Annual Fees For You Equals 51% Operating Margins For Oracle."

I think Oracle's success has had a huge influence on the technology marketplace. In the ten years that I've been covering content management, portals, search, et. al., I've seen many other vendors deliberately mimic Oracle's model.

And we're not just talking about commercial vendors here. A new breed of "commercial open source" vendors has also explicitly copied Oracle's approach: if a lion's share of the profits lies in customers paying annual fees, why charge for the software up front at all? Simply invest a little R&D to get started, use consulting projects and whatever the community can muster to drive ongoing innovation, carefully collar tech support costs, grow the company, and then sell it to a larger firm looking to acquire reliable revenue streams...such as Oracle.

These fees would feel less galling if you received great support in return. You've told us over the years that some vendors do indeed excel here. But most do not.

Then there's the thorny issue of supporting the software versus supporting (and upgrading) the implementation. In most sizable projects, someone (either your developers, a consulting firm, or a vendor's professional services arm) has so heavily customized the software that your vendor's tech support can quickly become impotent, save for addressing common bugs or very low-level problems. We've been advising buyers to take a close look at warranties and tech support within any consulting contracts, including those signed with a vendor. Remain particularly alert when buying software via a re-seller -- an increasingly prevalent model in the Web CMS market, as well as several others we cover.

Is there anything to like about maintenance fees? Some observers pointed out on Twitter yesterday that we should at least value the predictability of such expenses, even as we decry the rates (@lehawes). Annual fees help provide a kind of insurance for the customer and enable the vendor to invest in long-term support for the core codebase. And they put less pressure on vendors to front-load their total costs+ profit (@damtrends). Presumably vendors can break-even now, then profit later.

But oh, the profits. As part of our evaluations of publicly-traded vendors, we often listen in on quarterly financial analyst calls, which as Evans notes, can be quite revealing. One of my favorite vendor boasts to equity markets is, "obtaining a higher yield from existing customers." How much should financial performance matter to you the buyer? A little. It's good to know your vendor won't go bankrupt. Nonetheless, I think traditional technology analyst firms do enterprise buyers an injustice by too often conflating a software vendor's financial success with technical acumen or product development skill. (Some analysts also mis-identify vendor marketing and sales acumen with customer value, but that's another story....) I'm quite certain that in the software world, there's no definite correlation between profits and quality. According to Oracle's CFO, there is a correlation between profits and size of maintenance base.

There's some good news, though. We're seeing increasingly better peer-based, community support. This trend is surely more advanced in the open source world, but commercial vendors have been catching on here, too. The availability of peer support has become an important criterion for our evaluations in recent years, and enlightened suppliers are fostering active communication among customers.

Our research reports also instruct technology buyers how to negotiate down annual maintenance rates. In the field, we sometimes receive slack-jawed responses from both the customer ("you mean we can do that?") and the vendor ("you want to carve up our golden calf?"). Yes, on both counts.

Optimizing Digital Asset Management

Reblog from Business Management
E-Magazine

In an exclusive interview the IDC’s Melissa Webster talks to Business Management about the increasing emergence of digital asset management and the potential for the future of the sector.

“Increasingly what we see is companies wanting to design media and career assets that can be used online and in print, digital asset management can play an important role along that repository”
-Melissa Webster, IDC

Perhaps you could give us an indication of the types of challenges enterprises face when managing their digital assets?
Melissa Webster. First of all it’s a really fragmented market, mainly because there are so many different use cases. For example, if you are talking about the enterprise, typically the needs of the enterprise are revolving around management and marketing and you need to manage a library or repository of assets, which can be shared for worldwide marketing programs and that can be taken and reused by regional or local groups when they kick off their own campaigns. The assets can be marketing collateral, designed for print, web or radio, or they could be brand materials such as logos.

So, depending on what your business is, if you are a large brand manufacturer or consumer goods manufacturer, you are going to have a tremendous amount of content – some of it will be product photos, some of it will be rich media, such as video, audio or multimedia. You need to have expert metadata about your assets so that you can serve up the appropriate version to the right person, in context. Of course the digital asset management (DAM) system also provides the security, authorization and control over who actually says what. That’s part of the equation and it has worked for us for interesting assets and cataloguing them, but also when people use them and implement things like notification and approval workflows and so forth.

How does digital asset management refer to enterprise content management? Are the to related? Do they have unique functions and features?
MW. The difference really lies in the unique workflows, which need to be extremely specific in the case of digital asset management. The digital asset management system hopefully takes apart the asset into its component parts and storing these as separate assets in order that they can be reused in other creative ways without being redundant and then putting those assets back together when need be.

A digital asset management system can be used to help with problems around logo changing. For example, if I need to change the logo in 2000 brochures in 75 places than you can change the logo in one place and reflect that change throughout your current set of print brochures and on to websites. There is this notion that were used and the extensive linking of assets to each other, and we can call that level. There is the unique workforce for the creative process, which is a little different from what we do on the enterprise national side.

