When i think on Enterprise 2.0 implementation in any organization i am looking to see if the organization will embrace it and invest the time needed.
Judging people on a quick impression basis probably gives me the wrong impression over the flexibility of some of those organizations. And imagining the CEO of a company embracing a blog usually seems impossible.

Apparently i am wrong Ron Miller in Fierce Content Management has posted a commentary about how the Enterprise 2.0 is been adopted by the more mature crowd of companies as tools of communication.
It might be that the validity of the Web 2.0 as a communication platform is really here in the Enterprise Corporation and not the twitter mania over Iran.
I hope of hearing more and more news like that.

There are 2 pre warnings I am to put on this post.
1. This post is my own personal opinion and not of my employer
2. I am a vignette employee and have been offended by the paper thus this post uses harsh language. If you believe you will be offended by this post don’t read it. If you have decided to read it you are the sole responsible of your actions and Yuval Ararat will not be responsible.

The second wave is on now and the attack over Vignette using deception and frightening techniques just went to a whole new level.
I am now pissed, really pissed. This Clickability white paper just makes no sense and uses false information to intimidate customers of V5/6 from upgrading to vignette.
The white paper is full of half truths, but those i can accept as legit, like the V7 upgrade quoted at 1.5 million. That is a nice number but what hides behind it? What were the requirements and how much of that was the licensing cost? It does try to support the fact that licensing is expensive.

According to public financial reports, Vignette sold very few V7 licenses last year. Ever wonder why? First, there’s the cost. One Vignette customer (who wishes to remain anonymous) told us he had been quoted a $1.5 million price tag for a V7 upgrade.

Sorry mate but the upgrade is more then the licensing costs to say the least, usually the professional services or the agency bill is triple the cost so he got a nice deal in this case on the licensing.
Then they ask a legit question that has no grasp of truth

Who’s Working on Vignette 7.6 After the Layoff?

To answer it simply i am doing it now at a client site, so you can guess who.
As far as I know the layoffs had no effect on client’s activities nor on implementation of the new versions, making this question a more means of bringing the layoffs into the paper rather then introducing constructive information for their case.

Traditionally, when it comes to “upgrades” Vignette doesn’t even eat its own dog food. Once
again, according to CMS Wire, “And while we’re at it, we have to mention something about long
product development cycles, and Vignette’s slowness in adopting its own new releases. Would
that be out of fear of complex content migrations and painful upgrades?”

No, No, no no no. You are missing the point and clinging to falsehood again.
Dear Sir Robin, who robs to provide, we make many of the upgrades as VPS and as such eat our own dog food. Some of the migrations are complex from many reasons and some are as simple as a months work, all depends on the implementation and the customers approach to development.

I think that Vignette Clients are slow to adopt from 2 main reasons:
1. They don’t have the need and like the product they are with.
2. They are Enterprises and as such take time to make the decision and gather the funding. they are not little op shops where the owner is the IT is the Marketing like most of your clients.

Yes, it’s true that years ago Vignette was a CMS pioneer. But since then, the company has simply
failed to anticipate the speed at which the Web evolves (for the record, the head of Vignette has
publicly stated that the company completely missed the Web 2.0 train by failing to execute).

Now did we? Look at the CMS wire and take your pick of who is more reliable resource.

Yes, Vignette is a proven innovator

Oh as for the claim that the clients don’t embrace the new tech fast enough i have to disagree, they do so quicker then the industry perceive. Portal 7.4 was grabbed in the first days it was out and so did the VCM 7.6.
Vignette is the master of slow or no innovation. Ha! Should i respond to that? No i don’t think so i think they never seen the product suit and they are relating to customers who will never will. Guess Clickability has the capabilities in the space of the Collaboration server and the Community applications and services offering vignette has and with the ability to put it in enterprise server architecture. Oh, you don’t, maybe the cloud gods will grant you your wish.
But wait, SaaS will solve it all and the cloud will import all of your data automatically within weeks. So you will be up and running quicker then a speeding bullet.

Like Salesforce.com, Clickability is a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) company that lives in the cloud.There is no expensive software or hardware to buy or install. We provide our solution entirely in the cloud with a tested reputation for reliability, performance, security, and scalability. In contrast, Vignette’s installed software model is flawed (the same is true for any installed-software WCM vendor).

