ANALYSIS: The 50 Fastest Growing Online Job Trends In Q4 2012

Freelance artist

Web hosting rises as Android, IPhone ‘app fatigue’ and facebook, twitter social media confusion flatter to deceive

By ECM Plus

ECM Plus – Freelancer.co.uk has just released the Fast 50 report for Q4 2012, tracking trends in the online jobs market.

“The Freelancer Fast 50 report is a fairly unique leading indicator of the online economy”, said Matt Barrie, CEO of Freelancer.co.uk. “As the largest outsourcing marketplace in the world with almost 7 million users and over 4 million jobs posted to date, the Freelancer Fast 50 report is uniquely placed to provide insights into ups and downs in the demand for skills, technologies, products and performance of companies through analysis of over one hundred thousand jobs per quarter being posted online” he added.

New Hampshire home for ‘Cyber Kill Chain’ centre

Howarth opens new intelligence centre in Farnborough, England. Image: stumayhew

“Minister For War” opens Lockheed Martin’s new cybersecurity intelligence centre in Hampshire

By ECM Plus staff

ECM Plus +++ Lockheed Martin has just opened its first Security Intelligence Centre in Farnborough, England, which the company said would extend its ‘global reach’ and would be ‘augmenting facilities in the United States’.

The new Farnborough centre was opened in the presence of Conservative Party Member of Parliament The Right Honourable Gerald Howarth representing the constituency of Aldershot, also in Hampshire, England.

French knowledge behemoth finalises acquisition of US identity firm

Acquistion by French firm Safran completed

Knowledge management firm Safran completes L-1 Identity Solutions deal to become world leader in biometric identity solutions

By ECM Plus staff

ECM Plus +++ After completing all required approval procedures, French company Safran (NYSE Euronext Paris: SAF) has now finalised the acquisition of L-1 Identity Solutions, Inc., the identity management provider in the United States of America, for a total cash consideration of US$1.09 billion or US$12 per share.

WEEKEND PLUS: Free eBooks help schools in wake of state-slashed expenditure

Free ebooks for students. Image: chrisjohnbeckett

Free eBooks for A Level studies welcomed by cash-strapped schools

By ECM Plus

ECM Plus +++ A new survey conducted by OCR has revealed that school teachers now facing tight budgets are welcoming the offer of free A Level eBooks from next September to help with their pupils’ school curricula.

United We Stand: Doc storage for intranet knowledge gets smarter

United we stand. Image: Clearly Ambiguous

Unifying document storage promises to transform intranets into single search point for organisational knowledge base with new SharePoint Connector

By ECM Plus staff

ECM Plus +++ Altrincham-based intranet specialist Interact has just taken the wraps off its latest SharePoint Connector, a dual-purpose development that connects Interact Intranet to SharePoint, which the company claims will make intranets a single searchable point for organisations’ knowledge bases. 

Search engine behemoth lambasted in new book

Search and destroy. Image: andercismo

New book alleges that search behemoth has become a serial violator of privacy and property rights

By ECM Plus staff

ECM Plus +++ ‘SEARCH & DESTROY: Why You Can’t Trust Google Inc.’ is the first book to critically examine Google’s business practices, mission, and unprecedented power over information access and the digital economy. 

Dolan quaffs DataStream Content

XML - eXtensible Markup Language

XML markup data goes from unstructured to ‘smarter’ forms

ECM Plus – Dolan Company has acquired DataStream Content Solutions. which sells federal legislative and regulatory data and advanced content management systems to information businesses, publishers and governments.

According to Dolan, DataStream’s proprietary processes and technology transform highly-complex and unstructured data into valuable products and services for its business and government clients.

The acquired firm specialises in applying XML markup language to convert complex and unstructured data into ‘smarter’ forms, enabling flexible queries and dynamic database updates, Dolan said.

Dolan added that DataStream’s proprietary business lines include Legislative Impact and Regulatory Impact, as well as data management technologies which facilitate searching vast federal databases.

The firm also said they were licensed to business clients and to the U.S. House of Representatives Office of Legislative Counsel.

The company also offers other data management, conversion and analytic tools and services. Subsidiary Potomac Publishing was included in the acquisition.

Dolan said its target markets have been government, legislative and regulatory sectors.

DataStream will continue to be run by its founder and president, Mark Anstey, and its chief information architect, Ed Schulke. Both will report to The Dolan Company’s Business Information Division Executive Vice President Mark Stodder. DataStream will remain in its College Park, Maryland, offices, Stodder said.

Sad Anstey: It’s an exciting fit between our technological approach to government information and Dolan’s ability to market high-value business information and intelligence.”

