Facebook, Linkedin, YouTube, Xythos and Enterprise Content Management

As a technology marketer I’m feeling virtually bombarded by offers to learn how to master Web 2.0 technologies and social networking tools in order to remain relevant amidst the economic chaos of 2009. If you read half these solicitations, it would appear that traditional advertising and communications strategies have achieved a state of irrelevance, lost in our new multi-channel, multi-media world.

After spending so much effort and time focused on discovery, search optimization and living for keyword ranking results on Google, I’ve almost wanted to dismiss the more obtuse elements of community marketing. It’s not that we haven’t been engaged. We’ve got channels on YouTube and groups on Linkedin and Facebook thanks to more adventurous staffers at Xythos, but I wasn’t convinced yet.

That changed for good when I attended Educause 2008, the annual IT summit for the world’s colleges and universities. As usual, we had prepared for the event with pre-show mailings and other marketing campaigns intended to increase activity at our booth and the various seminars and events that we were hosting. In fact, in order to measure our campaign return on investment (ROI) we asked each attendee to identify what prompted them to visit us during the event.

About 11% reported that they had learned about Xythos, or one of our planned activities at the conference via a social networking site. Wow! I thought when I learned about this data. No, it wasn’t a huge percent, but as an organization we had hardly begun to invest in these networks. Equally important, the total cost of that investment was an incredibly small part of our marketing budget, even for that particular event.

This got me thinking and quickly planning in a different way for 2009. Being discoverable is still ultimately important, once prospective customers begin seeking solutions. However, it’s becoming more obvious that the process of becoming aware of, and learning about new ways of doing things is changing rapidly. Social networks on the web would appear to be important catalysts of that evolution particularly as they relate to the discovery of new technologies.

We’ve already been busy testing the hypothesis this year. While it’s a bit soon to draw conclusions, we’re beginning to see more supporting results. We’ve increased our production of rich media including recorded videos and audio podcasts in addition to updating blogs (like this one) more frequently. We’re using the social networks to promote this content and attempting to develop communities of interest around it.

For some of you, this might already appear obvious and old fashioned, but in the “serious” world of enterprise software marketing it hasn’t seemed all that common. As a result, these activities have helped improve search and discovery performance for some of the keywords and phrases important to our business. We measure these results using Google analytics and by monitoring inbound email and telephone requests.

If you’re wondering how all of this relates to enterprise content management, I can tell you without a doubt that many of our activities related to creating and managing rich media could not have happened very easily without an ECM system. For example, we develop and record audio and video content in multiple locations and need to share it quickly. Individual files can easily exceed 100 Mbs and would be prohibited from our company email system. Instead, we store them in shared folders within Xythos’ EDMS where all participants can see them, be notified when they change, etc.

Our ECM system also serves as our staging area for the main Xythos website essentially allowing us to proceed from concept to publication for all the content we create. Integrated collaboration and workflow tools help us to better automate the process and we make sure to use the version control features as well. Most importantly for our team, we’ve integrated our use of email with content management so that we dialog about projects in messages that include links to our media stored in Xythos. This relieves our email system significantly and makes accessing and sharing files a whole lot easier.

Of course, there is a penalty for having an easy to use ECM system and rich media authoring tools. Fear! Creating and distributing rich media content on social networks has become absurdly simple. While that may be OK for teens on YouTube or Facebook, it can be quite scary for corporate marketers. Fortunately, our ECM system promotes a healthy editing and review process, although its still no guaranty of quality. However, given some of the early results we’ve seen, I guess we’ll just have to swallow some pride and practice, practice, practice.

So, what’s your experience been like using rich media and social networking sites for your business or organization? Do you have any good stories you’d like to share?

Gmail Offline! Online Document Management to the Rescue?

Yesterday another Gmail outage was reported to last somewhere between two and half to four hours. That’s disappointing. I really like Gmail. It’s usually responsive, gives me all the storage I want and I can access it from any of my devices – when it’s available. I even use Google Gears to get offline access to Gmail - for when I’m disconnected, not Google.

