Content Management Software (CMS) provider, pTools, today announced the addition of a range of embedded social media and networking features to its software. From within the pTools CMS, social media content can be easily re-distributed to any site anytime in any format on any social network.

A key feature, pTools ‘TwitterDocs’, allows users to post to Twitter as they publish content through the CMS. There is no need to separately login to Twitter, and the content-related Tweet is controlled and managed within the CMS and its workflows.

In addition to Twitter, customer content is presented on Facebook, LinkedIn, and indexed in live search engine results such as Google & Bing with no pre- or post-publishing tweaking required.

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During the past 10 years, a number of software products used by online professionals have been discontinued. When this happens, customers are ultimately forced to spend time on product selection again as well as on a costly and risky migration exercise. Killing a product might make commercial sense for the vendor, but customers are left to pay for the consequences. In a young and crowded industry driven by vendors, there’s always a fair bit of fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) going around, but which products are dead or in serious trouble?

Vendors have typically not been very open about their intentions to discontinue a given product. Vendors usually blur their messages in marketing lingo and promises about migration help in order to keep their customers from departing to competing vendors. A few vendors have offered actual migration tools to assist with the implementation on the new system. Others, e.g. Microsoft, simply offer licenses for the new product and then leave it to the customer to do the implementation as was the case when SharePoint 2007 was introduced to replace CMS 2002 and SharePoint 2003.

A few of the product deaths have been caused by vendors having overlapping offerings after acquiring a competitor. CMS analyst Seth Gottlieb has written on why acquisitions are bad for customers where he says that acquisitions adds uncertainty and risk that a customer would do best to avoid.

Apart from acquisitions, some vendors have also decided to simply start over on a new technology with no real upgrade path for existing customers. This is what Oracle did with WebCenter and Microsoft with SharePoint.

Here’s a listing of products that are either dead or in need of some life support:

• Alterian: Refer to recent CMS Watch coverage of Alterian drops Immediacy
• Google Urchin: Unclear future inside Google which has a history of discontinuing products
• Microsoft CMS 2002: Officially discontinued – replaced by Microsoft SharePoint. See this letter to customers
• Open Text has a few ones, e.g. RedDot or Vignette
• Oracle Portal has officially been pushed to the side as a part of a consolidation strategy
• Synkron.web: Officially discontinued – replaced by Synkron Via

As you can see by the names on the list, both small and large software companies have a mixed track record when it comes to killing products. There only way you can reduce the risk of ending up with a product on life support is by investing time in talking to the community, consulting analysts and forcing vendors to be open about their roadmap. Still, no product lives forever.

Please help prospective customers, by dropping a comment below if you know of other products that deserve to be on the list.

It just occurred to me that my recent quotes on Fierce Content Management make me sound like the Statler and Waldorf of the content management industry. I really don’t mean to sound so negative but, from where I sit, software company acquisitions are nearly always bad news. My clients are software customers and [...]

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  by Brian W. Hill

Iron Mountain announced today that it has acquired privately-held archiving vendor Mimosa Systems. The approximately $112 million deal significantly bolsters Iron Mountain’s archiving portfolio with on-premises software for email, file and SharePoint archiving. With the purchase, Iron Mountain also picks up just over a thousand existing Mimosa customers and a good talent pool with expertise in archiving and eDiscovery.

My preliminary perspective is that this acquisition will entail some near- and mid-term bumps for Iron Mountain customers and prospects, but will ultimately prove positive. The three main reasons:

