Jeff Miller's Big Idea Creativity seeking form

ECM has provided an essential service to enterprises, helping them to better capture, organize and track massive quantities of content within their organizations. But the way we do business is fundamentally changing, as are our expectations of business software...

Since the first days of enterprise content management (ECM), it has presented a challenge. Organizations the world over realize the benefits that an ECM system can deliver in terms of better compliance, improved information management and superior information sharing...

The Web has become a primary channel for enabling successful marketing, customer interactions and business transactions, providing the potential for enterprises across industries to cost-effectively engage customers, differentiate their brands...

Last year, I wrote in this space about the advantages of SaaS-based ECM platforms. Since then, a variety of factors?including persistently tight IT budgets, lower headcount, business uncertainty and unrelenting pressure to grow through innovation...

The general definition of enterprise content management (ECM) applies to those technology enablers used to capture, manage, store, preserve and deliver information assets in context with content-rich business processes. When asked how to best achieve ECM success...

"Enterprise content management." It rolls off the tongue, doesn't it? At first blush, it would seem as straightforward and intuitive as any other "asset" management, like "cash management" or "property management." But content management?and to put it into even sharper focus, enterprise content management?is not nearly as clear-cut...

The proliferation of information has made enterprise content management a necessity for most organizations. However, traditional approaches to content management from proprietary vendors are expensive, difficult to deploy and costly to maintain...

In today's hyper-connected world, it can be hard to determine exactly what enterprise content management means to the modern organization. Is it records management? Is it documents management? Is it Web content publishing? Is it online collaboration management?...

Daring Fireball: An Ode to DiskWarrior, SuperDuper, and Dropbox

Hard drives are fragile. Read as much as you can bear to about how they work, how incredibly precisely they must operate in order to cram so many bits onto such small disks. It’s a miracle to me that they work at all. Every hard drive in the world will eventually fail. Assume that yours are all on the cusp of failure at all times. It’s good to be spooked about how long your hard drives will last.

John’s article, advice, and success story about doing smart backup is exactly the reminder that a lot of people need to hear right this second. Because, it’s impossible to overstate the importance of automated, redundant, and rotated backups. Trust me. You will need them all. Soon. Repeatedly. Forever. Always.

Worst of all, every stupid cliche about backup that currently makes you roll your eyes in exasperation will be visited upon you tenfold if you’re not using some flavor of the anal-retentive system nerds like John and I live by. Because, unfortunately, most people you know (including me) have already repeatedly been struck by backup’s biggest and most profound cliche:

Perform automated, redundant, and rotated backups as often as you can afford to lose every single bit of information that’s been changed or added since your last backup. Because it’s going to go away.

The Holy Trinity

Seriously:

• If it’s not automated, it’s not a real backup.
• If it’s not redundant, it’s not a real backup.
• If it’s not regularly rotated off-site, it’s not a real backup.

Doing any one of these things by itself or in tandem produces “a copy.” A copy is handy, and it may really save you, even a majority of the time. But, making casual copies is optimistic at best. Someday, you will need the benefits of all three layers, and you’ll thank John, me, and your chosen $diety that you sweated all those years of monkey work and aggravation.

The Next Layer

I do have three suggestions to append to John’s excellent setup:

• Schedule Every Rotation; Then Do it. Peg your off-site rotation to a date-certain (like how you probably changed the 9-volt in your smoke alarm for Daylight Savings Time yesterday). I do my rotations within the first five days of each new month. So, yes, do automate the creation of backups, but then also do the physical rotation like you’d pay your mortgage. On time and without fail.1
• Make and Update Specialized Disk Images. If the photos of your baby, the videos of your wedding, or those gigs of torrented Radiohead MP3s you’ve hoarded mean anything to you, give them extra-special treatment. At least every six months or so, burn them all onto drive(s) and rotate them off-site too. Either stick them in a safe-deposit box, or, even better, burn a new DVD of your kid’s progress every month, then mail it to the relatives. Distributed backup plus familial bonding = win/win.
• Make and Update Multiple “Go-Sticks”. Buy a bunch of good 4GB+ USB sticks and use them to hold 256-bit-encrypted sparsebundles of your “Holy Shit!” files. Keychains, 1Password files, bank account numbers, insurance records, etc. Anything you need to either start recovering from a catastrophe or go on the lam. Make multiples, schedule update reminders, swap them out in known locations, and, if you have the skillz, maybe set up an Automator script that automatically updates the contents of each drive whenever you plug the little buggers in.

You’re so sick of hearing this: automated, redundant, and rotated.

The Godfather of Ass-Saving

Also, a second high-five for DiskWarrior. I can’t count the number of times that this annoying, ugly, slow, and hard-to-use application has saved every last strip of my bacon. Like John says, yeah, start with Disk Utility, because it’s got 90+% of the firepower needed to fix the disk problems you’ll encounter this year. But, DiskWarrior will do everything right up to the impossible. And, again, yes: you will need it. I sure have.

Go. Do it. Now.

Backup is boring, it’s tedious, and it’s not cheap. But once you’ve had your ass handed to you by a badly-broken drive, you really get the importance of a zero-latency recovery. It’s positively liberating.

