The ‘Second Coming’ of Renditions - Video

Long time ECM veterans will remember the concept of document rendition – a transformed alternative. I think we'll see renditions again.

A rendition is essentially another form of a specific version of a document. There are two common types of renditions based on format and content:

1. The same information content as the original document, but a different file format
   

• For example, a spreadsheet file can be renditioned as a PDF
  

1. The same file format as the original document, but different content
   

• For example, a MS PowerPoint Document written in English can have a rendition that is also a PowerPoint file, but whose content has been translated into French
  

Renditions for limited bandwidth in the 90's

In the 1990's, one of the common use cases was to deal with the limited bandwidth available at the time. It often took a long time to download and open a document just to see if it contained what you were looking for. Accordingly, Open Text Livelink automatically made HTML renditions of many common formats such as MS Word that were much smaller files and so could be downloaded much faster for quick review.

I remember presenting the use case to customers: "If you want to look quickly at a file without opening the full thing..." Back then bandwidth was so limited it made sense. Now it seldom does, although there are specific use-cases like renditions that contain added content like secured signatures that still have value.

Bandwidth issues are back

Bandwidth is becoming limiting again – not for 'simple' text documents, but for rich media files such as videos. In fact bandwidth issues are so acute that the shape of the Internet has changed radically in the last few years. The explosive growth of video sharing has lead to the rise of Content Delivery or Distribution Networks (CDN) such as Akamai Technologies, Limelight Networks, CDNetworks and Amazon CloudFront to enable effective distribution.

Akamai recently claimed they handle around 20% or the Internet traffic by volume – most of this traffic is rich media which must be delivered very quickly as users expect pages to load extremely quickly even if they contain a video. A recent Forrester report says the expected threshold to load has become two seconds.

For video files to be useful to end users they have to start to play almost instantly. This is usually achieved by:

• 
  
  Locating a copy in close network proximity to the end user
  • CDNs use many distributed sites around the 'edge of the Cloud' to ensure that is at least one site close to an end user preloaded with files that are expected to be required
    
• Reducing the size of the video through transcoding and compression
  
• Streaming – starting to play before all of the content is received
  

The increasing use of mobile devices with narrow and unstable bandwidth connections, and different format requirements creates further hurdles to serving users rapidly.

Enterprise needs

So what about the enterprise or corporate user? Trained by the web, he/she expects to click on a link and have a video start playing within two seconds. But most internal ECM systems (e.g. for document management) are designed to download a complete file before it is available to the end user.

A story – Here's a scenario I experienced recently. A Finance department prepared a new expense form. To show staff how to use it they prepared a five minute video. The trouble was that their WMV format video was over 300MB. For most staff in a global company, especially remote staff, downloading a 300MB file to view it is just not practical. What Finance needed was to be able to upload the video, and have the system take care of making a rendition that was transcoded and compressed, made stream-able and hosted on a CDN.

There are just too many manual steps and too many options for most newcomers to video creation. Systems should take care of most of those steps. And one excellent way to execute several steps is to have the ECM system create a rendition of a deposited video that contains embed code to start a player and stream video from a CDN. The consumer users can then simply click on the object name in their ECM system and a streamed video starts to play almost instantly – as they have come to expect with sites such as YouTube.

So renditions have a place in the new enterprise again to deal with bandwidth limitations!


Syndicated at http://conversations.opentext.com/

Really looking forward to Virtual Content World - other ways to be 'virtual'

You've probably heard about the first Open Text Virtual Content World (www.opentext.com/virtualcw) on Tuesday 19 January 2010. Hopefully you can attend. I'll certainly be there in a virtual sense. It's not too late to register, and if you attended Content World 2008 you'll have received a code promotional code for free registration.

For those who can't attend, there is an even 'more virtual' and dare I say free option – watch the many postings on twitter and Facebook.

The twitter hashtag is #otvcw.

• If you go to http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23otvcw you can get a listing of all of the posts
  
• If you use a twitter client like TweetDeck you can of course set a standing search
  

The volume of tweets will really pickup on Tuesday if the Content World 2009 experience is any guide, not just from the 'official' event twitter account (@OTContentWorld) but of course from other OT staff like me, and most importantly, customers.

It should be a great event. There as certainly been a lot of organizational activity. Colleagues have told me this virtual event has been as much work as an in-person one.

'See' you there!

Twitter: @MartinSS

Syndicated at http://conversations.opentext.com/

Customer Community Success Metrics for 2009

Customer communities are all the rage nowadays, but it is not always clear what works and indeed how to measure success.

As 2009 draws to a close we have been reviewing how Open Text customer communities have been doing.

Background: For those not familiar with Open Text, we are a vendor of enterprise-class software to manage digital files (called content). The term enterprise indicates that we sell to organizations not consumers. We have relatively few customer organizations, but they are often typically some of the biggest organizations in business and government. We estimate that at least 1 in 3 Internet users visit sites that run our software! The software we use for our own communities is the same as we sell.

The Sites

For historic reasons, we run three primary community sites (requiring membership) in addition to our typical corporate websites. The community sites are:

• 
  
  Open Text Knowledge Centre (KC)
  
  • Primarily for system administrators of the software we sell
    
  
  
• 
  
  Open Text Developer Network (OTDN) which is housed on the KC
  
  • Primarily for developers using Open Text APIs
    
  
  
• 
  
  Open Text Online Communities
  
  • Primarily for business champions and power users
    
  
  

Site Metrics

1. The Knowledge Centre is by far the oldest community, dating back to 1996! As you'd expect, it has the most members and the most ongoing activity. Every day approximately 4,000 users access the site, and between 150,000-200,000 documents downloads are performed every month!
   
2. OTDN just completed its first full year during which just over 3,200 unique users participated over the past year
   
3. Online Communities got started in its present form in 2005. This last year 10,600 members collectively visited 118,000 times over the year
   

These numbers only measure direct participation. As you might expect, many community members participate through email-mediated discussions.

Convergence

Multiple systems have traditionally meant that there are multiple, disconnected silos of information. As a result, users don't know where to look and administrators have to duplicate critical content between systems.

A better approach is to deploy a single, 'enterprise library' of digital files (content) which contains all of the files, but just one active copy of each. The three sites above will soon converge to use the same enterprise library, which will also be used by our corporate website that is open to the general public.

One single repository can make user navigation harder unless the most relevant content is presented and organized in a fashion that best meets the needs of each type of user (i.e. persona). Communities of users with similar interests or jobs are one approach to organizing content, but of course there are others, including personalization based on the activities and preferences of specific users.

Measuring 2010 success

These communities will continue to develop, but the latest social networking approaches provide new ways to surface important content. As we deploy more social networking approaches during 2010 we'll have a solid base of community metrics from 2009 to judge progress. As you might expect, activities on external sites like twitter, YouTube and facebook are becoming increasingly important.


Syndicated at http://conversations.opentext.com/