Pivotal IT

Cloud Data Quality Webinar

2011-05-23T09:45:00.005-04:00

On Thursday, May 26th, Pervasive will be hosting a webinar featuring Pivotal Information Technology's own Cloud General Manager, Malcolm Hawker

The topic will be "Master Your Data Faster: An Integrated Approach to Data Quality". In this seminar, you will learn how Pivotal IT rapidly created a Master Data Model for their client, Neustar, using Pervasive Software. See how information is collected from multiple disparate sources, then validated and standardized using Melissa Data’s address validation library.

Master Your Data Faster: An Integrated Approach to Data Quality
May 26, 2011 at 2:15 p.m. CDT
Presenters: Malcolm Hawker, Cloud General Manager at Pivotal Information Technology

Data Integration Success

2011-05-06T10:50:00.004-04:00

David Linthicum, CTO of Blue Mountain Labs, discussed 5 critical success factors for Data Integration projects. Although all 5 are important, one jumped out at me and it may not be the one most successful cloud technology individuals gravitate towards first....

"Understand your business" is sometimes lost in the race to generate the best data integration product or project. The thought that , "Well, if we understand the data, understand the rules, and have the mechanisms, that should be enough" has typically been the mantra I have seen in many integration projects.
I am glad David pointed out the importance of understanding the business, because it is something I do first in every engagement. Understanding and mapping the inherent business processes that touch each data integration point is key in understanding and developing an effective integration plan. Each piece of data being integrated touches and more importantly, supports business processes. Understanding those business processes will help you avoid any lost integration points and will more importantly allow you to anticipate needs your customer may not even know they have.

Google Earth Builder

2011-04-23T17:51:00.004-04:00

Google launched its EarthBuilder product recently which allows you to "upload, process and store your geospatial data in our cloud. Your employees then can use familiar tools — (Google Maps and Google Earth) — to easily and securely share and publish mapping data,” Google’s Director of North American Geo Sales Tarun Bhatnager wrote on his company blog.
Google Earth Builder, which will be available in the third quarter of 2011, will allow those with large data sets, terabytes of imagery and other heavy computational needs to use Google platform for their own needs and significantly lower IT costs and eliminate time maintaining, scaling and updating software and servers. Just the ability alone to create custom map layers should drive a heavy user adoption.

This is part of a larger Google strategy regarding the cloud. While others have focused on infrastructure mainly, Google seems to be aiming squarely in the App space with this and their other cloud applications (Google Apps).

Given Google Apps 90% retention rate, this strategy seems to be paying off with a 100% Google App growth rate each year.

CloudFoundry

2011-04-23T17:33:00.004-04:00

Last week, VMware announced their CloudFoundry Platform as a service product to rave reviews.

For recap, Cloud Foundry, a VMware-led project is the world’s first open Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering. Cloud Foundry provides a platform for building, deploying, and running cloud apps using Spring for Java developers, Rails and Sinatra for Ruby developers, Node.js and other JVM frameworks including Grails.

Why is this a good thing?
One word...OPEN.

Open PaaS
Use it public, private and cross infrastructure
No lock in

Platform as a Service that gives users the ability to migrate, that lets them use their code wherever they like is amazing.
Cloud Developers are cautiously optimistic at this point because Developers can deploy their applications using their existing tools and with zero modification to their code.

Let the attempted commodization begin!

Cloud ROI

2011-04-23T17:29:00.003-04:00

What are you factoring in for ROI to move to a cloud solution?
Just the cost of removing a room or room of servers to something that is multi-tenet?
Then, you may be missing the true ROI of cloud computing.

As David Linthicum points out (http://www.infoworld.com/d/cloud-computing/what-youre-missing-in-your-cloud-roi-calculations-595), the true value of moving to a cloud solution is the ability to be infinitely more flexible in adapting to future needs.

I take that a step further in the fact that implementing a cloud based solution allows you to not have to overhaul your current IT staff and infrastructure but more easily adapt your new cloud system to what you have. I.e. just because you have an new system doesn't mean you have to scrap or relearn your intellectual capital.

Cloud and the Manufacturing Industry

2011-04-05T11:11:00.002-04:00

According to The 2011 Microsoft Discrete Manufacturing Cloud Computing Survey, "cloud computing also facilitates efficient collaboration across geographies(47.7 percent) and the ability to respond quickly to business demands (38.4 percent)." However, even with this increased sharing and collaboration, one key missing ingredient has emerged: the integration of these tools with backend business systems. Think of it as building the perfect car. Even if you build the perfect, most efficient engine, if you do not know how to connect that engine to the car, you will have a disjointed mess. The key mix is going to be companies and cloud technologies that facilitate an industry wide collaboration between manufacturing products, IT providers, service providers, and integrators themselves.

Government in the cloud

2011-03-26T19:51:00.003-04:00

Kevin Jackson, cloud blogger for Forbes, points out an interesting oxymoron with the government's strategy for moving the government infrastructure to the cloud. What intrigues me isn't that the government is transitioning itself to the cloud (as evidenced by data.gov, recovery.gov, and IT Dashboard), but it is the speed in which they are doing this. When you think government, do you normally think pushing the envelopes with newer technologies? I don't. However, I am extremely impressed with the government's aggressive attitude with this change. The fact that the most risk adverse organization in the United States is moving their infrastructure to the cloud speaks volumes to how much cost savings are gained by moving to the cloud and how much security can be gained in the cloud. That is the point that really hits home with me.

http://blogs.forbes.com/kevinjackson/2011/03/23/government-cloud-computing-on-forbes/

AIIM Info360

2011-03-21T16:53:00.003-04:00

Pivotal will be going into high gear with upcoming events and conferences. Next up is the annual enterprise content management conference by the Association for Information and Image Management. Here are the details:

AIIM Info360

March 22 - 24, 2011
Walter E. Washington Convention Center
Washington DC

The Association for Information and Image Management's annual exhibition, Info360, is held this year in Washington DC. Pivotal will be on-hand at the booth of eZ Publish, its partner in CMS. Visit us at booth #1839. For more information, visit http://www.aiimexpo.com/.

Read more about upcoming events on our web site.

CMS as Platforms for Interoperability

2011-03-18T15:00:00.000-04:00

Last week, while doing research for a new RFP response we're putting together, I read through the 2010 Gartner Magic Quadrant for WCM. It's an interesting piece of heavy analysis, and I'm always a little better informed after I've read a Gartner report. These lines in particular really jumped out at me:

"In more than 80% of inquiries that Gartner has received about WCM since 2H09, clients sought higher business value from their online presence, be it Internet, extranet or intranet. As a result, many enterprises replace their existing technology, in some cases, to interoperate with other components of their Web environment, such as Web analytics, an e-commerce engine or in-house business applications."

In almost every CMS implementation that we've done so far, the use of the CMS as a content management system is only the tip of the iceberg. All of our clients have wanted their CMS to do more -- integrate with more things, provide more features, expand their world. This isn't to say that the CMS isn't enough; rather, we are demanding more out of our CMS than ever before. Large enterprises, especially, want something that will make their web sites easy to manage and also let them integrate with social media, add eCommerce to their site, connect with SalesForce.com, add analytics gathering scripts, and use their LDAP for authentication. In fact, we had one customer did all of that and then went on to do even more -- like using the CMS as a portal in which a custom application interfaced with their back-end systems through a reverse proxy to allow automated customer self-service.