So was yesterday’s outage a problem? Not really for me. Gmail is a secondary service in my workday where I must still survive in an Entourage/Outlook/Exchange environment. However, if I were operating my own small business or was employed at one of Google’s larger enterprise customers that might not have been the case.

I’m not really going to complain about Google’s quality of service. Every organization’s email, whether hosted or on premise has its challenging days. I’ll tip my hat to Google for providing Gears as a free work-around for when either one of us is “off-line”. However, I’m still worried about the rest of my stuff. Without Gears for Google Docs, and other Google Apps, I might be unable to share contracts, invoices or other important documents. At least if I had a local copy, I could use other online services to collaborate during Google downtime.

Google Gears is a good first step towards online data synchronization and will probably help plenty more organizations get comfortable with the idea of trusting web services to manage growing parts of their business. However, until we can all be certain that 24x7x365 web access is, in fact guaranteed, we’re going to need Gears-like functionality for lots of other data too.

This is not a trivial challenge, particularly if you consider that a lot of business is still conducted using desktop applications not yet ready to migrate to the cloud, including Google’s version of it. For now, we live in the early transition stage of cloud computing where some basic and generally appealing apps like Gmail or Salesforce have migrated up, while many others still linger on the desktop.

Both application categories will need synchronization assistance to ensure anytime data access. Desktop applications can benefit from having their data backed up and protected in the cloud while cloud based services will occasionally require offline access. An online storage synchronization client may be a useful compliment to Google Gears for caching non-Google data managed by other web services. This can allow users to continue to use desktop applications, store and share their files in the cloud, and replicate them on the desktop – just in case.

If you’re not familiar with these kinds of tools, I recommend checking out South River Technologies WebDrive and our own Xythos Drive. Both of these web clients can help automate the synchronization of files between a web service, like those provided by Xythos EDMS and the desktop. The key benefit here is that the user’s relationship to their data is reversed. The cloud-based application becomes the primary data store while the client system becomes the secondary data cache – particularly useful if that system is a vulnerable laptop.

If you don’t already have access to an enterprise content management (ECM) application why not try Xythos on Demand? It’s an easy and free (for 30 days anyway) way to experience what its like to safely store and share your documents online. When you use the service in combination with Xythos Drive I think you’ll immediately appreciate what it means to have someone (or in this case something) else doing all the busy work of synchronizing your files for you. Best of all, if Gmail sputters again you’ll have disaster recovery plan already in place!

As always, please let me know what you think about it. Jim

Top 10 Ways to Save Money with Enterprise Content Management

We’ve been compiling a list like this for a while and it seems like now is particularly good time to share some of the ideas and suggestions that we’ve received on the subject. Is this the best list or the one likely to address the needs of most readers? I don’t know. However, if just one or two of the items on it can help your organization become more efficient, responsive or secure then I’ll consider the effort a success.

Even if your business is about crushing boulders using dinosaurs there’s probably still paperwork involved (or at least stone tablets, if you live in Bedrock). The point is that where there’s paperwork there are probably business processes developed around those documents. Those processes that continue to rely upon the exchange of documents are often the most likely to benefit from improved efficiencies via content management solutions.

Both large and small-sized organizations can enjoy cost savings benefits from these simple changes. In fact, I just learned about a 50 employee company in the insurance industry that has migrated document distribution online and claims to already be saving about $8,000 per month. A larger-sized Xythos customer recently told us they're on schedule to save over $125,000 this year by moving more of their document storage and distribution online with some fairly simple business process changes.

The second major category for cost-saving opportunity with ECM involves what we often call the “Webex test.” This basically involves asking the question “do we all have to be there?” Obviously, its not just meeting’s that can cost plenty, but also all of the collaborative work that takes place before and after meetings. The more this work can be supported by web collaboration tools the less likely expensive travel is required and, in theory the more productive employees can be.

If you don’t believe these kinds of collaborative cost savings can also be material just take a look at IBM. As a result of deploying Lotus SameTime to their many thousands of employees the company claims they are able save more than $8 million per month via web collaboration.



So without any more categorical discussion, here’s our top ten list of ways that you can save money with ECM (if you’re not doing some of these yourself already). As usual, we understand that technology alone is not the answer and recommend that you be ready to adopt a potentially more flexible outlook about how tasks should be performed in what may soon become more location and time independent environments.