Sorry to put the kryptonite on the table but this is nothing more then a false statement. SaaS is just another way and not the ultimate super model for Content Management solutions out there, the implementation will not be 2 weeks as a result of the SaaS, it is not self building self migrating magic wand solution. And I am still waiting for the response of John Girard to Jon’s blog post to prove us wrong. SaaS does not indicate that 90% of the industry is wrong. It just offers an alternative to self hosted solutions and the ability to reduce the price tag that comes with its limitations (lack of SSO with AD, Blocking of the service to the internet and security will be the first to pop).
Vignette video was between versions! Now where did they came up with this one? Have they lost the rich media services release? They are trying to mix the news release on the purchase of Vidavee and the announcement of the video integration.

Vignette software can often take months or years to be
fully deployed and has proven to be very difficult and costly to update or upgrade. It also requires a
highly technical staff to maintain and manage.

Where is Quick Site? it is lower costing and very quick to implement take you less then a month end to end, have they forgot to mention that just for the sake of argument? or they are just padding their white paper with more misleading information? you will be the judge of that.

VCM lipstic on a pig.

Wow, that is low balling, i think they crossed the line of been reasonable at this point.
Sorry Clicability but i dont care how good your product is at this point. Spreading this kind of false negativism is just exposing the true nature of your company, i would rather do business with the pirates in Africa then with you guys, they seem more reliable. The worst thing that really caught me was the classification of the pdf as White Paper, seems to be a marketing paper to me. It’s a wolf in a sheep’s skin that is what it is.
V5 – V6 – V7 is a hard upgrade but aligning yourself in the V7 space makes the upgrade to next versions a simpler option.
One thing to remember is that Vignette is not just a WCM system as Clickability and is in the ECM space. Different space different clients different pace and different products that is all I have to say.
But if you are still thinking on Clickability as a valid solution after all they are spreading look at Jons post about the Snake Oil and ponder to yourself if moving technology to any provider may it be Vignette V7 or Clickability or even Fatwire is any different from each other and thus will take less time. My claim is simple, NO! You will spend similar amounts of time moving to V7 as you will to Clickability or Fatwire. You are changing the software and technology and will need to do a lot of data conversion.
I am thinking of the fatwire chivalry act and wondered if the way that clickability is migrating the clients also ties them down to some 3rd party service providers?
The customer of the V5/6 usually are from an era where ECM was not even coined, thus vary in size and can be small WCM customers who can suffice themselves with the open source solutions out there. Take a look at the choosing a CMS post for more information on how to choose a CMS not based the above false information.
May the cloud be with you!

as the announcement of the S-4 are here and the shareholders meeting is to be on the 21’st of July 2009, the future of Vignette seems brighter and brighter.
To all the sceptics out there, V8 is coming out soon and the way it looks and built i will be so happy to implement it. Who wants to be my first customer? Sign up in the comments section.
The latest Fatwire advertisement that we are shaky providores and the best bet is to go and use fatwire, promoting its free licenses if you do the move with them, is like a Venus fly trap, the lure is great but wait till you get inside as my friend Jon’s post a-fatwire-in-shining-armour discovers, you will soon realise that there are 3’rd party connections to tie you down and the fatman’s way might not be as safe and free as it is publicly stated.
On another note, customers thinking their legacy fatwire system is not up for the job i have enough experience to put you out of your misery. I have done that twice already and willing to do that again, now that is chivalry.
Oh and you only need VPS team no other dodgy 3rd party to do the trick.
For the question imposed by fatwire in their ad,

Are you with a vendor that can provide the right path forward for your business?

i will say this: No vendor can predict the unknown future, but i am sure as the sun rises in the east that the products in the market are not going to any dustbin soon, Binaricly speaking the answer is YES from all of my clients.

Moving to FatWire in more technical details, my take is that customers considering a Fatwire Solution could find it limited in capabilities, the WCM capabilities and volume/delivery abilities lack, to say the least, when compared to the vignette solutions.

And looking at the available solutions you will notice that FatWire have no suite of products to match every product or most of the products that Vignette offer and most of the customer have implemented.

As for switching the CMS in your organisation to a different vendor, it is not as switching your internet provider and only changing the ADSL connection details getting the same result immediately, it takes time to choose the matching product to the requirements (look at my previous post), building the web presence (usually customers take advantage of the investment and redesign their Ux and branding incurring more cost), getting the Business users up to speed with the new content management system and so on and so forth.
Its not that this is not achievable but it will cost you more then the licensing fee. i will say as a rule of thumb about twice all in all correct me if i am wrong.

