Pattern Finder

Links for 2007-03-28

• Waggener Edstrom dossier revealed: A PR oops that Mike Gotta pointed me to. What's impressive is the level of detail that Microsoft/Wagged will follow in order to get a story they want. While this is at the high end of effort, other vendors are clueless when it comes to analyst/press relations. Informix used to win the prize for the worst analyst relations (AR) department, but that prize has recently been won by another vendor: you know, doesn't return phone calls for weeks, and then only to complain about what you said in the press.
• Yahoo! announced it's going to unlimited e-mail storage: Given the dropping cost of storage, this makes a lot of sense in the consumer space. However, heaven help the enterprise that follows the same strategy with its internal e-mail. Once e-mail has outlived its business/regulatory usefulness, you need to get rid of it so adversaries can't uncover dirt during the legal discovery process.

CMS/DITA Conference Observations

I attended the Content Management Strategies/DITA North America Conference 2007 in Boston yesterday and it was an interesting time. Not a huge turnout -- probably 200 people max -- but it was clear these were all people that lived and breathed content management and documentation. Second, it was a bit bizarre being at a conference promoting digital content reuse and being one of the few creating digital content. While I was typing into a laptop, almost everyone else was using trusty pen and paper.