ECM Stuff

Intranet Trends Survey

2011-06-23T15:35:00.000-04:00

I just thought I would pass on this message directly from Jane McConnell with the links for this years Annual Intranet survey. Jane's survey is an excellent tool to use. If you submit a response on behalf of your organization, you get a copy of the results, which I simply can't recommend enough - it is an incredibly useful document, and Jane does excellent analysis on the results to provide

New online Persona building tool - UsersBox

2011-05-26T08:43:00.000-04:00

I have just received my invite to the beta of the new online persona building tool called UsersBox. I have not had a lot of chance to play with it yet, but as they have a nice introductory video that explains the tool, and of course it has embed code, I thought I might just as well embed it here for you to see: Usersbox Introduction Video from Usersbox on Vimeo. I will let you know more when

Google Chrome Subscriptions - I told you so.......

2011-05-13T14:13:00.000-04:00

So on the way to work this morning I was listening to this weeks edition of the TWiT networks "This Week In Google" podcast, which of course was covering the Google IO announcements. I was surprised to hear the glitterati of the show still doing the whole "I don't get the need for Chrome, why wouldn't you do Android....." stuff, again........ I have already given my take on Chrome for

On the move again....

2011-05-06T19:02:00.000-04:00

Today was my last day as "Knowledge Manager" for a global division of a major professional services network. On Monday I start a new role as Senior Strategy Consultant (Enterprise Content Management) for one of North Americas biggest banks. So unless they have a social media policy that says I can't blog, which I somehow doubt, as I am going "back to my roots" in ECM, I should actually have more

JBoye Philadelphia 3rd to 5th of May - sign up now !

2011-04-12T16:36:00.001-04:00

If you have not yet signed up for the JBoye 2011 conference in Philadelphia next month, do so now ! Why do I so fervently suggest you do such a thing ? Simply because Janus and his crew throw an absolutely superb practitioner focused event. You cannot possibly attend without learning something useful and connecting with fellow professionals. So head directly over to the site immediate to check

Info360 Presentation Slides: "No ECM - No KM !"

2011-03-29T14:39:00.000-04:00

My presentation at the AIIM Info360 conference in Washington D.C. last week was based on a very simple premise: in order to achieve a Knowledge Management enabled organisation (or 'to do KM') you need a solid foundation of good information management, and for unstructured information that means having an ECM strategy. I have removed my employers corporate branding and added a few explanatory

AIIM Info360 - Post conference summary

2011-03-27T22:17:00.000-04:00

Firstly a huge thank you to Jennifer Marcus and her team at Questex Media Group for the organization of this years AIIM Info360 conference - the last one ever to have the dual AIIM Expo / Info360 branding. Secondly another huge thank you to all the speakers who made my attendance so useful and interesting, whether they were end users, or members of the vendor community, the presentations (at

AIIM Info360 Conference and Expo 2011 - discount code !

2011-03-14T21:40:00.000-04:00

The AIIM Info360 Conference and Expo, in Washington D.C. is almost upon us, the pre-conference learning sessions day is next Monday (March 21st) ! I am presenting a session entitled: "Where ECM fits in your KM and Info Mngt. Strategies" at 1pm on the Tuesday afternoon (March 22nd). If you have not signed up yet (why not ?) then your in luck because I can provide you with a $100 discount on a

Book Review - Intranet Management Handbook

2011-02-21T20:15:00.000-05:00

Martin White, Managing Director of Intranet Focus Ltd in the UK has a new book out called the 'Intranet Management Handbook' - there are new pages on the Intranet Focus site with links to resources quoted in the book. p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoCommentText, li.MsoCommentText, div.MsoCommentText {

Search Based Applications and Concept Search

2011-01-31T13:30:00.008-05:00

I have not written about search for a while, as my current role is is less involved in search than my previous one, but then a couple of things come along at the same time. Last week my colleague Martin White, of Intranet Focus, who is a true enterprise search guru, wrote about Search-based Applications. Martin's post was prompted by his review of a new book on Search-based Applications (SBA)

