Jim Gabriel

A META Group analyst forecasts that "everybody will have a content problem, if not today, then tomorrow." This forecast is echoed by scores of analysts from Jupiter to WestLB Panmure: e-business and corporate publishing are fundamentally not possible without sophisticated content management. When you consider that most analysts regard anything from a pricelist to a fax as content that can (and should) be managed in a corporation, it's not difficult to see the enormity of the content management problem facing us. This article tackles the following topics: Managing content defined Architecture and ingredients Selecting a system Role of XML in content management Building a suitable organization Creating an information map Going "live" as efficiently as possible It deals wi... (more)

Best Practices in Integrating Data Models for SOA

This article describes how an essential precursor to any SOA implementation is a data modeling exercise that integrates all underlying data models, focusing more on the business requirements than on system- and application-specific requirements. Integrating data models in a complex enterprise can be difficult because the IT landscape often reveals massive duplication and redundancy. Refin... (more)

Metadata Evolution Management in Your SOA

This article describes the increasing importance of metadata in today's service-oriented application landscape, and the consequent fragility inherent in architectures when faced with change. When we reach the point at which metadata drives the development and maintenance of services, evolving business requirements force us to break open and evolve our metadata first, and then to address t... (more)

Development Tools for XML Applications

XML is object without source. There can be no development tools for XML until we find a way of creating source code. "There's no such thing as an XML application." A strong statement, perhaps, but what do we mean when we talk about an XML application? Is a publishing system that relies on XML to do its work an XML application? Can we apply the term to a B2B marketplace where all the proce... (more)

Content Management Part 2

The golden rule of a content management system is this: the day you take it to production is the day you start work on the next version of the system. Content contributors will submit change requests for the document structures and input formats, publishers will ask for more metadata to enable more sophisticated delivery of content, and editors will ask for better workflow. And you may dis... (more)