Publishers showing spine in the ebook battle

Credit where credit is due. The publishing sector deserves a pat on its back for steering the future of the books.
Acknowledging the role that ebooks and ebook readers would play within the sector, the industry is not just keeping pace with the latest technology but is, in fact, a step ahead- forming alliances, consolidating and providing users a peek into the future.
Unlike the music industry, which was forced to evolve following innovations such as the MP3s, iPods and even Spotify that changed the consumption of music, publishers are bracing themselves with new technologies and organisations such as British Library is enabling consumers "to get to grips" with the hi-tech devices that could change the way we read.
Google Books, Google's online library has agreed to add one million books for free to Coolerbooks.com, for Interead's ebook reader Cool-ER.
The search giant, along with Sony, is also supporting the open EPUB- publishing format that can conform to any e-reader, liberating the market and challenging Amazon's model of ebooks compatible only with its own reader Kindle.
While on one hand, content-access is becoming sophisticated, Harry Potter publisher has given content too, a 21st century makeover. Bloomsbury Library Online has virtual bookshelves that allows one to access books via public libraries or through internet enabled mobile phones.
However, a lot still needs to be tackled- getting more publishers publish books in ebook-friendly formats, making the devices more affordable and user-friendly, digitising old books in ebook compatible formats and even collaborating with communication devices manufacturers.
Typical problems that challenge the music industry today are online piracy and file sharing issues. The issues are so deep-rooted that it requires government intervention and severe clampdown to restrict the damage.
We need due diligence process to combat similar file-sharing issues, legal compliances and piracy within the ebook market, its impact on book-sellers and physical newspapers, otherwise well-begun would remain half done.
By Archana Venkatraman

UPDATE: What Future for Search?

I was going to wait until tomorrow's keynote on Search before blogging about this, but I understand that the session will now count Andrew Kanter, Chief Operating Officer from Autonomy as a panellist.
As one of the senior figures at Autonomy it is going to be revealing what he has to say about search and what plans the organisation has for its technology. If you are involved in Enterprise search or just interested in semantic developments, this will be a must see.
With search guru Stephen E Arnold moderating the session I have a feeling that the panel will get a thorough grilling.
We will be blogging from the session so if you can't make it check back here around mid afternoon for a round up.

Online Information Conference - Opening Keynote

"We are now seeing a new set of business innovations and it's an interesting time to develop business, information being at the heart of business. Without the information tools and tech that we will here about can't hope to be successful." So opened this year's Online Information Conference courtesy of its chairman Adrian Dale
The theme for this year (subsequent to the economic bubble bursting)
Dale explained how in the 1960s and 70s it was those professionals in personnel who saw the importance of their role in a businesses strategy to justify their place on the board. Their its predecessors in Finance were the same. Meanwhile, the 1980s and 90s was the time for the business process managers - the supply chain managers in other words to take the lead and further influence their organisations for business benefit.
For the information profession, that role has largely been contained and formed as a number of cottage industries such the realm of the librarian, web development, the records manager. Now though we are moving into a time when it's the information manager that takes the lead, said Dale - at least in those organisations that have the foresight.
Why now?
For one, because of the vast amounts of information being generated across the globe. A live feed from EMC showed a row of whirling numbers projected across the world to represent this current data generation, in fact 432bn GB created since 1st Jan 2008.
We are dealing with the explosion of information and it has now caught up with us, said Dale, we have got to get to the heart of these processes. Most businesses won't understand how to manage information properly. Unfortunately that can mean less cottage industry of information management and more like a personal approach with everyone managing their own, but is that really a strategy?
This opened up the floor for Keynote speaker Clay Shirky, author of and "Here Comes Everyone - the power of organising without organisations. More to follow...

