September 7, 2007, Glasgow, UK - web site, intranet and document store analysis and migration company Vamosa (http://www.vamosa.com) is now offering free webinars for customers wanting to learn more about analysis and migration tools for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.

The ‘Migration to SharePoint 2007’ webinars start in September 2007 and consist of online demonstrations of Vamosa’s content and document store analysis and migration products, and are currently set to run throughout the rest of the year.

Presented by Nic Archer, Senior Vice President of Vamosa, the webinar will show customers the benefits of automated intranet and document migration, and of providing SharePoint 2007 customers with a quick start using Vamosa tools.

The webinars, which may be found at www.vamosa.com, cover everything from how to analyse your existing document stores and intranets, to how to transform and migrate content to SharePoint 2007. The online demonstrations also give customers tips and insights on what to consider when planning a document or web content migration project.

Using screen sharing inside a web browser, customers are able to watch live as key features of Vamosa Content Analyser and Vamosa Content Migrator are demonstrated. The simultaneous toll-free telephone conference allows customers to listen to the presentation and to ask questions in real time.

“Vamosa helps drive innovation for competitive edge by enabling faster team collaboration with automatic content transformation and migration tools,” explains Chris Parkhouse, Head of Marketing for Vamosa. “Vamosa tools reduce the time, cost and risk of moving to any new Enterprise Content Management system, including SharePoint 2007.”

“Webinars provide an ideal way for customers to learn about Vamosa’s software tools in the comfort of their own home or office.” concludes Parkhouse.

For further information please contact Vamosa by telephone on +44 (0)141 574 2500 or +1 617 621 3041. Alternatively email marketing@vamosa.com.

About Vamosa

Vamosa is the market leader in delivering software solutions for document and content analysis, transformation and migration. Using Vamosa’s automated tools – Vamosa Content Analyser and Vamosa Content Migrator – in a migration project can produce savings of up to 80% in cost and time over manual alternatives. With offices in Cambridge, MA, USA, and Glasgow, UK, Vamosa has attracted clients including The Club (a consortium of UK Government departments), Cable & Wireless, Vodafone, AXA, Statoil, Volkswagen North America, Alltel and Bank of America.

For more information visit www.vamosa.com

We're looking for an intelligent, self-motivated, adaptable technical author with experience of Java, Python, or C#.

In particular, we’re looking for candidates with some of the following:

• Experience in on- or off-line documentation authoring or technical illustration, using relevant tools.
• An understanding of the software development and technical publications processes.
• Ability and inclination to write your own sample code.
• Ability to read source code in languages such as Java, C# and Python.
• Logical and analytical approach to problem-solving.
• Exceptional communication skills.

The role involves working within the development team developing new and maintaining existing end-user documentation for our product range, including “How To” guides, reference manuals, user guides, and more. The successful applicant will also be an integral part of the Vamosa user community. We strongly believe in writing all our documentation in plain English and value the ability to explain complex subjects in simple language.

If you've got what it takes to work in a hectic environment like ours, we would love to hear from you. Please send your CV to jobs@vamosa.com, putting "Tech Author 2007" in the subject line.

After reading Ijonas' post about the death of Microsoft Office and the rise of Google's new online Spreadsheets (The end of Office as we know it), I have to admit I am a big fan of Webware... hence the reason I regularly check the blog Webware.com.

On that note the site is having what some may call a 'Crowning of the King of the Web', a contest to weed out the websites that try too hard and praise those worthy few.  The contest is split into 10 categories with each having 25 contestants. The entries were all submitted by readers of the blog a couple months ago and now the voting has begun...

Yesterday I spent some time just browsing the different nominees, some are worthless and others are quite interesting.  Although I haven't had the time to go through the whole list, I found a couple that I thought might be pretty useful.

http://www.askx.com/ is a version of the popular Ask search engine that uses all of the newest
Ajax technologies or http://www.chacha.com/ another search engine with a live person to help you search. Let me tell you talking to someone about search for Hadrian Engel return nothing but an upstanding young gentleman.

As for productivity, I have been swindled by 411 directory fees for too long! Google just recently created a FREE 411 number for those of use that need directory listings on the fly.  http://www.zoho.com/ is an online productivity suite (Word Processor, Spreadsheets and Presentations etc) that boasts it has a plugin for MS Office!

Lastly the site http://www.farecast.com/ seemed to be relevant to all of us travelers out there. It stores tons of data on the price fluctuation of online airline ticket stores and finds trends in ticket prices.  Most of all it tells you that you are buying a ticket when the price is a record high and waiting a day or so might save you some money!

There are more sites that I didn't have the time to try, online storage, databases, social networking, office tools, etc... But I invite you to browse some of these, most of these sites are just starting out and offer their services for free!

Metadata has a bad name. People find it a necessary evil that they need to deal with when they're dealing with content. These days you can't just stick a file in folder. When it comes to content management systems, authors need provide a variety document and version history details before a document can be placed in the correct location and the right document lifecycle workflows can kick-in.

