Tapping the Application Explosion: Why Wait to Deliver Great Content?

The Apple iPhone 3G is turning out to be a huge success by any measure, with Fortune magazine reporting today that its sales are going to top 3 million handsets since the the 3G-compatible model made its debut a month ago. The success of the 3G iPhone is being powered by the introduction of downloadable applications, which make the phone highly usable without having to resort to using a Web browser. Apple's CEO Steve Jobs claims that there have been more than 60 million application downloads for the iPhone already, enabling people to get information, share content and data and to do many of the things that they used to rely upon the Web for in most instances for content services.

Getting popular applications embedded into content platforms is all the rage on many fronts, of course. On the Web social media portals like Facebook applications have enabled a wide array of content sources to embed their information and capabilities into their portal while on the enterprise front Salesforce.com and other Software as a Service applications and portal services have made embeddable content a must for any publisher or content service provider. The big deal with the iPhone, though, is that these applications are living outside of the Web browser that comes packaged with the iPhone are are adapted to make the most of the iPhone's unique user interface. So not only do you get an appliance that's convenient but you also get one that have a wealth of functionality built into it - enough, perhaps, to make many people wonder why they're bothering with a PC at all these days. At around $200 for the latest model, courtesy of AT&T's subsidization of the iPhone, it's a question that's getting easier and easier to ask.

While there are still a relative handful of trend-setters equipped with this popular new device, its presence should send out a loud and clear signal to people who like making money from content that adaptability to various platforms - and bringing in high-value content to those platforms - is accelerating yet again the pace of change in the content industry. Just as you thought that you had your Web portal all sussed out, along comes another Web for mobile platform into which applications can be embedded that requires you to play catch-up all over again with a new set of competitors. When Google's new Android phone platform gets introduced later this year, the cycle will start again. At the same time these new platforms create opportunities to take information from a wide variety of sources and to make them usable all over again in new ways. Maybe yesterday's application using just your own content could benefit from new content sources as well.

Whether you're shifting your platform strategy to take advantage of these emerging applications platforms such as the iPhone or looking at an opportunity to bootstrap your own idea for serving up content MuseGlobal can help you to get a leg up on your competition quickly and effectively. Our Muse Content Machine is a highly flexible content delivery architecture that enables you to
connect any number of content sources to any number of delivery platforms quickly, securely with very little or no new development required to get all of the content that you need up and running on a new platform. MuseGlobal has been working for more than a decade to connect thousands of different types of content sources to all sorts of networks and applications environments, allowing you to focus on what you do best - offfer the best content through the best applications. With over 5,400 pre-built connectors to different types of content sources we can help you to accelerate your application development cycle for any new platform significantly - while allowing your brand and service to shine through our OEM-licensed capabilities.

Consider the iPhone just the opening salvo in a new war for people's attention on mobile platforms that joins an already noisy chorus of content applications vying for people's attention in new and exciting content delivery environments. If you're up and running in these environments already, we can help you to accelerate your strategy with more content integrated into your services before you know it. If you're discovering that it's time for you to consider how to get all-new applications moving on a new application platform, we can help you to get up and running in weeks rather than months. Whichever your situation, MuseGlobal is here to help you make the most of these exciting new environments rapidly, reliably and effectively.

A Cloud Apart: MuseGlobal, Content Integration and Cloud Computing

The SIIA NetGain conference in San Francisco last week was a great event for MuseGlobal to strut our stuff amongst the major and up-and-coming players in the content and software industry. While there was some ballyhoo about this being a new convergence of industry players, it's no secret that software and content companies have been joined at the hips for many, many years.

There was a fair amount of that "everything old is new again" atmosphere at NetGain, including the touting of "cloud computing" from major service providers such as Google, Oracle and Salesforce.com. Well, of course all of these companies provide very powerful software and services, but the cloud was with us even well before the Web became a reality. As soon as there were servers and client computers on networks the network cloud was being exploited to deliver high-value content services to major enterprises and, eventually, consumers. From that long-term perspective, you could say that content has lived in the clouds for a long time.

The difference today is that with more and more content staying in the network cloud instead of being downloaded into desktop applications and enterprise servers making the cloud a universal source of information for specific purposes becomes all the more important. After-the-fact integration of other important sources in desktop applications or through enterprise databases becomes harder when you're basing all of your content resources in the network. This means that you need to get all of the right content in the right place at the right time inside of network content serving applications.

