Category Archives: Standards

Posts related to industry standards (i.e. ECM in particular and software in general)

When content meets apps, Berlin edition

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Thanks to everyone at Day Ignite Berlin 2010 who came to the technical track session that I presented this afternoon. In order to keep the conversation going, I’ve uploaded this presentation as follows:

When Content Meets Applications

During this presentation I recommended that you consume my “Realizing great customer experiences with LiveCycle ES3″ presentation from Adobe MAX 2010, if you’re interested in more details about the architecture and capabilities of LiveCycle ES3. You will find that presentation here.

I also asked you to consider downloading and installing Adobe Enterprise Café. Café, as we like to call it in Adobe, helps you stay in touch with the enterprise community, receive news, find information and aggregate content related to Adobe LiveCycle ES (Enterprise Suite), Acrobat, Connect, ColdFusion, the Adobe Flash Platform, and (since its v1.5 release) the Omniture community. Targeted at the general developer ecosystem, Café is the one tool you need to search across the entire community knowledge base and stay in touch with the Adobe teams. Furthermore, the Café is hard at work to integrate the Day community as well. However, you don’t need to wait for that new version of Café; you can install Café today and when the Day community is integrated, you’ll receive that update the next time you launch the Adobe AIR application.

When I presented this session with Alex Choy in Chicago, Irina Guseva of CMS Wire published her thoughts on the session: “Apps as Content, or How Day and Adobe May Fit Together.”

When content meets applications

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Thanks to everyone at Day Ignite Chicago 2010 who came to the technical track session that Alex and I presented–especially those who stood the entire time in a packed room.

In order to keep the conversation going, I’ve uploaded this presentation as follows:

When Content Meets Applications

We’re very excited at Adobe about the opportunity to work with those at Day Software as fellow colleagues. By working together with you, we believe that great things will emerge from the unified delivery of content plus applications.

P.S. If you’re not already watching the #dayignite tweetstream, why not? ;-)

Update 10/18/2010: Irina Guseva published her thoughts on this presentation on CMS Wire: “Apps as Content, or How Day and Adobe May Fit Together.”

Update 10/22/2010: Presentations from Day Ignite Chicago 2010 are appearing here. Presentations that will also be delivered during Day Ignite Berlin 2010 won’t appear on Slideshare until after both events have concluded. (That being said, you can see a thorough write-up of David Nuescheler’s presentation here.) Event photos from Chicago are here.

Update on 10/27/2010: The message first delivered in Chicago around the unified delivery of content and applications was expanded upon in Los Angeles at Adobe MAX 2010, and that presentation is now available here.

Adobe, Customer Experience Management and Day Software

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Update 10/28/2010: Adobe successfully completes its acquisition of Day Software. Day will operate as a new product line within Adobe’s Digital Enterprise Solutions Business Unit, joining Acrobat, Connect and LiveCycle. Welcome to all my new teammates! :-)

Adobe has just announced a definitive agreement stipulating its intent to acquire Day Software. This acquisition will bolster Adobe’s leadership in Customer Experience Management, bringing Day’s industry-leading Web Content Management, Digital Asset Management and Social Collaboration applications, better known collectively as CQ, and Web scale content application infrastructure (CRX) together with Adobe’s LiveCycle, Connect and other enterprise software offerings–not to mention Adobe’s Flash Platform and industry-leading tools for creative professionals.

There is plenty to talk about in terms of how deeply aligned this acquisition is architecturally, technically and in terms of shared vision, and I plan to use this space to go into more of these details over time (e.g. synergies between Day’s targeting and optimization and Adobe Omniture‘s capabilities). However, I’m equally excited by the people involved here.

I’m looking forward to shortly being able to call folks like David Nuescheler, Kevin Cochrane and Roy T. Fielding not just industry colleagues but fellow Adobe employees. Welcome to Adobe, Day Software!

For more on Adobe’s approach to superior customer experience, I encourage you to subscribe to experiencedelivers.com and/or follow @AdobeCEM.

Update 7/28/2010: The Web is all a-buzz about this acquisition, and I would say it’s with good reason. Simply put: customer experience wins and therefore customers win, which means that businesses embracing Adobe CEM increase their own profitability.

Since my brief post above, Adobe has posted a press release and FAQ about the acquisition. Rob Tarkoff, SVP and GM of Adobe’s Digital Enterprise Solutions Business Unit (or DESBU) has also posted his thoughts, offering some key takeaways to consider from this acquisition.

Content-enabled applications empathized

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Laurence Hart was kind enough to pick-up my previous post on content-enabled applications and add his thoughts to the subject, especially concerning the role CMIS can play.

