I have worked with many customers where globalization [G11N] of content (which is combination of Internationalization [I18N] - making sure your code is not tied to any language specific logic, and Localization [L10N] - having content in multiple languages), is a hot topic during the requirement phase but it does not get fully implemented by end of the project. Reason? Well, there are many reasons, but most importantly is how critical is this for business users compared to other things in the project.  One of the hard part of this process in L10N, as developers can be guided to write logic keeping I18N in mind, but business processes have to be in place to translate appropriate content in a timely manner.

Reading the ‘The Global CMS Reality‘ on CMS Myth made me reflect on those customers again. This blog entry on CMS Myth mentions the report on ‘The World in 2009 - The Economist‘, which explains “Of the 1.5 billion people who will use the Internet regularly in 2009, only fifteen percent live in the United States. Only thirty percent speak English as their first language”. This is a powerful statement, as it explains clearly if you want to the company with global reach, you better have a globalized site, and this cannot remain a nice-to-have requirement, but should be part of critical requirement.

CMS vendors have also come a long way in making this process easy (well, easy in a relative manner), and with the combination of their products and best practices of G11N (extremely important to know, else you may end up with an inflexible design), customers have a fair chance of getting their site globalized.

If your site is not G11N ready, time to wake up and start planning, it doesn’t matter whether you have a CMS tool or not, if you want to reach the global audience, you better be multi-lingual!

As per the ChangeWave report on software spending, there are major cuts predicted across the broad spectrum for the next 90 days, and the worst hits are ECM and ERP categories with almost 1/4^th decline in spending. Spending cuts prediction is not surprising, if you look at current economy and how every company is trying to deal with shortfalls, you know that software would be impacted.

What surprised me was that ERP is predicted to be one of the worst hit. From customer’s perspective, I have always seen ERP listed as more critical than ECM (or many other softwares for that matter), so why it is at the bottom? I think this has more to do with project lifecycle than with criticality of software. You ask any customer who has gone through or is going through a ERP implementation and they can tell you horror stories on missed deadlines or extremely long project timelines. For many customers, to plan for such long projects may not be a priority and they would rather patch up what they have then spend lot of money on a new software in this environment. This means there is still a decent opportunity for ERP project work.

From ECM perspective, I am not that surprised. ECM products/projects do well when economy is booming, as many customers still view that as secondary to their most critical softwares. They know they have something in place and they can live with it, so they can let new software purchase wait in turbulent times. Another aspect is user interface, most of the ECM products allow you to modify user interface for end-users, so a customer could spend little bit money and do a face lift for end-users, and could live with back-end shortcomings. A customer who has difficulty making the changes to their front end, would be the one who could be spending the money on ECM.

The Economist in its latest edition had an article that caught my eye The paperless office: On its way, at last, here they talked about how information age actually increased the paper consumption rather than decreasing, as many had predicted. The trends in paper consumption show that this may be the year where paper consumption in offices in developed world would decrease and continue to decrease for the foreseeable future.

This could be a sign of sales boost for imaging products in ECM market. When ECM companies would start announcing their quaterly results, I would like to see if their Imaging products are producing more revenue than before, as that would confirm what this article is discussing.

I have met many people from companies/offices who has gone paperless route, they always exclaim how they did what they did before with so much paper, now they can’t live without their imaging solution. I think with these real implementation stories and what main stream media is saying, finally Imaging products could tip the balance against using paper.

As per Wikipedia, Microsite refers to an individual web page or cluster of pages which are meant to function as an auxiliary supplement to a primary website. The Microsite’s main landing page most likely has its own URL.

Microsites are quite effective as information outlet and its use is rising. You could give content authors wide range of freedom on how to create Microsite and what structure they can use. They could use any HTML editor of choice and copy the entire output folder to their Microsite folder on web-server (files including, but limited to images, JS, CSS etc). You point a URL to that folder and you are live! Content authors love this freedom of choosing their own structure, even if they have to comply with certain UI templates, they can still tinker with those templates quite fast.

On one hand this option promotes creativity, on other hand it can lead to stale content/template/message on internet longer than you want. You choose WCM and/or Portal products to help you manage the content life-cycle, so one naturally expect managing Microsites within these products. What happens when you try to manage Microsite using these products, can you still provide same level of freedom to content authors on creating Microsites?

Most of the WCM/Portal products would expect you to create templates and use those templates to deliver the content. If you want to create a new template or change existing ones, it would take time (Product companies may claim otherwise, and even if it is as easy to make template changes in few clicks, how about your governance process and testing the impact of template changes on existing content?). In short, it is not easy to change templates easily and give content authors same level of freedom in creating Microsites. This could create discontentment in content authors towards WCM/Portal tool, as it restricts them to certain existing templates for creating Microsites or makes them wait for the template creation process before they can publish their Microsite.

I have seen many of my clients struggling with this situation, where they have departments who want to rapidly create Microsites for promotions/campaigns and thay don’t want to live within the structure of existing templates. The discussion always boils down to this, IT team would ask how many templates you need and we would provide you the library, and the response would be, we don’t know what all we need, we need to be able to create the Microsites with new templates as we go.

I don’t think there is a perfect solution for this problem, but you can arrive at one which could accommodate majority of creativity requests upfront, but still leave room for one-off situations where you have no option but to allow content to be created on free-form HTML and dropped in web-server. Both sides would have to resist the temptation to follow one or the other route (WCM/Portal Vs. Free Form HTML) for all the Microsites. You would have to create governance process to keep an eye on those sites and regularly review them for their content and message.

While reading a entry ‘ECM is Fun’ by Carl @ TakingAim, I came across Wordle “a toy for generating ‘word clouds’ from text that you provide”. It was quite intriguing, so I ended up creating word cloud using Wordle for my blog as well. It was amazing to see your creativity printed out in a entirely new format. Here was the result:

This made me think about how content authors may feel when they see their content being re-purposed in myriad ways, sometime totally unpredictable. Would they feel proud or frustrated? What about me? I think I will be proud most of the time, probably except when the primary context itself is unrecognizable or spun-around. I create the content with a base context and if you remove that context, its meaning is lost.