In search of a competitive edge

Corporates appear to be sold on the idea of Web 2.0. More than three-quarters of executives who responded to a McKinsey survey say they plan to maintain or increase their investments in technology trends that encourage user collaboration, such as peer-to-peer networking, social networks, and web services.
More than half say they are pleased with their past internet investments, though some regret not boosting their own capabilities to exploit technology. So there are still people out there who ask their secretaries to print out their emails. Surely not.
Anyway it will be interesting to see how the results of the McKinsey survey contrast with research due out later in the year by TFPL and the Edinburgh-based Napier University School of Computing.
TFPL's Melanie Goody says that the idea of the research is to look at the risk and opportunities of social networking tool in the business market. At the moment most of what we think we know about the impact of social computing comes from anecdotal evidence, although last year the British Computer Society (BCS) estimated that £130m a day is being lost due to employee engagement with social networking sites.
The TFPL/Napier research (results in the autumn) is designed to look at the use of social tools such as Facebook, blogs and microblogs, plus more formal collaborative platforms such as Sharepoint (in which TFPL has a particular interest).
Out of the research it may be possible to start to formulate policies on acceptable use, workplace bullying and damage to corporate brand. Of particular interest to information professionals are subjects such as corporate confidentiality and the archiving of valuable employee exchanges which has to date received little attention.
Enterprises still have a lot to learn about web 2.0 and its role in the work environment. While there may be opportunities there has been a lot of focus on the downside risks. The McKinsey survey talks about the possibility of these technologies providing a sustained competitive edge. If that is the case then businesses will definitely be interested.

Some things are hard to find

By Phil Muncaster.
Autonomy has just announced a new e-discovery solution to increase its presence in this burgeoning space. When it bought archiving and e-discovery vendor Zantaz last year, the firm clearly signaled its intent to expand into areas related to its core competency and heritage of enterprise search. And while it`s still best known for the latter - and while it continues to make oodles of cash providing big name clients like the BBC, Boeing and Coca Cola with search technology - the e-discovery space represents a massive opportunity, as firms look to overcome the challenges presented by an increasing raft of legislation and industry regulations.
In the US, of course, e-discovery has been driven mainly by the recently updated FRCP - Federal Rules of Civil Procedure - which lay down aggressive new rules for the discovery and presentation of electronic records as evidence in US courts. E-discovery, archiving, retention; they're all bound up in this area and with strict penalties for the destruction of evidence also part of the new FRCP, the stakes have been raised significantly for firms. Not that this is just a US problem either - just as SOX was felt in other countries, so the FRCP could have an impact elsewhere, including this side of the Atlantic.
This new hosted solution features technology to accelerate the time it takes your legal bods to review electronically stored-information and classify it according to its status, and also to review the information and make an early assessment of the related case. As you'd expect from Autonomy, which I guess prides itself on being able to scale in the enterprise search space about as far and beyond what any organisation needs, the technology can process terabytes of electronically-stored info without blinking - in over 100 languages and 1000 data types. The filtering of information in such massive data sets can make it easier to gain visibility into that information, says Autonomy.
It remains to be seen whether this being a hosted solution causes any hesitation among enterprise buyers - after all, it's meant to dig out the most sensitive of sensitive documents; will firms prefer to keep this sort of capability in-house? In its defence on the security front though, Autonomy maintains that because all elements of the solution are maintained by a single vendor, this reduces the risk of data becoming lost or corrupted, and makes the whole process more auditable. Let's see what happens; e-discovery is certainly here to stay though, and you can probably expect more big name vendors on the content management scene trying to get in on the action with "holistic, end-to-end solutions".

Web 2.0: rubbish name, great idea

Web 2.0 is a crummy name -- patronising, cloying and irritating. It presupposes that there is a clear generation gap between the first set of web technologies and the second set, as if the latter had been distributed like manna from heaven. It attracts get-rich-quick jerks, gimmicky marketeers, serial startup merchants, venture capitalists, conference organisers, insta-pundits. Even, ahem, bloggers.

Whatever you might find to dislike about Web 2.0 though (and that capital ‘W’ as if it equated to God, the Queen or some such, is one of them) it is a very interesting concept indeed. Catch-all term that it is, it has become a useful shorthand for software that relies on the wisdom of crowds, peer review, user-generated content, hyper-interactivity, friendlier user interfaces. It has even transcended the web to become a familiar aspect of client-server software too. It’s like classical music: we might not all have the vocabulary to describe it, but we know it when it’s there and we know what we like.

Web 2.0 has changed the way we use the consumer web and even performed the miraculous job of reinvigorating somnolent software categories such as human resources systems. But its ultimate business home is in enterprise content management systems.

The dirty, dark secret of many ECMs is that they are woefully under-used and, when used, badly. Non-existent or generic tags, systems that wither on the vine, training sessions that failed to get users moving, new silos that replace the old silos... these are common problems and an indictment of the usability, or lack thereof, of many an ECM.

Web 2.0 (that cringe-worthy name again) gets around the problem with technology-light tricks that encourage the user to participate, vote and swap ideas, or at least not lose valuable documents. Little wonder that companies like Vignette, Documentum, Open Text and Alfresco are all sprinkling the fairy dust on their most recent programs.