Do you see digital asset management as a subset of an enterprise content management system or something completely separate? Is it within an enterprise content management (ECM) solution or is it something that companies will be looking to purchase separately?
MW. That depends on the requirements. Certainly the enterprise content management vendors have for some time offered digital asset management systems. However, there is still a place for DAM solutions, even in organizations that have these ECM offerings from the top ECM vendors if your requirements are specialized. If you are a large print publisher, for example, it may be that your enterprise content management vendors digital asset management solution does not deal well in designed documents and doesn’t manage those components. If you are doing a lot of print publishing, perhaps you need to buy a DAM that is tailored to managing that kind of content because you need to manage the component level so that you can print different renditions or need to dynamically resize things for the web.

How does the increasing digitization of many different types of content and information add to this challenge?
MW. Well, on the one hand we have this tremendous explosion of digital content and that is the case inside the enterprise as well as on the consumer side – we all take more photos with our digital cameras for example. There is a huge distortion of digital content and one of the things that happens is that because everything is digital it is relatively cheap and everybody keeps everything.

On the flipside, having digital makes it so much easier to catalogue, find and search. You can immediately call information based on a search, watch a preview and verify that that is the asset you want, which makes life so much easier. The other thing that is so great about the digital world is that it is easy to create variance of that asset, it just takes a little code, whether that is a transcoding video or audio or whether you are taking a brochure apart and putting it back together in a new way with new ingredients. It is so easy to take, edit and revise different assets.

One of the things we are talking about in this issue is the idea of managing the customer experience across different platforms and channels. What role does DAM play in helping manage that customer experience for companies?
MW. The digital asset management system is a source of direct images, video, audio, the rich media and multimedia formats assets. It might be used in the context on a website with mass logos and text or the applications to enable transaction on that website and other commerce. The DAM is managing ingredients for that process. Increasingly what we see if companies wanting to design media and career assets that can be used be online and in print, so the digital asset management system can play an important role along that repository and surface the right assets for the right publishing point, although they it is not itself providing the web publishing capabilities, that is the job of the web content management system.

Where do you see the market heading next? Is there a major trend that you think will have a big impact on this particular sector?
MW. I certainly think that the trend seems to tightly connect the digital asset management system and the web content management system as an important trend. Increasingly among smaller web content management vendors are integrations with DAM systems and I believe we are going to see that more and more between the web publishing side and the digital asset management side.

We are seeing grand management applications on top of digital asst management systems to provide some of the out-of-the-box workflows that the marketing department needs, either to work internally across a large globally distributed marketing organization or to facilitate collaboration with their advertising and interactive agencies and stakeholders to help in their marketing.

Types of DAM
There are several broad categories of digital asset management systems, including:

• Brand asset management systems: With a focus on facilitation of content re-use within large organizations, here the content is largely marketing or sales related. For example, product imagery, logos, marketing collateral or fonts
• Library asset management systems: With a focus on storage and retrieval of large amounts of infrequently changing media assets. For example, video or photo archiving
• Production asset management systems: With a focus on storage, organization and revision control of frequently changing digital assets. For example, digital media production
• Digital supply chain services: With a focus on pushing digital content out to digital retailers. For example, music, videos and games

The FeedRoom Introduces Comprehensive Online Video Solution for Media Relations and Public Affairs

SaaS Offering Enables Fortune 1000 Enterprises and Government Agencies to Add Streaming Video and Broadcast-quality Downloads to Online Press Rooms in Minutes – at Half the Cost of Branded News Sites

NEW YORK, NY (July 22, 2009) – The FeedRoom, a pioneer in online video communications, and a market leader in live streaming video and digital asset management, today announced a new subscription-based, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering designed to address the needs of media relations and public affairs professionals looking to add high-quality video to their Web sites and online press rooms. The value-priced offering combines the unique publishing, distribution and measurement capabilities that Fortune 1000 and government communicators require to ensure greater transparency, control and global reach within the changing news distribution landscape, including social networking sites, bloggers, mobile applications and other new media.

A recent study of more than 12,000 journalists and media representatives published by the Institute of Public Relations shows that corporate communicators remain key to helping journalists and editors identify and develop stories, with 94 percent reporting that they rely heavily on organizational Web sites for information. At the same time, the 2009 Online Newsroom Survey reveals that the desire for video by media has increased substantially over the previous year, with more than 80 percent of journalists now wanting to see video files.

“Using online video, in both live and on-demand formats, companies can aid journalists, bloggers and others in building stories, particularly if the video is easily accessible in the resolution and in the format required for broadcast or embedding,” said Mark Portu, President and CEO of The FeedRoom. “One method for addressing this has been the use of siloed, Internet TV channels. What communications professionals sacrifice with this approach, however, is a truly integrated strategy that ties together the marketing, branding and PR initiatives of an organization in more creative and controlled ways – and at significantly lower cost.”

The ability to quickly add video to a virtual press room, produce live news conferences or enable media to directly download high-resolution, broadcast-quality video from an organization’s own site provides greater context, as well as measurement in the form of real-time data on traffic, audience and views. Available immediately, the comprehensive offering includes capabilities for:

• Fully customizable user experiences, including a range of player templates;
• Secure media download features for podcast, Web and broadcast-quality video;
• Syndication support via XML and video RSS feeds;
• Support for high-quality, on-demand and live streaming video;
• Registration capabilities with approval and communications processes;
• Advanced reporting integration with industry standard measurement services and tools.

