With technology evolving at the speed of light, and everyone looking to benefit from the latest, greatest hardware and software, keeping up can be challenging for educators, administrators, and school districts themselves. To help, THE Journal spoke with a handful of technology experts and came up with a short list of top tech trends you'll want to watch in the new year. Here they are:
1. eBooks Will Continue to Proliferate
eBook readers aren't going to replace traditional math and English textbooks anytime soon, but J. Gerry Purdy, chief analyst, mobile and wireless, for business research and consulting firm Frost & Sullivan in Atlanta, said the devices will gain traction in the K-12 arena this year.
"The eBook phenomenon is gaining ground in the consumer space, where people are using them to read both fiction and non-fiction," said Purdy. "The way the stars are aligned, it won't be long before someone adapts eBooks out of the consumer space and makes textbooks available on these portable devices."
While eBooks would literally lessen the load that students have to carry around with them in backpacks all day, Purdy said, the devices aren't "quite there yet" when it comes to color, graphics, and symbols. "The eBook readers are mostly black-and-white right now," he added, "but when the technology advances to the point where color and animation can be integrated, it will become much more viable for the textbook market."
2. Netbook Functionality Will Grow One-to-one computer initiatives are proliferating throughout United States schools and are expected to become even more popular in 2010 as netbooks become even more affordable. Priced at $200 to $300, these small, inexpensive computers are helping to bridge the technology divide that exists at those schools where individual students don't have access to their own laptops.
Netbooks, Purdy said, are opening the door for students to tap the Web as a learning tool, along with general computing--which will eliminate the need for multiple devices (one for computing, another for Web browsing, and so forth) by students, said Purdy, and will help streamline technology initiatives at the district level. "I know that if were administration, I wouldn't want to issue two to three devices to each student," he said. "I'd want one device that would fulfill multiple needs."
3. More Teachers Will Use Interactive Whiteboards
Large, interactive display systems that allow teachers and students to work together in ways that traditional blackboards could not are gaining ground in the K-12 environment. Expect the trend to continue this year, said Sheryl Abshire, chief technology officer for Calcasieu Parish Public Schools in Lake Charles, LA.
"These tools have been around for a while, but the educational landscape wasn't ready to use them 10 years ago," said Abshire.
Abshire said she credits federal economic stimulus funds for helping to advance the use of whiteboards, many of which are just now being installed and used in the nation's K-12 schools. "We're seeing a big resurgence in their use, and I expect that to continue in 2010," she said. "The buzzword for the 21st century is 'engaged learning,' and the whiteboards will serve as a catalyst for getting students out of their seats and up to the board to learn."
Analyst firm Gartner has just released a report that highlights eight up-and-coming mobile technologies which they predict will impact the mobile industry over the course of the next two years. According to Nick Jones, vice president and analyst at the firm, the technologies they've identified will evolve quickly and will likely pose issues that will have to be addressed by short term strategies.
The eight technologies identified include the following:
Bluetooth 3.0
This is one of the no-brainers on the list. The Bluetooth 3.0 specification will be released this year and devices will start to hit the shelves by 2010. At this point, it's expected that the 3.0 spec will include faster speeds, reportedly transferring files at 480 megabits per second in close proximity and 100 megabits per second at 10 meters. It will also feature an ultra-low-power mode that Gartner predicts will enable new peripherals, sensors, and applications, such as health monitoring. The technology will be backwards compatible, allowing old devices to communicate with new ones, so there's no reason for it not take off in the upcoming years.
Mobile User Interfaces + Mobile Web/Widgets
Mobile user interfaces and mobile web/widgets were listed separately, accounting for two items on the list, but we think they can be lumped together. They all point to how mobile computing is rapidly becoming a new platform for everything from consumer mobile apps to B2E (business-to-employee) and B2C (business-to-customer). (Gartner did not include B2B on their list.) Modern day smartphones like the iPhone, Android, Blackberry, the upcoming Pre, and others deliver better interfaces for browsing the web, thus making it accessible to more people. Widget-like applications, including those that replicate thin client technology, will become more common especially in B2C strategies. Yet the mobile web still has challenges ahead. For example, there are no standards for browser access to handset services like the camera or GPS, the report notes.
