I came across a timely article from the consumer centric blog ReadWriteWeb. This blog post from RWW comes straight off the heels of our well attended Content Days in the Asia Pacific and Japan region in February, where we gave customers and partners a sneak peak at the upcoming launch of Open Text Everywhere. Open Text Everywhere aims to provide the empowerment, agility and control you’ve come to expect from an ECM vendor like Open Text, but right in your hand in a mobile device. At the end of my speech on the topic of mobility, we looked into the crystal ball and had a lively forum with the audience about how we as the Content Experts could envision the next generation of mobile applications for ECM. As I mentioned, RRW has made an interesting point in their article dubbed “FourSquare for the Enterprise: Give it 2 Years, Max.” FourSquare, a location based service or LBS, is known in the consumer world for allowing you to share your whereabouts and activities within a social network. It uses your current GPS location of your mobile phone to enrich your experience, allowing you to “check in” to restaurants and cafes as well as see exactly where you friends are at the moment. I happened to use FourSquare as an example of consumer technology that is headed our way within the enterprise during our Content Days in February. Truth be told, the Japanese have been playing the internet-enabled application game for years now, and the rest of the world is just catching up. One of the examples cited from the RWW article is that “A new generation of location-based applications will integrate with microblogging platforms.” This is a reasonable assumption for ECM as well, as location is an integral part of your approach to collaborating with a person. Are you in the office? Are you working from home? Should we meet face to face, or over a unified messaging platform? Automation will be key, as no one wants to have to explicitly state they are on the go, but simply having a mobile device that can detect that you are out of your GPS defined “office” or “home” region should allow your followers to understand you’re on the move. However at the Content Days, we all agreed that there are some interesting applications for location, mobility and even augmented reality for the future of mobile ECM. For example, we envisioned healthcare applications that could allow a doctor to see patient records and casefiles immediately from their mobile when approaching a patient’s bedside. Retail applications that allow you to use the phone’s camera to identify products on store shelves and be presented personalised coupons, rich media and social reviews. Energy and Utility applications that would overlay pipes, cables and pathways in a similar fashion to allow engineers to see a heads-up display of important data. Technicians in the field could be presented with MSDS, PDS and repair manuals on the fly when simply approaching a piece of plant, property or equipment. Even a museum or gallery goer could benefit by snapping photos of a famous painting and then being returned reams of historical information, artist background, related works and video content of that artwork or architecture. As you can see, the future for mobile applications is quite bright and Open Text Everywhere is only the first step in allowing the massive amounts of content organisations have today to be exploited and leveraged by their employees and consumers, at the moment they need it most. Disclosure: Cuneyt Uysal is a Product Manager and corporate blogger for Open Text corporation. You can find this post at http://possibilities.opentext.com