The new solution is based on the extensive capabilities of FeedRoom 4.0 Enterprise Video Platform^TM, a scalable enterprise video solution that integrates seamlessly with existing content management systems, social media distribution and community tools, and leading Web analytics solutions. The flexible system supports a variety of highly customizable, lightweight video players and the powerful, easy-to-use FeedRoom Studio^TM publishing application. Unlike consumer video-sharing sites, FeedRoom 4.0 ensures positive online brand experiences by providing maximum control over the distribution and measurement of video content for marketing, public relations and corporate communications.

“A well-thought out, online press room can be a great resource to both journalists and PR teams alike,” adds Portu. “With ten years of experience working with leading brands to support their news and crisis communications efforts, we’ve seen a growing number of customers, such as General Motors, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Yum! Brands, The Pentagon and others, able to address the new media landscape more efficiently, while also significantly enhancing the value of their sites for journalists by creating an integrated online media experience.”

White Paper: The Benefits of Video-Enabling Your Virtual Press Room

Download a complimentary copy of “The Benefits of Video-Enabling Your Virtual Press Room: Capitalizing on Digital Media in the Age of Transparency, Social Networking and the 24/x News Cycle ” at www.feedroom.com. This paper discusses methods for making online video an essential part of an integrated, cross-media communications strategy.

http://www.feedroom.com/page/07_09_PR_Solution

Growing need for digital asset management

Reblog from ZDNet News: Jul 21, 2009
By Hassan Kotob, President and CEO of North Plains Systems

Commentary - Digital asset management, or DAM, has often been described as a process or a tool for organizing the creation, management, distribution, and archiving of rich media assets. In the DAM world, the term “assets” generally refers to rich media files such as images, photos, video and audio, whereas a “file” generally refers to email, documents, records, or scanned images. Creative agencies, publishers and media outlets have long realized the wisdom of utilizing DAM solutions for producing media assets, managing digital rights, conferring with clients, handling review cycles, retouching images, and editing photos and videos.

The growing need for digital asset management
Today, it’s increasingly common for businesses of all kinds to produce corporate videos and podcasts, e-Learning modules, YouTube clips, training materials, brand identity graphics, and more. DAM systems bring order to the creative process involved with producing and leveraging these assets to their fullest extent.

A recent Forrester report noted, “With technologies like digital cameras and inexpensive authoring tools driving asset creation costs down, digital assets are greatly increasing in number and these rich media are being used across a wider range of enterprises. Inadequate management of these growing libraries, however, will make reusing and repurposing difficult, leading many organizations to take another look at DAM.”1 Analysts at IDC concur: “IDC believes the digital asset management market will enjoy a compound annual growth rate of more than 25 percent during the period of 2006-2010, outperforming the overall content management market…and the software market as a whole, by a wide margin…DAM will remain an independent and lively market…given the specialized requirements of DAM solutions.”2

The benefits of DAM
Organizations deploying specialized DAM solutions typically realize the following benefits:

• Consistent messaging and brand — With built-in revision control, asset repurposing, and approval processes, DAM systems enable organizations to maintain consistent use and re-expression of digital assets, from brochures to corporate videos to web content.
• Generation of new revenue streams — Many organizations have built new business opportunities around the creation of high-value content for internal and external clients by repurposing their assets such as using book covers to promote books online. Consider a photo that costs tens of thousands of dollars to create each and every time. With DAM, it can be reused. Without DAM, its existence may not be known and the re-creation costs are incurred once again.
• Cost savings — Organizations gain a return on their investment through the elimination of redundant asset creation efforts and the ability to quickly retrieve assets.
• Digital media management and distribution — DAM systems enable the efficient organization, indexing, and distribution of digital assets. Advanced DAM systems provide a distributed architecture and multi-site asset storage, as well as the ability to provide multiple repositories for self-synchronization of both assets and their associated metadata.
• Global web-based access — Organizations can distribute digital masters and other types of licensed assets via secure web access. Advanced DAM systems also provide asset ordering and fulfillment modules, and can easily integrate with existing e-commerce and transaction servers.

Vetting DAM solutions
Select a digital asset management system based on your creative needs. This may include management of your organization’s creative assets, managing broadcast and post-production workflows, media enhanced e-learning, video-on-demand repositories, multi-channel distribution, personalized publishing on-demand, and more. Most businesses today will find it beneficial to use a solution that also manages the video creation, editing, collaboration, and management process. This involves ease of integration with video editing applications, video usage standards, and broadcast workflows. Questions you may want to consider before investing in a digital asset management solution include:

• Does the DAM solution provide seamless integration with creative authoring tools such as Adobe Creative Suite and Quark or digital editing suites such as Avid and Apple's Final Cut Pro?
• Is “work-in-progress” supported by this DAM solution, or does it simply provide the ability to archive your organization’s assets? Some DAM and ECM solutions provide only the archiving capabilities.
• Is this a “best of breed” DAM solution? Be wary of vendors who try to be all things to all customers. Give preference to a best of breed DAM solution over an ECM or MRM (Marketing Resource Management) solution that also offers limited DAM functionality which may not meet your requirements.
• Can the solution scale? Be sure to select a DAM solution that has the ability to keep up with the growth of your organization and its requirements. And of course, if you are thinking of an enterprise-wide or global implementation, the ability for your DAM solution to easily scale is a necessity.