But, for now, right this second: go Gmail your kid’s baby pictures to yourself. Do it.

Alfresco christens beta program

New Enterprise 2.0 tools

Confirmit introduces Horizons V. 15

Puppy!: This is a larger article about why Joel Spolsky is going to stop blogging, but I really appreciated this bit at the end.

Although I appreciate that many people find Twitter to be valuable, I find it a truly awful way to exchange thoughts and ideas. It creates a mentally stunted world in which the most complicated thought you can think is one sentence long. It’s a cacophony of people shouting their thoughts into the abyss without listening to what anyone else is saying. Logging on gives you a page full of little hand grenades: impossible-to-understand, context-free sentences that take five minutes of research to unravel and which then turn out to be stupid, irrelevant, or pertaining to the television series Battlestar Galactica. I would write an essay describing why Twitter gives me a headache and makes me fear for the future of humanity, but it doesn’t deserve more than 140 characters of explanation, and I’ve already spent 820.

Generally speaking, I feel exactly the same way, and I don’t think anyone has summed Twitter up more concisely or eloquently.  This of course raises the question of why I still have a Twitter account…

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Like, Python: I can’t decide whether this is stupid, or awesome:

Like, Python uses Python’s own tokenizer to essentially add keywords to Python’s lexical understanding. Python is a subset of Like, Python, so any script you’ve already written in Python is valid Like, Python and will run in the interpreter. But you can also write like you’d speak.

So, you get something like this:

#!usr/bin/python
uh from sys import exit

# Grab the user's name.
ok so like name = raw_input("yo! what's your name?" ) right

# Make sure they entered something, then say hi.
if name.strip() is actually like "":
    toootally just exit()
else:
     um yeah
     print like "Hi %s, nice to meet you." % name

 

This was sent to me by Seth Gottlieb.  Figures.

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The Database of Intentions Is Far Larger Than I Thought: John Battelle updates his Database of Intentions to include concepts like The Social Graph and The Status Update from the social networking explosion since he last wrote about it.

Taken together (and honestly, there’s really no other way to think about it, to my mind), these signals form a Database of Intentions that is magnitudes of order larger, more complex, and more powerful than my original concept back in 2003. And while the current players in each category are clear, what’s also clear is that the battle is on to control each of these critical signals.

Before reading this, you really need to read the first Database of Intentions post from back in 2003.  Or his book.

I absolutely believe in the Database of Intentions.  Both in a larger, Internet sense, and in an organizational, intranet sense.  It seems simple – what people are searching for and clicking through to is what people want.  That concept, however, often gets ignored in when doing more practical things like content planning or traffic analysis.

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gigapan: Gotta say that I’m kinda smitten with Gigapan.

The GigaPan process allows users to upload, share, and explore brilliant gigapixel+ panoramas from around the globe.

People take and upload panoramic photos with insane pixelcounts, and you can explore them via a Google Maps-like interface.  What’s neat is that people can take “snapshots” to hi-light things in the image, which you can skip through.  It’s like “Where’s Waldo” for realsies.

Some awesome ones:

• A pig sculpture decorating contest in the UK
• Hanauma Bay in Hawaii. Some of those people are so far away.  Look for the turtle.
• Kocani, Macedonia
• The Golden Gate Bridge. I’ve been in this exact spot.  You can zoom all the way into the city in the background, with reasonable clarity.

This proves that all those “enhance” scenes in CSI could totally happen in real life.

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EPiServer Trumps Competition, Decides to Go Public: This is neat to see.  Not many pure CMS companies are public.

EPiServer is preparing to go public on the Stockholm Stock Exchange. Being one of the few in its Web CMS market segment to be public, this move gives the company a certain advantage.

For buyers, it is going to be easier to evaluate a public company, since all the financials will be out in the open. One might say that no one cares about that, but the reality shows a different picture. No one wants to indulge in guesswork when investing in a Web CMS product and vendor. As we know, this deal is just like marriage.

As soon as I can figure out how to buy something on the Stockholm exchange, I’ll invest.

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Why Ad Blocking is devastating to the sites you love: I really have to agree with this post.  Too many people feel like the Internet is designed to be free, and there’s no expense associated with content development.

This is an impassioned plea for Ars Technica not to block their ads.  It’s worth reading.

My argument is simple: blocking ads can be devastating to the sites you love. I am not making an argument that blocking ads is a form of stealing, or is immoral, or unethical, or makes someone the son of the devil. It can result in people losing their jobs, it can result in less content on any given site, and it definitely can affect the quality of content. It can also put sites into a real advertising death spin.

I wrote about this exact same thing a couple years ago: AdBlock Plus and the Future of Advertising:

Like it or not, advertising is the currency of media. Unless you want to pay for everything you watch, read, or hear, advertising is going to have to be somewhere.

Risking a really bad analogy, it’s like a terrorist movement, — if you successfully block its traditional methods, it will just come out in more subversive ways. It’s up to us which method we let stick — but one of them will have to stick, trust me.

Still true.

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Attensity expands its reach

New interfaces, analytics, etc.