Google ChromeOS, ECM and intranets - UPDATE

2010-12-16T12:05:00.001-05:00

Update: I write this, go for lunch, come back and pull this out of my RSS reader: http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/12/nothing-but-web.html ---------------------------------------------------------------------- So there has been a little written in the last week or so about Google's ChromeOS - a lot of it complete drivel in my opinion, and as this is my blog, I think I am entitled to

Intranets in 2011: A turning point - highlights from the Global Intranet Trends

2010-11-09T12:35:00.000-05:00

A few days ago Jane McConnell of NetStrategy/JMC blogged on the highlights of her just released 2011 Global Intranet Trends report,you can read that blog posting here: Intranets in 2011: A turning point Jane says she has so many highlights to discuss, she has written 3 posts, but go to that link to start your journey. To get your own copy of the report and make your own analysis of the

Knowledge Workers Toronto - Content Reuse Presentation

2010-11-04T09:40:00.000-04:00

On Tuesday evening I attended my first Knowledge Workers Toronto (KWT) get-together. You can find KWT by searching for it at www.meetup.com The session included two guest speakers addressing the topic of Content Reuse, and it was an excellent presentation and discussion, of which more in a moment. I should introduce the speakers first though: Pamela Kostur of Parallax Communications and

ECM / Content Management podcasts on the TWiT network

2010-10-20T10:51:00.000-04:00

If you have never heard of the TWiT network, head on over to TWiT.tv or look them up on iTunes. Named after the This Week in Tech show, this 'netcasting' network includes a show on open source subjects called FLOSS Weekly - click the graphic to go their main info page: FLOSS Weekly is presented by Randal Schwartz (of Perl fame) and a number of worthy co-hosts. Recently they have had excellent

ThoughtFarmer SharePoint Intranet Connector

2010-09-29T09:53:00.000-04:00

A little shout out for the Vancouver boys because I love this video ! Come on, why not buy it, you get a free set of Kitchen Knives !!

AIIM Fall Event Toronto - review

2010-09-24T15:03:00.000-04:00

The AIIM day in Toronto on weds 22nd Sept, was the second venue in the “grand fall tour” of the AIIM road show, and it was as good and as interesting as ever. An 8am to 2pm (roughly) event, if you include breakfast and lunch, there were two tracks of interesting sessions, and I will give a quick over view of thoughts on those in a minute, but firstly if your in the information management or

Goodbye Goole Wave, Hello Voice, whither the Enterprise ?

2010-08-26T18:08:00.000-04:00

Once again apologies for the absence of posts, well I am settling into a new job and had a weeks vacation too...... So its "Google Wave is dead, long live Google Wave (technologies)" ? Yes Google killed off Wave as a consumer product, but really did anyone ever think it was going anywhere as a tool for general purpose use by Joe public ? As Google note, they have foldded elements of the Wave

SharePoint, Intranets and webinars, oh my......

2010-06-22T21:19:00.005-04:00

Apologies for taking so long to write about this, but last Thursday (18th of June) I took part in an Intranet Benchmarking Forum webinar as a panelist.The webinar was an "open to the public" event of the IBF SharePoint Special Interest Group (SIG) and it was timed to coincide with the release of a new IBF report on SharePoint 2010. The report was written by my good colleague Martin White of

Evaluating ThoughtFarmer 3.7 as a social intranet platform - Updated

2010-06-04T12:09:00.002-04:00

UPDATE - please look in the comments to see new info from Chris McGrath of the ThoughtFarmer team.I have owed the ThoughtFarmer team a blog posting since version 3.6 of their product came out. Now 3.7 has been released, and I have had the morning at home before heading out for the weekend for the Medieval Fayre, I though I better write something !I have recently written a post for CMS Wire