Conclusion
Until recently, many enterprises have not realized the great need for DAM solutions. The ability that DAM has to manage both documents and digital assets is extraordinary. While many general content management vendors offer basic DAM functionality, they have lost touch with the collaborative process that is so integral to the creation and management of rich media assets. These systems may support the ability to attach static images or even short video clips. However, the proper management of rich media assets requires a more sophisticated approach.

Forward-thinking organizations recognize the need for solutions designed from the ground up to support the creative process. Selecting the best solution that meets your requirements enables organizations to leverage the expertise of both knowledge management and artistic teams to their fullest extent.

Open Text, Autonomy, IBM Among Leaders in Records Management

Reblog from CMSWire
By Barb Mosher, July 20th, 2009

It's always good to get recognition from the analyst firms because many organizations pay attention to what these guys say. In the ever evolving area of records management, this recognition can help a lot.

According to the report: The Forrester Wave(TM): Records Management, Q2 2009, a number of key enterprise content management vendors lead the wave for records management including Open Text, IBM, EMC and Oracle. Autonomy and CA are also leaders, with Interwoven and HP noted as strong performers.

We took a closer look at what features brought some of these vendors to the top of the pile.

The following figure tells you how companies feel about the need to support regulatory requirements today.

Survey on need for Records Management

As you can see, records management is fairly important to most organizations, regardless of size. That may be because GRC isn't just an issue of larger organizations.

Selecting the appropriate records management solution isn't easy though and it does depend on your requirements. According to Forrester, there are five trends that affect the selection of a records management solution:

1. Rising demands to mitigate legal risks and challenges
2. Evolving records management certification requirements
3. Expanding focus beyond physical records, toward a broader array of digital assets
4. Converging vendor capabilities for archiving, records management, and eDiscovery
5. Looking down the SaaS path

Forrester helps evaluate some of the record management vendors out there including: Autonomy, CA, EMC, HP, IBM, Interwoven, Open Text and Oracle. These vendors met certain criteria that Forrester applied which included:

• 200 deployments or more of the solution in the enterprise market (employees of 1000 or more)
• Native support for both physical and electronic records management
• Mentioned often by Forrester clients

These aren't the only vendors out there, but here's a look at the leaders in this market and why they rise to the top.

The Leaders in Records Management

Forrester Wave Records Management Q2 2009

Autonomy

Autonomy's Records Management solution is based on their acquisition of Merido back in 2007. Obviously the fact that the solution leverages the IDOL platform is a key component for Autonomy as IDOL enables the pulling together of information from a variety of locations.

Other notable features include integration with their eDiscovery and enterprise archiving solutions, along with the addition of a number of legal experts and significant install base of legal solutions that came with the Interwoven acquisition earlier this year.

The Autonomy Records Management solution is compliant with a number of standards already and they are actively pursuing the DoD 5015.2-STD V3 and MoReq2 standards. Autonomy is also one of two non-enterprise content management vendors to make the leaders for records management (the other was CA).

Open Text

With a particular focus on their current shipping offering, the report also cites "strong physical records management capabilities and retention management support for a wide variety of electronic content types and applications."

With strong integrated solutions for both Microsoft SharePoint and SAP, Open Text does seem to have a good handle on the records management needs of organizations today. In addition, their solution is compliant with a number of standards including the U.S. Department of Defense 5015.2-STD, the United Kingdom's TNA regulations and Australia's VERS regulations.

IBM

IBM made the list for their IBM FileNet Records Manager. It is one of two Records Management solutions that IBM offers. FileNet Records Manager offers support across a number of information assets and is integrated with the FileNet ECM, as well as archiving and eDiscovery solutions.

IBM has achieved certification with all Records Management standards except MoReq2, which they are actively pursuing now.

EMC

EMC's Documentum Records Manager makes the leader list having improved its physical records management capabilities and offering a modular approach for retention management.

EMC is also actively pursuing the DoD 5015.2-STD V3 and MoReq2, having achieved certification for the others.

Oracle

Oracle's record management solution is Oracle Universal Records Management, offering a framework for federated records management and physical records management capabilities. Oracle does not offer native archiving and eDiscovery solutions to integrate with its records management solution, but Forrester notes its language support as another key feature to its position on the list.

Oracle is compliant with the DoD 5015 certifications and is actively pursuing the MoReq2 and VERS certifications.

Want More Details?

This was just a quick look at some of the leaders for Records Management. To get more details about these and the other vendors in list or just to understand more about the records management industry today, get your copy of the report.

NASA erased moon footage - What's the value of your digital assets?

Image via Wikipedia

On July 20th 1969, Neil Armstrong was the first man to set foot on the moon. To commemorate the 40th anniversary of this historic event, NASA releases restored videos of the lunar excursion.

NASA admitted that it must have erased the original videos of the live TV transmission so that it could resuse the videotape. In the 1970s and '80s, NASA had a shortage of the tapes, so it erased about 200,000 of them and reused them.

The space agency admitted that "A three-year search for these original telemetry tapes was unsuccessful. A final report on the investigation is expected to be completed in the near future and will be publicly released at that time."

NASA senior engineer Dick Nafzger said a the search led to the "inescapable conclusion" that 45 tapes of Apollo 11 video were erased and reused. Nafzger, who was in charge of the live TV recordings back in the Apollo years, said they were mostly thought of as data tapes. It wasn't his job to preserve history, he said, just to make sure the footage worked. In retrospect, he said he wished NASA hadn't reused the tapes.