It's great getting a chance to push boundaries. Using a CMS as a platform instead of just a publishing application means creating a more tightly integrated environment. Tight integrations means fewer people supporting more features and functionality, which drives down costs while providing a great looking return on investment. It means faster development time and the lower costs that go along with it. It means integrated management, fewer administrative interfaces, and a more empowered user-base. And it's easier to maintain because everything runs off of a standard environment. No more one-offs that runs by itself on its own server, lonely and forgotten.

It does mean you're going to need a CMS that can handle the workload -- one that's as much an environment as a set of content management features. There are more than a few out there, though you'll want to do your due diligence since they all have areas of expertise. Of course, we'll mention the one we're the most familiar with here: eZ Publish. And you'll probably need someone to help you put it together. But most importantly, you're going to need to think about your web presence and the technology that supports it in a whole new way. If you do, you'll reap the rewards.

Disaster recovery and the cloud

2011-03-14T10:52:00.004-04:00

First, Our thoughts and minds are with all the citizens of Japan at this, their time of need.
As efforts are being coordinated around the world for relief as well as locally in Japan, the cloud can be used for mobilizing relief across the country and the globe. Relief agencies can share information, resources, and implementation plans quicker and faster using a shared model made available by the cloud. With the potential of traditional IT infrastructure being damaged or briefly immobilized, the cloud offers a solution to sharing and managing information as well.

One of the less touted, but equally important, advantages of cloud computing is more nimble disaster recovery and the potential for a quicker recovery time. In a sense, it provides more security as if one of your data centers suffers, you have a backup in other places.

I see the cloud playing a huge part in the mobilization of relief as well as helping rebuild and reform any lost infrastructure after this disaster.

Jobs in the cloud

2011-03-04T11:38:00.002-05:00

I read an interesting article about how cloud computing can create jobs in the immediate and long term future and it got me thinking about something that is almost counter intuitive. If one of the benefits of cloud computing is efficiency and the reduction of IT staff (i.e. jobs) to maintain infrastructure, the first thought is the cloud is greatly reducing jobs. However, this article points out a key point that even with the move to the cloud, that just opens up a huge door for people with skills developing applications and having vision in how to implement a cloud solution. One door closes but another opens up with the potential of a 100X multiplier. Very intriguing....

http://www.cloudtweaks.com/2011/03/how-cloud-computing-can-create-jobs/

Data quality...the 800 lb. gorilla

2011-02-11T15:51:00.004-05:00

So you have made the leap to the cloud. You are moving efficiently now processing and using the data you have collected on a day to day basis. One question....How clean is your data?

Do you have multiple duplicates?
Do you have silos of data that do not talk to each other?
Is your data actually quality data? I.e. correct data for your leads, customers, accounts, etc.

The cloud gives a big advantage to receiving and processing data vs. traditional infrastructure. It also puts a bigger emphasis on keeping your data clean, up to date, and quality in order to make your business run more efficiently. And the more data you receive, the more it is paramount you keep that data clean.

Many organizations are now establishing not only data quality processes in house, but are intelligently relying on external companies to help manage the quality of their data. The cloud increases your range of input, but it also can increase your margin of error if your data is not maintained.

The Curious Case of WordPress as a CMS

2011-02-09T14:30:00.000-05:00

WordPress is ...

a SAAS blog application
a content management system
a social media tool
all of the above

I remember when I first heard about blogs. Actually, I hated it. I'm a private person in general, and the thought of writing my journal online was absolutely horrific. I don't even write a regular print journal, so I couldn't fathom why anyone would want to share their inner-most thoughts with the world.

Of course, I was only thinking of things from my perspective. A lot of people wanted to share their thoughts with the world on a thousand, million different subjects, some of them private, most of them not. And blogging, as a precursor to social media as a whole, was really what drew people into technology. It's a bit of a hyperbole, sure, but in my opinion, blogging humanized the Internet.

So, people now wanted to blog, and the early entrepreneurs did it by hand. These old HTML-masters simply created the next entry and posted it on their site ... the old fashioned way. As more people joined the conversation that was growing on the web, entrepreneurs created software to make blogging easier, allowing people to create and manage their content without having to write code from scratch.

As far as content management systems go, then, blogs really pushed the adoption of CMS applications by creating a very real, very immediate need. So it's curious to me why WordPress, one of the grand-daddies of blogging software (though an admittedly hip and still relevant grand-daddy) is continually questioned about its validity as a CMS.

The key is to think about what people mean by content management systems and to understand that as our needs become more sophisticated, technology becomes more complex. When we can do more, we want more, and so it's an endless cycle of technological progress. Nowadays, we need to do more than just manage content. We want our software to manage workflow, define process, integrate with social media networks, juggle multiple web sites from one administrative interface, support multi-channel publications, manage users and permissions and groups and security and ... whew. I get exhausted just thinking about it.

But here's the thing. In essence -- in it's pure, basic form -- a content management system managed content. That's it. The end. And if there is a simple management need, then we don't need anything very complex. WordPress is great for individuals, small businesses, casual groups, and anyone else who has very straightforward needs. It's a CMS that, when used in the right situation, can be very powerful and cost effective.

That's the first question we always need to ask: what is appropriate? Right-sizing a solution to a problem is fundamental to creating the right solution. Don't discount an application just because it doesn't come with all the bells and whistles; sometimes that's just sound and fury signifying nothing.

* BTW, yes, I realize the cognitive dissonance I'm inspiring by writing about WordPress from a Blogger-based blog. Such is what keeps life interesting!

Hybrid Clouds

2011-02-04T13:06:00.002-05:00

Imagine you are the head of Information Technology at your company and you have spent the last 5 years keeping up with your infrastructure on-site and keeping your servers up to date. Suddenly, you realize that there is potentially a better, more cost effective way to manage your data and infrastructure in the cloud. What do you do? Do you throw away your investment over the years? Do you incur conversion costs to save a lot down the road?

Well, with hybrid clouds, you don't have to make that decision in a sense. You can combine your infrastructure on-site with cloud solutions.

Hybrid cloud can be defined as the “use of physical hardware and virtualized cloud server instances together to provide a single common service.”
You could keep your crucial data on local servers, while putting the rest on clouds. You can choose to carry out critical operations in their own on-site data centers, while using cloud computing for tasks that require repeatable processing power.

CIO Cloud survey

2011-01-26T14:32:00.002-05:00

According to The Gartner Executive Programs survey entitled "Reimagining IT: The 2011 CIO Agenda", over the next four years, 43 per cent of surveyed CIOs worldwide expect to have most of their IT systems running in the cloud or on software-as-a-service (SaaS) technologies. The current figure is just three per cent. This survey was was conducted from September to December 2010 and includes responses from 2,014 CIOs across 50 countries and 38 industries.

For CIOs worldwide to acknowledge this speaks to not only the value (both real and perceived) value of moving IT systems to the cloud, but also the time frame importance placed on it. The companies that help guide and manage companies/customers through these migrations will become trusted leaders. With all the cloud technologies out there, the competition will not be based on who has the shinier bells and whistles technology wise but who can MANAGE not only that migration but the resulting CRM system created in its wake.