It’s probably still a little early to know whether Web 2.0 (last time, I swear) is the elixir that fulfils ECM’s huge promise, but it is a phenomenon that fundamentally changes the usability and, to dig out an ancient term, user-friendliness of software. Some elements will pass by the wayside but supporters can already show that it is rewiritng the face of what were unwieldy, ugly programs. Now, if only we could think of a new name...

Microsoft wants it all in ECM

Open Text’s announcement this week that it will work with Microsoft to create services that sit on top of the latter’s SharePoint Server is a classic example of the realpolitik that currently characterises enterprise content management (ECM).

SharePoint has created a seismic shift in the category to the extent that ECM heavyweights realise that it makes more sense to make nice with the software giant than to try and stare it down. Open Text is not alone in realising this, and firms like Documentum, Interwoven, Vignette and others have done much the same. Fair enough, but the catch here is that Microsoft has a long history of turning the tables on its erstwhile partners.

The SharePoint strategy is straight out of the Microsoft playbook.

Step One: start out with a product that integrates with other Microsoft programs, and looks and feels just like them, even if it is a little rough around the edges.

Step Two: Create licensing that provides the illusion that the program is free or very low-cost.

Step Three: Get channel partners to work with the product in order to create traction.

Step Four: Adopt the marketing message that “this is [insert product cartegory name here] for the rest of us”.

Step Five: When traction has been gained, build up capabilities over subsequent versions to challenge, and usually beat, specialists.

Microsoft has pulled off this trick in server operating systems, systems management and many other areas. The likes of Open Text can argue for a while that SharePoint won’t scale, isn’t appropriate for certain verticals, doesn’t have top-end sophistication and so on. But when Microsoft enters a market it wants it all and software history is strewn with the names of companies that learned that the hard way.

Here’s hoping Open Text stays Swiss (and Canadian)

I must admit that I was among those who thought that Yahoo would cave in, and sell out, to Microsoft. Having predicted a deal for some time, it’s human nature that I would want this pair to go ahead and combine. Now it looks like Yahoo will rebuff the world’s largest software company – at least for now, anyway.

Another prediction that I have been making for some months (OK, years) is that Open Text would sell out, with SAP quite likely to be the buyer. It hasn’t happened yet and, as another strong Open Text financial quarter goes by, you could argue that it’s becoming less likely to happen.

Let me say that even an eventual vindication of my forecasting powers is not enough for me to wish Open Text to join the rush to consolidate, and admit that there are good reasons for it to stay neutral. Some buyers will prefer a Switzerland of ECM that will not automatically try to push its own database, applications or other stack components.

Another reason is focus: Open Text has broadened its reach with deals of its own (Ixos, Hummingbird et al) but it is the one large-ish company that can still fit under the capacious umbrella branded ECM.

And, as long as Open Text stays away from the negotiating table, it can still market itself as a best-of-breed player in a sector dominated by one-stop-shops. A David surrounded by Goliaths, for the romantically minded.

That said, I still don’t buy the argument, well argued though it is in the is Big Men On Content blog, that Open Text is not attractive to a buyer because that would mean extensive duplication of assets. Modern business software deal-making, as evinced by Oracle’s capture of PeopleSoft, is largely about being able to monetise customer base rather than worrying about having too much code that was written to do the same stuff.

So I hope for the sake of competition in the ECM sector that Open Text stays solo, but I still think it more likely that a sale will come.

MS-Yahoo shows that search trumps portal

Briefly, as is its wont, fame beckoned for your blogger last week when he did a tour of duty at the BBC to talk about the likely effect of Microsoft’s bid to buy Yahoo.

There’s no need to go into deep details about that putative transaction here, although, if you’d like to see what I think, you could look here, here, here, here and here. No, what struck me most forcibly was the extent to which search had beaten its old enemy, the portal. At the Beeb, headlines suggested that Microsoft was buying a leading “search engine”. I must admit raising a quizzical eyebrow as it’s a long time since I heard the term used to describe a company.

And yet…

In the mid-1990s I edited a web site that shared office space with Yahoo UK. A manager there berated me for referring to Yahoo as a search engine. No, it was a gateway to the web -- a portal, no less, he insisted.