Enterprise Search Summit 2010 summary - day 2

2010-05-13T17:48:00.007-04:00

This is my second summarizing post on the excellent Enterprise Search Summit 2010 conference. See my earlier post for a summary of the workshop day, and first full day of the conference.Day 2 kicked off with an excellent keynote from Peter Morville of Information Architecture (for the WWW), Ambient Findability and Search Patterns fame. I have seen Peter speak before, and I am a bit of a 'fan boy'

Enterprise Search Summit 2010 summary - day 1

2010-05-13T16:17:00.003-04:00

I am 'back at the ranch' after an excellent trip to New York for the Enterprise Search Summit 2010 which was a lot of fun and very informative.A big thank you to my friend and colleague Martin White of Intranet Focus Ltd, a true search expert, who got me involved, and to Michelle Manafy, editor of eContent Magazine and conference chair (and her colleagues) for her excellent job organizing

CMIS steps away from being officially ratified.

2010-04-27T15:14:00.003-04:00

Irina Guseva writing at CMS Wire tells us that the CMSI draft has passed a critical milestone, getting 15% of votes, in the journey to become an officially ratified OASIS standard, read her article here:CMIS Makes it as an official standard.She has some quotes from Alfresco, Nuxeo, IBM and Day Software, and its an interesting little read.This is very important for the ECM industry, but actually

More SharePoint 2010 seminars and learning

2010-04-23T15:56:00.004-04:00

It's been a busy couple of days ! Yesterday morning the Toronto AIIM Chapter held a MS sponsored event on the 'future of productivity' - mainly Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010. This morning was a longer session held by EnvisionIT at the Microsoft Canada offices in Mississauga. Strangely enough it was EnvisionIT who brought two early adopter SP2010 clients to the AIIM seminar as case studies too !

JBoye Philadelphia 2010 - coming soon.......

2010-04-13T13:31:00.004-04:00

May the 4th to the 6th to be exact !This is a real "user community" conference, packed full of real world case studies, and with a luminary list of speakers from the content management community - with individuals like Mary-Jo Foley, Eric Karjaluoto and Peter Kim as keynote speakers.Last year Janus got his money's worth out of me, as I did a workshop with Martin White, did a case study session

SharePoint 2010 for BI seminar

2010-03-26T19:32:00.002-04:00

This morning I attended a seminar put on by EnvisionIT at the Microsoft Canada headquarters in Mississauga.It was a fascinating session, as I would not say BI was my area of expertise at all ! I did a couple of two day training courses when I was working at the OU, so that I could work with the SAS data warehouse, and we did some development work with the in-house SAS experts in order to build a

Divulge your innermost (intranet) secrets

2010-03-17T16:18:00.003-04:00

So the brilliant west coast gang at ThoughtFarmer have put up an excellent new site called:Intranet SecretsThey beseech you to drop by and anonymously leave some gems of wisdom or wit about your intranet - go on, you know you want to...... :-)There are a few good witty entries already, so I urge you to go and add yours. On the serious side, some of the comments will make you shake your head in

Now AIIM Enterprise 2.0 Practitioner Certified

2010-03-12T09:57:00.003-05:00

So, that's this years first bit of professional development completed - even though I managed to break the AIIM online / elearning system - twice !Yep, another logo to add to the side bar !I enjoyed the course. It puts a heavy emphasis on Prof. Andrew McAfee's original SLATES model, and on Dion Hinchcliffe's FLATNESSES extension of the model.The 'blurb' on the AIIM site states:"The E2.0

Guest writing for CMS Wire

2010-03-03T20:13:00.004-05:00

I have been approached by CMS Wire, who liked my writing on my humble little blog here, and so I will be writing at least one article a month for them, and the first one is now available here:SharePoint Enterprise Search: Lessons Learned in the fieldBriefly its about our experiences at work with SharePoint search. My manager and AVP have been working on this since well before I joined them. The

Off topic post - Go Canada Go.....