Location Awareness
Location sensing, powered by GPS as well as Wi-Fi and triangulation, opens up new possibilities for mobile social networking and presence applications. Technology's earliest adopters are already familiar with social networks like Brightkite and Loopt which let you reveal your location to a network of friends. But we're still on the tip of this iceberg. Take for example, the iPhone IM client Palringo, they're just now adding location services to their application. This allows users to see how far away their contacts are, introducing a whole new dimension to mobile communication. Over the next year or two, this sort of technology is expected to become more commonplace, but it will also raise questions about privacy. Will you want your network of online friends and acquaintances to really know your exact location? Will turning off location awareness signal that you're up to something sneaky (so asks the suspicious wife, husband, boss, etc.)? As a society, we will have to answer these questions and more in the near future.
Near Field Communication (NFC)
NFC is a technology that provides a way for consumers to use their mobile phones for making payments, among other things. It's something that has taken off in many countries worldwide, but certainly not all, and definitely not in the United States just yet. Unfortunately, Gartner predicts that the move towards mobile payment systems will still not occur this year or the next in mature markets like the U.S. and Western Europe. Instead, NFC is more likely to take off in emerging markets. Other uses of the technology, such as the ability to transfer photos from phone to digital photo frames, will also remain elusive to more developed markets.
802.11n & Cellular Broadband
802.11n, a specification for wireless local area networks (WLANs), initially gave us pause. Although not ratified as an official standard yet, the technology is already commonplace. However, until it "goes gold" so to speak, it won't really infiltrate the mobile world. Even the ubiquitous iPhone only supports 802.11 b/g at the moment.
On the flip side, the other internet connection technology, cellular broadband, has the potential to make Wi-Fi almost unnecessary, at least for achieving high speeds. In addition to mobile phones, laptop makers will likely continue to incorporate this technology into their netbooks and notebooks using modern chipsets that provide superior performance to our current crop of add-on cards and dongles.
Display Technologies
Display technologies will also see improvements in the upcoming years. New technologies like active pixel displays, passive displays and pico projectors will have an impact. Pico projectors - the tiny portable projectors we saw being introduced at this year's CES - will enable new mobile use cases. Instant presentations in informal settings could become more common when there isn't large, cumbersome equipment to set up. The different types of display technologies introduced in 2009 and 2010 will become important differentiators between devices and will impact user selection criterion, says Gartner.
With only a few weeks left in 2009, it's time for our team of CMS Watch analysts to reveal our 2010 predictions, where we make our best guesses as to what the Content Technology industry will hold for you in the new year. This is our fourth year in a row trying to read the future, and like most predictors, our track record is mixed. If you'd like to see how we've done, you can view past predictions here: 2009, 2008, and 2007.
On a whole, we think 2010 will be characterized by a movement by "back to the basics" among technology vendors. This includes a renewed focus on internal content technology applications as we describe in today's press release. While some of these changes may seem modest, oftentimes recessionary times are the catalysts for necessary changes to be made.
(One prediction we can guarantee is that 2010 will bring lots of new and exciting changes coming to CMS Watch, so keep watching this space!)
Without further ado, here are our 2010 Content Technology Predictions. Read the predictions below, or my colleague Alan can lead you through a video rendition:
1) Enterprise Content Management and Document Management will go their separate ways ECM as a marketing and technical concept has great validity. But the idea of having a single overarching platform to manage all sources of content management only works well in those enterprises that follow a unified and services-oriented architectural approach to IT. Instead, most firms keep their focus on specific business processes such as accounts payable, customer acquisition, case and matter management, and so on. The need for similarly specific software solutions has not abated, and document management vendors fill this requirement well. The maturation of integration approaches (e.g., REST) and standards (e.g., CMIS) will help spur the development of these business applications, since they typically need to tap other enterprise systems. Therefore, in 2010 we will see more vendors returning to core document management and workflow requirements, and becoming bolder about their lack of interest in embracing broader ECM functionality (DAM, WCM, Collaboration, and so forth) -- at least not in an integrated platform.
2) Faceted search will pervade enterprise applications Full-text search is of little value when trying to mine corporate document silos. Most firms continue to rely upon good electronic filing systems (information architecture). However, most don't correctly file business documents, and become over reliant on search engines to magically sort and find chaotic information piles. In this environment, faceted search (logically chunking large search result sets) will enjoy a revival, sparked in large measure by the growing adoption of Lucene Solr by other software vendors.