But the company that differentiated on search quality, Google, has been the winner so far on the internet. Having a string of great properties like Mail, Flickr, Delicious and Finance has helped prop up Yahoo in hits; Microsoft has had the tie-in to a massive brand and OS; but Google’s search has been the most powerful means of making hard cash.

There is a lesson here for all those web sites that don’t deliver the search results you wanted, and even for enterprise search and content management camps. At least for many ways to search and control data, unless you have an excellent core search capability, the other guy probably has a better product.

Alfresco and SAP could (and should) cosy up

If you can’t beat ‘em, join 'em, goes the old dictum, and SAP could be joining forces with Alfresco to provide it with a missing component in its enterprise software stack.

SAP’s recent decision to help pump $9m into Alfresco coffers was an indicator that the ECM open-source startup company is highly thought of in Walldorf. Of course, the investment was made by investment arm SAP Ventures and does not commit the firms to working together but you don’t wave to be Gipsy Rose Lee to read a little into these tea leaves.

Some close to SAP say that the German giant was looking for an ECM strategic purchase in the days when Shai Agassi had power. Open Text was the company most often linked back then and a deal would have made a ton of sense as the pair had worked together before on many projects. It would also have had the effect of potentially weakening Oracle, before the database giant went out and bought Stellent and BEA to give itself a full house of ECM products.

Alfresco might well be the hottest property among new ECM companies. The company has plenty of managerial experience and engineering talent from old-world ECM but has none of the legacy code and is free to explore potential of the latest tools. Its approach of building systems by layers of web services, rather than through software breeze blocks, might well fit with SAP’s NetWeaver strategy.

I spoke to Alfresco chief marketing officer Ian Howells after the investment was announced and he was keen to reiterate that Alfresco’s plan is to IPO rather than sell out. The big vision is to build a “world-class” software company and there are rich pickings to be had among smaller companies and those happy to serve themselves rather than follow the ancient enterprise path of consulting-led engagements and long negotiating cycles.

Good for him and Alfresco, but that shouldn’t preclude the company from working closely with SAP so that when enterprise applications owners come to look at content management again, there is a good fit between this pair.

Oracle’s ECM full house

I don’t know if the earth moved for you last Thursday but it was a pretty crazy day as merger and acquisition activity once again wrecked the old-look competitive landscape.

Sun’s deal to buy open-source database outfit MySQL probably eclipsed the much larger agreement for Oracle to buy BEA Systems in terms of media attention. It wasn’t a good day for anybody else to get a moment in the media spotlight so lots of us missed another significant purchase, that of Captovation by, that man again, Oracle.

All these deals have some significance for ECM. MySQL is the database of choice in LAMP stack deployments and a regular partner for open-source content management systems. BEA is best known for other middleware-related technologies but it also has strong portal capabilities.  Captovation adds another, relatively small element to Oracle’s ECM equation through document capture and imaging.

Confused by Oracle’s if-it-moves-buy-it strategy? You will be if it’s your job to explain to bosses what’s going on at the company. Oracle now has a full house (and more) of portals, document imaging programs, ECM system and developer capabilities, as well as CRM, business apps and integration tools. Its roadmap already looked like the M25 on a bad day, and with the BEA and Captovation contracts in place, things aren’t going to get any easier.

This is a very obvious period to ask for some face time with your Oracle rep, but give it a while yet. After all, the Redwood Shores executives will have to explain to themselves, and then their managers and staff, how having this pot pourri of technologies is going to help user organisations. You can't argue with Oracle's ability to extract stock value from its acquisitions but the jury is still out on whether it is doing anything for the people who bought the software.

EMC’s Document Sciences buy points the way for ECM

Merger and acquisition activity has been the name of the game in enterprise content management for the last few years so it was no great surprise to see EMC adding to its content management and archiving division with an $85m agreement to buy Document Sciences in the dog days between Christmas and New Year.

However, whereas a lot of the buying and selling in ECM has been about consolidation, this is a “tuck-in” deal, meaning that it is a purchase EMC can easily afford, of a company that adds incrementally to its portfolio rather than changing the face of its strategy. That said, I think it’s indicative of the direction in which ECM is heading.

Documents Sciences’ Xpression suite helps firms automate document output and communications. If you want to create contracts, marketing correspondence or company policies, its software can help. More importantly, it has pre-built hooks into ECM software, as well as ERP and CRM programs, so output management is not a silo but an integrated part of your business infrastructure.

