That Was The Week That Was ....

I'm not sure I could have asked for a better first full week of the New Year. No matter how I look at it 2012 looks like it's going to be a promising, exciting, and busy year in the world of Content Strategy and Business Communications in general, and on a personal level for 4Js Group as well.

Let's take a look at what made this week such a perfect start to the year.

• I kicked off the week by delivering the final manuscript for "THE CONTENT POOL" book on Content Strategy to the fine team at XML Press for final copy edits, indexing, and layout. - We are looking at publication in the first half of the year. - As soon as we have nailed down a date I'll post it here and on my twitter accounts. - I'll also be posting updates here as the book goes through the final stages before publication.

• Then the fine folks at MindTouch issued the list of what they considered the most influential people in the Technical Communications and Content Strategy industries. I was delighted and honored to make the list under both my own name, and as 4Js Group, alongside so many other great industry professionals.

• On the conference front, it looks like I will be speaking at this year's Lavacon in Portland in October. Lavacon has rapidly become on of my favorite events of the year, and I always enjoy speaking there.

• I was also invited to join a panel on "Delivering the Business Case for Innovation" at the upcoming Intelligent Content Conference in Palm Springs next month. - The conference has a great line up of speakers and subjects.

As I mentioned, overall a great week - and a great start to the New Year.

Remember the (STC) Alamo

Just over a week ago I attended what was simply the most open and stimulating regional STC event I have ever been to.

The Central Texas STC Fall Seminar, was organized jointly between the Austin and San Antonio chapters of the industry group and held at the excellent Hotel Valencia on San Antonio’s famed Riverwalk. (Home to many fine restaurants - including the one where we had lunch.)



But it wasn’t the setting that made it memorable – it was the participation.

In my experience a lot of these regional get-togethers end up in features and functions comparisons of tools, minutiae of the job, or arcane technical discussions about standards that only a minority of people use. Not so in this case.

The discussions ranged from using emerging new technologies, Web2.0 tools,, wikis, social networks, to how to develop and recognize metrics, to how to make sure that the documentation process is heard and accounted for in a Agile Development driven world.



But underscoring all the talk of technology was the realization that technologies will come and go, and the most important skill to develop was the ability to learn about new things, and communicate that in an empathic way.

There were several people who were attending their first STC event and they, along with everyone else, left with the impression that this is an exciting time to be in the corporate publishing world.

SaaS Publishing

A couple of weeks ago I attended a software industry business conference in Atlanta. The hottest topic under discussion was the shift from traditionally licensed, on the desktop, software to Software as a Service, or SaaS.

The SaaS model replaces desktop processing with the work being done by remote servers located “out there” in data centers and accessed via the internet. For those of us who’ve been around the IT industry long enough this is nothing new. It’s reminiscent of the old mainframe / dumb terminal model. The biggest difference is that now the processing power is the responsibility of the software vendor and instead of a dedicated network access is now, theoretically, from anywhere at anytime.

The poster child for SaaS is Salesforce.com, and the seems ideally suited to enterprise wide business systems. But isn’t publishing also an enterprise wide activity (even of 90% of enterprises don’t recognize it as such). Is there a role for a SaaS solution on publishing?

In some ways we already have them, blogs (like this one) and wikis are SaaS models where all the processing, storage and delivery is done via a web server with no specialist editing software on the host machine.

With both blogs and wikis gaining wider adoption in the Corporate Publishing world, will more traditional editing, content management and publishing tools be far behind?