Blog entries

8 Tips for Improving the Document Review Process

Paul Walsh — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 19:35:50 +0100

The analysis and research company Basex published a survey this week entitled "The Document Jungle". It is a survey of the documentation habits of 300 knowledge workers.

They reported that each person produces 1 or 2 short documents per day and were called on to review around 3 to 5 documents per week. Some documents are not sent for review or sent to just one co-worker. The majority are circulated for review.

When it comes to circulating documents for review, 60% of the time thRead More...

"Free as in not being ripped-off"

Paul Walsh — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 00:45:23 +0100

Theme of the week for me has been "free software".

It started from a strange source - reading about the judgement in the BSkyB versus EDS law case. Briefly, BSkyB hired EDS in 2000 to build a customer relationship management (CRM) system for two call centres in Scotland. The project was worth £48m, and EDS gave assurances that the system could go live within nine months and be completed within 18 months. However, by 2002 BSkyB had taken the development back in-house (it then spenRead More...

IT Technology - a Buyer / Vendor disconnect?

Paul Walsh — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 01:16:54 +0100

An interesting survey arrived in my inbox from Cobalt Corporate Finance about the latest quarterly survey of a panel of Computing magazine readers and Cobalt’s IT vendor clients. This allows for a comparison of the buyers (202 IT managers) and the vendors (80 C-level executives). They specifically looked at attitudes to Business Intelligence, Cloud computing, Data Security, Green IT, Mobile Computing, PC/Windows Upgrade, Social Networking, Software as a Service, Unified Communications aRead More...

Some 2010 Predictions for Content Management Technology

Paul Walsh — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 19:19:14 +0100

CMS Watch is a great site for learning about document management, web content management, enterprise content management, enterprise portals, web analytics, and enterprise search solutions. It's mandatory reading for those of us making products, and definitely worth the time of any buyer who needs to select a product in this area.

This week they published their predictions for what is likely to happen in 2010. They were also brave and smart enough to assess how well their 2009 prediRead More...

On BizSpark and Microsoft Development

Paul Walsh — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 21:22:02 +0100

We recently released CogniDox 8.1 and amongst the new features was a CogniDox Word Add-in.

An Add-in is a software component that adds custom commands and new features to a primary program such as those in the Microsoft Office suite. The particular value of the CogniDox Word Add-in is that you can browse and issue commands to the CogniDox repository while you are using Word.

The first elementary fact we faced is that the Office suite is a collection of individual progrRead More...

What tools do Knowledge Workers use?

Paul Walsh — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 23:59:54 +0100

I've been using the term "knowledge workers" frequently in recent posts, so maybe it's overdue a definition. Here's a recent quote from McKinsey analysts that I find useful:

"The heart of what knowledge workers do on the job is collaborate, which in the broadest terms means they interact to solve problems, serve customers, engage with partners, and nurture new ideas." -- McKinsey report, October 2009

CogniDox is used by companies that make high-tech pRead More...

What is Product Management?

Paul Walsh — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 20:05:27 +0100

The Cambridge Product Management Network had a useful get-together this week to debate the question: what is product management? It was a fascinating source of insights as to how things are done elsewhere. There was a range of job titles present and roles from "we have many PMs" to "I wear many hats, PM is just one role". There wasn't a consensus that the group had answered its own question, but along the way we covered the key elements. I suppose we could have referred to Wikipedia for an anRead More...

Open Source CMS Market Share Report

Paul Walsh — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 21:10:33 +0100

The 2009 edition of the Open Source CMS Market Share Report was released today by the water&stone digital agency. A free copy of the survey can be downloaded from CMSwire at http://www.cmswire.com/downloads/cms-market-share/

Ric Shreves, who has led the reporting on this and previous editions in 2007 and 2008, has developed a very thorough and clever method for analysing the market share of an open source product or project. You can't just use company financial data becauRead More...

Surveys on Knowledge Worker applications and Social Networking

Paul Walsh — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 20:48:01 +0100

The concept of a Knowledge Worker has been around for a long time (Drucker, 1959) but it is still a slippery term to define. Sometimes it's synonymous with Information Worker; other times it's a sub-category. It can depend on the company using the term - IBM favours one, Microsoft another. Sometimes it's reserved for a minority who work on unstructured tasks and goals which they achieve through free-form collaboration with others - not to be confused with workers who process information in stRead More...

Measuring the benefits of Enterprise Software applications

Paul Walsh — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 17:14:52 +0100

There was an interesting survey published just over a week ago - Axios Systems, an IT services management software vendor, commissioned interviews with 1500 IT executives in North America, Europe and Asia.

The headline was that 57% of interviewees felt their IT systems, processes and services were not delivering the value expected of them by their companies.

I was taken with two other points - 67% said that they still had no way of directly measuring the business value oRead More...