DataStream’s company’s Professional Services Division provides specialised outsourced services to the legal profession through three subsidiaries. NDeX is a provider of mortgage default processing services in the US; DiscoverReady provides outsourced discovery management and document review services to major companies and their law firms; Counsel Press is the nation’s largest provider of appellate services to the legal community.

KM goes mainstream with SharePoint auto-tagger

SharePoint 2010

SharePoint 2010 Auto-Tagger from Layer2 jump-starts migration with rule-bsed cntent cassification

ECM Plus – by Paul Quigley – A new SharePoint add-on to auto-tag items and documents based on classification rules has been released by Layer2. 

The software claims to spped up the migration process so that users can use all of SharePoint features based on tagging.

According to the company, with the new released of SharePoint Server 2010, Collaborative Knowledge Management (CKM) and Social Networking are a cost-effective approach to enable organisational intelligence in the enterprise.

Tagging based on managed metadata can drive navigation, discovery, relation, and re-usability of content, the company said. Managed metadata also provides a common corporate vocabulary and can connect people to social networks. But these great features however completely rely on amount and precision of tagged content items and documents.

By default SharePoint 2010 offers a manual tagging feature only. “The initial content tagging process required for thousands of documents definitely lowered user acceptance in our migration projects” said Frank Daske, Business Development Manager at Layer2. “The potential benefit of the new features can hardly be obtained by means of manual tagging. That’s why we have created the Auto Tagger extension.”

Auto Tagger for SharePoint Server 2010 completely automatically categorises SharePoint items and documents in background using taxonomy-based managed metadata or terms organized in the term store. Tag rules, item or document properties, metadata, the information store context and textual document contents are considered with the auto-classification. Auto Tagger could be helpful for initial tagging, e.g. after content migration from any system to SharePoint 2010, and for daily background operation. List items are processed as well as enterprise documents and files located in SharePoint libraries.

A high quality of subject classification can be achieved using a high performance completely .NET Framework based rule engine. Rule-based classification is much faster, less expensive to implement, and produce reliable, reproducible results with higher accuracy compared to linguistic and statistical approaches. Existent IFilters are used for content analysis, e.g. for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF and many more. The add-on is seamlessly integrated with the default SharePoint tagging process. Manually assigned tags are kept untouched. There are flexible background operation settings to adjust to customer requirements.

The open API allows existing 3rd party solutions for text-mining, rule generation etc. to plug in. You may also tag any external data source to use with the SharePoint Knowledge Management and Social Networking features without any restrictions with the help of the Business Data List Connector for SharePoint. Auto Tagger is a component of the new Knowledge Management Suite for SharePoint 2010.

Knowledge Management Suite comes with auto- tagger, tag suggestions and advanced metadata navigations

The Knowledge Management Suite for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 encourage knowledge workers to take advantage of the new SharePoint 2010 features by making it as easy as possible to manage tags, tag content and use tags for knowledge browsing, navigation, content discovery and search. The suite consists of several components, e.g. for improved taxonomy management, content based tag suggestions, auto tagger and metadata navigation Web Parts.

The Tag Navigation Web Part harvests the value of collaborative tagging by using the SharePoint 2010 managed metadata taxonomy tree directly for content discovery and navigation. The Tag Directory Web Part renders managed metadata as A-Z directory index or enterprise glossary, to alphabetically browse the corporate knowledge. The Related Content Web Part for SharePoint 2010 automatically displays related content context-based by using existing tags, for example, related products or services, assigned file downloads, context-driven contact information, tasks, events etc.

The solution was developed 100% based on the new SharePoint 2010 Server Enterprise Metadata Management API.

Information Commissioner: Street View breaches data protection laws

Commissioner Graham finds Street View broke law

Government watchtdog finds search engine giant of unlawful Street snooping in private data dredge

ECM Plus – The UK Government Information Commissioner has found search engine behemoth Google will be subject to audit and must sign an undertaking not to breach data protection laws again.

The Information Commissioner further stated that if the search engine company were to undertake such an unlawful data breach in the UK again, they would ‘face enforcement action’ the ICO said in a statement.

Commissioner Christopher Graham said: “…there was a significant breach of the Data Protection Act when Google Street View cars collected payload data as part of their wi-fi mapping exercise in the UK.”

Commissioner Graham has instructed Google to sign an undertaking in which the company commits to take action to ensure that breaches of this kind cannot happen again.

Furthermore, in light of the breach of data protection, an audit of Google UK’s Data Protection practices will also be undertaken.

However, the Information Commissioner rejected calls for a financial penalty to be imposed on the search engine giant, but said that it was ‘well placed to take further regulatory action if the undertaking is not fully complied with.’