3) Digital Asset Management vendors will focus on SharePoint integration over geographic expansion Most if not all DAM vendors will debut a SharePoint "connector". ADAM was first, Open Text followed, more will come. We will see continued adoption / use of SharePoint as a front-end to DAM. At the same time, DAM vendors will struggle to meet the proliferating demand for DAM technology in Europe. Some DAM vendors are already declining to respond to RFPs because they know they can't support clients on the continent.
4) Mobile will come of age for Document Management and Enterprise Search Does your ECM package come with its own mobile app store? In 2010, it might. Smarter phones, more bandwidth, and an increasingly mobile workplace will push the traditionally more staid document management and search vendors to develop richer mobile interfaces. Meanwhile, major enterprises (and vendors) will need to adapt their search and information access strategies in the face of mobile application search, with a new emphasis on precision over recall, and a fresh look at faceted results (see #2, above).
5) WCM vendors will give more love to Intranets Intranet managers have had to take on greater responsibilities in the past year, especially for internal collaboration and community services. But they frequently tell us that their Web CMS vendors have turned their attentions slavishly to the needs of public website marketers. Amid a crowded market for e-marketing-oriented WCM solutions, in 2010 some opportunistic WCM vendors will renew their focus on the specific needs of Intranet scenarios.
6) Enterprises will lead thick client backlash Some content technology vendors are rolling out thick clients at a time when IT has not forgotten the headaches around user provisioning, security, and version control they experienced when Java applet technology was all the rage. In particular Adobe Flex -- as a content-app development and deployment framework -- will fail to reach critical acceptance. To be sure, Flex can work well for some one-dimensional applications, like Twitter clients. Yet, the negatives around Flex are various and sundry, ranging from its unfamiliarity and the difficulty of finding Flex-capable developers who have enterprise software experience, to unresolved issues around memory management and performance. It won't take CMS vendors long to figure out that Flex is no substitute for AJAX and especially HTML 5. Similarly, DAM vendors that continue to support a rich / desktop client (Extensis, Canto) will finally abandon it for web-based interfaces.
7) Cloud alternatives will become pervasive A majority of the 200+ content technology vendors we cover will come out with optional, cloud-based storage, archiving, and processing services. Big candidates for processing services are episodic but server-intensive tasks like publishing, indexing, and transcoding. And before year's-end we will see the first wave of backlash as well, as vendors unfamiliar with running (or brokering) such services stumble noticeably in early attempts, and customers become more savvy about security, SLAs, network performance, and other vital considerations. This will slow, but not halt, the rise of cloud-based supplemental services across nearly all the technologies we cover.
8) Document Services will become an integrated part of ECM Document Services (Document Composition, Document Output Management) will attract increased attention from vendors as well as customers. Most of these technologies are not new (and indeed, some, like COLD, are quite old). But enterprises will discover huge potential of verticalized applications by integrating document services into existing ECM systems. Examples include electronic billing, statement/policy generation, and presentation. Many vendors already have some offerings here and we will start seeing better integrated solutions in 2010.
9) Gadgets and Widgets will sweep the Portal world Lightweight technologies like Gadgets and Widgets have become increasingly popular on the public web. In 2010, enterprises will more intently use them to build tactical solutions ("quick wins") and then slowly migrate to more strategic options. So portal vendors will not only support these frameworks but also will start providing a roadmap for moving from Gadgets to Portlets, and vice-versa.
10) Records Managers face renewed resistance There is a fight already brewing between records managers and business managers, but in 2010 the battle will join in earnest. Throughout much of the past decade, records managers succeeded in getting more executive attention in the wake of scandals and stiffer legal/regulatory requirements. Today, though, the RM profession is perceived as being behind the times and focused on paper documents; sadly there is some truth to this. At a time when enterprises have fallen behind the curve in dealing with e-mail as a primary source of records, the potential for Cloud Computing and new viral collaborative technologies raise further questions about the RM profession's ability to adapt and deal with changing times. As a result the movement for simple retention rather than detailed RM practices will continue to gain ground.