What's the value of your digital assets? Make sure you can trust you Digital Asset Management software to provide maximum security and searchability for your assets.

Read more:
NASA lost moon footage, but Hollywood restores it (AP)
NASA Releases Restored Apollo 11 Moonwalk Video (NASA)

Autonomy Puts Its Meaning-Based Technology to Media Use

By Irina Guseva, CMSWire, Jul 16, 2009

Autonomy has partnered with VMS, a provider of media intelligence solutions. VMS will use Autonomy’s meaning-based computing software to build tools for media analysis and competitive intelligence.

VMS is planning to enhance its own PR and advertising solutions for media monitoring, measurement, analysis, competitive advertising and marketing intelligence, workflow management, analytics and PR measurement across all types of media.

Autonomy Interwoven web content management system — powered by Autonomy's Intelligent Data Operating Layer — will be used by VMS as an integration point for developing tools that can analyze different types of content and act accordingly.

Digital Asset Management (DAM) will also be part of the offering with Virage MediaBin, where meaning will be extracted from video and digital media.

Audio analytics from Autonomy can be used to analyze speech and music files.

VMS is no stranger to Autonomy’s circle, being their customer and partner. You may know VMS by their products, including Vantage and AdSight.

As Autonomy indicated earlier, meaning-based marketing (and meaning-based everything, really) is indeed coming to the forefront.

Reblog from CMSWire, http://www.cmswire.com/cms/web-cms/autonomy-puts-its-meaningbased-technology-to-media-use-005052.php, 17 July 2009

Equilibrium MediaRich Server Enhances Media Management and Delivery Capabilities for Extensis® Portfolio Server™ 9

SAUSALITO, CA, July 14, 2009 - Equilibrium®, a software and hosted services company that specializes in helping enterprise clients of all sizes to manage, monetize and mobilize content, today announced that MediaRich® processing engine is now providing excellence in media management and delivery for Extensis, a division of Celartem Inc., Portfolio Server™ 9, a market leading digital asset management and media delivery solution.

Portfolio Server 9 allows organizations to deploy multi-channel marketing, control their brand, and with the implementation of MediaRich, effortlessly manage and process rich media, and deliver assets through the Web. The server utilizes a new powerful media-processing engine from Equilibrium. MediaRich offers a new metadata architecture, resulting in extensive file format support and allowing users to catalog and thumbnail virtually any file.

Equilibrium announced a strategic technology partnership with Extensis in June of 2008, where Extensis would integrate Equilibrium's MediaRich for integration into the release of Extensis Portfolio Server.

Continue on http://www.equilibrium.com/2009/07/equilibrium-mediarich-server-enhances-media-management-and-delivery-capabilities-for-extensis-portfo.html

Open source: it's just a license

By Adriaan Bloem, Analyst, on CMS Watch

A lot of my time is spent evaluating technology, and I have a confession to make: the licensing is one of the least spectacular bits to review. It's certainly relevant, and always one of the things we discuss, but it rarely makes the top-10 issues in a review.

As a student, I spent some time studying information technology law, and I'm still intrigued by the legal technicalities of Apache, GPL, LGPL, and other open source licenses. I will also, from time to time, read the fine print of commercial licenses. Your legal department will probably want to do the same. But you should ask yourself this: is the license really a decisive factor when picking software?

Oddly enough, with open source, it often is. In many European countries, governments are actively pushing for the use of "open source" and "open standards." On a superficial level, that makes a lot of sense. Who'd want vendor lock-in, or extortion by an integrators' truck system? Think of all the advantages. Who doesn't want global interoperability? How could you possibly resist the ability to shape and mold software to your liking? And best of all, it's free!

Of course, in reality, things aren't quite so black and white. First of all, I have to keep repeating that open source isn't gratis ("think of free as in free speech, not as in free beer"). The "free" refers to a model of development and innovation, not to a matter of cost. Get out your calculator and tell me this: what's more expensive over the course of three years. Software that's $30K up front, with a 15% annual maintenance and support fee; or software that's "free," but with $15K a year in "gold support"? Or, if you're planning on doing it yourself, one FTE? It's just an example, but you get the point -- it's very hard to do an enterprise implementation cheap, whichever way you turn it. Large companies like IBM aren't in open source because they've suddenly become philanthropists.

So maybe the real reason is development. You can take the open source software and change it. That may be true, but "closed source" doesn't mean to say you can't modify the code that's on your servers. It's usually a bad idea -- your changes may be lost with the next update -- but then again, the same could happen with open source software's next release. Sure, often you can't really touch compiled commercial code; but how many actually modify and recompile open source C? If you're a software company, developing on the basis of open source, you may want to actively participate in an open source community and help develop the code. But if you're not, all you may want out of the community is free support: see the previous paragraph.

In reality, not only is there a large gray area between black and white, there are plenty of zebras, as well. There's commercial open source, there's shared source, there's community open source, there's community editions, there's open sourced commercial software. There's open source without much of a community, and commercial closed source with a large and active community. There's a lot of mature and stable open source software, and a lot of new and untested commercial software. It's hard to apply any clichés to such a broad spectrum.