According to the ICO statement, iInternational data protection authorities that undertook in-depth investigations into Google’s activities found fragments of personal data, including emails, complete URLs – and passwords.

ICO said that following the admission by Google that personal data had indeed been collected, and the fact that Google used the same technology in the UK, the Commissioner decided that formal action was necessary.

Commissioner Graham is also requiring Google to delete the payload data collected in the UK as soon as it is legally cleared to do so.

Information Commissioner, Christopher Graham, added: “It is my view that the collection of this information was not fair or lawful and constitutes a significant breach of the first principle of the Data Protection Act.”

Said Graham: “The most appropriate and proportionate regulatory action in these circumstances is to get written legal assurance from Google that this will not happen again – and to follow this up with an ICO audit.”

Sonic Foundry taps TechSmith in content capture blitz

Lecture theatre content capture - Picture: Okie

Firms announce partnership for Camtasia Relay Content Now managed within Mediasite Lecture capture platform

ECM Plus – Sonic Foundry has formed a new venture with TechSmith, the screen capture and recording specialist, to automate ingestion, catalogueing and management of Camtasia Relay course content within Mediasite, a platform for multimedia presentations.

According to the venture partners, the new feature set will tightly integrate the two best-of-breed lecture capture offerings, specifically, course content with Camtasia Relay for automatically uploading recordings to Mediasite’s centrally-managed, knowledge management library.

The Mediasite lecture capture and content management system automates the recording, delivery and management of multimedia presentations that combine video and accompanying visual aids for live or on-demand viewing. Mediasite is a cornerstone in the design of many smart classrooms on today’s college campuses.

TechSmith’s Camtasia Relay enables recording of lectures from the desktop, capturing audio and screen content, and publish them for an on-demand audience.

“TechSmith and Sonic Foundry have shared many of the same customers who have expressed a desire to make our solutions more interoperable, streamlining the content management of Camtasia Relay on-demand materials, alongside Mediasite’s live and on-demand rich media lectures,” said Rich Boys, Camtasia Relay product manager.

Rob Lipps of Sonic Foundry added: “Lecture capture continues to rise in importance on campus, driving the need for online repositories that can accept and manage multiple forms of course content. Mediasite’s ability to ingest content created at the desktop through Camtasia Relay is an advantage to both Mediasite and TechSmith customers who need a centrally managed, scalable knowledge catalog where students can access all recorded course content.”

Mansour proffers unifying concept of knowledge management

Knowledge management theories challenged

KM-WM by M.K. Mansour, Ph.D., sets forth a holistic view of knowledge management based on original theories

ECM Plus – ‘KM-WM: A New Vision Based on Conceptual Theories of Knowledge and Wisdom’ by M.K. Mansour, Ph.D., offers a re-examination of the field of knowledge management KM) and new theories about the generation of knowledge, information-sharing and decision-making within organisations.

According to Mansour, the recently-developed field of knowledge-based management suffers from fundamentally unsettled issues.

Mansour says that before practitioners implement KM, the nature and theory of the field should be explored and a unifying vision defined.

KM-WM is Mansour’s attempt to rectify the existing lack of clarity in the field by presenting a holistic vision of KM that draws on new conceptual theories and empirical research.

Mansour revisits the issues of knowledge generation and the integration of decision-making into the generative process and then advances new conceptual theories of both and offers a proposed account of the distinctive essence of knowledge management.

“I drew upon insights from the fields of business, institutional management, information management, artificial intelligence, psychology and philosophy to develop a unitary conception of KM” commented Mansour. “I also used this multi-disciplinary approach to ensure broad applicability in a variety of fields.”

Masnour posits that although knowledge management has existed as a field of study since 1995, the lack of clarity still existent in the discipline regarding some of the most basic elements inspired Mansour to write the book.

Mansour surveys existing perspectives on knowledge management, an analysis of the concepts of knowledge, data, information, wisdom and decision-making as well as proposed theories of each.

The book concludes with a clarification of knowledge management’s distinctive essence built upon the preceding theories.

‘KM-WM: a New Vision Based on Conceptual Theories of Knowledge and Wisdom’ is available at amazon.

Legal eagles becoming paper tigers

Legal eagles becoming paper tigers

Open Text EDOCS pushes into law market

ECMPlus – by Paul Quigley — Open Text Corporation today said it was expanding further into the law market including new integration between its eDOCS Edition and its Social Workplace.