• Message archiving remains critically important. Over the past decade, tens of thousands of organizations have adopted message archiving solutions. An array of vendors, providing archiving offerings for Exchange, Notes Domino, and other messaging systems, have helped these buyers comply with regulations, mitigate legal risk, and improve operational efficiency. While the message archiving market is mature, it’s changing and growing at a rapid clip. Although Mimosa made an impressive initial entry into SharePoint archiving last year, message archiving accounts for most of new customers the vendor signed in the last 12 months. With this acquisition, Iron Mountain demonstrates that it understands how important message archiving is to prospective buyers and its strong intent to capitalize on the opportunity.
• Functionality delivered as on-premises software (as opposed to SaaS-based solutions) matters to many archiving buyers. With the promise of lower total cost of ownership, more rapid deployments, and other advantages, message archiving vendors providing SaaS-based solutions report strong customer growth. In announcing its April 2009 partnership with Mimecast for SaaS-based message archiving, Iron Mountain sought to take advantage of this market growth. While the vendor has had some traction with this partnership, prospective buyers with a preference for on-premises solutions due to privacy, security, legal, and other concerns remained out of reach. Now, with Mimosa’s on-premises message archiving software, Iron Mountain can more effectively target these buyers as well as organizations interested in exploring hybrid solutions, combining a mix of on-premises infrastructure and cloud-based services.
• Message archiving buyers struggle with eDiscovery challenges. From a series of podcasts I’ve recorded with message archiving customers (e.g., Canaccord, Media General, and Rohm and Haas) over the past few months and from ongoing exchanges with enterprise buyers, it’s clear that many are achieving legal risk mitigation objectives but most organizations struggle. Interestingly, top challenges typically don’t include issues with insufficient message archiving features or other application-specific factors. Instead enterprises report difficulties in synchronizing eDiscovery, archiving, and records management efforts along with issues in establishing policies for retention management and legal hold as key challenges. Effectively incorporating Mimosa’s archiving products and expertise into the broader Iron Mountain portfolio holds potential to ease these difficulties. For example, a solution that tightly integrates message archiving, preservation, and legal review along with solid best practices guidance would go a long way in easing enterprise eDiscovery pain.

Enterprises report frustrations in integrating applications that support disparate steps of the eDiscovery process. If Iron Mountain successfully incorporates the Mimosa product set into its portfolio, the vendor has good potential to address enterprise legal risk mitigation headaches. This is a considerable effort, however, and success is certainly not assured. I’ll be monitoring Iron Mountain’s execution on this deal and will be looking for examples of customers leveraging multiple Iron Mountain archiving, records management, and eDiscovery offerings in production environments. If your organization fits this description, please send me a note at bhill@forrester.com.

What do you think the acquisition means for the message archiving market? I welcome your comments here. Also, Forrester is currently conducting research on message archiving trends, budgets, and user expectations. We’re wrapping up an online survey now and value your message archiving insight. If you would like to participate in an online survey to support this research, please click on this link. (No vendors please.) We plan to publish key summary findings in early 2010.

The management within a company finds it needs to replace their existing, custom developed ERP system with a modern standard ERP system. A major ERP vendor brings their best sales people to a meeting with the management, equipped to the teeth with the most impressive product PowerPoint slide decks they could up-bring (that is, bullet-rich slides with a lot of interconnected 3D boxes that makes the ERP seem very advanced and capable).

The sales people manage to convince the company management to buy the most expensive license of their ERP system. All modules they could possible use, and a few more, are included in the price. As an extra bonus, the license agreement also contains a few “Easter eggs”, including a free license of the vendor’s state-of-the-art and very versatile portal software.

The company – some folks at the IT department – discovers the Easter-egg with the portal software. Like boys with toys, they can’t wait to open it and see what it does. So, they install the software on a server – “for evaluation purposes”.

Sometime later, a business unit identifies a need for aggregating all the information and tools they need in one place. They’ve heard that some competitor does that by using a portal solution, and that a portal solution is just what they need too. So they turn to their IT Department, telling them they need a portal solution.

The boys at the IT department (not many girls around) get all fired up. They tell the business people that they in fact already have a state-of-the-art and very versatile portal software in their enterprise software portfolio. Since the ERP system is a corporate standard and is mandatory to be used by all business units, so must the portal software that came along with it. Besides, it is free of charge. In fact, it is already installed on a server. With an IT strategy having consolidation as a key component, introducing new enterprise software is simply out of the question (even if you could argue that the portal software is not officially introduced and used).