11) Internal and external social and collaboration technologies will diverge Many collaboration and social networking vendors are struggling to support internal ("behind the firewall") and external community scenarios off the same codebase. In 2010, most will give up the struggle and acknowledge that these business scenarios have fundamentally diverged. We will see more separate offerings from the same vendor, with increasingly different user experiences, security models, performance goals, and so on. At the same time, vendors will add and promote integration hooks as more customers seek to "move" discussions and collaboration across enterprise boundaries.
12) Multi-lingual requirements will rise to the fore Many firms are now recognizing the need to localize applications and content across cultural and geographic boundaries. Though the technology has been around for while to enable this, a mindset shift is propelling this requirement forward. For some firms it is the perceived or actual threat of competition from countries such and India and China. For others it is the recognition that employees and partners operate more effectively in their native language rather than using English as a second language. For others it is the potential to sell outside of saturated English-language market. Many collaboration and social computing vendors in particular will get caught flat-footed in their assumption that application interfaces need only support English.
I am constantly asked about why we put our software out as open source. Is it some sort of altruism? Communism? People who have worked with proprietary platforms may not be familiar with open source and its implications or the advantages or disadvantages for the products they are using or for the users’ organizations.
Much of the early development of what is now known as open source started with the GNU project by Richard Stallman in the early 1980s to create development tools that emulated Unix, but did not require a license from AT&T or any payment to anyone for that matter. Stallman labeled this “Free Software” and felt that the freedom to use this software was paramount. This early development culminated in the mid-1990s in the creation of a completely open and free Unix-based operating system called Linux by Linus Torvalds under the same license terms as GNU. Torvalds designed Linux to be open and to allow other hackers to contribute to it.
In 1999 at the inspiration of Eric Raymond and his book “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” and through the organization of Tim O’Reilly, the community of developers and hackers who had created this free and open software decided to call the movement “Open Source”. Raymond’s and others’ reasoned that “Open Source” would be clearer to the potential users of the software and less threatening to businesses. This change was also timed to coincide with the release of the Netscape browser and the creation of the Mozilla Foundation.
Not long after this, open source got a huge boost when IBM changed strategy of building proprietary Unix systems and decided to adopt open source and Linux as a means of competing against Sun and others in the development tools market. IBM started actively contributing to the Apache project, a collection of open source tools and the most wide used web server. By contributing to Apache, IBM did not have to reinvent tools for integrating with various web technologies and actually benefited from the development as others, just as others had benefited from the IBM’s contributions. Before long, other large vendors started actively contributing to open source.
This also set the stage for start-ups in the early part of the 2000s to create businesses based upon open source and to employ a professional open source business model. MySQL was a database system originally developed in the early 1990s and had used the GNU GPL license to distribute their software. When Martin Mickos became CEO in the 2001, he helped develop the dual license business model of distributing a GPL-version of the software and selling ordinary software licenses to those who wanted support or wanted to distribute their software without the GPL license. Shortly after this, Marc Fleury took his JBoss application server and licensed it under the more liberal LGPL or Lesser/Library GPL license. JBoss raised venture capital and started to acquire other Java-based projects. Both companies thrived in a down economy proving the value of distribution via the open source model and developing business through selling support and services.
Open source became a change or really a revolution in business model and means of production rather than anything technological. It is underpinned by three main principles:
Opening intellectual property and transparency spreads faster than concealing intellectual property and builds a bigger pie
Share and share alike of intellectual property will grow that intellectual property faster
We should all reuse other people's intellectual property and stop wasting time re-inventing the wheel
This change in business model led to a flurry of start-ups to use open source as their preferred distribution model, including Alfresco in 2005. The advantages of this approach became clear with the success of Linux, MySQL, JBoss and others. These include:
Broad distribution of product through internet download
The ability of users to try the product before buying, eliminating much of the sales and demand generation activities of ordinary enterprise software
Much broader testing and code review of products in the beta and product phase of development
Word of mouth marketing and open source meet-ups reducing the cost of marketing
Lower cost of development through use of other open source components and contributions from the many extensions that users create
Bug fixes from users end up fixing problems themselves
The benefits to the user and business community also became clear:
Users were not locked into a proprietary platform and they were free to use the open source version of the product
The vendors providing these products were the support source upon which they could rely if they needed fixes, advice, warranty or indemnity
The open source vendors were held more accountable than the proprietary vendors since there was always the possibility to switch back to the free version
Users could see the source code and either make the minor changes they wanted without waiting for the next release or even change wholesale parts of the product
Because of the lower cost economics and economies of scale of open source distribution, the lower cost of product was passed on to the consumers of services
The transparency of open source means that there is greater visibility of changes coming and what bugs already exist
Through the community and transparency aspects of open source, the users played a more intimate role in the development of the products with a greater influence on product direction
There are lots of open source programs and projects out there and many of them are terrible. However, open source works well when software is a commodity and you cannot tell one piece of software from another - e.g. word processors, web browsers, operating systems. When software is a commodity, you are paying only for a brand where the company is getting money for no changes in the software. Professional open source works well when enterprise software is commoditized. Alfresco was created because of the increasing difficulty in differentiating one enterprise content management system from another.
