Web - Usability - Humor
Wednesday, September 11, 2002[2:46:55 PM]
Content Management at Seybold
Content management companies were thick as fleas at Seybold. My general is impression is that there were more big companies, and fewer small companies than last year.
I think one of the smartest businesses is AtomZ, adding hosted content management. They started with a hosted search engine that spiders your website, and appears to be part of your domain, but it's really on their servers.
A lot of companies have database to InDesign products for catalogs. One company had an xml/Quark product.
To me, the most interesting product category is xml editing software. What good does it do me to have xml-based content management if I can't create and edit xml?
XML Spy, XMetal, Arbortext, and HV have xml editors. Some other companies will translate from Word to xml, but that is not a pretty approach.
XMetal looks the best, just to watch a demo. I want my users to act like they're using a word processor, but also be able to see the structure. XMetal handles that fine.
The bad news is that Corel just bought the maker of XMetal. Corel sold it's soul to Microsoft for $150 million. And it's not like Corel has a track record of buying a program and making it a huge success.
XML spy didn't seem to make quite as pretty a demo for editing, but their Schema/DTD editor is a slick demo.
Arbortext seemed to be the clunkiest ui. The xml editor is available as a standalone product -- you don't have to buy the whole Arbortext solution to use the editor.
A small company called HV has a Word plug-in that somehow adds metadata to a Word document that can be converted to xml. You can validate the xml output of your document within Word's gui.
RIP Interleaf. Interleaf at one point had a successful technical publishing program, but self-destructed over the years since the introduction of Word 6. A few years ago Interleaf tried to sell an xml plug-in for Word, but they would only let you buy the client program if you also bought their whole content management system, including the database. I can't even remember who bought Interleaf.
Documentum, in the old days, was one of the leading monolithic document management systems. You would spend a ton of money, and a ton of time customizing. Today, the tech guy waxed poetic about open apis. You can do your customization in Java of VB.
Interwoven was there. I still get the impression that Interwoven is slick but terribly expensive source control, and they just had to change the name to content management in order to sell it to anyone.
The fundamental difference between content management and source control is that software has many dependencies, while documents usually stand on their own. Thus most content management systems strive to make it easy to launch documents individually. Interwoven takes the approach of launching a whole edition of a website.
The slickest gui, I thought, was from a company called Stellent. Their approached seemed to be to translate Word documents. It wasn't at all clear how they would decide how to tag the content. It was just supposed to be easy.
The Seybold expo as a whole was smaller this year. They didn't use the north side of the Moscone Center. It felt quite comfortable though -- not too crowded, and not too empty.
Maybe I was too caught up in the
content management area, but
there didn't seem to be many fun
small products. The trend is
down, with the economy.
[11:57:51 AM]
Have you patched Internet Explorer today? Oops. The patches in Service Pack 1 still leave you wide open to attack: TheRegister.co.uk.
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Last update: 9/20/03; 3:00:14 PM.