A lot of ECM 1.0 has been about taking a belt-and-braces approach to content. It has sprung from the “save everything” and “keep the CEO out of jail” period of post-Enron paranoia. The Document Sciences deal is a reminder that making use of that stored content through automated business processes should be the raison d’etre of ECM. A fully-functional ECM system is a system for saving time by creating a single, intelligent repository of content that can be reused and repurposed in many ways.

ECM shouldn’t be a glorified storage dump and it’s good to see EMC recognise this.

You pay for what you get

Civil servants are reeling in the wake of the horrific news that CDs containing the records of Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC) database have been lost, and the futher news of DVLA data being lost. The full cost to tax paying members of the public may not be fully realised for years to come.

This debacle is not only an example of incredibly poor information management, but also a sign of a wider problem in the UK, that you get what you pay for. Or in this case you don't get what you pay for. 

Information management is, or rather was, at the heart of British life. Travel to former colonies like India or Australia and they'll gladly inform you of the regimented behaviour towards information that led to government structures that have served the sub-continent and prison colony well to date. Yet, those standards have dropped.

An IWR reporter remarked as we debated the issue, how come information of this value was so easy to simply download and burn to a CD?  Technology preventing such blunders is not new and is a basic function of many information management systems.

Revelations of the missing information came a day after a report on the BBC's Today programme that the Driving Standards Agency and vehicle licensing body the DVLA employees take on average three weeks sick leave a year. Missing information and low staff moral are examples of a civil service that is poorly funded and poorly managed.

It is too easy to wag the finger of blame at civil servants, when in truth a much wider debate needs to take place.  As tax payers and child benefit recipients we are angry and worried, as information professionals we are dumbfounded that such lapses could have occurred.  What of our role as citizens?  Since the 1980s we've wanted a John Lewis service, but only paid Tesco value brand prices.  If you want John Lewis quality, you pay John Lewis prices.  On the high street this modus operandi fits well with the public, as they choose when they want quality and when they want to increase their spending. So why is it that we expect our state services to manage high level information on a low level budget?

This needs to be a debate about our society and its values, literally, as well as an improvement in information management.

How will a slowdown affect ECM decision making?

With 2007 all but put to bed, a lot of people are looking forward to 2008 with not a little trepidation. And the cause of that fear is the prospect of a decline in the macro economy.

I'n no economist and have healthy scepticism for many self-proclaimed experts, but there is a lot of consistency in terms of the impact on IT buying. Down markets can be very healthy for technology buyers and very disuptive on the incumbents. In the early 1990s, for example, companies like Microsoft, Dell and Oracle were able to win chunks of market share as firms looked to take advantage of the move to client/server architectures, and shift away from mainframes.

In the wake of the dot-com collapse, software-as-a-service companies such as Salesforce.com took advantage of the squeeze on capex spending by offering subscription-based pricing that let firms get projects up and running very quickly.

In ECM, it's pretty obvious that firms offering low-cost, fast-deployment options stand to prosper if the economy struggles. That could be good news for SharePoint, Alfresco and companies offering freebie tools such as IBM Yahoo OmniFind and Microsoft's Search Server.

pdf forgeries

It's not every day an email starts like this:

PDF files have essentially become the standard within the business community because of the need for a protected file. However, the software is useless if users need to edit the document in any way.

Oh ho ho (he says, seasonally), does this mean the sender has a way to edit pdfs undetectably? This I must see. The software is called deskUNPDF Professional and it comes from Docudesk. It promises to:

convert PDFs into Word documents, view data in XML-format, or convert the files into HTML for a web presentation

It actually throws the result out in a huge variety of standard formats including images, csv and Sony Reader's lrf.

The danger appears to be that you could 'round trip' a pdf by exporting to word or an image file, fiddle around a bit and then print to pdf using one of the many pdf writers around.

Fortunately for people trying to protect their pdfs, the exercise proved less than satisfactory. Forgeries are evident. So the real value of the software is that you can move a pdf into another format.

Below, I've round-tripped an image page and a text page from the World Wildlife Fund's "Sustainability at the speed of light". It is utterly evident that I've been up to no good. And that, I believe, should be proclaimed as a valuable feature of the software.

Here's the original and the pdf output going via Word:

It's shrunk and there's a bit of textual overlap. The Word export has strange column breaks and the different text blocks appear to be in the wrong sequence when editing.

In honour of the Kit Kat tv commercial where the pandas roller-skate when the cameraman's not looking, I thought I'd do a bit of panda substitution using the GIMP.

