WOBURN, MA – May 9, 2011 –Axceler, the leader in Microsoft SharePoint administration and migration, today announced that Hay Group, a global co
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Axceler ControlPoint Helps City of Charlotte Expand Its SharePoint eGov Environment
City Will Also Turn to Axceler Davinci Migrator to Help Migrate and Enhance Its Growing Central Information Hub based on SharePoint
WOBURN, MA – March 29, 2011 –Axceler,the leader in Microsoft SharePoint administration and migration, today announced that the City of Charlotte, NC, is using Axceler’s ControlPoint, the company’s award-winning SharePoint administration software, to better manage its large and complex SharePoint environment. In addition the North Carolina municipality also will be deploying the company’s Davinci Migrator product to manage its upcoming SharePoint 2010 upgrade.
“Tasks that used to require so much time to handle manually now can be accomplished in a fraction of the time with ControlPoint. The time savings for us is huge,” noted Kyle Wright, SharePoint Infrastructure Support Manager for the City of Charlotte. “ControlPoint is the only reason we’ve been able to stay ahead of our growing environment without increasing headcount.”
Ease of use and the ability to help manage a more formal SharePoint environment were driving factors in the City of Charlotte’s initial decision to choose Axceler’s ControlPoint. With seven SharePoint farms running on nearly two dozen servers – and with both internet and intranet components -- the City of Charlotte’s SharePoint environment serves the needs of some 6,500 employees in the city’s fourteen key business units. The applications supported in its SharePoint environment range from mission-critical capabilities like records management and team collaboration sites, to informational functions such as posting benefits information, to less formal applications like the online employee swap shop. ControlPoint helps Wright better address burdensome but essential administration tasks – such as replacing outmoded web parts – that were difficult to tackle with native SharePoint administrative tools.
“ControlPoint’s ability to handle so many administrative tasks – like generating web part reports by site and by web part – was a key factor in our decision to go with Axceler,” Wright said. “And this turned out to be even more important than we originally anticipated.”
Wright has used ControlPoint to create a new permission and inheritance structure in the city’s SharePoint environment, and to distribute site administration to the city’s key business units. ControlPoint’s analysis and reports also enabled Charlotte to hit the go-live commitment on its new external facing web site.
The City plans to upgrade to SharePoint 2010 this summer with the help of Axceler’s Davinci Migrator for SharePoint 2010. Besides taking advantage of the latest SharePoint technology, one of the city’s main goals is to restructure its SharePoint farms in order to support a much more modular approach to data backups and restores. “We were originally on SharePoint 2003, and our usage has grown exponentially,” explained Wright. “One of the real benefits of Davinci was that, during the migration, we can completely reorganize our content and sites, create new site collections and create new databases. By reorganizing our data along departmental lines, we’ll make our migration process faster and more efficient.”
Quoting IT: Content-Centric Budgeting
"Until we learn that, in an increasingly content-centric world, we cannot continue to base automation efforts exclusively on a technology-centric model, agencies will continue to invest millions of dollars in programs and have little to show for it."
-Barry Schaeffer, Federal IT program failures: It's the content, stupid, Federal Computer Week, September 23, 2010.
Cancer Treatment Systems Firm Identifies Huge Reduction In Technical Documentation Costs
Clinical solutions firm Elekta has identified annual cost reductions of up to £500,000 a year in their technical documentation expenditure, following a comprehensive review of their documentation development and management processes.
The human care company behind some of the world's most innovative devices for the treatment of cancer and neurological conditions recruited document management consultancy Mekon to identify and achieve efficiency savings in the way Elekta creates, manages, uses and delivers information for the large number of documents it produces.
The result of Mekon’s Consulting and Implementation Process is a new Global Information Management (GIM) strategy which augments the high quality of Elekta’s documentation with keener global management, a holistic structure, and more dynamic delivery and deployment of information. The strategy is being implemented by a global project team lead by Nick Rowlands, Elekta’s Information Systems Architect, with Mekon’s assistance, and the support and sponsorship of Elekta’s senior management.
Micropayments for Content
Rita McGrath at Harvard Business Review has written a blog post on why she hates micropayments. Micropayments are financial transactions involving very small sums of money (see Wikipedia). For online publishing, a small fee would allow you to view the content for a certain period of time or for a certain number of articles.
Personally, I'm not sold on the concept of micropayments for content which is probably why I was lured to Ms. McGrath's article in the first place.
The idea has been around a long time — at least since the mid-to-late 90s — with both supporters and detractors weighing in. Millions have been lost by companies seeking to capitalize on streams of micropayments, almost all of which eventually crashed and burned. Myself, when confronted with a request to chip in 99 cents for a one-time glimpse at an article or $2.99 for a week's worth (as some of my local newspapers are doing) — well, I close that window and go away.