2010-02-28T20:42:00.006-05:00

I am proud to live in Canada, I say 'live' because I am only a 'permanent resident' and not yet a citizen, so I can't technically be "proud to be Canadian" (yet) - but if you had seen me sat on the very edge of the sofa (or standing for the whole of the extra time) screaming at the TV, wearing my (1992 version) Canadian hockey jersey, you would think I was "born and bred' here !I have

SharePoint 2007 metadata management - fail !

2010-02-23T15:53:00.004-05:00

I am writing this post mainly in the hope that I missed something fairly fundamental and that someone will contact me and make me look stupid by providing an easy fix........ but I am not holding my breath !I have been designing a SharePoint (MOSS2007) Project Management Information System (PMIS) that fits our own particular Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) and Enterprise Project management

EMC and FatWire partner for Web Experience Management

2010-02-17T14:30:00.005-05:00

I picked up on this yesterday via CMS Wire, you can see Barb Moshers article here: "EMC replaces their WCM with FatWires Web Experience Management"EMC's press release is here: EMC and FatWire Jointly Deliver Marketing Solutions for Web Experience and Brand ManagementAs we would expect of anything Documentum related, Pie has some cogent thoughts on the partnership on his blog here: "EMC admits it

Time for some professional development.....

2010-02-10T10:34:00.004-05:00

I have not done a AIIM course since early last year, so I just signed up for Enterprise 2.0 Practitioner . You can find details here on the AIIM site: http://www.aiim.org/Education/E2.0-Enterprise-Web-2.0-Training-Courses.aspxHowever, a quick copy and paste of the course outline is below for your information:The E2.0 Practitioner Certificate program covers the concepts and technologies of

Michael Sampson responds to my post on collaboration

2010-02-04T22:19:00.007-05:00

I have the privilege of knowing and interacting with Michael Sampson, a true collaboration expert based out of New Zealand. I made a recent post called: "what exactly is collaboration and who owns it?" In the article I suggested that speaking of some amorphous entity called 'collaboration' could actually be unhelpful and counterproductive. As such I also suggested splitting the space up into a

More on Nuxeo DAM

2010-02-04T12:13:00.005-05:00

So, how slow am I ? Yesterday I blogged the Nuxeo Digital Asset Management piece, but its been in public beta for months, and I have not noticed - DOH !However after yesterday's posting, I was approached by Cheryl McKinnon, the Chief Marketing Officer at Nuxeo, someone I have known since she was in her previous role at OpenText.Cheryl gave me a bit of a "blogger briefing" on Nuxeo DAM because,

Open Source.... DAM..... !

2010-02-03T13:40:00.003-05:00

Thats Digital Asset Management, not a profanity :-)If your interested in an open source (i.e. you can download it and play with it, right now !) system for managing your digital assets, check out the Nuxeo DAM product.I am pretty sure that the last time I spoke to Cheryl McKinnon their CMO at an AIIM event before Christmas, she said that they were working on DOD records management certification

Tweeting at work.....

2010-02-03T12:42:00.005-05:00

..... not just tweeting, but now blogging too and I know my boss reads this site, so please note Tony that I am writing this one handed while eating my lunch with the other.......I guess we all know the "nay sayers" who don't really grok social networking, so I just wanted to share a very quick example of how Twitter can work for you in a 'work context' - I assure you that the vast majority of

Alfresco, SharePoint and iPads.... Oh my.....

2010-01-28T20:19:00.004-05:00

Well what a busy two days I have had, and I need to blog them properly, so I guess this is really just a heads up. I have been out of the office to an Alfresco 3.2 "lunch and learn" yesterday, visited the Microsoft Canada building this morning for a "SharePoint 2010 for social computing" seminar and then this afternoon we had an excellent SharePoint 2010 provided by Microsoft at our premises.

What exactly is 'collaboration' - and who owns it ?