The business people understand they don’t stand a chance against this strong setup. Besides, when looking at the slide decks that the vendor left them with, the portal software seems to be pretty much what they are looking for. So, they decide to skip the part of the process where they define their needs and requirements in more detail and start looking for different alternatives to evaluate and eventually purchase. Instead, they invest their money in an implementation project, seeing the promise of a short time to platform and quick and tangible business results.

The implementation project is executed and eventually a portal solution is launched. Soon enough it turns out that they did not really get what they expected, but to ensure return on their investment, they decide to force adoption with directives and policies. Maybe they will also work out some the kinks, possibly by purchasing a bunch of 3rd party software.

It does not take very long until the following has happened: The users are unhappy and frustrated and do whatever they can do to find reasons for not using the portal solution. The expected results are nowhere to be seen, and the portal solution quickly enters maintenance mode. It is just too expensive to develop it any further. But as some people have invested a lot of prestige and their entire careers in this thing, nothing can be done about the situation.

A couple of years later, the business people identify a need for aggregating all the information and tools they need in one place. This time, they don’t need a portal solution. Obviously, portal solutions are not the recipe for success. Now success is spelled differently. Instead, they need a versatile platform with a lot of capabilities, from search to business intelligence.

So, they turn to their IT department…

It would be very interesting if you could list 5 faults you find in this story, and come up with 5 things to make it right.

(thanks @letterpress_se for inspiration)

I smiled at this the other day -”Software Developers: The New Rock Stars of Marketing” - it comes from the article  ’Out of the Box’ published a few weeks ago in the UK Financial Times, that talks about the role of technology in marketing in the new media age. The smile is because this is pinned up [...]

The world of the knowledge worker is document centric.  As a group, knowledge workers spend significant time creating, managing, reviewing, and editing documents.

Danger lurks in the document jungle

[For the purposes of this discussion, we define a document as written communication created using word processing software, a typical example of which is Microsoft Word.]

A recent Basex survey of 300 knowledge workers revealed (not surprisingly) that 95% of them create and review documents on a regular basis.

The prevalence of word processing tools and e-mail have made it easy, some would say too easy, to send documents anywhere and everywhere for input from colleagues, business partners, customers, and suppliers.

A mere twenty years ago, document review was very different.  Fewer documents were being generated overall so there were fewer to review.  The review process was paper based, documents were typically stored in file cabinets, and, since making corrections and revisions often meant retyping a document, people only made important corrections and tried to get it right the first time around.

Today, the typical knowledge worker creates one to two documents a day comprised of one to two pages each.  He also receives three to five documents that are between three to five pages long for review each week.

Why the disparity in size and quantity between documents created and documents received?  People who create longer documents also create more of them and are more likely to send them out for review.  In addition, 22% of documents are not sent to anyone for review and a similar number are sent to only one colleague.

What happens when a document comes back to its creator with these edits and comments is also interesting since most documents come back with multiple edits, changes, and comments.

Despite the tools available both within word processing software and externally, the typical knowledge worker uses a fairly inefficient process to review documents, 60% of knowledge workers say they e-mail the documents as attachments to several reviewers at once.  46% report that they then compare edits and comments manually once they have received them back from reviewers.

As a result, almost 40% of knowledge workers say they miss edits and comments in the documents they get back from review.  Fewer than half of the knowledge workers surveyed say they get documents back in a timely fashion.  Another 25% of knowledge workers say they intentionally leave people out of the review process for fear of slowing it down.

All of these inefficiencies come with a significant cost to the bottom line.  Errors in documents that are overlooked can result in lost sales and lower profits.  The multiple hours a typical knowledge worker spends each week trying to manage the review process could be put to far better use.

The future for document review and revision is far from dismal.  Software companies ranging from start-ups to industry giants are tackling the problem.  Nordic River, a version management company based in Sweden, offers TextFlow, a browser-based tool that generates marked-up review copies of a document based on changes and comments made in individual versions of a document.   Microsoft, in the forthcoming Office 2010 suite, will introduce Co-authoring, a set of tools that allows for multiple users to edit a document at the same time.