Now back to the S-4, i am anxious to be at the 22′nd of July and to know how the merger is going to go ahead, it seems that exiting times are just around the corner and we are about to embark on a marvels journey when it comes to the new product line and the new products we will get exposed to from the OpenText side.
I am an ex sharepoint .Net Architect and will love to work on both sides of the technological trench again.
For those who are sceptic in my predictions there is a great interview audio with the CEO of OpenText, John Shackleton

To those who are curious what an S-4 stands for, this is a form that public companies have to file to give the facts around a Merger for the share holders.

Every one out there who wants to hear more about V8 listen closely tomorrow to the vignette wire!

I see around the web, guides on how to select an open source Content Management System, though important they usually miss the mark for companies looking to evaluate the CMS vendors from both ends of the trench.
So what happens when you want to do a comparison between ANY content management systems?
Here is my take, based on my experience, on how to evaluate a CMS regardless of its vendor’s nature.
I will start with the commons i find on the web, most of the recommendations i have seen tend to split the evaluation into these topics when it comes to open source

• Web application platform
• Software license
• Stability and development activity
• User community
• Documentation and source code
• Web standards, accessibility
• Suitability and usability

These topics are great! What they are missing is fully disclosing the hidden costs for both the open source and the commercial implementation, but do a decent job.
So what is missing from the list? Allot, Platform is nice but is not specific enough, licences are nice but again don’t cover some of the hidden costs like annual support, stability is a vague factor and developer community is usually tightly bound to the next item Community, and both don’t represent the parallel commercial vendors Professional Services.
Bashing this list brings us no where. Calm down yuval! ahhh that’s better.
Let’s start from the most important factor in an organization, the Human.
Humans make the decision of which CMS answer their needs, wants and aspirations.
I see the process divided into realms representing the people involved in the choice.
There are 4 “teams” involved in the Content Management system, some directly and some indirectly, all influence the decision over which CMS will be chosen

• Direct
  • Development Team
  • Business Users Team
• Indirect
  • Financial Team
  • Management Team

Requirements for a Content Management System don’t match these teams precisely and are in 5 dimensions

• Technical Dimension
• Support Dimension
• Features Dimension
• Implementation Dimension
• Cost Dimension

These dimensions are not separate and all represent the same product thus you get some overlap between them.
Each team is more dominate in one of the Dimension and has more say over it, so nature’s laws direct us in giving them the rule over the dimension they are dominant in.
This is not true to every company and usually the division over the decision criteria’s and dimensions is left to the project sponsor due to cost.
[INSERT RANTS HERE]
So what is the more optimal way of going through the process of analysis of a content management system?
The steps i see are

• Listing Requirements by each team
• Sorting the requirements to each Dimension
• Assessing the proposed products – There are many options to tackle this, let each team do a Dimension or create a team for all dimensions or let an individual do the job
• Meet with teams to finalize the decision

My thoughts about assessing the products is to take each team and assign them the dimension they are good at, this will enable them to be more thorough, the team can be a single representative.
After the teams asses the Dimensions for each product the time comes to collect the assessments and get a score for each product.
Here is a sample of the decision supporting parameters separated to each dimension.
In each of these Dimensions there are decision support factors that need to be rated/graded with a mark in a predefined scale i.e. 1-10 or similar.

• Technical dimension
  • Core language
  • implementation languages
  • Application servers
  • Operating systems
  • Supported databases
  • Rendering of content
  • Interfaces to external systems like LDAP/SOA bus
  • SLA levels per CPU
    • Peak Users
    • Peak Page Views
• Support Dimension
  • Community/Activity rate in the product
  • Clients
    • World Spread
    • Size
    • Since when
    • Versions
  • Documentation Availability and Quality
  • Community Collaboration tools (is it forums/wikis or more)
  • Support product team and availability
• Features Dimension
  • Content Modelling
  • Workflow
  • Users And Groups
    • Ability to subdivide content between groups
    • Groups based capabilities
  • Media Handling capabilities
  • DRM
  • Publishing
  • Versioning
  • Personalization
    • Of content (group based, same page displays different content)
    • Of presentation (iGoogle)
  • Reporting and statistics
  • Search
    • In the CMS
    • In the delivery stages
  • Content Staging
  • Scalability
  • Caching and tuning features
  • Perceived External Attacks Security of the product
• Implementation Dimension
  • Initial Estimation of effort (in man days)
  • Implementation Planning
  • How many features need customization
  • Availability of the Skilled Crew in the market
    • Hiring/Converting existing crew
    • Service Providers/Agencies
  • Availability of integration system internally
• Cost Dimension
  • Licensing
  • Support
  • Implementation
  • Future Development
  • Training
  • Infrastructure
  • Contracts
  • Trial Periods

So you want to start a business? Here’s a checklist of things I would do before paying a dollar to any one to develope my software.

