Last week, Stellent announced it has staked a leadership claim in the content security market by acquiring SealedMedia Limited, the world leader in easy-to-use, enterprise digital rights management solutions, and Bitform, a provider of content cleansing technologies. As a content management and compliance technology provider, it is a logical extension for Stellent to provide customers with additional capabilities for minimizing content risk and maximizing content security.

Stellent plans to integrate the SealedMedia and Bitform technologies within the company's enterprise software products. With these content security capabilities, Stellent customers will be able to better secure and control sensitive content both inside and outside of the enterprise. Brief descriptions of SealedMedia and Bitform technologies include:

• SealedMedia -- SealedMedia's enterprise digital rights management technology helps organizations maintain complete control, for the lifetime of the document, over who can use their most sensitive information and when they can use it. Its solutions address content security and compliance risk, giving customers control over when, where and how information is used and by whom -- even after it has been delivered.
• Bitform -- Bitform's content cleansing technology helps mitigate information security risks by stripping files of sensitive, confidential or proprietary information. By integrating Bitform's technology within its ECM products, Stellent will enable customers to automatically or manually ensure final, published documents are clean and accurate. Bitform Secure SDK's support for automated, policy-driven document analysis and cleansing also will enhance Stellent's records management and compliance applications.
  

To further communicate the value proposition these acquisitions hold for Stellent customers and prospective customers, the company has developed a Content Security eSeminar Series. Please attend these brief online events running throughout August to learn how Stellent's content security capabilities can have a powerful impact across an organization. Visit www.stellent.com/contentsecurity to register for the seminars and receive additional information about these exciting new additions to the Stellent product offering.

Interwoven is a company that puts out Enterprise Content Management tools. Some of these tools are: TeamSite, WorkSite, Media Bin, OpenDeploy (now with DataDeploy), LiveSite, Meta Tagger, ControlHub, and RecordsManager.

Even though Interwoven has a lot of products, it has tons of support out there. The two main places to look are the Interwoven Support Site and Interwoven DevNet. The official support site requires that you are working for a Interwoven customer. That is ok because the better of the sites is DevNet which allows anyone to join, read, and contribute. DevNet is supported by a bunch of developers that use Interwoven products in addition to Interwoven employees. It isn't often when I can't have my problem figured out by someone on DevNet. A third option for support is this website right here. There isn't much now, but you can email me at contentman@logan.ws if you have any questions about any Interwoven products or other content management info.

Interwoven TeamSite is one of the leading Enterprise Content Managerment Systems out there. I have worked with TeamSite for over 4 years from version 4.5.1 all the way to our current version of 6.1 at Reader's Digest. Reader's Digest uses TeamSite to host over 30 sites internationaly and allows for editors all over the world to update their sites. TeamSite is also being used as the main source control system for java, jsp, jhtml, html, and many other other types of development and media files. The latest of Reader's Digest's sites that is now contained inside TeamSite is its website for its new magazine with Rachael Ray, Every Day with Rachael Ray.

TeamSite has come a long way over the years I have worked with it. TeamSite was very buggy where I had to restart the server a couple times a week while now our Solaris machine doesn't need to be rebooted except for a couple times a year. One good thing about TeamSite is that you could always do a lot with it. A bad thing about it is that most of what you want to do has to be customized to do so. In the past, all these customizations would be lost as you upgraded TeamSite. Interwoven has learned from its mistakes and has allowed the customizations to be kept separate and alive as you upgrade. One problem that Interwoven has had over the years and still has trouble with is the user interface of TeamSite. TeamSite is far from the friendly applications that Microsoft puts out there. One really good thing about Interwoven is their award winning development site call DevNet. DevNet has a big community of TeamSite nerds that go to any length to show their supreme knowledge and help you solve your problems.