There's only one thing you can generalize: open source is a specific kind of license. And discussions about which license is better are rather academic. What you'd want to decide on is what your software should do, if and how you want to customize it, and how easy it is to get support when you need it. That means doing your homework, and finding out the real story: you'll certainly want to know what's behind the facade. And that's something that applies to software under any license.

Reblog from CMS Watch, http://www.cmswatch.com/Trends/1642-Open-source:-it%27s-just-a-license, 13 July 2009

Extensis Announces Availability of Portfolio Server 9

Extensis, a division of Celartem Inc., announced the availability of Portfolio Server 9, a digital asset management and media delivery solution. This powerful release allows organizations to seamlessly deploy multi-channel marketing, control their brand, manage and process rich media, and deliver assets through the Web. Portfolio Server 9 introduces a Web Client to allow users to catalog, search, edit, batch convert, automate tasks, and manage assets from anywhere at anytime. This new Web Client and the optional NetPublish component for instantly publishing assets to the Web provide a mechanism for organizations to easily share all types of rich media assets to internal and external teams.

Reblog from EContent Digital Content Strategies & Resources, http://www.econtentmag.com/Articles/ArticleReader.aspx?ArticleID=55024

Major New Release of Open Text Web Solutions Makes Delivering Content-Rich, Personalized Websites Easier Than Ever

Open Text, a global leader in Enterprise Content Management (ECM), today announced the immediate availability of Open Text Web Solutions 10, the latest release of Open Text’s industry-leading Web Content Management (WCM) software. The new release allows organizations to intelligently manage and deliver a broad set of corporate information to users over the Web, and features extensive usability upgrades, a new technology foundation, and deeper and more comprehensive integration with the Open Text ECM Suite and the SAP NetWeaver® Portal component.reBlog from digitalassetmanagement.org.uk, Digital Asset Management, Jul 2009

Picturehouse New York – October 14, 2009

Picturehouse organizes the only events of their kind in the stock picture business, bringing together buyers and suppliers of photography, illustration and footage in city centre locations around the world.

Picturehouse New York will take place at the The Metropolitan Pavillion (next door to the Altman).

More information on http://www.picturehouse-us.com/event.php?eventID=70 or contact Deborah Free, Picturehouse Marketing US, LLC, 9965 Leroy Pavilion Road, Pavilion, NY 14525, USA, Tel: +1 (585) 768 7880, Fax: +1 (585) 768 2941, E-mail: deborah@picturehouse-us.com

WIPO Global Symposium of Intellectual Property Authorities - Geneva, September 17 and 18, 2009

Developing Global Intellectual Property Infrastructure for Promoting Science, New Technologies and Innovation Worldwide

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) is organizing a Global Symposium of Intellectual Property Authorities to be held on September 17 and 18, 2009, at the International Conference Center Geneva (CICG).

The Symposium will:

• provide heads of IP authorities, industry leaders and other stakeholders with an international forum in which to discuss how the present intellectual property infrastructure, could be developed in a coherent way to support increasingly borderless activities for innovation within science and technology communities and industries
• Present WIPO’s new vision and strategy for reinforcing and integrating different technical components for developing the global IP infrastructure
• involve users of the IP system in the process and create stronger networks between IP authorities and industry/IP practitioners

More information on http://www.cepic.org/documents/Wipo_1.pdf

What Wimbledon and vendor selection have in common

By Theresa Regli, CMS Watch

As Murraymania swept the UK, I settled into my Court No. 2 seat on Wimbledon's always-action-packed middle Saturday. In addition to the matches of Serbia's Ivanovic, Australia's Hewitt, and Russia's Safina, I had a great view of the Centre Court scoreboard, so during breaks I was keenly watching the results of Andy Roddick's match.

"Andy's got the first set," I said to my cousin, who's studying in London and joined me for the day. "Andy's not playing yet," interjected the Brit to the other side of me. "Yes he is," I said. Pause. "Oh you mean, your Andy," he replied. "Right," I smiled back, "not your Andy, who plays tonight." Then came the most interesting comment: "Well, he's not really my Andy," the gent said. "I'm English, and he's Scottish."

Territorial rivalries are perhaps more pronounced in sport than any other pastime, be it the Boston Red Sox vs. the New York Yankees, the Calgary Flames vs. the Edmonton Oilers, or the New Zealand All Blacks vs. the Australian Wallabies. Such territorial rivalries aren't altogether absent from the content management vendor selection process, either, and I find this much more pronounced on the eastern side of the Atlantic than in my native North America.

Of course, in Europe and the UK there are many nations and territories (both political and historic) in a comparatively tiny geographic area, which makes a perfect petri dish for such rivalries to fester.

When I work with clients or subscribers to help them select vendors, the two or three finalists often end up being very technologically similar, and once tools have been tested and deemed appropriate for clients' environments, the conversations just prior to final selection often become very much "cultural." It's not just about whether the team is qualified, and if the support line is open when their time zone is open for business. It's also about who they are, and when a few hundred thousand sterling or euros are on the table, the rivalries come out in closed-door conversations.

• "They're Belgian -- there's so many jokes about Belgium. Isn't there a reason for that?"
• "They're Dutch -- so they're blunt, that's good, right? Aren't the Dutch cheap, too?"
• "They're German -- so regimented -- is that right for us? What if the schedule slips, will they charge us double?"
• I wouldn't even know where to start on the Scandinavian rivalries, which go back to the days when Sweden and Denmark traded off conquering the whole of Northern Europe.