• Focus Dude! (Crush, Finding Nemo) Narrow your vertical to the smallest segment you can, You need to think small at the bgining and aim big. Feature creep is a killer at an early stage and companies often try to do too much. Your end product, if it comes to market, will be so much smaller than you imagine.
• Zoom inOutline 2-3 things you things to focus on within your chosen niche. The list will probably narrow down to one idea, remember that feedback is going to make you Alter/Mend your idea.
• Shop Around Find 5 example companies that do at least some aspects of what your company should do and explore them extensivel. try using their services in a trial mode or even paid mode and keep a list of features and group all their features into
  • Features they do well
  • Features I can do better/different
  • Features you can collaborate on
  • Features you got inspired to do that are not in their spec

  Rank the items you found by importance, use more then high rank at least once,

• Use your imagination take the list look at the most important features and imagine what ties this all together in one product/site/company.
  Do you see more then one product? excelent! find a way to create a suplimentry product.
  Choose the minimum ammount of featurs you can define as a product.
  What features can be a suplementry service?
  Play around and have some fun.
• Put your thinking to the test communicate your ideas to people in the industry, preferably the leaders of the industry, mention the smallest versions of your idea and get feedback. After their feedback, go through this whole process over again.
  You could try Blog/Forums and solicit the known products to get some more feedback.
• Build the plan you have validated the product and know how to build it. just a small thing to do before that is to get the business side of things sorted out. build a plan that handles branding/marketing, timing, financials. make some thing that will cover the fundomentals.
  
• Build ItOnly now you are ready to talk to a contract developer. may be find a person who is looking to join the adventure? but someone you can trust to make the job and in a timly manner based on your business plan.

So good luck to all of you who are about to build their startup. i hope you will succeed.

Google have changed the IA of the news.google.com section and started serving the Wikipedia values matching the news items you watch.

Now i find it strange that when i click on the news from australia the topic contains no Wikipedia results. is it limited to US?
I am not dissapointed but happy that i have not been pumped out with the useless value definition of the wikipedia article.
I think that a slow changing article in an encyclopedia is not what i am looking for when i search for news. i want to see twitter updates from the last hour as part of the google news page IA, that will make me smile and be happy.

I have started mocking around with the new HTML 5 tags and behaviors.
The sample is available here.
It is based on the sample from Laurent i just did some changes and added the video to one of the boxes.
Things that are nice to know is the dragOver(ev) function and the way it controls the boxes ability to be dropped.

function dragOver(ev) { var idelt = ev.dataTransfer.getData("Text"); var id = ev.target.getAttribute('id'); //Allows the boxes to be dropped at any if( (id =='box2' || id =='box1') && (idelt == 'drag' || idelt=='drag2')) return false; //deny the purple video box to move to the center box else if(( id =='box3' && idelt == 'drag3') || ( id =='box1' && idelt == 'drag3')) return false; else return true; }
To get the example to work you need firefox 3.5 because of the video format as OGG.
Some people predict that the HTML 5 will replace entirely the Flash/SilverLight, and i read some people trying to analyze the statement.
So i will add my 2 cents to the pile.
The HTML 5 will not be a full replacement to the Flash/SilverLight solutions from a couple of reasons that are not obvious.
1. its not capable enough to fully replace the replace the Flash/SilverLight in all scenarios and will probably be replacement in some due to its simplicity.
2. The code is exposed and thus pose an IP threat to the code making the websites capability exposed to copycats.
there are some obvious ones that are been put in this post by Paul Krill
So what will be in the future of HTML? my guess is that it will not replace the Flash/SilverLight but mearly change the landscape making it easier to present rich content without Flash/SilverLight but wont take their place as application frameworks for more complex solutions.
The implementation is nice but a bit lacking for my taste may be with HTML 6 or 7 we might see the better result aimed for this one.

I have taken the evenings off from creating content to try and get my laptop work on the latest OS available from Microsoft! Windows 7.
Why you might ask… i was thinking it will be an interesting experiment and might return my confidence with the windows OS. so how was it?
I will start with the process.