If its so bad, why do we need metadata ? Search engines do an excellent job of providing accurate, secure, and fast access to massive volumes of content held in many disparate stores. Isn't that enough ? What more would you want ? Unfortunately the world of content and unstructured information grows ever bigger, is more regulated, and becomes more important to organisations day-by-day, which means that single scenario of the knowledge worker using the search engine to access content doesn't describe accurately the world we live in anymore.

The world of keeping documents on file systems and emailing them to colleagues is fast disappearing. Governments are introducing new regulations on how we conduct business with each other, and this affects how emails, documents, and other unstructured content is created, accessed, maintained, and ultimately disposed of.

The large volumes of content we deal with means vendors such as IBM, Stellent etc. develop content and records management systems to allow organisations to implement these new regulations. The policies that run on top of these systems are driven by metadata. Metadata is required to decide where a document is to be stored or when documents should be disposed of. Its unavoidable, we need metadata, unless we build artificial intelligence into our records management systems and teach the AI how to read.

Metadata has a bad name, because organisations treat it as transactional data, like a unit price on an order line item.

Metadata is different from content and its different from transactional data.

Metadata describes content in a given context or series of contexts, some of these are user-generated, some machine-generated and potentially interpreted differently across consuming systems.

Metadata needs to changes over time, to reflect the changing contexts in which it is used.

Therefore we need to start to think about metadata in a new light and consider what some people are calling a metadata lifecycle model.

Search is a magical thing. You type in a few keywords into the little box at the top right-hand corner of your screen or into your web browser and a world of relevant information unfolds itself right in front of your eyes.

Search is a half-baked truth. You type in a few keywords into that same little box and that lists comes back. You have no idea whether or not that list of results is "the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth". Take look at the screenshot taken from my MacBook Pro's Spotlight desktop search for "trip to London". God knows what email message about swimsuits has to do with my trip to London this week. I dare not open that email for fear of embarrassment.

I have no way of knowing whether or not the results in my Spotlight search is an exhaustive list or merely a subset. It probably isn't and without a shadow of a doubt there are better search engines out there, but for me its good enough. The "top hit" was the right document I was looking for.

Search engine vendors have a hard time. They find themselves in a continuous war of words with one and another. Rocket-scientist generals explaining to their foot soldiers in the marketing departments why their rocket-science algorithms are better, more accurate, faster, and more truthful than the next guy.

You the user/buyer get bombarded by all sorts of messages such as "multi-axial guided navigation" (no wonder the military funds this stuff, its got the word 'guided'), "smart previews" (for the dumb user), "information transformation layers" and (my personal favourite) "meaning based computing". Selling complex solutions to complex problems. Yet in software design terms all these products pretty much only deal with one single use case: the information overloaded knowledge worker sitting in front of their search box wondering what to type in next. Sure some vendors take matters a step further by screen-scraping your screen for text and using that to "guide" your search by "understanding your current context", but its just more of the same, saving you a few keyboard strokes.

The problem with the typical search engine vendor is that they need to convince you that more complexity is better not worse, which goes completely against anything we've ever learned from Mother Nature.

Take Autonomy, pretty much top-of-the-heap king-of-the-hill in search vendor terms. I like Autonomy. Yes its expensive, yes its complex, it hits all of my geeky-techy buttons. I wish I had designed & built their software. I wish I was that smart.

Autonomy's message is typical: complexity complexity complexity. They're the "meaning based computing" guys. They even provide a page explaining why other current popular approaches are unworkable and what they say is pretty much correct, but in doing so only reinforce the perception that their own sector consists of a bunch of snake oil vendors.

How do you, the corporate buyer, measure "meaning based computing"? How do you know that when you type in "trip to london" into that little box you are getting the whole truth? Unfortunately you can't.

It's magic, it's a secret and they won't tell you.

Following on from the previous installment where I discussed the Mozilla Firefox browser and it's various plug-ins and extensions, this time I thought I'd give a quick run-down of the other tools I frequently use in debugging content and migration issues.

First of all, there's trusty old Textpad. Textpad is a plain-text editor and really excels at performing regular expression search as well as find-and-replace. And, with the appropriate syntax files in place, it will also do syntax highlighting of HTML, JSP, JavaScript, Python, Java files and others. (On a side note, my personal preference is to set the Textpad editor "keystroke compatability" to "Microsoft applications", but you can also select others. No vi or emacs bindings as far as I can see, though!)

Speaking of regular expressions, you can't get much better than RegexBuddy. This tool lets to edit and test your regular expressions, and even provides a visual builder to create new expressions. With it instant feedback through highlighting your test-data to match your regular expression, RegexBuddy is an invaluable tool in both teaching yourself regular expressions as well as a tweaking guide for the more experienced user.

To solve character set issues, I use SC UniPad. This allows you to quickly and easily identify the encoding type of a file as well as the Unicode id for any character contained within it. This is useful to detecting content where the encoding header doesn't match the content.