Dueling cloud support

2011-01-14T10:24:00.002-05:00

Fascinating article about Amazon and Rackspace and their cloud support options. Last week, Amazon added new tiers to its cloud support while also cutting the cost to users while also guaranteeing faster response time with cloud support. Rackspace offers cloud support as well but counters with the fact that they provide customer support for their product vs. Amazon's product support. It's an interesting breakdown of differing support strategies but ultimately proves one thing...cloud implementations are a product to themselves and require the proper amount of support.

The Perfect storm for the Cloud

2011-01-14T10:18:00.003-05:00

(I apologize in advance..Sorry, I had to use the storm + cloud pun. It just called to me.)
The rise in news and talk and implementations of the cloud occurring during an economic downturn and recovery period is no coincidence. When an organization is forced to cut costs and streamline its business processes, one of the first questions that is raised is "how can we improve our IT processes?". I worked at a company where the CEO came into the server room that housed all our infrastructure and said "how can we get rid of all this expensive equipment but stay up and running?". After the momentary shock to the department, one solution was to identify those processes that could be run virtually and use cloud computing to do so. I don't believe our company was the only one to experience this. I guarantee many companies had the same experience.

Information Architecture Tools

2011-01-11T10:15:00.004-05:00

A couple of weeks ago, I talked about the importance of a solid information architecture foundation to your web site. So today, I decided to go looking for a few tools that people can use to do just that. Rather than re-inventing the wheel (we all know how much I hate that), I decided that today's post would be a simple link to a really nicely written article: 8 Free Tools for Good Information Architecture and Usability by Craig Tomlin. What did I love the best? Free tool number one is "A Paper and Pencil".

Brilliant! And true.

In this high tech world, the basics still make a lot of sense. Go and read Craig's article for more tools, but remember: in the end, it's as much or more about the human capital than the tools we use.

In the CMS World, Technology Powers Business Processes

2011-01-10T16:43:00.006-05:00

Asking whether business process or technology comes first is like asking "What comes first: the chicken or the egg?" Some spend a lot of time trying to solve all of the business process decisions before choosing a technology. Others spend their time purchasing technology solutions and then hoping to shoehorn their business processes into it. The reality is that it's often a hybrid of both. Companies need to get just enough process done that they can choose a relatively right-sized, decently appropriate technology solution. Then, they implement the technology solution and, as needed, migrate outlying processes to the work flows present in the solution.

Content Management Systems (CMS) are a good example of this. It's a good idea to have a solid foundation in content management philosophies. Who owns the data? Who controls the data? How often is the data updated? How does data get approved for publication, deletion, or storage? Content is king, nowadays, and companies need to understand and pro-actively administer their content. Companies that have an online presence are especially sensitive to this.

But as time passes, content builds, and the backlog can get larger and larger. After taking an initial pass at those key questions, it's time to just jump in and find the right CMS. A good CMS will effectively manage data (including its quality and integrity), encourage user collaboration, and enforce policies by establishing an agreed-upon work flow. The work flow will not be a perfect match to existing business processes, but from there, a strong change management program will help users automate and integrate.

Figuring out what that perfect mix is can be difficult, but it's worth it. The right mix will speed up companies' returns on investment by allowing them to realize value to the entire program as soon as possible. Just as with any project, it will help to have knowledgeable internal users, empowered stakeholders, and a supportive executive sponsor and, when necessary, to call in the right subject matter experts as advisors. In our content-heavy world, having a CMS is essential, and it's best to do it sooner rather than later.

SMB's and the cloud

2011-01-06T11:13:00.002-05:00

Even though small and medium sized business owners have the most to gain from migrating to the cloud, in some cases they are the most hesitant to do so. In my experience, this has mainly not stemmed from fear but from not knowing all the resources available and knowing the advantages of doing so. One thing to remember is that most small and medium sized business owners are successful because they are knowledgeable and passionate in their field and do not necessarily carry that same passion and commitment towards IT trends, research, etc.

Although their are many advantages to a cloud solution, one large advantage the cloud gives and SMB owners crave is the ability to be adaptable. Small and Medium sized businesses have to be able to adapt to changing business and customer needs quickly and at little cost.

SaaS solutions directly cater to this need:

1. SaaS solutions allow customers to gain the advantage from multiple software upgrades delivered by the vendor. If there is a change or a better way of doing things that gets incorporated in the SaaS solution, all customers get this change quickly.

2. SaaS solutions are designed to make it easy for business owners to customize their applications quickly and simply. Changing the look of a business' site or workflow used to be a task requiring a large IT team. Now, with some simple clicks and drags and drops, business owners can change the way they do business more quickly.

Small and medium sized businesses have the most to gain from moving to or implementing in the cloud.

Cloud Computing Trend in the new year

2011-01-06T10:46:00.007-05:00

As the beginning of the new year is a time for resolutions and predictions, I would like to offer up one of my own.
With a majority of companies both large and small having been tasked over the last years with converting their current software development environments to the cloud, many companies took their first step in the "cloud pool" with Infrastructure as a Service applications. This allows access in the cloud environment by renting infrastructure that you would typically control or manage in-house. This leads to advantages such as budgeting of hardware costs, less overhead for server maintenance and general economies of scale based on a typical IAAS company having massive platforms to serve multiple customers. All the while, you can maintain more control over your environment.

I see IAAS continuing to be a very viable solution for companies but the next question that is always asked from companies is "how can I enable my developers on our cloud environment?". To do this, I believe companies will be shifting their cloud focus to Platform as a service in the upcoming year. In PAAS, programming platforms (java, .NET, etc) and especially APIs for building applications in your cloud environment are exposed as a capability.

Although it allows you less control than IAAS, the advantages of utilizing Platform as a Service will allow for a higher level of abstraction and creativity from development teams especially when it comes to API usage.

Social Media Means Being Social

2011-01-05T16:16:00.004-05:00

You wouldn't believe how many people put together a social media strategy without considering how to be social. For some, social media simply means posting press releases on a Facebook page or sending out headlines via Twitter. But social media means that people are interacting, and to be truly effective in that area, we have to be interested in and want to get to know people -- whether they're our customers, our partners, or our peers.

In this day and age of media-oversaturation, then, it's fantastic to see a celebrity who's really doing it right: Vin Diesel.

Vin Diesel's Facebook page will soon be topping 20 million friends. He's currently at 19,919,374, and according to SocialBakers.com, he's getting approximately 9 thousand new friends a day. At that rate, in a couple of weeks, he will surpass the 20 million mark.

Of course, there are other people with larger pages than his. Lady Gaga has 25,872,337 friends, Eminem has 25,079,045 friends, and Megan Fox has 20,099,809 friends. So, it's great that Vin Diesel's come in 4th amongst not-dead (Michael Jackson), non-Facebook app (Texas Hold'em Poker) people, but so what?

The so what factor in all of this is that Vin Diesel is not, in and of himself, a top-tier celebrity, and yet he manages to be more popular than expected because he's doing something very, very right with his Facebook account. Vin Diesel is managing his own account.

Yes, that's right. The man behind the account is Mr. Vin Diesel himself. When he writes "Grateful for 2010... excited about 2011...", he means it. Contrast this with Eminem's Facebook, which refers to him by name, making it either a very awkward, self-referential 3rd person treatment or a very bland, very sanitized (but I'm sure well-meaning) online marketing presence.