I end up spending quite a bit of time talking with clients about how they can benefit from vendor characteristics that are different from how their company normally functions. A bit of German organization and Dutch bluntness can be a great thing if your company has neither. I also watch vendors make an extra effort to bring in the "local flavor" to meetings -- someone from the local country or territory, if headquarters is on the other side of the continent. This always makes a big difference to buyers -- more than I believe it should. The English sales guy in the meeting in London isn't going to be the one you'll be working with, or providing you the ongoing service you'll need. Good service is good service, regardless of where it's provided from.

As an American who does a lot of work in Europe and the UK, I also experience trepidation on the part of some buyers. "Oh, you're American," I sometimes hear when I connect with a potential client via phone or meet up in person. Well yes, but CMS Watch is also a UK Limited Company, and one of our Principals is a Brit, and I'm perfectly happy to use the word "whilst" and drink a warm beer with you after work, if it makes you more comfortable. (Note: Americans can be even more blunt that the Dutch.) Expertise may be what matters in the end, but it's far from the only factor when closing a deal.

Stereotyping is dangerous, and as the world becomes smaller, you the technology buyer need to think more about benefiting from that which may seem foreign or "too different" for your organization. Yes, chemistry is important, but suppliers should be adept enough to adapt to your environment, and yet bring new approaches and attitudes to the project to help you be successful. Be it tennis or a vendor competition, the most appropriate mix of factors need to come together to create success, and sometimes those characteristics may not be the ones you're used to, or possessed by your fellow countryman.

As for my final take on Wimbledon: I wish Rafael Nadal wasn't injured. I'd love to see Federer break the majors record, but I'd be just as thrilled to see Roddick pull through. I don't care where Andy Murray is from, I'll cheer for him to play well, along with anyone willing to call himself a Briton.

May the best player win, wherever he's from.

Reblog from CMS Watch, http://www.cmswatch.com/Trends/1636-Wimbledon-Selection#idc-container, 2 July 2009

Effective image cataloguing

Repost from Canon Professional Network

Can you find the image that you want in less than five minutes? If the answer is ‘no’ then you may need to explore what are the best options for cataloguing your photographic work. The advent of digital image capture has caused a profound change in the photographic industry. Not only in the way that images are captured, but also in the number of images that photographers work with and how they are catalogued.

Rapidly filling archives are a great incentive to create a robust solution for backup and cataloguing images, but while backup is a regular subject between photographers, discussion of cataloguing and image databases almost seems to be taboo.

Databasing for images - otherwise know as Digital Asset Management or ‘DAM’ - is now a big business and the range of software products available to catalogue them has increased substantially, but finding a solution to fit individual needs is not always easy.

What type of software do you need?

Many think that applications like Adobe Bridge are image-cataloguing software and that by having their files arranged in a folder structure, with an overview provided by Bridge, they have an image database. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Adobe Bridge is an excellent file browser but file browsers can only display readily accessible photos. Using Bridge to view photos (or other media assets), your computer hard drive must contain the original files, or must be connected to storage media that contains the files.

© David Noton Enlarge image

An image like this could be keyworded under ‘South Africa’, ‘lions’, ‘wildlife’, ‘waterhole’, ‘bush’ and ‘Kruger National Park’ amongst other potential categories.

The key functionalities that differentiate catalogue software for cataloguing an image database from simple file browsers are as follows:

• Offline working - for adding metadata, searching and editing remote catalogues.
• The ability to create multiple subsets of images within the main catalogue.
• Detailed image searches.

Traditionally, the range of image cataloguing software for photographers has been limited with the key players including Microsoft Expression Media (formerly iView Media Pro), Extensis Portfolio, Fotostation Pro and ACDSee.

The relatively recent arrival of the Apple Aperture and Adobe Lightroom software packages have extended that list, as both of these have all of the necessary ingredients to be considered as cataloguing applications, with the added benefit of containing sophisticated image processing ‘front ends’.

The only way to see which of these applications works for you is to download the trial and experiment with adding metadata, and searching. The process is not a quick one, but neither is creating the final catalogue - a process that may require hundreds of hours to complete.

While the above applications meet the needs of individual photographers with relatively small archives, newspapers, magazines and agencies require a more robust, server-based system. While the basic operation is similar, these systems are geared up for multi-user access, robust security and multi-layered backup solutions. In many cases these are bespoke or customised versions of ‘off-the-shelf’ solutions.

Components of an image catalogue

© David Noton Enlarge image

An overview of the image, together with its specifications and the catalogue it has come from, in Extensis Portfolio.

Key ingredients to ensuring a successful image catalogue of any size include:

• A robust storage solution, with adequate backup.
• Excellent image previews.
• An intelligent file naming system.
• A consistent and carefully thought out keywording system.
• Subsets or grouping of images within the larger catalogue.

The ability to find the required images rapidly is the most important requirement of any image catalogue and keywording, along with file naming, is key to this.

Keywording is a complex subject and it is important to consider the subject carefully. If you have an image of your vehicle, you may well describe it to a European as a ‘car’, to an American as an ‘automobile’ and to another person as your ‘wheels’ - the keywords for the image have to include all of these, as well as perhaps ‘Ford,’ ‘hatchback’ and many more.