Although HTML 5 is still a draft specification, it's impact is being felt across the technology landscape as this is written. In creating a new standard, the W3C was mindful of the latest developments in applied web application technologies, such as the growing popularity of media-rich Web sites over static brochure-ware, and innovations like AJAX.  I say applied because one of the key drivers behind the new specification was the understanding that the last decade or so of web development can be summed up as "forcing browsers to provide an experience they were never intended to," as I often mention to my colleagues. Anyone who has worked as a web developer can sympathize with the amount of hacks, workarounds and plugins needed to deliver a modern, interactive experience. And that's just within a single browser, let alone making your site cross platform. Hopefully, HTML 5 can begin to address this quagmire by making the underlying markup both relevant and applicable to what the web is actually used for these days. I won't go into detail with regard to the specification and it's potential,  but instead focus on how it will change the game specifically for the CMS software industry. So how will this impact authors, administrators, contributors on the web? Let's dive into the features and see how. Clearer separation of navigation, header and footer elements With the new elements types for navigation items and such, you'll not be surprised that browser safe, standardised and design-agnostic navigation can be provided out of the box in CMS. With standards around the underlying HTML of the navigation, CMS vendors can reliably provide more advanced site creation, navigation management wizards without having to worry about supporting the top 15 AJAX libraries and approaches out there. This portability can be achieved today with good effect using CSS and List elements, but these new elements should also help put to rest the debate about what type of navigation model to use and perhaps more importantly, provide the syntactic sugar to help search engines understand your site structure that much easier; for example, without the need to generate an XML sitemap. Local storage database Arguably the most obvious benefit to software vendors of all types is the local storage facility. No longer do we have to worry about flaky connections and long-workflow-abandonment. With local storage comes the promise of authoring web pages while on your flight to Texas, replying to blog posts in the train tunnel and a slew of other offline scenarios. Immediately, the mobile application development realm becomes far more interesting as offline caches can be stored in the device for interrogation when not connected, and in general, a faster experience when checking the local cache for your documents, as opposed to constantly "pulling" from the web server.  Long, multi-step online business processes won't be abandoned as often when users realise they can pick up right where they left off. Essentially, web apps will behave much more like desktop applications in their statefulness. I expect the memory allocation for each domain to be increased quite quickly, as pressure from vendors to store local caches of binary documents and other rich media will quickly surpass the 5MB suggested limit. Flash, Silverlight and Applets, oh my! The impact of web sockets, or the ability of web pages themselves to call and respond data sources, based on the socket pattern. If that sentence just flew right over your head, think about chat or instant messaging applications. They have traditionally been implemented in Flash or other RIAs du to the in built capabilities of the 3rd party plugin to supply the infrastructure. Although corporations like Facebook and Google have overcome this with their COMET based chat clients at significant development cost; this new infrastructure provided in the specification, could level the playing field for everyone else that is not as fortunate. "Essentially, what it does is lays the groundwork to have equivalent functionality that Flash or Silverlight provides," says RedMonk analyst Michael Cote. With the addition of new elements or tags for video and audio, the specification is pointed squarely at vendors like Adobe and Microsoft in an attempt to swing the balance back in favor of Google, who employ's HTML 5 lead editor Ian Hickson open standards. What does this mean for CMS software as we know it? For one, vendors will have an option outside of siding with Adobe or Microsoft, avoiding allegiance and licensing headaches when it comes to picking a video player of choice. Outside of the media player debate, CMS vendors can hope to bring a level of control and configuration not found in RIAs today. Most CMS struggle with anything besides supplying a basic XML file for Flash objects to ingest. That's about as far as they go today. With the new specification opening up the breathing room a bit, we could see a standardised approach to feeding parameters, content and even deploying objects within the RIA. CMS are great when it comes to deployment, rollback and versioning of code, and up until now, CMS functionality has been for the most part shut out of the equation because it had to hard stop at the executable level: the .SWF file. It was impenetrable. Now, CMS vendors can perhaps go deeper into the actual DNA of the RIA and allow authors to probe, create and adjust the contents and interactions just as richly as pure HTML or any other text markup. As with most trends, we'll have to watch for the final evolving uptake and following impact of these new standards. If the mind-bending Jedi tricks AJAX developers have crammed into ailing browsers is any indication of the future, we're sure to see many uses no one can anticipate right now. What are some ways in which you think the popular CMS platforms will be affected by the coming of HTML 5?

I had a great discussion with Bill Dawes, Editor of Image and Data Manager online. We talked about how my organisation has already made the switch to Enterprise 2.0 tools completely out of viral growth. We never sent a "thou shalt use the new system" braodcast email or enforced it's use. It completely gained traction and adoption on it's own merits of high usbaility and effectiveness as a collaboration tool. Read more here.