Vin Diesel is also doing several other things right:

He posts candid pictures, lots of stills, and some digital art pieces.
He talks directly to the fans, is appreciative, and stays positive.
He talks about things that are important to him, like race relations, his work, and his outlook on life.
He posts videos.
He makes bi-lingual posts to continue to engage his many Hispanic fans.

So when Fast Five, his latest movie and the fifth in the "Fast and Furious" franchise, released their trailer, who do you think got to see it first? That's right. All of Vin Diesel's many, many Facebook friends. And with nearly 20 million of them, that's a marketer's dream come true.

Now, we can't all be a movie star, but there's something we can take from this and apply it to our own social media strategy. First, stop thinking so hard about making it a strategy. Second, genuinely want to socialize with others on the Internet. Third, start or join discussions. And finally, be real, be sincere, and be transparent.

Social media is breaking all the old rules, so consider taking a big jump and doing the same.

No Stories to Tell

2011-01-04T17:47:00.004-05:00

CMS Wire ran an article today that I found very interesting. "Content Strategy: When You Have No Story to Tell" highlights the very real concept that, as people with emotional ties and connections and a fondness for said ties and connections, we want to understand things more than just a factual level. We want to know the hows and whys and reasons behind it all. We respond to stories that make sense, that inspire us, that make us want or need or strive.

The following web sites are a few of my favorite storytelling sites.

Kiva

Site: http://www.kiva.org/

The Story: Kiva helps concerned people make microloans to hard working entrepreneurs in 3rd world nations in order to help them build better lives.

What It Does Right: With community service or good deeds site like this, stories practically write themselves. But with donations and charitable contributions struggling in this economy, sites with the most compelling stories will get the most charity. Kiva does it right by ...

Showing pictures of the recipients.
Giving biographical information about the recipients. ("Baatarsuren Batbold is 21 years old and lives with his parents in Hovd province in central Mongolia. They live together in a ger, a traditional Mongolian nomadic housing tent.")
Telling lenders exactly what's needed.
Giving specific financial data.
Displaying and linking to other lenders.

White House

Site: http://www.whitehouse.gov/

The Story: The President gives you a look inside his politics, his life, and his beliefs.

What It Does Right: Regardless of your political orientation, it's clear that our current President has fully embraced that Internet and understands its potential to reach people. The last time technology did something so striking was on September 26, 1960. The general election presidential debate was shown via television, and it changed the course of how presidents are elected.

Be transparent.
Include lots of pictures and video.
Provide multiple ways to interact and make feedback easy to give.

Pottery Barn

Site: http://www.potterybarn.com/

The Story: You deserve to feel warm and comfy and cozy in your wonderful home filled with wonderfully warm and comfy and cozy Pottery Barn items.

What It Does Right: Pottery Barn sells home furnishings for a specific type of customer. It's focus is on contemporary design that emphasizes hearth and home.

Images have soft lighting and neutral colors.
Typography focuses on hand-writing, which emphasizes the old-fashioned (values) and hand-made (quality).
Items are arranged in full sets that emphasizes the home and family.
Item descriptions are full of evocative words like "rich", "timeworn", and "lush".
Lots of options to share items with other friends, so they can feel warm and comfy and cozy, too.

Mobile Personas: The Power User

2011-01-03T16:08:00.004-05:00

A couple of months ago, I found myself outside the office, running both personal and business errands. I still needed to be connected, but I didn't have my laptop with me. And, surprisingly, I didn't need it. My smart phone, a Palm Pre, had everything that I needed and wanted in order to accomplish my goals.

I left work that morning to go to an off-site meeting. I wasn't sure where it was, so I opened Google Maps, entered the address, and got a set of directions by using my current GPS location as the starting point. While driving, I got onto a conference call (with my Bluetooth headset) to work with our developers on some questions they had about a user story. During the off-site meeting, I received a text message from a good friend of mine reminding me that the pre-sale for a particular concert we wanted to go to would be over in 30 minutes. After the meeting, I opened the Pre's web browser, went to the venue's web site, and purchased two tickets. I started the FaceBook application and let everyone know that tickets were in (virtual) hand.

That was the point when I realized that things had changed for me. From notification to purchase to sharing the information, I had been able to do it all while completely mobile. There was a distinct sense of freedom at that point.

For the rest of the day, in between the remaining errands, I regularly checked my work email to make sure that everything was going smoothly. I also logged on to AIM just to be fully available to the developers. And before heading back to the office, I checked my calendar one more time to make sure I knew what that night's plans were.

I'd fully entered the mobile age, and I was there as a power user.

Mobile Personas

Personas are artificial constructs that help product owners, architects, and designers extrapolate how users will interact with applications. The goal is to create a detailed profile that represents a type of user. These profiles capture expected behaviors, specific qualities or characteristics, and pre-dispositions or biases of that user type. To humanize users, personalities are intertwined with the personas, often including actual names, pictures, and biographies.

Developing strong personas is a part of the design phase. Research (in the form of metrics or interviews), thoughtfulness, and review are important tools in creating functional personas. Doing so will provide many returns during the later development phase. Developers will have a better understanding of users, and when decisions are made, they are more likely to be the right decisions for that user type. QA engineers will have a better understanding of the users they are attempting to emulate, which will increase the quality of the testing as they take on the behaviors and patterns of the users.

Mobile personas are emerging as an important and distinct sub-set of Internet culture. They are related to the current Internet power user persona but differ in several significant ways. In fact, the ways in which they differ really harken back to the power user of a decade ago, when our biggest challenges were bandwidth and limitations of displays. For those who have been working in the Internet industry for awhile, then, it's that whole adage that "everything old is new again".

Understanding the Power User

The following are some thoughts and suggestions for creating and incorporating the mobile power user persona.

Key characteristics of the mobile power user:

Is on the go ... a lot.
Wants to be free but still connected.
Wants to be able to do everything on the smart phone.
Wants everything to be fast, fast, fast.

Key challenges of the mobile persona:

Limitations of the technology -- some smart phones still don't offer Flash or deal well with sophisticated JavaScript.
Bandwidth -- transmit speeds are still a problem with mobile devices, and worse yet, it creates an impression of slowness from the device, application, the web site, etc. ... even if it's undeserved.
Coverage -- tunnels are the bane of my existence, but then so is being in rural areas or anywhere outside of coverage.

Strategies for engaging the mobile persona:

Quick, efficient, and minimalist design.
Store off-line (on the device) as much as possible. It will create the appearance of speed if the application doesn't have to make or sustain one or more connections to the Internet.
Is willing to pay for applications, but only if they're cheap and offer clear value. Demonstrate that value early and often.
Offer a mobile version of a web site, but only if that mobile version is as fully featured as the original web site. Stripped down mobile sites that don't allow smart phone users to use the original web site offer no value and create frustration and a bad experience.

Five Things About ... Mega Menus (Day 5)

2010-12-31T14:03:00.003-05:00

Day 5: The Journey of a Thousand Miles

Over the past four days, we've taken a good look at a web design trend that continues to be hot. There are still many web sites out there that could easily take advantage of this IA/design element. Mega menus aren't particularly complex; they just require some planning, consideration of users and their habits, and careful testing.