Our ECM Cost-Saving Top 10

(Please note that we’ve ranked these items according to estimated ease of actual cost savings measurement, ease of project implementation and relative degree of anticipated cost savings. “Your mileage may vary.”)

1) Reduce travel and entertainment budgets
2) Eliminate document courier services
3) Minimize MFP and printer consumables (paper and toner)
4) Consolidate department file servers
5) Reduce office heating and air conditioning costs
6) Slash administrative and clerical support costs
7) Consolidate data backup and protection
8) Minimize physical document and records storage costs
9) Accelerate content discovery
10) Share office space
11) Improve content re-use ( everyone needs a little something extra these days!)

Worried that cost saving alone isn’t enough incentive to get your organization to take advantage of ECM? Take a look at this recent article in AIIM’s Infonomics magazine about managing change:

Scared of Change – Infonomics www.infonomicsmag.com

Want to hear more about putting ECM to work for your cost savings initiative? Check out these web resources:

Escape the Cold with ECM and Online Collaboration

At Xythos we sometimes joke that the popularity of online document and content management applications is directly related to an organization’s geographic location. Those closest to northern latitudes have a natural incentive to seek alternatives to personal travel, at least during half the year we laugh. After all, doesn’t that help explain the longtime popularity of ECM vendors like Hummingbird and OpenText?

As I warm my fingers above my MacBook’s CPU this February morning I can’t help but think there may be some truth to this joke. Though if we believe Punxsutawney Phil, the joke’s on us all because “six more weeks of winter it will be”. For those of us who use ECM systems, I wonder if we’re ready to change? Do we feel confident we can accomplish most, or maybe all our assigned tasks without traveling? Are we more comfortable conducting business remotely or from a home office than we’ve been in the past?

I’m not suggesting that ECM systems and web collaboration tools can eliminate the need for human interaction or attending business meetings altogether. Those of us engaged in customer-facing roles know the process of establishing relationships is key to business success. I imagine that still remains true both inside and outside organizations today. Yet, it is still cold out there …

Once we get to know our co-workers and customers and have established a degree of trust and cooperation, I think the potential for productive and potentially long distance collaboration is significant. In fact, simply doing our jobs in environments that don’t introduce myriad interruptions (possibly like the office?) has proven to significantly increase individual performance, according to analysts. Of course, that’s assuming you have access to such an oasis.

So, how can ECM help fight off the winter doldrums and maybe keep us warmer too? Why not test your system and discover how much it can help you get done without visiting the office every day of the week? If you live in a colder climate, that might be one less day of stepping outside and being miserable. If you live in a warmer place use your ECM system to enjoy it a little bit more. Get out on the patio and do some creative project planning. Just don’t brag about how nice it is, or you might get the next consulting project in Duluth.

The combination of ECM, Web 2.0 collaboration tools, and pervasive web connectivity not only helps reduce travel costs, it can limit our impact on the environment as well. The cost of transportation and exchange of documents can migrate from the physical to the electronic universe with consequent benefits. According to the US Energy Information Administration, transportation accounts for 33 percent of carbon dioxide emissions. That’s far greater than the 2 percent that Gartner estimates suggest information and communication technology contributes.

If your ECM system isn’t Internet compatible, it might be time for an upgrade. Web-enabling your system can truly expand the benefits your organization experience’s by multiples. Not only can it support remote access and more enjoyable winters, but it can also become a first step towards better integrating your customers and partners together with your business. That’s probably a smart move in any economic environment.

If you don't have access to an ECM system, but want to get a quick understanding for how this could work, try out Xythos on Demand. This software as a service (SaaS) ECM solution will get you started in minutes and it’s free for the first 30 days. That might be an easy way to avoid the cold.

Google Follows Xythos and Zimbra Offline

I know, it sounds sort of odd doesn’t it? However, headlines about Google going offline were all over the tech news sites this week. I think it’s interesting that the world’s largest provider of web services recognizes that a key barrier to increased service adoption is customer concern about online service availability. After all, isn’t the web supposed to be there for us 24x7x365?