The author of the article discusses further the importance for any payment system adopted to consider "how the payment link of customers' consumption chains fits into their total experience". Micropayment systems have a tall order in that they need to be seamless, transparent, and achieve inevitability. Even grimmer for publishers, it's not only the micropayment experience that needs to be improved but also the non-micropayment systems too.
For the past few years, I've paid a yearly subscription to the Wall Street Journal for the print publication and the online subscription. With my yearly renewal coming up very soon, I've decided to discontinue my online subscription to the WSJ. Why would I do that? There are some very basic reasons to why I'm dropping WSJ.com. I rarely find myself reading the online content of the WSJ. I either already read the stories in the print version of the WSJ or I have found myself already familiar with the news story because I read a similar story posted elsewhere online. Stopping by the WSJ.com, unlike CNN or FoxNews, never became a daily ritual for me.
Future of Intranet is on the Internet
Internet Evolution: "What’s more, the traditional intranet approach is collapsing under the pressure for information that must be available both inside and outside the organization. Sales information that customers should see is copied and enhanced with additional information behind the firewall for sales employees. Guess what happens when the information needs to be updated? Yeah, often only the version on one side of the wall gets the changes.
The firewall is starting to look rather antiquated."
Survey says content is still king
As most site owners do, I rely on content to sell my site on the Internet. I fully recognize the emerging trends of social or community sites such as FaceBook and Twitter attracting large audiences on the Internet. While I have been dabbling with how I can benefit by merging conent and social media into a website, CMS Report remains mainly as a content site. If suddenly people lost interest in using the Internet to retrieve content then sites like mine would no longer have a reason to exist.
With the continued growth in social media sites is there a future for content sites and content management systems? As an article on CNET by Lance Whitney points out, apparently, the answer remains a resounding "yes".
The Internet offers everything from searching to shopping to social networking, but Net users still spend most of their time on plain old content sites, according to a survey from the Online Publishers Association.
In the latest installment from its monthly Internet Activity Index, the OPA reported that Internet users are now spending 42 percent of their time online using content sites, more than any other category. That figure represents a 24 percent jump from 2003 when Net users spent 34 percent of their time on content sites.
Content sites include those that offer news, information, and entertainment, such as NYTimes.com, ESPN.com, MapQuest.com, and Edmunds.com.
This is good news for those of us that run mainly content websites. I am still fascinated by the use of social media for moving information to a wider audience and I will continue to experiment in that direction. But in my heart I know that my site can't truly compete as a social site with the very popular community sites that already exist today. I do though have unique content to offer through articles and blog postings that can't be found elsewhere on the Internet. It's good to know that with content still king there is a reason why sites like mine still have a future on the Internet.
Charging for online news doomed to fail
There has been a lot of articles written lately on Rupert Murdoch's latest comments regarding the need to charge online readers for the content they access to the business model The Wall Street Journal utilizes. Murdoch recently announced that additional News Corp's newspapers would be charging users access to their online content.
Speaking on a conference call as News Corporation announced a 47 percent slide in quarterly profits to $755 million, Murdoch said the current free access business model favored by most content providers was flawed.
"We are now in the midst of an epochal debate over the value of content and it is clear to many newspapers that the current model is malfunctioning," the News Corp. Chairman and CEO said.
"We have been at the forefront of that debate and you can confidently presume that we are leading the way in finding a model that maximizes revenues in return for our shareholders... The current days of the Internet will soon be over."
That pay for content business model that Murdoch wishes to spread to the the rest of the News Corp holdings has worked pretty well for the WSJ. Yearly subscription to WSJ.com is around $100 and the business news site recently introduced a cheaper micro-payment system. Deane Barker recently pointed out this story on his Gadgetopia blog. Barker points out that this business model could possibly work for additional online news sources, but Murdoch needs "another big player on the bandwagon, and he might kick the snowball off the hill. Gannet? New York Times Company?". Barker's point is that for News Corp's subscription model to work, access to news content needs to be limited at other places online too. In my opinion, a fight against free online content is a war that has already been lost.
As a subscriber to the WSJ in both print and online content, I do see paid online subscriptions working for niche news sites. I however have serious doubts that the model can work for general news. People are willing to pay and only pay for content they can get nowhere else online. The news articles found in the WSJ is unique content and since its also content of value, I'm willing to pay for it. However, reporting general news is a much different game. Even if the majority of newspapers started charging access to their content it only takes one newspaper willing to offer that same story for free to break the pay for access model.
CNET: Twitter-sphere
Is it too soon still to speak of the Twitter economy? Yeah, just a
bit. But you'd be wise not to ignore the new vehicles for spreading the
word.
Content Is Becoming a Commodity
Sarah Parez: Over the weekend, it seemed that everyone in the tech blogosphere contributed to the discussion around fractured blog comments; Robert Scoble even went so far as to say that the "era of blogger's control" is over.
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