Throughout this, we've discussed mega menus mostly from an information architecture and visual design perspective. This was done on purpose. While it may seem to some that the hard part is programming the mega menu and implementing it on the web site, that's actually fairly straightforward. It's not easy, per se, but it's not complex. The complexity comes in the planning and design stages.

The next step is to implement the code, which is going to use JavaScript. Specifically, all of this is much easier to do with jQuery, a JavaScript library. There are a lot of jQuery packages that will help programmers implement their designs, and in my opinion, there's absolutely no sense in reinventing the wheel. (I'd rather spend the time going on to create new wheels, or maybe to drive in the car I've made out of all the wheels I've implemented.) I tend to use Joel Birch's superfish, but there are a lot out there, as 1stwebdesigner has taken the time to enumerate. While implementing the code, just make sure to stick to the plan and, if there are any changes to be made, try to go back to the planning stage and rework the diagrams rather than just continue to modify the code. Often reworked code can begin to produce unexpected behaviors, which increases the cost of implementation due to testing and debugging.

2011 looks to be an exciting time for mega menus. As mega menus become more popular, designers will be pushing the boundaries. As long as they stay within the guiding principle -- increase usability by providing visually intuitive ways to display organized content -- then the results should be interesting and educational. Personally, I can't wait to see what people come up with.

Five Things About ... Mega Menus (Day 4)

2010-12-30T17:00:00.002-05:00

Day 4: Learning By Example ... of What Not to Do

There's a lot to be learned from sites that incorporate the design elements you need. Good examples teach you how others have addressed them, but bad examples can often teach you more by showing you the traps in which designers can fall. Let's look at four examples and talk about some ways they can be improved.

Before we start, I want to point out that these are not horrible examples of mega menus. I deliberately looked for things that were off by one or two points in order to keep this blog post focused.

Epicurious

Site: http://www.epicurious.com/

Description: The addition of the content on the right hand side is a way to really focus users on a particular concept (Epicurious is obviously really heavily promoting their healthy articles). While it's not strictly within the guidelines of well-designed mega menus, it's a good example of bending the rules to accomplish a particular purpose. Ad inventory has increasingly found its way into the mega menu, but if done judiciously and thoughtfully, it can work. In this case, it does.

What is actually the issue here is the lack of headers in the left column. All of the links are of equal weight, which provides no tangible benefit to users. Mega menus should provide to users short cuts to understanding the site. This one doesn't.

Fix: Utilize more space and add headers here. Take a look at the site metrics, figure out where users typically go, and then make those sections easy to find and easy to navigate to. Not all pages are created equal, so don't make your users have to deduce the correct choice. Show them.

Juniper Networks

Site: http://www.juniper.net/

Description: The content is fine, there's just too much of it. A mega menu must be quick and easy to browse. Users need to visually process the information without spending a lot of time reading prose. They're not focusing on a specific topic that Juniper wants to emphasize (as with the Epicurious site), and those links are intended to remain there. The descriptions add no inherent value, so they're not necessary. Also, mega menus, by nature, appear when users move the mouse over a link. When users move the mouse away, the mega menus disappear. There is no functional need for the close button. And remember, if it doesn't add value, get rid of it!

Fix: It's simple, really. Just remove the descriptions (including the Learn More link), create regular links for those four items, put them under a category heading, and remove the close button.

Accenture

Site: http://www.accenture.com/

Description: Without headers, users can't easily compartmentalize this list. It could just as easily be a simple drop down menu, except Accenture then added "Client Successes" and "Overview of all Industries" at the bottom. There's no hierarchy here, and users are left to simply browse, thereby minimizing the increased usability that a properly designed mega menu is supposed to provide.

Fix: I'd start over from the beginning and go through the content planning process again. Get the IA diagram out and start creating smart, user-focused categories for these links to fall into. Once that's created, add visual design elements designed to emphasize the hierarchy.

Oracle

Site: http://www.oracle.com/

Description: My major concern with Oracle's mega menu is their use of font qualities. It seems that there are headers there because the text is bolded and a point or two larger than the second-level text. But there is a series of links at the top of the right column that are either links masquerading as headers or headers with no sub-level content. This speaks to a structure that's not completely consistent, which is reflected in the visual design.

Fix: They're clearly links to major section, but without knowing their complete information architecture, the easiest fix would be to create a couple of categories for those links and move them under those headers.

Five Things About ... Mega Menus (Day 3)

2010-12-27T19:57:00.008-05:00

Day 3: The Importance of Visual Elements

One of the most interesting things I learned in my Humans, Computers, and Cognition class is that visual pre-processing is a powerful cognitive tool. When we see something, our brains are already processing it without our conscious awareness, whether it be drawing likenesses or comparing differences to things we already know, gathering data based on patterns, looking for threats, and so on. Within milliseconds, our subconscious minds have already made some very basic deductions about what we've seen.

Savvy designers can use this tendency to better inform their work. The best designs are truly "intuitive", which means that someone has presented the data in such a way that end-users quickly and easily make the deductions that the designer intends for them to make. For instance, by using an orange background to indicate action-oriented buttons on a web site, a designer is training end-users to understand that if they want to do something, they should quickly (often subconsciously) scan the web page for anything orange. Another example is a tag cloud. The most popular tags are in a larger font size, making it very easy for end-users to find them.

All of these concepts are present when thinking about mega menus.

Here are some guidelines to think about as you consider which visual elements you need to include in your mega menu:

The Use of Colors
The Use of Fonts
The Use of Headers
The Use of Graphics
The Use of Space

The Use of Colors

Color theory is far too broad a topic to go into much detail here, but it's also a significant component to effective visual elements, so we have to address some part of it. The principle behind color theory is that, particular to a culture, colors have meaning and can impact users' perceptions. Red is associated with passion, whether it's love or hate. Blue is associated with calmness. Knowing what colors mean allows a designer the ability to influence the users' emotional state and preconceived notions, and we can make that work for us in mega menus.

The Use of Fonts

The heavy use of typography to convey meaning waxes and wanes in popularity, but it's currently riding an all-time high in the world of web design. Typography can be used to draw attention to specific items, to highlight important concepts, and to organize otherwise complex collections of links. In essence, all the rules about typography that influence a web site also applies to the mega menu. Keep things simple, keep them readable, and understand why you've chosen a particular font, size, or style.

The Use of Headers

Headers keep content visually organized by implying a hierarchy. Users must be able to quickly and easily understand what defines a particular category. These labels are the first place that users scan to determine whether a grouping contains the type of content for which they're looking. Headers are often larger than the content links under them, and headers of the same size are readily understood to be peers within the hierarchy.

As labels, headers must be descriptive without being wordy. They are the one word or short phrase description of an entire category, and it's important to be precise. If a category contains cars, motorcycles, and trucks, then the category should be labeled "vehicles". It's one word, it's descriptive, and it's easily understood. Which brings up a good point: be careful about being too clever with headers. An unhelpful label reduces the usability of a mega menu. No user wants to struggle to decrypt a pun or understand industry-specific slang, and no web site owner should want to alienate any potential visitors.

Finally, from a code perspective, consider the judicial use of HTML header tags. Not only do they keep content orderly, they're effective for use in search engines.