I didn't add the speed streaks (and I cannot repeat the phenomenon) but they do look rather nice. However, even had my panda been better executed, this is clearly no way to forge a pdf.

Bear in mind that a lot of pdfs are protected by copyright and you need to be sure you're not going to land yourself in hot water by republishing. (Hopefully my snippets aren't going to get me into trouble.)

Time for ECM to stop selling fear

Over at CMS Watch, Tony Byrne mentions that he has heard the term “risk of incarceration” being used by reps as a spin on the older and somewhat more traditional meaning of ROI, “return on investment”. That shouldn’t surprise you too much on at least two counts.

First, enterprise content management (ECM) companies have become accustomed to pitching content management as a tool to “keep the CEO out of jail” by providing an audit trail of programs, files, messages and their associated creation, viewing, editing and other interactions. The selling spiel says: “Remember Enron? You don’t want to end up like that so you’d better have a good document management and retention strategy. Oh and if you were scared by Sarbanes-Oxley, there’s a ton more of that stuff coming down the line.”

Second, the company Byrne says he heard using the term was IBM, the company that was the originator, of course, of selling “fear, uncertainty and doubt”.

As I said at the top, I’m not at all surprised but if sarcasm is the lowest form of wit, then this is certainly among the lower echelons of effective sales and marketing. It gets an instant reaction but you might struggle to sell it twice –- as many firms are finding out the hard way.

For the last five years, ECM vendors have been touting regulatory compliance and reputation risk as threats to business. This was a crude but effective weapon in the down market after the dot-com collapse but, having made fortunes from scaring the bejeezus out of firms, the sales guys could really do with a hose down and a fresh approach.

IWR Information Professional of the Year Award

The IWR American Psychological Association Information Professional of the Year award has been announced and went, deservedly to Brian Kelly, UK Web Focus for the UKOLN organisation.

The award is judged by a panel of previous winners and the IWR editorial team. As editor of IWR when I judge the award I look for an individual who is pushing the limits of information, technology and making the role of the information professional as far as possible and making it an exciting role.  When looking through the final results I could see that the other judges felt the same way and Brian was an excellent choice.

Brian's role is a national Web co-ordinator, an advisory post funded by the educational body JISC and the Museums, Library and Archives Council (MLA).

In this role Brian is looking at the web as central resource for learning and research in higher education and is looking at ways to make the web a successful resource, which is a challenging role, because the web is still very young and is constantly changing. This can be seen with the recent changes dubbed Web 2.0, therefore Brian is going to be pretty busy for some time to come.

Based at the University of Bath, I know from information professionals I have dealt with in the academic sector that he is very well respected and his thoughts are often the basis for great debate within the industry. Linked to this is his blog, which is one of the most popular blogs in the sector.

I hope all IWR readers will join me in congratulating Brian for an award very much well deserved. 

Jimmy Wales on the role of Wikipedia in society

Jimmy Wales, chairman of Wikipedia was the keynote speech of Online Information 2007 with a presentation Web 2.0 in action: Free culture & community on the move.

Starts with Britannica editor Charles van Doren 1962, who said the encyclopaedia should be radical, but Wales claims they have been anything but.

Small showing of hands for those that have edited, although Wales believes it’s a good showing, "but not as many as college kids".

I consider us to be the Red Cross of information, he says as he describes its charitable status. Have 10 full time staff and will spend about $2 to 3 million this year, which is tiny compared to the major publishers. Vast majority of the money is from small donations, which he likes because its grass routes and not dependent on advertisers.

Wales talks about the desire to extend the languages that are in use on Wikipedia, including Hindi and Afrikaans.

Wiki is free in the sense of GNU, its free to copy, modify and distribute.

Shows a video of his travels to India and how he learnt that the local communities want to use the English version, as the English language is a route out of poverty. His organisation has been out to South Africa teaching students how to edit Wikipedia. "One of the things we have learnt is that if you can get five to 10 editors working together, it can make a great difference." These groups make progress and then they look towards outreach and who they can include. Hence the organisation has set up an academy to find the founding editors. It has begun in India, with 10-20,000 articles a month being put together by academy organisations.

Wikia is his next subject, a separate organisation with 66 languages, including a 67th, Klingon. Wales goes on to demonstrate using Google search results for Muppets and how the top result is the official site, but the rest of the results are from web based conversation, ie Wikipedia pages, forums and fan sites. He demonstrates an article on the Ford motor company and how on Muppet Wiki site, there is an article on Muppet Ford ads and how this demonstrates this level of information would never have been available before.