Other Interwoven products that I have worked with are:

• Interwoven OpenDeploy
• Interwoven DataDeploy
• Interwoven Teamplating (now Forms Publisher)
  
  
  

What is AIIM:

For over 60 years, AIIM (The Association for Information and Image Management) has been the leading international organization focused on helping users to understand the challenges associated with managing documents, content, and business processes. AIIM is international in scope, independent, implementation-focused, and, as the representative of the entire ECM industry - including users, suppliers, and the channel - acts as the industry's intermediary.

AIIM is having its annual conference and is looking for speakers.

AIIM is looking for:

• an end-user
• an industry expert
• a consultant
• an analyst
• or a solution provider - must present with a client
• (or any combination of the above), they are interested in reviewing your submission

Conference sessions will be divided into five themes:

• Content Management Architecture, Infrastructure, and Applications
• Data, Image, and Content Capture: The On-Ramp to an ECM Solution
• Centralizing Your Assets: Store, Retrieve, and Preserve
• Communicate, Collaborate, and Manage - "Can You Hear Me Now?"
• Making the Invisible Visible: Measure, Monitor, and Analyze

URL: http://www.aiim.org/callforspeakers2006

For your submission to be considered, it MUST be received by September 19, 2005. Should you have any questions regarding the Conference or the submission form, you can contact Stacey Kocan-McCormick at
smccormick@aiim.org or 301-755-2686. (Toll Free: 800-477-2446.)

Conference info:

When: MAY 16-18, 2006
Where: Pennsylvania Convention Center, Philadelphia, PA

The webcast from Forrester Research on August 24th at 2:00 PM EST wasn't bad. During the first 45 minutes, Kyle McNabb talked about active Content Delivery. The last 15 minutes were run by RedDot. I will post more about the last 15 minutes at another time.

Kyle talked about how content delivery normally is an IT controlled process and isn't very efficient when it comes to getting what the business needs done. This includes site personalization and targeting set up by IT. Normally by the time that IT will get around to setting up some kind of personalization or targeting, the marking need is over.

The proposed solution is active content delivery controlled by the business user. The idea is that the business user knows the user base of the site the best and should control the personalization set up. Active content delivery is based on a content management system that allows the business user to push the personalization rules to the site and then get metrics information back to analyze. Allowing this quick to site personalization will give the site users what they want faster which should make the site users happier and coming back to the site.

Some good side effects to active content delivery is that it frees up the IT developers to work on site enhancements and other bigger projects.

Kyle's overall recommendations:

• Include content delivery requirements in your WCM evaluations - Don't assume that Web Content Management systems will handle your content delivery needs
  
• Look for capabilities that run within your chosen application server environment - Look for content personalization inside your application server but don't exclude other options.
  
• Make personalization a business function, not an IT tool - Allow business users to control personalization and leave IT to the big projects.
  
• Expand the definition of content to include code - Allow business users to move around, configure, and deploy components on the site instead of requiring IT to get involved.

I agree with what Kyle said in the webcast. He does mention that there is IT reluctance to implement his suggestions but he doesn't go into it much. As an IT person I see how setting up a site to allow full personalization by the business user without IT involvement can be tough to reach and increase the amount of support required.

The key to setting up a business user to set up personalization is knowing what information set you want to personalize off of. This sounds like a no brainer but you would be surprised when a business user can't answer the question of "What do you want?" Then when you think you have covered everything that the business person wants, there are always cases that pop up that brings IT back into the picture.

Allowing the business user control also puts IT out of the loop. This can be a problem when a business user deploys some personalization at 7 pm and the site goes down. Your trusty operations person will get the alerts saying the site is down, but won't know what scheduled pushes to the site just went out and who to find to fix the problem. This could probably be avoided by making the content management pieces fool proof and/or keeping logs or webpages that keep track of who did what and at what time. This just adds to the complexity of the active content delivery system and the reluctance of IT to implement it.

In my experience, the more you allow a business user to modify and configure, the more complex your system has to be. The more complex your system has to be, the more likely your business user will not want to use the system.