The business of software - is selling commercial open source really that different?

Paul Walsh — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 17:41:51 +0100

It's been one of those months where two or three thoughts or threads connect together.

First, we've been exploring tighter integration between CogniDox and Microsoft Windows Office applications. This led us to sign up for the BizSpark technology seeding program (many thanks to BLN for sponsoring our application) and to work with Microsoft technologies; if not for the first time then at least more than usual for us. Completely unconnected, of course, but in the same period MicrosoftRead More...

Open Source in UK Government

Paul Walsh — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 22:59:27 +0100

IDC’s latest Worldwide Open Source Software 2009-2013 Forecast reports that global open source software (OSS) revenue was $2.9 billion in 2008, and is expected to grow by 34% in 2009 to $3.9 billion. IDC predict global revenue will grow to reach $8.1 billion by 2013.

This is higher than IDC previously predicted and they attribute their change of mind to the current recession, the growing acceptance of OSS and inclusion of revenue from hybrid products from the larger IT vendors anRead More...

New release CogniDox v8.0 on the download servers

Paul Walsh — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 20:07:12 +0100

This week we made our quarterly release of software, which we labeled version 8.0 (as opposed to 7.x) because (a) there were substantial changes to the internal architecture to support search engine plugins, and (b) it has a re-worked configuration system which makes life easier for CogniDox sysadmins.

The headline feature was therefore the fact that user companies can select between using the 'classic' Swish-e or the Apache Solr search engine. We've blogged in the past about EnterRead More...

Where Does The Day Go?

Paul Walsh — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 07:00:00 +0100

Back in 2003, researchers at the School for Information Management and Systems at UC Berkeley published a fascinating study entitled "How Much Information" that attempted to measure how much information was available in the world (then). It broke down the data by individual media such as TV, Newspapers, Internet, etc.

In TV for example, 21,000 TV stations around the world broadcast 123 million total hours on air every year. Even if 75% of content shown was repeat programming,Read More...

Open Source Enterprise Search is a Hot Topic

Paul Walsh — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 07:00:00 +0100

We published a paper just two days ago on open source Enterprise Search tools such as Lucene/Solr and Xapian/Flax which basically asked whether these tools are now comparable for this purpose with the proprietary products from the likes of Autonomy and Microsoft FAST?

It's a very hot topic at the moment, and Matt Asay (VP Business Development, Alfresco) covers Lucene/Solr in particular in his CNET blog.

At the risk of simplification, the answer is more or less "yes", but the iRead More...

Improving Document Import

Paul Walsh — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 07:00:00 +0100

One of the top issues in all Enterprise Software is that, no matter how good the software tool, unless it is widely used it is a waste of time and money.

"Shelfware", as it is known in IT circles.

If you purchase a top of the range CRM system to manage all your customer contact details and keep track of your relationships with them, it still falls into disuse unless your salesforce actually use it to record their visits and calls. In fact, 30% of CRM projects completely fail duRead More...

Search and the Flax search client

Vittal Aithal — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 07:00:00 +0100

Recently, we've been completely re-working the core CogniDox search functionality. When we initially wrote CogniDox, we were looking for a fast, open source search engine we could easily tailor to our needs. As it turned out, we chose swish-e and it has served us well in the ensuing years.

Well, times change, and we now have to cater for multi-site, multi-cluster installations with large, multilingual document sets. While swish-e is simple to setup and use, it lacks several featurRead More...

Building Software in-House – Why?

Paul Walsh — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 07:00:00 +0100

I came across a survey by Cadence Design Systems, the electronic design automation (EDA) company, in which they asked 256 members of their on-line community whether they used internally-developed EDA tools in their design workflow.

The answer was that 36% of them did, and the majority (76%) of those planned to continue to do so at the same level or to increase their usage.

That reminded me of a Gartner study in late 2008 which looked at the wider software market and concluded that curreRead More...

Agile, Continuous Integration and Software Documentation

Paul Walsh — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 07:00:00 +0100

At an event hosted by the Electronics KTN and DSP Valley I had a conversation with the CEO of Easics NV about the suitability of the Agile methodology for embedded software development. One thing we agree works well is the use of Continuous Integration.

For anyone unfamiliar with the concept, Continuous Integration is a software development practice that requires regular and frequent (e.g. daily) check-in of new code. It requires a code repository with minimal branching, and the evolving repoRead More...

On Roles in Startups

Paul Walsh — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 07:00:00 +0100

At a recent Connected Cambridge meeting I heard Tony Milbourn (one of the ex-founders of TTP, now doing a new startup) talk about the different cognitive styles people bring with them to a startup business. He contrasted people who use the "wet towels around the head" approach to those who use the "frog kissing" model.

I guess you're familiar with "The Frog Prince" analogy about the fairytale princess who kisses the frog that transforms into a prince. If you talk Read More...