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Federating your Enterprise Content
Wednesday, June 18, 2008 — posted by Simon Bate
Summarizing an interesting day at Gilbane San Francisco 2008.The Gilbane conference focuses on Enterprise and Web Content Management. Not necessarily something directly in Scriptorium's business, but there are many, many tie-ins with what we do do. In particular, structured documentation and XML are golden to Enterprise Content Management Systems.
The keynote address was delivered by Udi Manber, VP of Engineering for Google. One of the more interesting points in his talk was the engineering process within his group. An engineer doesn't ask permission to do anything. Instead, they experiment, evaluate the results of what they did, and then get approval based on the data.
This address was followed by a discussion between Dan Farber, Editor-in-Chief at CNET news, and Denis Brown, SVP of Business User Imagineering at SAP. Some points:
Denis described the "consumerization" of the workforce. That is, just as people access Amazon to order books or CDs, when the go to work, they expect to be able to use corporate intranet web sites to perform similar tasks. AND the sites need to work just a smoothly as Amazon.
One topic that has arisen again and again is the security issues presented by Web 2.0. This led me to wonder about IT protections on web traffic. In my experience, IT has often presented a big hurdle for technical documentation teams to make content available on externally facing corporate web sites. There are often reams of paperwork to be filled out...and even more if the pages might be updated more than once every 6 months. Web 2.0 means traffic and content will be flowing both ways. Oh boy.
In the next session I attended, Steven Arnold discussed aspects of his recent Gilbane report "Beyond Search". Beyond his gruff (world-weary?) demeanor he had some good observations. Among them: Enterprise search doesn't exist (because most enterprise docs are not available for indexing); 50-75% of users don't think Enterprise search is working for them; there is no one-size-fits-all search, buy what works for your organization and data; most Fortune 500 companies have 5 to 10 separate search engines in house.
Ross Mayfield (http://www.socialtext.com/blog/) brought some fresh air to a large panel on Collaboration and Social Computing. All presenters had an enterprise focus; that's what they do. But Ross' discussion of "people as first-class objects" was really good to hear.
Labels: conferences, gilbane08
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