The Use of Graphics

The use of graphics is one of the most powerful and easiest to abuse visual element available to the mega menu. If properly applied, they can add value. Graphics can add visual interest, can help users understand the point or purpose of the content, and can draw the eye and thereby highlight important content. However, if improperly applied, large graphics can add too much size to the mega menu, thereby making it slow and unwieldy; inaccurate or misleading graphics can give the wrong impression of the content; and too many graphics can create clutter.

Unless your web site focused on something visually distinctive, it's most often best not to use graphics. Let users do quick scans of the content, and focus on a quick, responsive mega menu. But the concept is there if you should need it. Just use caution.

The Use of Space

Space is an interesting concept. It covers several tactical decisions you can make, so this section is much more of a smorgasbord of design elements.

Space, while important, is often ignored because web sites want to convey as much information as possible all the time. It's important to struggle against that all too natural instinct. Too much content creates a sense of clutter and can overwhelm users, making them less likely to stay at the site. Users have a very short attention span, and if they can't find what they want immediately, they will move on. Content that they actually do want to see may be overlooked or ignored because there's just too much going on. Negative space -- space with no content or art -- can help create a sense of orderliness that encourages users to stay and look for what they need.

We're most accustomed to reading lists of things on a web page in columns, not rows. When creating your mega menu, try to stick with links arranged vertically. Of course, this sometimes means that a link will be too long for the column it's in and will wrap to the next line. Visually distinguish that those two lines belong together by either using bullet points or further indenting the second line.

And another point: avoid a lot of prose. The point of a mega menu is to provide quick and easy ways to find content. Forcing users to read a lot of content defeats the purpose.

Design, Test, Refine

Finally, the key to good design is to realize that no single person can create something in a vacuum that is usable by everyone. Usability is as much an individual process as well as a group trend. The thoughtful designer will put together a proposed mega menu and then test, test, test! Mega menus must be useful; therefore, test it with a series of users and let them tell you whether it is. If your web site has the budget for it, conduct usability testing with actual users. If you don't have a budget for it, don't skip the testing, just ask people in different departments to take on the role of an actual user. Either way, designers must ask for and receive feedback (positive or negative) from users and then refine their designs with that feedback in mind in order to ensure that the mega menu is usable.

All set? Great. Tomorrow, we're going to look at how to do it wrong. There's a lot to be gained by learning from others' mistakes.

Five Things About ... Mega Menus (Day 2)

2010-12-27T19:31:00.005-05:00

Yesterday, we talked about figuring out whether your web site needed a mega menu. Installing a mega menu when one's not needed can negatively impact usability, so it's an important question to answer. So now that you've decided it's something you need, let's get started.

Day 2: Structure the Content

Once you've determined that mega menus are a design element that will increase the usability of your web site, how do you go about creating one? It's not enough to simply add a mega menu to each link in the primary navigation and then add all of the secondary pages or categories to them. Frankly, it's not enough to "simply" do anything. I'm a big fan of the scientific method. The best way to figure out what to put in a mega menu is to use your metrics to determine site usage, and then to organize your content with that usage pattern in mind.

You are keeping metrics for your web site, right?

Metrics-Driven Decisions

Let's go ahead and assume that yes, you have a series of metrics that make sense and help you understand general trends and direction on your web site. Even the simplest of metrics will help us figure out what content to put on our mega menus if we use a little deductive reasoning. Being able to productively use metrics only takes three things, after all:

An understanding of the purpose or goal of your web site.
One or more questions to ask about your web site that relates to that purpose.
One or more tools to track the answers to the question(s) you've asked.

We won't go into details about Pivotal's philosophy on metrics today, but suffice it to say that when we try to make informed decisions, it's more logical and accurate to use evidence and hard data. For today's purpose, we're just going to think about page hits, which any web site can track using tools like Google Analytics. Obviously, the more sophisticated your metrics and the tools you use to track them, the more evidence and data you can bring to bear on the creation of your web site's mega menus.

Organizing Your Content

The biggest challenge is one of value; a mega menu should create value by increasing web site usability. One of the foundations of the principle of mega menus, as you'll recall from yesterday's post, is that it must provide visually intuitive ways to display organize content. Simply showing a list of links is not enough. There must be a purpose behind them, and the organization must be logical, thoughtful, and straightforward.

Before determining what gets shown on a mega menu, consulting an information architecture diagram (or it's little brother, the site map) will be helpful. All pages should be enumerated, categories at each level should be delineated, and the relationships between all of them should be clearly mapped out. A diagramming tool like Visio or Omnigraffle is helpful for this process.

Once everything is laid out, highlight pages with the highest number of page hits. At its most basic, an IA diagram with popular pages highlighted will show off the sections that are of the most interest to users.

Getting more sophisticated, and if there's a lot of interest in this, consider heat map analysis. This will require more metrics than just page hits, as the paths users take through the web site will be considered. Pages with the most hits are destinations and should be marked in a bright red. Pages with fewer hits are marked in successively "cooler" colors, moving from red, orange, yellow, green, and blue.

The visualization provided by cross-referencing metrics like page hits with an IA diagram is a great tool in determining what content will be shown on the mega menu. Categories will start defining themselves based on user traffic. It may be that new sets can be drawn around groups of pages. Or, maybe the current IA, with its categories and hierarchy, will prove to be exactly what's needed.

Putting It Together

A mega menu appears when users highlight a link in the primary navigation. So using those links as the starting point, create a new diagram with the mega menu hierarchy in mind. While many are tempted to skip the diagramming step, I find that a little planning prevents a lot of code re-writing (a much more expensive task) later. The top of each hierarchy should be the primary links, and in each should be a set of categories, sub-categories, or landing pages. Unless the web site is very small or shallow (in which case, ask again whether a mega menu is truly needed), don't clutter the mega menu by including every page. In fact, always lean towards minimalism and high impact. In other words, what is the least amount of content you can get away with that will still increase the usability of the web site the most.

That's it for this section. The input to this section is the answer to the question, and the output is a mega menu diagram that is logically built out of data and evidence. With that in hand, we move on to the next part: visual elements.

Five Things About ... Mega Menus (Day 1)

2010-12-27T12:46:00.005-05:00

Mega menus have been around for years, but their popularity really took off in March 2008 when in Jakob Nielsen, usability's own champion against the forces of bad design, declared that mega menus "tested well enough that [he] want to encourage its wider use." Ever since, large web sites have implemented some stunning examples of the design element. And following closely behind, there have been several different sites that do a great job of rounding up some of the best examples on the web. So go there if you want to see what can be done with mega menus. Here, we're going to focus on the specifics of how and why to bring this design element into your web site.

Day 1: Determine Whether It's Useful

Planning before implementation -- it's such an important but often over-looked concept. In this case, you have to determine whether or not you even need a mega menu. One of my biggest pet peeves is designers who blindly follow current trends and add design elements simply because they're popular. Good design comes from understanding the reasons behind these elements and applying them when and where appropriate.

In the case of mega menus, the guiding principle is one of usability. Mega menus must:

Provide visually intuitive ways to display organized content.
Make it easier and faster for users to find what they need.

The mega menu allows users to see an organized sub-set of options immediately and in such a way as to invite comparison. Visual elements like changes in font sizes, colors, or indentations allows users to more quickly understand the available categories and groupings. While content should exist within a strict information architecture hierarchy, not every user will think about information in the same way; mega menus can allow alternate methods of content grouping to address some of those differences. And all of this helps users make faster decisions about where to find their content.