While managing transparent access to content sources can be hard for some technologies to manage, MuseGlobal content integration technologies make getting comprehensive and unified content from any range of content sources in network-based content services easier than ever. Yet again, MuseGlobal was there before the idea of transparent access to diverse content sources had become a fad. We've been sussing out the details of how to connect to thousands of different kinds of databases, search engines, feeds, subscription content services and Web mining applications on the widest range of networks for more than a decade. The architecture that we've put into place to manage this simply and reliably in a way makes MuseGlobal a content cloud unto itself - and given our track record with major publishers and content technology companies around the world, allow me to say that we see ourselves as a cloud apart from the rest.

The nice thing about MuseGlobal OEM technology is that you can decide for yourself how you want to work with our content cloud. You can take in content from MuseGlobal into the back end of your own content cloud, or you can use our integration software to create a content cloud that surrounds your own core content delivery technologies. Best of all, you can tune which sources you want to present from MuseGlobal and how you want to filter and present them very easily. Vertical search engines? We're there and all over it before you know it. Business intelligence engines? Been there, done that. Consumer ecommerce portals? Our cloud will be raining content on products that they'll be eager to buy.

So when you think of cloud computing, remember that you need to think about how much of the right content it will take for your own platform to be the rainmaker on the networks of your choice. Don't settle for a drizzle of the sources that your clients want - let MuseGlobal help you to make your content own cloud the one that pours it on.

Unifying Content in the Enterprise with Google, MuseGlobal and Adhere Solutions

MuseGlobal has been an OEM partner with many of today's leading enterprise search engines and search infrastructure providers through more than a decade of developing advanced technologies for content integration. Partnerships are at the core of our value in the content marketplace, after all, making it possible for companies to use our content integration technologies to make their own platforms shine. I must say, though, that our new partnership with Adhere Solutions to enable content integration for the Google Search Appliance is one of the more exciting opportunities that we're encountering in the enterprise marketplace.

Everyone knows Google, of course, including the millions of people in enterprises worldwide who use Google every day as one of their primary "go-to" resources for information found on the World Wide Web. For this reason sometimes Google is seen as "the enemy" in enterprise I.T. and knowledge management circles, the interface that keeps on getting attention as they try to engineer their own solutions from in-house and subscription content sources. In many of these institutions you can find the Google Search Appliance as a tool that departments or whole enterprises are using to unify external Web content with some internal content sources. It's a powerful concept, but one that needs every possible source included to gain everyone's attention - otherwise the GSA becomes just one of a number of searchable sources.

This is where the All Access Connector comes in. Using Adhere Solutions' extensive background in integrating the Google Search Appliance into enterprise environments MuseGlobal now has a partner that can help enterprise partners to leverage the full power of the MuseGlobal's content integration capabilities through the most popular search interface around. The All Access Connector enables over 5,400 different types of content sources to be integrated rapidly into the GSA. Subscription databases, internal databases and document repositories, Web content, feeds, content harvested from intranets and external sources, multiple search engines - all these and many more can be made available through one search interface and returned in whatever format accelerates your productivity the best.

The response to this product launch has been extraordinary. All of a sudden people who had not quite seen the potential for federated content are beginning to see the light now that the "G-word" has entered the picture. It's really quite a simple concept when you come right down to it: if people like using a particular tool to solve their problems, why not make that tool work better for them? Apparently this resonates loud and clear for many who have been frustrated with powerful solutions in enterprise markets that just don't seem to get used as much as they should. If Google is the platform that users want, and you can deliver content from all of your searchable sources and feeds through that platform, well, why not make all of your content available through it? With the All Access Connector, we're finally able to make "all" mean "all" - and in doing do we get people making the most of all of their investments in searchable content.

We're very excited by the response to the All Access Connector and we expect to be very busy this year helping people to make the most of it. It's a concept that MuseGlobal can make work through any platform, of course, not just Google - including your platform as well. Something to think about. In the meantime our thanks go out to to Erik Arnold and all of our new friends at Adhere Solutions who are making the All Access Connector a reality using our content integration technology. It's a great partnership that we expect will provide our customers with extraordinary returns on their investments in our joint capabilities.