Keywording has to be broad enough to be inclusive, but tight enough to narrow down a search rapidly to the required images. David Riecks, author of the website www.controlledvocabulary.com, has spent a great deal of time on this subject and he now retails list of controlled vocabulary, specifically to allow more accurate keywording of photographic images.

© David Noton Enlarge image

Keywording has to be broad enough to include the correct images but tight enough to isolate them. Here is a detailed view of thumbnails and keywords from travel photographer David Noton’s images of a Chilean wine region.

The 100,000 image watershed

In many cases 100,000 images is a watershed. For an individual photographer, it is a very large number and may represent many years of work, assuming that images are edited along the way.

For a large photographic agency like ThomsonReuters, this may represent a much shorter length of time, including as it does, the output of many or in some cases, hundreds of photographers.

The individual photographer

David Noton is a travel and landscape photographer with a library of pictures that stretches back over 25 years for stock, publishing, advertising, and his programme of exhibitions, writing and talks.

David administers his collection with the help of his wife, Wendy Noton, and office manager, Sharyn Meeks. He also calls upon a specialist third party keyworder to bring maximum value to his images.

© David Noton Enlarge image

David Noton used the image location as the basis of his file naming system. Here is a list view of his UK images from Dorset.

David Noton’s workflow stages are interesting:

• All images are captured in RAW.
• Initial edit and selection by David Noton.
• Processing to 16-bit TIFF by David Noton.
• Basic captioning by Wendy Noton.
• Low-res copies sent off to a specialist keyworder.
• Minor dust busting and clean up. Images added to database by Sharyn Meeks and Wendy Noton.

David moved over to digital from film completely around four years ago. He has used Extensis Portfolio for some time and, although the bulk of his archive is digital, film-based images have also been scanned and added to the system.

His digital archive consists of around 15,000 carefully edited and captioned/keyworded images. The portfolio catalogue is fast and images can be found in a few seconds. To speed things up David has two parallel archives - full resolution files at camera native size and a smaller ‘low-res’ archive for searching and client previews, with each file typically around 1Mb.

The Agency - Reuters

In stark contrast, the agency Reuters aims to deliver around 1,700 images a day to its clients, primarily in the news and magazine industries. Although it's on a far large scale, the workflow is not too dissimilar to that of the individual photographer.

© Reuters Enlarge image

The Reuters packages page clearly shows the diversity of content the agency produces. These are very important for clients who want to browse through particular subject areas more granularly, not just the standard News, Sport, Archive and Entertainment topics.

Images are filed by photographers to the Reuters Global Picture desk in Singapore by internet, mobile and satellite phone. Typically images will be filed as high quality JPEGs with the photographer encouraged to hold on to the RAW or unedited camera JPEG for possible reuse in different markets. Photographers are responsible for adding accurate title and caption information to images before filing; encompassing location, event, subject names and details.

Images are handled by Reuters’ Singapore editing desks, where they are cleaned when necessary, edited and assigned supplementary catalogue codes before being uploaded to the Mediaplex distribution system. The supplementary codes (‘Supp codes’) have been agreed between all the major agencies and ensure that images are automatically distributed to the correct image feeds requested by clients. Reuters has taken this one step further by ensuring that the ‘Supp codes’ for pictures synchronise with those used for text, ensuring that a picture search on Reuters' Media Express system or the client’s own databases will also bring up the matching story.

For instance, these codes include ‘ENT’ for Entertainment and ‘SOC’ for Soccer. Others include health, politics, education, society and many more.

A sub-selection of the best ‘feed images’ is selected by the Singapore desk for detailed keywording to allow the images to be added to the Reuters Pictures archive, a smaller and more specialist archive of images.

Once the images have been keyworded they are added to a powerful and sophisticated Cortex database created by Orange Logic digital asset management software.

© Reuters Enlarge image

A small Reuters keyword tree for the word ‘School’, showing what comes underneath this branch and above it.

Reuters has the challenge of continuing to supply its existing markets with timely news pictures for which the agency is best known, whilst at the same time seeking to supply new markets with a broader range of imagery as befits a picture agency. Careful keywording is a key constituent of this and the system is reliant on human input, utilising a ‘keyword tree.’ A keyword tree is effectively an automated form of controlled vocabulary that can rapidly be drilled down, so for instance, the term ‘Trafalgar Square’ will automatically add-in ‘London’, ‘England’, ‘Europe’, ‘Capital’, and ‘City’ as other valid search terms.

Isolating images within the larger database is the purpose of a well-constructed image catalogue. Kevin Coombs, editor, News Pictures Production, at Reuters says that: “Effective search and retrieval is the most important tool in our industry today.”

The challenge for individual photographers and agencies alike is to successfully upscale this to deal with ever-greater numbers of images and increased throughput. However, effective and targetted image cataloguing can result in extra business for both the individual photographer and the larger picture agencies around the world.

Links:

• www.controlledvocabulary.com
• www.davidnoton.com
• www.pictures.reuters.com
• www.orangelogic.com
• Microsoft Expression Media
• Extensis Portfolio
• Apple Aperture
• Adobe Lightroom
• Fotostation Pro
• Acdsee