So before thinking about adding it to your web site, ask yourself these questions:

Does my web site have a large number of unique pages (> 50) of content?
Is the primary navigation composed of a large number of categories (> 7)?
Is the site's information architecture complex enough that my users are unable to find relevant content?
Do I have content that is important to the site but buried deeply in the hierarchy?
Is my search feature returning too many results?

The purpose of these questions is to determine whether or not you have sufficient reason for adopting mega menus. Smaller web sites have no need; there simply isn't enough content on them to justify the potential drawbacks of adopting mega menus. (We'll address mega menu drawbacks later in the week.) Web sites with only a few pages can best be served by better navigation elements (a traditional drop down off of the primary navigation), an extended footer, or a site map. The same holds true for shallow web sites. Users can simply click the primary links, and if those landing pages are designed well enough, they'll quickly get a useful sense for whether they want to continue.

Even large web sites may not need to use mega menus. Web sites where users should navigate a structured hierarchy in order to find their content wouldn't find a significant benefit with sophisticated mega menus. Strangely enough, mega menus aren't necessarily useful when there are too many options. When all of these many, many items are equal, what would you highlight, and what would it mean to those items that you didn't highlight? Examples of both concepts can be seen at Amazon or eBay.

So, if you answer yes to at least three of these questions, then it's safe to consider using mega menus on your web site. In the end, all web design is about usability; web sites that are not usable are not useful and serve no purpose.

Join us again tomorrow as we figure out where to go next.

Happy Holidays!

2010-12-22T13:43:00.003-05:00

Happy holidays to everyone. Safe travels, be well, and enjoy this festive time of the year.

DreamForce Thoughts

2010-12-21T13:36:00.000-05:00

Pivotal's cloud expert, Malcolm Hawker, visited DreamForce 2010 recently and came back with these thoughts:

One of the last sessions at DreamForce was hosted by the Professional Services group of salesforce.com. That discussion highlighted those areas where salesforce.com is hearing the most demand from it's clients for support from third-party consulting companies. Here is the list:

Sales Cloud

Enabling Master Data Management (MDM) solutions within SFDC.
Implementing Jigsaw contact database and similar sales contact db's
Building solutions to improve sales Territory Management & Lead Assignment
Building solutions to impove Quoting
Building Partner Relationship Management (PRM) solutions to capture partner leads, registering partners, etc.

Service Cloud

Implementing Service Cloud software
Penetrating the 75k salesforce.com customers using sfdc for sales/marketing but not for call center support.

Force.com

Defining business strategies for migrating apps to the cloud, including conducting Application Portfolio Assessments (define the 'as is' and 'to be' in the cloud).
Defining Enterprise Solution Architectures for the new cloud-enabled technology org.
Defining Enterprise Technology Processes / Governance for life in the Cloud.

Pivotal Awarded for the Quality of Its Information Management Solutions

2010-12-20T16:03:00.004-05:00

Just last month, Pivotal was awarded the “Most Innovative Solution” for 2010 at IntegrationNext, Pervasive Software’s annual data integration summit. We were recognized above more than 30 other companies nominated for awards at the Pervasive event, including some of the worlds largest IT consulting, software, and business service companies. Needless to say, we're quite proud of our team and their ability to architect and implement high quality solutions for very technical data problems. The full press release has more details.

Along those same lines, our very own Malcolm Hawker speaks with Pervasive's Jeff Kaplan to discuss the information management solution we created for Neustar. Read more and watch the full video at Pivotal IT Leverages Pervasive's Technology to Create an Integrated Approach to Data Quality.

TCP Windows are not a buffer

2010-07-29T16:50:00.004-04:00

Recently, I read an article that attempted to explain what TCP windows were and how the effected traffic flow for TCP connections. While the author was 90% correct about the practical knowledge, there was a lack of understanding that permeated the article. TCP windows are one of the most complicated things about the protocol, and it's not surprising that there was a fault present.

For this article I'm going to assume that you've got the basics of TCP/IP down. The TCP window can be defined as such: the window is the total amount of bytes of data that can be sent prior to receiving an acknowledgment. What this is, in essence, is the data that is actually on the wire between the transmitter and the receiver. The idea behind the sliding window system is to cleanly implement a mechanism for flow control.

An example in the real world is water in a hose. The transmitter is the faucet, and the receiver is at the other end of the hose. When you turn the water on, it takes a bit of time for the water to get from the faucet to the other end. This, in network terms, is the propagation delay (also called the return trip time, or RTT). Once the hose is on, we see the water representing our data. Most of the data is at the faucet. Some of it has made it out of the hose at the other end. But the water that is still inside the hose is what represents our TCP window. In a network sense, we're doing the same thing with data. We're trying to fill the "hose" of our network with enough data so that the data continues to flow smoothly.

This is not a buffer. Buffers are temporary memory areas for storing data. I would no more describe the objects that a juggler juggles as buffered than I would describe the TCP window as such.

Now, clearly I'm cranky, but we're not done quite yet. The reason this is important is so we can understand the true effect that windows have on data flow. If the window for a given connection is too small, the traffic will studder. The reason being that the transmitter will fill their window and then stop transmitting. The good news is that the window can shift as the connection moves past it's initial start. We can also determine ahead of time what the optimum window size is for a given connection. The formula for this is bandwidth * propagation delay. In this case, the bandwidth here will represent the size of the smallest link between two machines.

Typically the maximum TCP window is 64k -- a number that seems small because it is. What we can do is enable an option called Window Scaling. This will allow us to create windows that go as large as 2 GB. Something that would be useful only over network connections that have very long propagation delays (traveling to Mars anyone?). The window scaling function is advertised at the start of a connection in the SYN packet. Both sides must advertise it in order for it to be an option for this connection. Linux machines, for example, default to advertising this capability.

In short TCP windows are not buffers, and you kids need to get off of my lawn.

A10 Customer Advisory Committee Meeting [June 2010]

2010-07-22T17:00:00.001-04:00

Last month, I attended an A10 customer advisory committee meeting. Was a good discussion involving folks from some pretty large companies. While I can't go into detail on the specifics, I can say that the future looks good for A10. The features they are looking to add will be impressive.

It is also very interesting to listen to the different uses that people have for the AX platform. There are folks with load balancers in front of segments with thousands of hosts in the same layer 2 domain. These folks require sub-second fail over time because every failed session of their web application means that they lost revenue. It really gets you thinking outside of your home environment.

One of the things that I've been impressed with is that A10 is developing some features that take advantage of both the AX platform as well as the device's position in the network. An example of a feature that illustrates this concept and has already been released is the DNS query validation. The AX device can perform analysis of the query coming in to determine if it is malformed. If it is, it can simply discard the query. Having a feature like this will protect a DNS server from a crapflood.

Thinking like this is what makes me love the AX platform and ACOS.

Beyond Publishing

2010-07-21T13:30:00.000-04:00

Next week, I'll be presenting a webinar entitled "Beyond Publishing: Other Roles for Content Management Systems". Here's the description:

When we think of content management systems (CMS), we usually think of ways to publish content immediately and easily to our web sites. A CMS, though, is more than just a publishing tool for the web. Its fundamental purpose is to manage and manipulate data; with that in mind, we now have a lot more options, including collaboration, transformation, and process management functions. In this one hour webinar, we'll explore the business needs and solution sets that a CMS addresses in these three areas.