Something big is cooking and you'll be seeing it live from the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston if you're lucky enough to be there. At the recent Content Days in Australia, I had the pleasure of showing off a brand new product that put a fresh face to collaboration. It was mentioned in the press more than a few times, especially KMWorld. The crowd was awed by the novel concept of collaborating via streams of information, grouped together by the teams communications such as email, blog posts, documents and wikis. Completely browser based, these conversations and status updates happen in real time as threads of discussions weave seamlessly in this new paradigm of collaboration. So what was this new magical product? Google Wave, you say? No, in fact, it was our about to launch OpenText social media initiative aimed at making enterprises bloom. Imitation is the highest form of flattery we suppose. See for yourself at http://wave.google.com/. Open Text Social Media will be generally available in July, 2009. To learn more, go to: http://cli.gs/OTSocialMedia

In a move that closely follows the recent acquisition of Interwoven, Vignette is rounding out the latest move in consolidating in the WCM space. The full scoop is here. This is another sign of how important WCM is to mega- enterprises who are recognizing web as their primary strategic channel for information. All hail the death of the document!

Finally, a startup that addresses the most glaringly obvious feedback from the user community who wish to leverage the inherent benefits of GoogleDocs yet still are hesitant to make the switch. In my consulting organisations who are trying to make the switch, they see the value in GoogleDocs - I mean, who doesn’t? A free ECM system by Google is nothing to shake a stick it. However, in practice, everyone who has actually tried to use this web office platform in earnest realises that for the enterprise space, there’s very little chance you could actually get a researcher, or business analyst at a firm to sincerely drop MS Office in favor of Writely. The reality is that users, as always, fear change are not willing to abandon their most sacred of trusty tools. And for good reason, the online variants are clearly leagues behind at present. Enter OffiSynch. Reiterating my advice to my clients, I’ve blogged before about the need to maintain the desktop productivity tools such as Word and Excel, and layer in the content management and collaboration goodness of GoogleDocs. This is what my clients have been doing manually with good success, and I can guarantee you that these synching tools will become mainstream tools for the web office innovators and leaders. Then I hear the discussion of business model, monetization. I regret to inform you that there is but a single, uninteresting business model for these companies. There’s little doubt in my mind that tools like OffiSynch are aiming purely to be purchased by their friendly ecosystem giant. It’s a path several prior ventures have taken to great success, and will continue to do so. From a Google product management standpoint, what I find most interesting is that these synching tools are noticeably missing from so many Google product lines. Google Reader lacks a native synching tool for the iPhone, lacks a synching tool for Outlook, etc. Contrast this to the understanding of prior ECM software vendors who immediately knew that to make an impact upon the existing customer base, they created desktop file explorer and Word integrations immediately because they analysed a typical user’s day to day work patterns and approached their product from a user-centric design philosophy. This is opposed to Google’s browser-centric philosophy, that continues to hold them back from virally growing their application suite. Good thing smaller players like OffiSync can fill the gap.

Check out the response to the CMSWatch challenge here on the ECM Briefings blog. This was a great opportunity to showcase social media, and for a change, illustrate how the WCM vendors themselves participate in a discussion. I look forward to all the feedback from the user community.

In reading a well-articulated yet unsurprising article on the eco-friendly sub-trends emerging in 2009 by TrenWatchers, I was reminded of a non-profit idea I had decades ago. We all throw out things we shouldn't. The VCR remote that has a single broken button, the microwave that simply had its turntable belt snap yet still warms food fine or the laptop with the broken screen. Naturally, the "repair vs. buy a newer better version" decision is one that we have traditionally chosen to favor cost over environmental responsibility. What better excuse is engrained upon consumers than "if it's broken, don't fix it. Buy a new one?" As we see the perils of this shortminded logic come to the forefront of politics, I can't help but think about a primitive idea I had. What if we could begin to explore repairing items and craftsmanship again in the United States and other developed nations? Why is it that we can't repair the microwave in today's day and age? Becauase it costs you $100 dollars just to have a technician (if one even exists in your town) look at your microwave, when you could buy a brand new one from China, albeit of crap quality that will fail in a year, with some new trendy feature of allure. I thought about this on my commute as my bus rolled past a TV and Electronics repair store, in shambled and definintely without marketing investment since the 1960s. Transistors and tubes anyone? I won't go into the obvious follow on costs that we as a nation are oblivious too when chosing to buy the new microwave: the cost of waste, removal, impact on the environment, lost service revenue and economic stimulus for the repair person, etc. I can hear the greed-driven counter argument from capatalism: if consumers were taught to spend less, how would that adversely affect the economy? Simple: it would hurt China's trade surplus and corporate shareholders, it would only help local consumers.