Jonathan B. Spira is the CEO and Chief Analyst at Basex.

ALEXANDRIA, VA. – Feb. 16, 2010 – Bitrix, Inc. (www.bitrixsoft.com), a technology trendsetter in business communications solutions, announces the availability of Bitrix® Virtual Appliance 1.5 for Amazon EC2, a major release of the free virtual platform that creates an optimal performance environment for Bitrix® Intranet Portal and Bitrix® Site Manager.

The software underwent a number of significant improvements to deliver customers more reliability and services while using the company’s CMS/EMC solutions in Amazon Web Services. Bitrix Virtual Appliance is based on a self-updating Fedora Linux operating system, includes the latest versions of the Bitrix web environment, and features increased system performance and optimized memory usage. Following the latest Amazon development initiatives, the software now supports all three datacenter location regions (US – Standard, US – N. California, EU – Ireland).

The release also includes the beta-version of Amazon EBS storage volume, customized especially for Bitrix Virtual Appliance. This feature allows the user to create up to 1TB of back-up copies of web projects and intranet portals, roll-back projects to a specified point in time, protect data for long-term durability and remain sure that the data is securely stored and guaranteed by Amazon.

“SaaS deployment provides a wide range of benefits connected with cost reduction and quality of service,” said Dmitry Valyanov, President of Bitrix, Inc. “It reduces expenses on high-priced hardware, IT staff and the user pays only for the actual software usage time. Moreover, customers get the service provider’s guarantee for solution availability, security and integrity.”

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Microsoft Office may be one of the world’s most widely deployed software packages.

A backstage pass…

Indeed, with a user base of 500 million, any changes or updates to the suite are significant for that fact alone.

In the upcoming Office 2010 release, there are many areas that have been retooled and refined; however, for the typical knowledge worker, the most obvious will be the user interface.  In this research brief, we will look at how the user interacts with a document through the new Navigation pane and Backstage view.

The new Navigation pane in Word enables users to move around a document, search for content, and change the structure and organization of headings.  This replaces the old Document Map and Thumbnail panes and brings those feature sets into one place along with Find.  Users browse through a document by heading, page, or search results.  Content in a section is moved around a document by dragging-and-dropping the tab for the heading.  Additionally, the outline of a document can be manipulated to promote or demote sections.  When sections are moved, all headings and subheadings automatically adjust.

Office 2010 also features a new way to manage documents, the Backstage view.  This new functionality extends across the entire Office suite.  The Backstage view appears when the user clicks on the File tab from within an application.  The view that opens up provides the user with access to tabs that show document info,  permissions, versioning, printing options, and sharing options.  The user has multiple options for sharing including e-mailing the document as an attachment or link, or via a blog post.

Backstage also includes Accessibility Checker, which allows users to identify elements of a document that may cause problems when used with assistive technologies.  These functions were previously found in various Ribbon menus and, with 2010, have been separated out from functions that are needed for actual content creation.  The goal of Backstage is to help users work with documents, processes and workflows, as opposed to when you work in the document.

Features such as presence are incorporated into Backstage, making it possible to initiate contact with document authors and to see related documents.  Backstage is extensible, meaning that it can be customized to allow for a range of application data to be brought into the view.

The interfaces for Backstage and Navigation are smooth and intuitive to use, and the concept of separating these features and giving them their own panes that group like-minded features together is a good one.  Obviously getting used to features being in a different place takes some time, but Backstage and Navigation are both positive changes that increase usability .

We will be examining other important new features and enhancements in Office 2010 in the weeks to come.

Cody Burke is a senior analyst at Basex.

Microsoft Office is undoubtedly one of the most world’s most widely deployed software packages.
Indeed, with a user base of 500 million, any changes or updates to the suite are significant for that fact alone. In the upcoming Office 2010 release, there are many areas that have been retooled and refined; however, for the typical knowledge [...]