What I find most interesting about the CMS space in general is that people are very fond of labeling (others' thoughts on WordPress as a CMS for instance), categorizing, and separating. Perhaps it's our hyper-focus on all things meta-data related, but it creates false dichotomies and encourages people to think inside the box. Instead, let's take a look at what a CMS as an application and a platform really provides us, and then let's think about how to expand that into some interesting solutions. Those solutions, centering around collaboration, transformation, and process management functions, are what we'll briefly explore during the webinar.

Sign up for the webinar today.

Office News

2010-07-20T12:28:00.002-04:00

And in random office news ...

What I like about raw office space is that it's a blank canvas upon which we can paint anything we want. It means having a large closet made into a tech lab; it means choosing to have collaboration space rather than segregating everyone into isolation chambers. It also means running our own cable, which, as techie geeks, is something we actually enjoy doing.

I am in charge of the company fish. Seriously. This is a big responsibility.

We've picked a theme for the rooms: Star Wars. The conference room is Dagobah. The collaboration space is Tatooine. I often sit in Hoth, the little huddle room for quick meetings and where I go when I need quiet to actually think and write. I can't express how much my geeky heart loves this. When deciding, the conversation actually (d)evolved into memories of the original trilogy (Eps IV, V, and VI). We'll be stenciling Yoda-isms on the conference room walls.

I suppose I should call the company fish Padawan.

eZ Publish Mobile Solutions

2010-07-09T16:17:00.006-04:00

Two weeks ago, I had the opportunity to watch a demonstration of eZ Publish's mobile solutions for the content management system (CMS) space. The goal of the demo was to show off how eZ Systems has integrated mobile functionality into their eZ Publish CMS.

The first two solutions were a strong indication that mobile browsing has reached critical mass. eZ showed us that default templates are designed to make eZ Publish web sites accessible by smart phone browsers without additional development work, making a web site immediately mobile accessible. The web site automatically goes from a multiple column to a single column view. Of course, it's important to keep in mind that if those default templates are to be useful, there's a very specific way they have to be used, and pages will have the same look and feel across multiple web sites. Still, it's a great start, and even minimal custom development work should make some great leaps in uniqueness and usability of the design.

The second solution was interfacing with the administrative functions using a mobile browser. This includes everything from making a post (which isn't new in social media) to creating new pages. Unfortunately, since mobile browsers still have problems with advanced JavaScript and AJAX, and download and rendering times can try even the patience of a saint, the administrative interface is much more simplistic. It is, by necessity, a stripped down version of the full eZ admin interface. Markup will be the biggest challenge; writers are used to having WYSIWYG options nowadays. From a change management perspective, companies will need to make sure their writers and editors are well trained and know to expect to have to do their own markup, otherwise adoption rates will be depressingly low in any but the most tech-savvy of user groups.

The most exciting thing about the mobile solutions that eZ Publish now provides is the iPhone/iPad application toolkit. Using the toolkit and associated APIs, companies can now build iPhone apps that use their eZ Publish instance. An audience can access web site content in a completely different manner. While iPhone apps are not exactly trivial to develop, this allows more seamless integration between PC and mobile-based methods of content retrieval. Companies can use a single eZ Publish database as the authoritative source of content, and writers can use the eZ Publish admin interface to populate content for multiple channels, whether it be the web site, an iPhone app, or PDFs.

What I love about this is that thinking outside the box will result in some slick interfaces and creative functionality that will help end-users realize they don't have to stick to traditional methods of interacting with web sites. And, really, it just goes to show that a CMS can be a web CMS, but in the end, it's really about the content, and how we interface with that content is really up to us. eZ Publish's mobile solutions offer an array of intriguing possibilities.

SoftServe and Pivotal IT Create Strategic Partnership

2010-06-15T15:28:00.002-04:00

Ft. Myers, FL. – June 15, 2010 – SoftServe, Inc., a leading global provider of proven high quality software development, testing and consulting services, today announced that it has entered into the agreement with Pivotal Information Technology (Pivotal IT), a leader in the technology consulting industry that helps companies reach excellence through business and technology solutions.

The strategic partnership brings together SoftServe’s robust software development experience and dedication to best practices and processes, and Pivotal IT’s profound industry insight and recognized consulting expertise to drive greater value for their customers.

Read the full press release.

The Intersection of Marketing and Technology

2010-06-11T15:57:00.001-04:00

Event: The Intersection of Marketing and Technology
Sponsor: Women in Technology

The Marketing and Technology special interest groups (SIG) returned to a popular topic: that part of the Venn diagram where marketing and technology intersect. This year's focus was on marketing automation tools. Speakers included Holger Schulze, Giovanni Collabro, Julia Lim, and Christine Schafer, and it was moderated by Technology SIG chair Kate Hanusik. Eileen Martin and I were in attendance from Pivotal, along with fellow technologist Angelica Brown.

So, my thoughts? Great job all around. Today's event was very informative, and I thought the panelists did a great job of explaining both the market, the options, and their own personal opinions. And there were a lot of personal opinions. Holger seems to think traditional marketing is dead; Julia not so much. The speaker who stole the show, though, was Christine Schafer, whose self-admitted love of analogy gave us an amusing way to understand and internalize the concepts she was trying to convey. I especially enjoyed Christine's comment that "every time you do a technology implementation, the one thing you're going to need is therapy." This explanation of the importance of change management in technology implementation will stay with me forever. I hope Christine follows up on her promise to write a blog post about this.

Other highlights:

Know your audience before you decide what's best for your web site, marketing campaign, or social media strategy.
Ask for info a little bit at a time. Using marketing automation tools, a company can figure out whether the user's been there and filled out information before, and each subsequent visit can request an additional piece of the puzzle.
Offer free content. Build trust. Go out on a first date before pressuring a prospect to marry you. (Another great analogy from Christine.)
Write once, use many. White papers can become a series of blog posts. Blog posts can become a series of twitter updates. Webcasts can be created out of presentations and training sessions. Reuse, reuse, reuse!
Don't police bloggers beyond the basics. Don't specify topics. Don't be afraid to talk. The key is to be sincere, transparent, and real.
Blogs are an SEO driver due to the frequency of refreshed content and linking.
Linked In communities are a great source of discussions on a more thoughtful level than Facebook or Twitter.
The business case reasons for marketing automation tools include:

Metrics and reporting
Insights into the process and cycle
Insights into prospects, leads, and customers

What's on the horizon?

Personalization at a more sophisticated level
Delivery to mobile devices

And that's it! WiT continues to sponsor intelligent, relevant discussions. Eileen and I were quite happy with the event, the panelists, the participants, and the topic.

Pivotal IT and eZ Systems Create Strategic Partnership

2010-05-11T11:00:00.000-04:00

HERNDON, VA, May 11, 2010 -- Pivotal Information Technology (Pivotal IT), a leading technology consulting and service company today announced that it has formalized its agreement with eZ Systems (eZ), the global company that provides solutions for the Content Management Ecosystem. The agreement brings together the world's largest open source Web Content Management companies product of eZ Publish Premium, and Pivotal IT technology consulting and program management services to form a value offering for customers.

Read the full press release.