"We are living in a false economy where the price of goods and services does not include the cost of waste and pollution," Lynn Landes, Founder and Director of Zero Waste America.

Fact is, we are finally coming to terms with the 1980s "greed is good" lifestyle and the hangover is sobering. With less and less value creation occuring within US borders and as a result of true US GDP (hint: try adjusting our GDP for goods produced locally with local resources, very enlightening) we are simply siphoning the consumer spend out of this nation. Now, this is a gross over simplification of a long term trend towards globalisation, and taking advantage of labor price differences. The US auto-industry is a great example of our failures to capatilise on local resources and ingenuity. But I digress. This train of thought made me recall an idea about leveraging labor price differences in developing countries for the sake of good. Imagine the possibility that these often discarded yet serviceable goods were made availible for repair. Based off of the model of self-sufficiency, capatlist farming schemes used in Africa to teach economics to fringe villages, this method could be applied to harnessing the latent value in all things we typically call "garbage." Instead of filling up landfills, goods in need of minor repair could be donated for free to these trade schools and the students would learn vocational skills to repair these household goods: either selling the refurbished unit or simply donating to needy homes. Although a microwave may not seem necessary to the average sub-Saharan tribal villager, these goods could be of value to neighboring cities and metropolitan areas in poor socioeconomic standing.The students in return get vocational and business skills necessary for partaking in the global economy. Naturally, there are many hurdles: logistically transporting tons of microwaves and washing machines from other nations, funding for the teachers, incentivization for donations, etc. By no means small hurdles. However, at some point, self-sufficient agriculture is not going to be a feasible trade for villagers looking to enter society as whole. This could simply be another venue for value creation, fortunately out of thin air. Please, send your thoughts and poke holes in the idea. Its far from pefect, so I'd love to hear your thoughts on making it so.

Oh baby, just where do I start with this one. In it's infinite wisdom, Sydney mass transit (known as the RTA) has decided to begin replacing IMHO the already effective train station displays. Here are the new ones:

Let's breakdown the ways in which this active signage is confusing.

1. Primarily, instead of the previous congruous interface on one screen - two screens are now provided, yet the interface is divided. This immediately separates the information uneccessarily. confusion around what the purpose of each display is immediate, especially for existing commuters who are accsutomed to the single screen, single interface of yore. The real estate of the prior single plasma panel is probably 75% of this combined two screen format. This could unfortunately be an example of the classic management mistake of a) having the requirement to expand the visible area (the new 25% provided by 2 smaller screens combined) yet b) realising that the software to run the screens cannot merge the information into 1 display or otherwise remove the vertical separator that divides the displays. This may be the inital culrpit behind why usability was lost, very early on in this civic projecte.
2. Eye tracking will show that the most prominent and inital hot spot is actuall the "Following Trains" which look like embossed buttons on top of a contrasting blue display. This is unfortunate for someone who didn't bother to look back up and to the right for the "Next Train" which is camouflagued amongst a wash of white in the right scrolling monitor. Incidentally, I assume the business requirement here was to provide "more information about following trains;" something which was not availible in the prior interface. So, what should have become a benefit, implemented incorrectly, now is a distraction to the single most important use case: "When is the next darn train?" I can almost imagine a designer reflecting that the right screen should be used to replicate the original display (from an information architecture perspective, it does) and simply using the left panel to display otherwise new and auxilliary information. This approach fails to appreciate overall analysis of the combined result, while trying to correctly minimise changes to existing commuters.
3. In fact, the effect power of borders and box shapes even creates an area of more attention towards the blue box for "8 cars" than the time of the next train. Now let me  ask you as a commuter, how many times have you really cared about the exact number of cars on a given train, or how often this actually factored into a decision about your travel? I can honestly answer never for me - perhaps more important for the staff or authorities on patrol.

We'll look in our next blog post on how I would have redesigned this interface for greater usability.