Open source development is painted as chaotic and unreliable by proprietary, but in reality it is generally just as controlled as any other project. There are project leads that make decisions and no more than a handful of people developing it. Sometimes these developers can come from more than one company. This is made easier because there are no secrets or intellectual property to hide. However, the project leads have the final decision on what goes in or out. There can, however, be many times more testing involved than ordinary software. In most successful open source projects, you can have hundreds of people downloading the software and testing it out and sometimes even providing fixes because they could see and fix the source code.
In order to make this process work, somebody must pay for it. Usually an open source company is in markets directly adjacent to the software, such as system integration. By supporting Linux, IBM makes its money by selling hardware that runs Linux and selling consulting services to build solutions for customers. IBM has a huge patent portfolio, but they make twice as much money selling hardware and services around open source than they make from licenses from their patents.
More recently, projects that had been purely community-driven are seeing the opportunity to create a professional open source company that is closely associated with the project. A couple of years ago, Dries Buytaert got funding for Acquia to create professional services around Drupal, the open source web content management project that he started in 2001. Recently, some of the core committers of the Lucene and Solr projects have created Lucid Imagination to provide support and enterprise features on top of those two open source projects. The demand was there in much the same way that previous professional open source project have seen for support, bug fixes and features. They also have fit into categories that are consolidating and commoditizing.
Alfresco Software makes money by selling technical support on the Alfresco system. Not everyone wants or needs support, but it isn’t necessary for everyone to want it. With over a million downloads, a small percentage of users who need support in a product environment, especially in the Global 2000, are sufficient to support the community, the project and the company. By participating in the $4 billion enterprise content management market, Alfresco has sufficient scale to continue growing and service the open source community and product.
I was asked by a major IT magazine how I thought Information Technology would be different in the 2010. Bill Gates said in the Road Ahead, “We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next 10.” He’s right, but this is on the cusp of being in between, it’s only 3 years away. I would actually prefer to describe further in the future with my promised write-up of the Davos Connected User in 2015 session.
Here are my prognostications:
Storage and the network bandwidth to store and access information is growing much faster than computing causing an explosion in content creation. This will make content management one of the most important information technologies and new technologies will emerge to automatically find, organize, verify and visualize content.
Content and content management will increasingly be delivered in two main forms - appliances and on-line services. Extremely simple, purpose-built physical appliances for household and office use will capture and organize documents, photos, music and video. Software appliances, configured as virtual machines for specific tasks, will be downloaded from the internet to generic hardware that will come in sizes Small, Medium or Large.
On-line collaborative and content services will extend from Web 2.0 to the community developing sites and user experience with open source accelerating their rate of evolution. Mash-up technology will replace web services and will blur services as it blends internal and external services. Services will start to spill over into the physical world as shops and delivery become more integrated into requests from the internet.
A new revolution in user interface design is just beginning as designers move from physical to soft design. Gesture control will make its way into handheld and notepad devices. User interfaces will move from 2D to 3D as gamers influence work habits and we may see the first holographic interfaces. Avatars will begin to replace dialogs as the request-response metaphor and we may see practical voice recognition and language understanding.
Business computing will shift significantly from PCs to mobile devices as Blackberry-size devices capture more business activities and form factors improve. Ubiquitous internet access and informality espoused by blogs and instant messaging will lead to simpler forms of communication. Content will be consumed on something probably closer to a Playstation Portable and your very thin mobile phone.