For XML and XSL work, I use Altova XMLSpy. This is a powerful XSL editor with a full XSLT Engine built in so you can perform your transformations with a simple key-press.

For comparing files (and folders) I prefer CS Diff. This visual diff tool has a handy single-pane view of the differences between the files which I find much easier to read than the traditional diff/patch output.

And finally, for viewing the Vamosa log-files while the program is running, I use BareMetalSoft BareTail. (BareMetalSoft site appears to be down at the moment, alternative download site is here.) This is a powerful Windows implementation of the standard Unix 'tail' utility, with added functionality for highlighting based on simple searches.

And there you have it - my Content Migrator's Toolbox.

Now over to you - have I misses any of your favourite tools? Do you disagree with my choices? Please add your comments below.

Sometimes we come across content that resists migration for some reason or another. I've tried to pull together a list of the tools I frequently use to view and check content whenever I see a problem. I hope this list is useful, and hope everybody will post links to THEIR favourite tools below. But for now - here's my starter for ten (all links open in a new window).

First of all, check out the excellent Content Migrator's Cookbook for "recipes" for performing common tasks on content already added to Vamosa. This includes useful Jython scripts and XSL transforms as well as suggestions on connecting to external datasources and more.

Secondly, for viewing content before it's added to Vamosa, consider using the Firefox browser (along with the extensions below). Use Firefox's browser tabs to view and compare pages.

To determine potential Identify issues, use a Firefox User Agent Switcher extension to retrieve pages under a different guise. This allows you to quickly determine if the source server is returning different content based on the connecting browser. (Vamosa identifies itself as "Jakarta Commons-HttpClient/2.0", but we may allow this to be set as a Project setting in the future).

To determine potential content issues, use Firefox Web Developer and Firebug extensions to inspect the content. Also consider using the Firefox HTML Validator extension to review the content, and try the Firefox View Source Chart extension to quickly review the structure of the content. The Live HTTP Headers extension lets you view the headers returned by the server, which is useful for determining character set issues and so on.

It's the most wonderful time of the year!

The swan song of Tsunami Ken's tenure as social convener for Vamosa Inc was held on Saturday 9th December 2006. 

In dramatic fashion, Kenny Boy organised a politically correct, religiously neutral Holiday Extravaganza in the imaginatively named 'Felt' (oo err Missus!) - a combination of restaurant/nite spot/pool venue.  A great time was had by all (thanks Kenny Boy!) and here are a couple of snaps showing some of the highlights. 

Other, more incriminating, pictures are available for $10/£5 if you want to some cheap gossip. 

Kenny, Eric, and Johnny; if you give me $20/£10 each, then the pictures will never see the light of day.

HAPPY HOLIDAYS FROM US ALL IN BOSTON!

Grace is said before scoff: Johnny prays for forgiveness while David snaps the sleazy fun

Steve O Gets Down to Business: Steve has to pot this one to get his tie back

Hadrian Gets Excited: Calm down Mr Engel, your eyes give away what you are thinking!

I have just spent a few days at the Gilbane Conference on Content Management here in Boston.  It was a well attended event and (as is the norm), there was a very healthy bunch of commercial sponsors - companies who shell out a lot of money to get the chance to show their wares, talk to delegates and generally showcase their latest and greatest innovations.  So all is good in the world of software - but is it?

My cynicism radar was definitely working overtime.  Having attended some of the sessions - and I thoroughly enjoyed some of them - I have to say that there was a distinct lack of enthusiasm in some for vendors.  If you believed some of the self proclaimed 'industry watchers', 'demand side analysts' and 'CMS experts' you would think that the commercial software vendors are a cabal of evil, hell bent on relieving all those poor unsuspecting organisations of their software budgets, and delivering very little in return.

Now I have worked in software for 20 years, and in IT for 23 years, so I have seen my share of this view from customers, but I have to say I am getting a little bit tired of this view.  We all know what bankers do - they bank; retailers retail and defence contractors help to defend.  The software industry is a very dynamic and fast changing sector.  The level of talent and the level of innovation that exists within the sector is second to none.  With innovation comes risk.  Thousands of software companies are formed every year.  The amount of risk sustained by the software sector is unbelievably high.  Software as a sector really does punch way above its weight when it comes to its attitude to risk.  With risk comes reward to some, but a lot of strife to the majority of software startups.

So the next time somebody turns round and questions the motives of the software industry, ask them if they realise the level and speed of innovation that is produced every year.  The ability to bring products to market which really address true real world problems.  The ability to make things faster, or cheaper, or easier to use.  This comes from innovation and from a healthy and positive attitude to risk.  This does not come cheap.  Not in monetary terms, nor in the blood sweat and toil shed each and every day by the small guys, the innovators, the risk takers.

I have a confession to make: I am a Power User. (GGGGGWWAAARRRRR!) That means I spend all day geeking out over technology and software. In fact this blog entry is a perfect example of "me".