Jeff Potts
KM Whirled: Collaboration, Portal, Content Management, Search, and a dash of personal info most people won't care about
















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Wednesday, January 07, 2004
 

FileNet Appointed ECM Product of the Year by Transform Magazine. Of all the enterprise content management products, FileNet's P8 architecture has the most fully developed business process management component. In addition to basic workflow capabilities it provides process modeling, simulation and analytics. Tight integration with iLog gives the product access... [cms~wire]
10:38:06 PM    

Vignette Appointed WCM Product of the Year by Transform Magazine. Vignette V7 is a suite that lets you tackle content management, build portals, integrate content and enterprise applications, improve process management, perform analysis and reporting or all of the above. Portal capabilities were beefed up by the late 2002 acquisition... [cms~wire]
10:37:06 PM    

Presentations from XML 2003. I am starting to pull together the presentations from XML 2003. I will update this entry and this list as I get them all in one place. The presentations include: My general presentation on XML and Content Management My shortened... [Ideas in Technology and Publishing]
10:21:38 PM    

Will XForms Matter?. My recent column on XForms is now live on the Transform Magazine site. To briefly quote: XML was born when a bunch of very smart people realized that HTML, while easy to use and widely deployed, wasn't a robust enough... [Ideas in Technology and Publishing]
10:19:35 PM    

Got some great games for Christmas...

Ballast is by Gigamic, the makers of Quorridor, last year's favorite acquisition (right up there with Spy Alley). Ballast is a Jenga-like game where you take turns removing blocks from a structure. You are awarded different points for different sized blocks. The kicker is that the blocks are all cylinders and are stacked within a vertical ring. So, it is pretty tricky. My 5 year-old son liked it but I think he enjoys the carnage of Jenga to the more subtle block-shifting of Ballast.

Octiles is very cool. It is sort of like Chinese Checkers. Up to four people attempt to move all of their pieces to the opposite side of the board. The catch is that the paths your pieces follow change. Between you and the other side of the board is a field of octagons. On your turn you are allowed to place an octagonal tile ("octiles") which has a set of arcing paths printed on it. Each tile has a different pattern. The paths of each piece interlock to form a twisted maze. Your piece must cross the tile you placed. This one was my son's favorite of the three new games. He's able to beat me with minor coaching (and poor play on my part!).

Carcossone was given to me by my Aunt who played the game with my Uncle and a German couple. They liked it so much, the German couple gave it to them (my Uncle had to find an English-language rule set). I can see why they liked it so much. In the game, up to five people take turns placing tiles that contain things like roads, cities, farms, and cloisters. The tiles must match up with existing tiles (eg, grass on an edge matches with grass on an existing tile). After placing a tile, you can deploy a "follower", a little wooden piece that essentially declares that territory for you. You score points by completing formations like completed cities, roads, and cloisters in which you have a follower deployed. You can also get points for followers deployed as farmers that supply completed cities. The trick is that you have a limited number of followers. And, once deployed, farmers can never be re-used.

The game changes each time you play and requires different strategies based on the number of players. Mine came with a free set of "river" tiles that add a subtle yet challenging twist to the tile layout constraints. Yesterday my Uncle sent me the "Inns and Cathedrals" expansion tiles but we haven't played with them yet. My son enjoys the game but requires more coaching than the other games (the box says 8 and up). The longer playing time is also a challenge to a five year-old's patience. My nieces, nephew, and in-laws all enjoyed playing until the late hours. Good stuff.


9:57:01 PM    

Read a couple of books over the break. Life of Pi by Yann Martel is outstanding. It is the best fiction I've read in a long, long time. It originally piqued my interest because of its lost-at-sea theme (check out my Listmania list for more seafaring books). When Reverend Kanter quoted it during church one morning, I added it to the wish list. I wasn't disappointed. The book starts out exploring the life of a boy searching for his spirituality. He ends up being a Hindu-Christian-Muslim. That alone is pretty interesting, but he also grows up a zookeeper's son. These two world's collide as Pi ends up a castaway during a disaster at sea. I won't give away any more than that. My advice is to not read anything more about the plot--just open up the book and dive right in.

The other book I read was The Mothman Prophecies by John A. Keel. It's a non-fiction account of John's experiences chasing UFOs and other strange phenomena in the 60's and 70's. It's more like a collection of case notes than a single cohesive story. A lot of the stories sort of ran together. I haven't seen the movie upon which the book is based, but maybe in this case, the movie pulls it all together better than the book.


9:40:31 PM    


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