2010-01-25T17:02:00.003-05:00

This article is mostly prompted by internal discussions within my group at work, but also because I have been reading Prof. Andrew MacAfee's book on Enterprise 2.0. Also in the bigger picture it links back to some posts from late last year on the TiMAF definition of information and information management, because your definition of what constitutes collaboration will impact on who the 'owners'

Are you managing a Government web site ?

2010-01-20T15:45:00.005-05:00

If so the latest webinar (28th January) from my old colleagues at Prescient Digital Media maybe of interest to you.Best Practices for Managing a Government Website Redevelopment

Come and join the Intranet Best Practices workshop at J.Boye 09

2009-03-27T12:22:00.004-04:00

I have the pleasure to announce that I will be running a pre-conference workshop at Janus Boye's innaugral North American conference: Philadelphia 09The workshop is Intranet Best Practices and its a double act with my very good friend and colleague Martin White (of Intranet Focus Ltd).Martin is also doing a session entitled: Making the most of SharePoint 2007 and I think current plans may see me

EMC should bid for Sun !

2009-03-25T20:27:00.002-04:00

I have been really busy with on-site client work for a few weeks, and have numerous clients with 31st of March deadlines, busy busy, but I have been wanting to respond to Pie's posting: Documentum and the Search for Search for over a week now.However then we get the "IBM to buy Sun" bombshell...... :-)All good fun eh. So I thought I would tackle both issues with one posting. Why ? Well as you can

Enterprise search revisited - updated

2009-03-06T11:36:00.006-05:00

Although I am a bit slow catching up with the conversation (hey, I have been busy....) I wanted to respond to Pie who has made his first posting specifically around search, as he say's search is cropping up more and more often in his world of ECM work.Pie's posting his here: "Traditional Enterprise Search meets Enterprise 2.0"Pie's posting is largely in response to and reference's a recent post

SharePoint pro's and Con's

2009-03-03T09:51:00.003-05:00

My boss Toby Ward (see http://intranetblog.com) has taken an internal company briefing I did on SharePoint technologies and added some content to make it 'SharePoint Pro's and Con's' which he is presenting at the IntraTeam conference this week in Copenhagen.This is the 'sneek preview' version which is up on SlideShare.net"Sharepoint Moss 2007 Pros & Cons by Toby Ward, Prescient Digital MediaView

ECM Maturity Model

2009-02-26T20:16:00.002-05:00

So I am about 4 days late with this, so it may not be 'news worthy' anymore, but it appears my friends at CMS Watch have joined forces with some of their other friends to develop an ECM Maturity Model - or - ECM3 for short.The have put up a blog at http://ecm3.org/You can download the maturity model itself (a PDF document) here: http://ecmmaturity.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/ec3m-v01_0.pdfPlease

New open source ECM 'appliance' released - updated

2009-02-25T16:03:00.004-05:00

Alfresco the open source ECM platform vendor has joined forces with Ingres the open source database vendor to release an 'ECM software appliance' called Icebreaker ECM.The original Ingres Icebreaker database appliance was released some time ago. It is a cut down version of Linux which includes a base system required to run the Ingres RDBMS on top of it, all packed together in a single easily

Where ECM fits in the bigger information management picture

2009-02-17T21:01:00.006-05:00

I have just spent a busy and very, very interesting week at the head offices of a global client, who of course can not be named, assisting in the formulation of their KM strategy by undertaking a review of thier ECM program. This prompted a little graphic artistry on my part, (well since I got my MBA years ago, I like to draw concepts......)Anyway, Knowledge Management being a bit of a fuzzy term

Enterprise RSS, wherefor art thou...?

2009-02-03T20:51:00.007-05:00

Toby Ward over at Intranetblog has a post "Enterprise RSS is not dead, its still being born" in which he references ReadWriteWeb and some other sources. I will not regurgitate the post here. but I am a big fan of RSS and ATOM content syndication technologies, however as Toby points out lack of enterprise take up is more to do with cultural, human factors issues. However within the Information

The reality of SharePoint deployments

2009-01-29T19:57:00.006-05:00