The search engine is a political statement, in a small P sense, Wales says. The proprietary software of the main players is a mystery in that people have no control of the accountability. The Wikia search will publish its algorithm.

Wales believes that the trust of social networks and setting up trusted networks can be utilised in search. .

On the role of collaboration, he asks the audience to imagine that they are designing a restaurants, discussing the idea that we trust the people around us, we don't put people in cages in restaurants because they will be using knives.
The wiki philosophy is to allow people to do good.

ECM needs to get usability - fast

New research from Oracle and IDG suggests that firms are failing to capitalise on unstructured content. Well, with Stellent now added to its acquisitions mountain, Oracle would say that, wouldn’t it? But the data is interesting nonetheless.

According to the report, two-thirds of “senior IT decision makers” in Western Europe think they have the unstructured data issue managed, or are on the right tracks to cracking the problem. The flip side of that is that 60 per cent say they can’t make business decisions based on unstructured data because it is either too hard to find or because it is sitting among other, irrelevant data.

The average organisation surveyed had 4.28 ECMs in place (!) with many, unsurprisingly, seeking to consolidate. Oracle suggests that this “raises the question as to whether European organisations actually understand that unstructured content is an enterprise-wide issue that requires a strategic enterprise-wide solution”.

That’s a dodgy conclusion. The proliferation of ECMs (and ERPs, databases, BI systems etc) might be better accounted for by the crazy growth patterns and the pace of change in modern technology-driven business. When Oracle itself came along with client/server databases, few smart companies said “sorry, we’ve already standardised on DB2 on the mainframe”.

One other data point is worth examination: 63 per cent of European enterprises “consider email as the primary source for managing unstructured content, with 86 per cent admitting that email is used as the primary source for sharing content”.

That’s refreshingly open but it’s not as “surprising” as Oracle suggests that email is often a vehicle for decision making. The fact that many of us use email as out primary means not only of communications but also for knowledge management, contact information and much else is as much an indictment of ECM usability as anything else.

This research is clearly Oracle positioning itself as the company capable of making ECM palatable for mainstream businesses who are dissatisfied by the big incumbents. Fair enough, the more ECM matters get an airing the better.

But it also suggests to me that ECM is still in its infancy. Alfresco’s John Newton is fitting ECM with social networking integrations to reflect his belief that ECM users will move from being 10 per cent of the orgainsation to over half of users. This Oracle data backs up the hunch that ECM might have to change fast to fit in with the way users want to work, rather than asking users to adapt to what software designers say is right.

Alfresco securely binds Facebook to ECM

You hear about organisations such as BT and the BBC adopting Facebook as the place to hang out and connect. A friend in the BBC told me they were all "addicted" to Facebook. Perhaps she should be told not to use that particular word at her next performance appraisal.

JP Rangaswami, MD of BT Design, is hugely in favour of Facebook because it creates a formality and permanence around conversations which were once the province of the water cooler. He can see what's really going on rather than have to believe what the org chart tells him. He also likes the idea that the infrastructure to run Facebook is external to BT and therefore someone else's problem.

As you know, many other companies are terrified of letting their staff loose on such social networks and actually ban them, despite the fact that many staff are familiar with them and use them elsewhere in their lives.

Software vendors either want to create their own equivalent in order to keep control or they reluctantly allow Facebook into a a sidepanel of their main applications. They probably don't want to give too much functionality away in case it undermines their business model. I wouldn't like to hazard a guess at what Microsoft is up to with its shareholding in Facebook.

But then along comes enterprise content management company Alfresco with the idea that it will not only accept Facebook, it will cheerfully integrate it into the company's repertoire. It allows registered users to publish and share documents and other information in a controlled, secure and auditable environment.

In case you've not heard of Alfresco, it started a few years ago with the intention of being a free Documentum but five times faster and ten times cheaper. The apparent conflict between 'free' and 'cheaper' is that anyone can download and run the software for free, but if they want support they can jolly well pay for it.

Since then, it has fully embraced the social networking world, blurring the boundaries between front office and back and putting content production and consumption into the hands of the many rather than the specialised few.

Company founder John Newton is a panellist at the Online Information conference next Thursday at 11:30. The debate will be about the death of proprietary content management. Wishful thinking? Or are these guys onto something?