Industry Insight

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The two keynotes on the first day of EclipseCon Boston fit together so well it was eerie. I suspect that it was both by design and not by design – meaning the topics were complementary, so were naturally paired, but the speakers both work in different areas, with different people, and yet are drawing similar conclusions. The convergence of these ideas on developers and creativity and the software market offers insight into how we are solving business problems today.

Steve O’Grady, analyst at RedMonk and author of the book The New Kingmakers, How Developers Conquered the World, gave a brief history of the technology marketplace. He noted that three important open source projects emerged in 1995: Apache, MySQL, and php. All three eventually dominated their domains over commercial products, because they were freely available, worked well enough, and developers embraced them. After the founding of Google, a company that …

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At the end of November, Jane and I attended the Gilbane Conference in Boston where we joined a myriad of content management professionals – one of them being Heather Hedden, an information management guru specializing in taxonomies, indexing and search; author of The Accidental Taxonomist; and Simmons Graduate School of Library and Information Science teacher of taxonomy creation courses. We were lucky enough to speak to Heather over lunch and secure a future interview. Now, we’re passing along the wealth of information Heather provided us. And to think, it’s just a sneak peek of what it takes to be a taxonomist!

What does a taxonomist do? Is this a relatively new type of profession that was born in the Information Age, or is it more of an evolution of expertise?

A taxonomist designs, creates, edits, and/or maintains taxonomies. Taxonomies vary, and people called “taxonomists” may work with different …

Ron Miller is a familiar face for most of us in the content management world. I always bump into him at conferences, and it’s always a pleasure to hear his take on the current state of the industry. He wasn’t expecting my request to turn the tables, and interview him during the Gilbane Boston conference. He didn’t know if he would have good answers for my questions: “I’m just a humble scribe,” he told me. Well, as I suspected, the discussion was interesting and his perspective was incredibly insightful. At the end he laughed and said he was surprised at how much he had to say. There’s nothing like a red velvet lounge to inspire you to riff on the topics you know best.

#BigData

[JZ]  Big data had a prime place at the Gilbane conference. What did you think of the keynote presentation and other discussions on big …

Social software of all flavors generates a lot of buzz these days, but is there any business value beneath the glossy veneer of hype? When it comes to social content management, the answer is a resounding yes. Combining social technology tools with effective content management creates a more productive, connected work environment.

In a mobile world where people don’t always work in the same office and the water cooler is often virtual, efficient forms of collaboration are more valuable than ever.

Email doesn’t cut it. Not only is email communication time consuming (not to mention spammy), it simply is not organized for efficient search, workflow, or document storage.

A content management platform is the broader expression of a document management application that essentially adds structure to all types of unstructured content, such as images, documents, contracts, etc. The structure includes a wide set of services that range from version …

There’s clearly a connection between the open source development model for software and innovation in technology, and there are a lot of different perspectives on the link between the two. Innovation is a wonderfully fluid topic in and of itself — the kind of phenomena that fascinates, is characterized by recognizable patterns, but yet defies concrete black-and-white definition. As soon the concept of innovation in the technology world seems to be narrowed down, an exception emerges. That’s the fun of it. And that’s also why discussions about innovation are more interesting than definitions.

In Barb Mosher Zinck’s recently published “Discussion Point” article — Does Open Source Encourage and Support Innovation? — the question was posed to open source vendors Hippo, Liferay, and Nuxeo. Responses came from the CEOs, CTOs, CMOs, and Community Managers, giving a range of perspectives on this multi-faceted issue.

Some recurring themes from the responses include:

• An

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Why it’s important for your business…

So, a few weeks ago, I ended my discussions with my panel of community managers (jump to the beginning of this series of post if you want to be introduced to them) with a very simple—but very important—question about the importance of the community management role for their business:

If your company was bought and you had to explain to your new boss why community management is important (and had only 1 sentence to save your job), what would it be?

Nicolas’s opinion is clearly related to the Open Source development model. In short, if you’re open source, you need it:

“Open-source and Community Management are Siamese twins: the one cannot live without the other. Eschewing this common-sense principle inevitably makes one wither, and so will the other, eventually.”

James think it speaks by itself, no need for much comment:

“A healthy community got

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