“Law firms are recognizing the benefit of collaborating with others on key projects and cases, and require the same type of secure environment that follows existing information governance rules and regulations,” said Todd Partridge at eDOCS and Legal Solutions for Open Text. “By integrating Open Text Social Workplace and eDOCS DM, law firms will have more options for collaborating on ideas, documents and matters with clients and employees that will be secured and stored within their eDOCS repository.”

The new integration, OT saidl, would enable law firm users to collaborate on documents and matters stored and governed within eDOCS, including microblogging and IM. It also claimed that law firms would be able to keep closer more productive attorney client relationships, and provide for more effective knowledge capture and sharing within the practice.

Open Text Document Management, eDOCS Edition 5.3 would further help manage document-based knowledge assets by enabling users to capture, organize, locate and share business content in a secure, integrated, and intuitive environment.

eDOCS DM 5.3 has Windows 7 and Office 2010 support and updated integration is available. 

Also added in 5.3 is new platform support for 32 and 64 Bit versions of Windows Server 2008,SQL Server 2008, and Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) support, while deployment costs are lowered through native Windows Installer support.

The company also confirmed that eDOCS Edition can also be Integrated with Open Text Records Management.

Enterprise Semantic knowledge suite launched by Transinsight

Semantic Web - by dullhunk

Search intelligence breaks new ground for organisations

ECMPlus – by Paul Quigley — Transinsight has released the latest version of Enterprise Semantic Intelligence solution.

According to the company Transinsight’s Enterprise Semantic Intelligence Knowledge Suite offers semantic technologies that take the search process to new levels of efficiency.

• “Over the last year we developed a new and highly scalable system comprising the latest algorithms. We made significant investments to be able to provide our clients with true innovations in the area of enterprise wide large scale information handling,” said Dr. Michael R. Alvers, CEO of Transinsight.

The new version of Enterprise Semantic Intelligence Knowledge Suite contains about 100 custom relevant improvements. The system can now deal with more than 100 million documents and vast background knowledge bases for several million concepts. An improved semi-automated knowledgebase generation is now available to customers that do not have their own ontologies or taxonomies available as background knowledge. Novel algorithms allow untrained users to develop ontologies in practically no time. Users are supported in the generation of terms, definitions, abbreviations, synonyms and relationships to other terms. The algorithms are thoroughly validated against manually developed ontologies and
achieve an agreement of 82% (fully automated.

Manchester document storage firm sets out expansion plans

Solution touts ‘paperless office’ paradigm

ECMPlus – Records management service provider Archive Solutions has is to expand into a fourth warehouse in Greater Manchester and into electronic document storage technology.

According to the company, it aims to grow the business to five times its current size within five years to meet increasing demand for the archiving, storage and compliance of records.

The firm’s customer base includes accountants, lawyers, financial services firms, local authorities and hospitals.

Partnering with Avanquest ProcessFlows, suppliers of a wide range of solutions which automate business processes, has enabled Archive Solutions to extend its services by adding ProcessFlows’electronic filing to their portfolio of document storage options.

Claire Dunn, Archive Solutions’ Managing Director is leading the expansion. Her enthusiasm and personal knowledge is driving development into new, more modern ways of dealing with the age old problem of what to do with too much paper you can’t destroy.

Dunn said, “Our partnership with Avanquest ProcessFlows means we can now offer complementary software and digital capture, workflow and scanning/storage solutions – turning paper into electronic format so the original documents can be securely destroyed – allowing us to provide an even better service to our existing customers and those looking to review their archiving needs, budget spend and services in general.”

Companies are legally bound to keep paperwork for a period of time, but storage can be costly and if you opt to store documents in-house, not only do you have to find the space for all that paper, staff are needed to manage it all. Organisations also want to save time when it comes to retrieving old documents. Nobody wants to waste time trawling through piles of boxes in dusty basements to find what they are looking for.

It is commonly accepted that manually retrieving a file from a filing cabinet takes between 15 to 30 minutes of an employee’s time per request, and, that searching for and processing documents takes up between 15 to 25 percent of the average ‘knowledge worker’s’ time

Dunn added, “Switching to ‘electronic filing’ gives clients multiple-user, real-time, instant access to all the archived documents we store for them, at the click of a button. Being able to retrieve their files instantly means they can respond to queries in a timely manner. It increases efficiency and enhances customer service.”

Franca Cognata, Channel Partner Manager at Avanquest ProcessFlows said, “As part of our Channel Partner Programme, Archive Solutions can now offer a range of complimentary products and services, supported by a partner with a 23 year successful track record, which builds upon the core competency of the business – archiving and managing documents for their customers.”

Welcome to ECM Plus

Enterprise content management, document management, knowledge management, digital asset management, compliance, governance, rich media management, web content management, it’s all here..