Obviously, there’s more to it than that. Having anytime access to your data is certainly important, but knowing that you have control of it is even more critical. I suspect that is one of the reasons more businesses have not adopted Google Docs of Gmail. The fact that these services are still labeled “Beta” probably doesn’t help either.

There will probably always be times that we cannot be connected to the web. Whether that’s in an airplane or simply some WiFi dead zone at a hotel, “no service available” is a message that’s still all too common. Google Gears is a good first step towards addressing these issues, but I’m not sure it means now is the time to discard our desktop applications altogether.

Perhaps there will soon be a time when web apps replicate on my desktop regardless of their connection status and that will be good enough. Today however, I find myself continuing to return to my desktop for programs that can respond acceptably and generally offer me a greater degree of control over how I manage my data. To be fair, I think this is also a function of the maturity of my desktop apps vs. newer web-based alternatives.

However, as my job leads me deeper into the world of rich media the demand for improved application performance multiplies rapidly. I’m already enjoying many of the new features in iLife ’09, but I recognize that even though they leverage web data more, there’s little chance they could perform satisfactorily as web services alone. So, while I applaud Google for addressing the offline challenge, I consider it to be a fast moving target they may not catch up with.

Larger and more complex data files demand faster microprocessors and more sophisticated software. As a result, I benefit from using the latest desktop software from Adobe and Apple while considering my sixteen-month-old Macbook to be somewhat obsolete. This became abundantly clear as I struggled to publish twenty minutes of HD video for our web sites this week.

I need a seamless online and offline connection from my desktop to web servers in order to publish and preserve my output. This is where Internet “bridge” technologies, like Xythos Drive make sense. Xythos Drive synchs my data locally for offline work and lets me perform those tasks with the applications of my choice, whether from Adobe, Microsoft or whoever. That’s the best of both worlds for me when we’re talking about rich media.

When we’re talking about more lightweight collaboration (Email, messaging, etc.) Google is definitely getting better at addressing my needs. However, I like Zimbra Collaboration Suite a lot too and they’ve offered an offline solution for quite a while already. Zimbra has also partnered with Xythos to integrate enterprise content management (ECM) into their popular Outlook alternative. I think that make plenty of sense, particularly if you’re collaborating around rich media!

Gmail continues to improve and I certainly feel like a beneficiary of that. Google could also benefit from considering how users would like to better integrate their desktop lives online and what better solutions their web services can offer in that regard. As a fan of Blogger, I have high hopes.

How are you bridging the divide between what you do on your desktop vs. the web? Please let me know.

Simplifying Compliance with ECM and Metadata

Let’s face it, not everyone remembers to put all their tools away when they finish a project. Even with good intentions, I’ll leave a paint brush in the garage sink or forget a trowel in the garden. Nothing tragic really. Others aren’t usually impacted and I’m generally not putting my family at risk. OK – you could argue about the rusty trowel, but the risks associated with disorganization or protocol failure in business are a whole different story.

I suspect that the many thousands of hours spent by businesses on compliance training last year didn’t always achieve the desired results. The fact is, taking the extra steps to record how and what we’ve just done each time we perform a business task generally seems like its getting in the way of doing the job itself. If compliance procedures can’t be automated, or at least neatly integrated into business processes, even the most well-meaning employee can easily forget.

Now I know, that some readers are probably thinking, “Rules are rules. If employees can’t follow-them, then they should be punished…” OK, but is that really how you want to manage your business? Do you think that’s going to improve productivity or motivate your team to succeed? That’s why I was excited to learn about a new way to automate how emails are scanned, categorized and stored, so that employees don’t have to waste time scrutinizing messages attempting to stay compliant at work.

The solution consists of two key components, a couple customizations and a new Microsoft Office plug-in. The first component is a basic ECM system (Xythos EDMS) configured with a staging folder to capture email messages and attachments. The Office plug-in allows users to direct email to be saved in a staging folder or simply have all messages (and attachments) automatically stored there. Each message and file attachment is captured as a record inside the staging directory.