From my first post: Content-enabled applications should facilitate the convergence of content, collaboration, interaction, and process.

I agree with Laurence (aka JaneDoePie) that content is an enabler, not the center. All content-enabled applications “should be shaped to work with and enhance the process the users use to perform their work.”

Laurence offers case management as his favorite, generic content-enabled application in order to further ground the point that success is determined by the combination of content, user experience (interaction, more than just UI, IMHO) and process (e.g. collaborative workflow).

I’m in the middle of reading Subject To Change, and already I’ve found its message highly relevant to the subject of content-enabled applications. For example, the book focuses on experience strategy and how to develop organizational empathy where the target users of your products or services are concerned. Specifically, in the case of case management, the book would argue that you, as case management application architect/designer, need to actually observe case workers in their native setting to appreciate how case management really works (or doesn’t). Go beyond theory and someone else’s analysis. Experience business activity firsthand in order to model reality into your solution.

Recently as part of the Case Management Solution Framework xCelerated Composition Platform (xCP) released for D6.5 SP1, a sample application for grants management was shipped that illustrates how Process Suite components can be used to build case-based, content-enabled applications. You can download this package from Powerlink (authentication required). The easiest way to run this sample application is to install it using the express installer, which will install all the right components (with their compatible versions) and the DAR file. You can also download the express installer from Powerlink (authentication required).Please see the update below for the correct link.

A goal of a solution framework is to make it easier to build content-enabled applications such as those for case management. A solution framework should allow you to invest more time in becoming empathic in order to ship solutions that resonate well with your users and drive more efficient business as a result.

In this response, I wanted to focus on empathy’s role. Separately, I plan to pick up the CMIS angle raised by Laurence. Thanks in advance for joining our discussion online…

Update 5/1/2009: A PM colleague pointed out to me that the link to the “one click” installer that takes one from state “zero” (i.e. Windows but not database) to state “ready for proof of concept” is as follows: https://emc.subscribenet.com/control/dctm/download?element=2193203 (authentication required). Cheers!

Building content-enabled applications

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Both Pie and Marko have blogged about content-enabled applications, or what Gartner calls CEVAs (content-enabled vertical applications).

As it so happens, I’ll be presenting there will be a session on this subject next month at EMC World 2009.

Based on my research of what folks label a content-enabled application, two things rise to the top: process (surrounding content) and subject matter expertise (individual or group surrounding process), and context. OK, three things.

For example, Forrester defines content-centric applications as “solutions that put the business’ content to use, and add context along the way–to support line-of-business needs.” Example solutions include customer self-service, claims processing, proposal management, contract management, and case management.

Other CEVA vendors argue that content-enabled applications are process-oriented, not content-centric. I tend to prefer this viewpoint. A claim is valueless in itself. Only once is claim is processed is value realized, including taking a future liability off the books.

Content-enabled applications should facilitate the convergence of content, collaboration, interaction, and process.

Before you leverage your content in an application to generate value, ask yourself few questions:

  • Who uses the content? Why? How?
  • What processes does the content support?
  • If I’m not a subject matter expert for this type of content, who can I involve to design a better application experience?
  • What processes does it support?
  • What context is involved, either centrally or peripherally?

Start with something familiar to just about anyone these days: email (or IM, micro-blogging, etc.). Answer the questions. See how applications, for example, around email have evolved. Think about where current email applications may have untapped potential. Etc.

So, where have all the CEVAs gone (as Marko asks)?

  • I think that we in the content management business do ourselves a disservice by overly complicating concepts (e.g. behind TLAs or FLAs). Although fine as a conceptual catalyst, CEVA is self-defeating, IMHO, as a rallying label.
  • I agree that CMIS has great potential to increase the availability of content-enabled applications, if for no other reason, because application development that consumes the proposed standard should have a greater return on investment by being applicable to multiple content repositories. (ECM vendor partners are you listening?)
  • In the end, it’s the application, not the content or the process or the people. That is, if you’re just adding a document and perhaps a workflow to some code, you may have an app…but it won’t be used. Focus on user experience (i.e. the meaningful, intuitive presentation of content, context and process together).

Back to EMC World…          Orlando, FL - May17-21

I’ll miss interacting with ‘Zilla at the conference. It was at EMC World in 2007 (also held in Orlando, FL) that I first met Mark in person.

If you are able to make the conference and consider yourself to be a “2.0 type,” you may be interested in Len’s advert. Looks like there is even a LinkedIn event established for the conference.

I plan to tweet the conference and otherwise engage with the community. In the meantime, if you plan to attend my session (as presented by others), please feel free to comment (here or ECN) on your thoughts about content-enabled applications and what you’d like discussed or demoed. Thanks in advance.