In the first part i realized that the upgrade option is only available from Vista Ultimate SP1, So i had my Vista Enterprise in the drive and got my XP upgraded to the Vista Ultimate.
Right after that i updated the Vista to the latest patches and service packs and put the Windows 7.
Surprise. i get an error stating that you cannot upgrade the Vista Enterprise to the Windows 7 but only the Vista Ultimate is able to upgrade.
I decided to leave it and just make my Vista working with all the office software including the VPN client and the VMWare workstation.
And after a few hours i have left it as it.
I could not accept this situation and yesterday just decided to Google my situation. feeling like an idiot not doing this earlier the feeling was worsen after realizing my solution was to change a key in the registry from Enterprise to Ultimate, yes that makes you feel great doesn’t it.
Ok so i have made the change and all was working very very well. until i decided to do the windows update dance. and now my system is not willing to start at all.
For this reason i have not yet posted any real impressions from the Windows 7 and it seems that the VM with the Windows 7 i had was much more stable then my current configuration.
At this time i am making the final tries to make my PC boot correctly, these seem to go avail and my machine likes the BSOD more then working like it did earlier.
So i decided in the spirit of windows 2000 to do a repair of the install, reading some info on the net made me go to the system restore menu and try my luck. to say the truth i could not find the system restore link the way they described it on the forum so i decided to open the control panel and use the search capability, to my surprise it works really well and the 5th link was actually the one i needed.
After a few days i have been deleting drivers and trying to fight a BSOD of the 0×000008E kind i have decided to try and just install the windows on top of the existing one and see how that goes.
All the help i got from this post about restoring was not impacting the machine at all.
I have to say that recovery is not the walk in the park you would expect from the established windows after the time machine of the mac.
But that is probably the reason i am writing this post over my G5 and not my laptop, more probably so due to the 23″ screen.
So now i have a machine with nothing installed on it.
Its running nice but a bit useless.
As for the upgraded windows i have no idea what happened to the files but looking at program files most of it got deleted by the install apparently, It was a wise move to backup all prior to the install.
I have discovered after a short fright that the Cisco VPN was my problem.
As for the usability after a couple of days with the Windows 7 i have to say that windows team have done a nice job, they have also made the windows more like OSX. but with the change comes problems, to avid windows users the access to your information on the disks is a bit hidden and makes you click just more. for the home users the way information is ordered is very easy and intuitive.
For the look and feel of the system i can say it seems quicker then the Vista and less cluttered, not too many side bars or other items lurking on the .
The taskbar is better and reminds me of the OSX again joining the applications windows under one icon and popping a preview on top of it, i like it alot wspecially when using multiple windows of Acrobat.
Over all the system is better then the vista and seems to be intuitive, the similarities to OSX will probably keep users from upgrading if the software price will be right.
Update:
I have found a feature showdown of the OSX VS Windows 7 on lifehacker.com, it does make you think of how well constructed the task bar in 7 is.

One of our local partner just partnered up with OpenText. this is quite good to know we are to keep our partners are not leaving us with this new constellation.
Most of the guys that are in StoneBridge Systems are like family to us in VPS so it is a great news.

and regarding the news here is the item i got the news from.

Information architecture and the way radio websites are built.
Taking a look at the Radio of Collage of digital arts in Holon called halas.

My first impressions were that the site is not just minimalist in form but very functional. first when you go to a radio station you want to hear that station right. so the radio starts streaming straight away. that is a goof Information Architecture choice you get what you want.

The screen is split not evenly attracting you but at the same time annoyed me until i picked up why it was split, a click on the Info button opens the player up displaying a very informative text on the show.
Apparently the right side is station information and the left side is current broadcast, a thing that you don’t get quick enough but a minimalist design requires intrigue.
The symbols are almost coherent and release you from thinking to some extent. They are obviously using common icons to make it identifiable.
Button labels are popping on the top bar buttons but not on the lower part so there is some missing coherency? or may be a design bug?
I dont think it was not planned. this site was very very planned and thought of, the minimize X button implies that there was a real thought of thoroughly and was designed thoroughly.
The Splitting line apparently is the show timer stating the position i am in and the total time of the show.
The creators of the site boast with not so great site signature of annoying wastage of real estate.
But back to the radio, as oppose to the creators site, is spreading on your site correctly and gives you the information you want when you want it. the information appears in the center of the player and spreads the radio player on your screen to put the information in a table or iconized layout that is true to the information it represent.
In the overall i really think that the site is much more condensed accurate available and the Information Architecture is well thought of.
Its unfortunate that the creators site is not as good.