The second component captured my attention because it’s the part that can help organizations relieve employees from the duty of classifying their email and remembering to declare required items as official records. This task can now be performed by a product called Mindserver Categorization Engine, from Recommind. When records are added to the Xythos staging folder, Xythos sends a file link to Recommind causing it to parse the file contents and generate an XML data file, which it returns to Xythos. Xythos then reads the XML results and moves the record into its appropriate record category based on the content parsing results performed by Recommind.

Those of you familiar with natural language parsing algorithms understand that no system is perfect, although over time they generally improve. It’s possible that trained records managers may still need to review the contents of the Xythos records categories to ensure the system performs as expected. However, the real value delivered with this solution is its ability to substantially reduce the burden upon employees. Once they learn they can batch or automate the process of records declaration they’ll be more likely to perform the task consistently. That’s a hallmark of a successful compliance solution.

Regular readers of this blog may also recognize the importance that metadata plays in this solution as well. Just as Google geographic positioning data helps me better organize my photos, Recommind ‘s XML metadata is helping automate the process of records classification. Data inside messages and file attachments, as well as metadata like message sender and subject each influence the recommended outcome. While these categorization methods may not be perfect, I suspect that the more metadata is included in the decision-making process the more likely desired results will be attained.

So, how is your organization leveraging metadata to manage your content? Have you found ways to use this data to reduce business operating costs or risk? Please let me know.

Will ECM Really Matter in 2009?

Spending the holidays away from the office doesn’t necessarily guarantee the rest and relaxation I hope for, but it almost always provides me with a better perspective when I return. Today, I’m reflecting upon that experience as I fly across the country for our annual business kick-off meeting. I can’t help but remember how many times my family and I found ourselves searching for content we needed - often struggling to get it from one device to another these last few weeks.

The ease with which we can capture digital memories is staggering. I must have recorded several hundred JPEG and RAW images by New Years day in addition to hours of generally awful video with my new Canon Vixia. My MacBook threatened to shut down if I saved one more file and wouldn’t even open a web page until I moved 50 Gigs of older photos off it.

I first tried copying data to a terabyte drive connected to my airport extreme, but even with N band WiFi I received a 37 hours to complete message and then saw the transfer interrupted. I finally gave up and just used a portable Western Digital drive and sneaker net. That was just the beginning. Not all the data we needed this holiday was on the same Mac or server and yours truly finally paid the price for not properly naming photos last year. I almost missed my ShutterFly card delivery deadline as a result.

Once again, the value of meta data has been hammered into my head. I need better ways (or habits) to keep track of all the stuff that makes up my digital life, both at home and at the office. My challenges with rich media certainly aren’t limited to chronicling my family either. We’re developing more audio, video and graphic resources than ever before to help our growing software and SaaS businesses. While we do a better job of categorizing content we make at work, there’s still plenty of room for improvement.

I was excited to learn about some of the new features in iLife that Apple announced last week because I think they can help me address some of these content organization challenges. For example, being able to categorize photos by location using Google Maps could help me find them more easily because that metadata relates well to the way I remember things. In photo face recognition could be similarly helpful.

From a business perspective, I’d like to see how I can use this kind of metadata once its stored in our company’s ECM system. This might improve how we discover and share rich media within workgroups as well. Most ECM systems are capable of storing plenty of metadata, but I don’t think many get used much for this purpose. That’s because it’s a hassle for users to add it when all they really want to do is retrieve or save a file and move ahead with their job.

Applications like iLife or those which scan email messages can help automate the process of generating valuable metadata and make ECM much more beneficial for end users. In turn, this could make ECM systems more valuable to businesses, as they promote increased activity and a better chance for content to be shared and re-used. As the content we use to conduct business inevitably becomes richer it would seem that ECM should continue to have an important role to play – even if it’s just helping me find that image I need for the overdue brochure.

Obviously, ECM can do much more than this, but by leveraging enhanced meta data ECM performs an invaluable task. It helps build a better relationship between users and their data by creating improved context. This helps us better recognize and conceptualize data – turning it into actionable information we can more easily put to work.

Next week, I hope to look more carefully at some other data capture technologies that can help automate meta data creation and categorization. This might be a good way to address compliance requirements as well. In the meantime, why not try some of this yourself? Test drive Xythos on Demand with your own data capture tools for physical or electronic documents.