Elsevier's Y.S. Chi Points to the Value of Engineering Content "Experiences"

We had a good time at the Buying and Selling eContent conference in Scottsdale this year, our first time at this event. Certainly there were many familiar faces from the content industry there, including Y.S. Chi, Vice-Chair of Elsevier, who gave what I thought was probably the most insightful presentation of the conference. Y.S. highlighted how the content industry needs to focus more on developing valuable "experiences" than more content.

What did he mean by this? Well, certainly Y.S. had in mind many of the workflow-oriented tools that publishers are beginning to emphasize in trying to add value to long-established database services. And I would think that it might also include some of the advanced social media projects that Elsevier and other major scientific publishers are embarking on that enable scientists to collaborate on building valuable reference content and research.

But I think that Y.S. was also pointing towards one of the key factors that makes publishing so hard for many established companies these days: owning content is not as important oftentimes as getting content to do something useful for people. If content can be thought of as the raw materials of publishing, then getting content from point "A" to point "B" is no longer such a great business to be in now that the Web and corporate intranets make the A-B value proposition pretty low on the value totem pole.

Search engines that publishers put on top of their own content collections help to find those raw materials more easily, but the value of those searchable services is considered high only when they are able to locate all of the possible content that applies to a given problem or task. Leaving content out of the equation means that you have only part of what you need to build a valuable experience. That's kind of like building a fantastic roller coaster but leaving out a few hundred feet of track. Sometimes doing just part of the job very well is just not enough.

The traditional solution that publishers would use to address the "missing track" issue would be to license more content or to create it themselves. That worked pretty well when there were relatively few sources of licensed content and relatively few people willing to create it themselves. But most sizable enterprises have very sophisticated sources of internal content as well as a growing array of sources that are generated by their peers in other companies or universities that help them to meet their goals. Add in Web sites that are growing sources of fresh information about businesses and key trends and it's not so easy to fill in that missing track. It's as if the roller coaster that the customer wants keeps growing far faster than the publsihers' ability to fill the gap.

In the experience economy that Y.S. references it's all about anticipating the gaps and finding more innovative ways to fill them more quickly than someone else, so that the raw materials of content can be transformed into experiences as efficiently as possible. Well, if the value of experiences is so high, then why do publishers still place so much emphasis on getting content integrated into the back end of databases when it's greatest value is found outside of a database? In other words, why not push the point of content integration as close to the point at which content is experienced? This will enable more sources to be brought together from more places more easily and efficiently.

Well, not surprisingly that's the key to what MuseGlobal does with content. The Muse Content Machine is a content integration platform that enables a publisher to assemble more searchable sources of content more quickly and more effectively than any one else. Instead of trying to create one master database with one login and one search engine The Muse Content Machine can enable a publisher to build applications that access multiple searchable sources from a single query. To your customers it will look like you've built a rich application from one commonly indexed database. But behind the scenes The Muse Content Machine federates content from thousands of different types of content sources and delivers the freshest and most relevant content from each source. Nasty details such as multiple source logins, different data formats and different types of content sources - search engines, databases, Web harvesting, feeds, video and audio, catalogs - are all ironed out very neatly and efficiently by The Muse Content Machine.

The Muse Content Machine lets publishers focus on getting the right content into the experiences that their customers want, regardless of whether those sources are in their key databases, at the customer's site or available from the Web. With thousands of different types of content sources already integrated into The Muse Content Engine our answer to "can you integrate this?" is usually "been there, done that." Best of all, when changes to a source occur The Muse Content Machine makes it easy to respond to those changes and keep all of your sources working together. To your customers it will be just one big powerful experience - but to you it will be the miracle of the most advanced content integration capabilities making everything that's not unified appear to be a unified source of content. The result: you'll have spent a lot less on developing content and a lot more on developing the experiences that will bring in higher revenues with lower maintenance costs.

Keep your eye on Elsevier as they begin to take advantage of Y.S. Chi's vision - and keep an eye on MuseGlobal as we help publishers, software companies and other media players to create more realizable value from unified content.

Dow Jones and Generate: Making the Most of Web Harvesting Services

Kudos to Dow Jones Enterprise Media for announcing their acquisition of Generate, the online business information harvesting service that has been a center of much buzz for the past several months. What made Generate such a hot topic of discussion? While there are a lot of companies out there involved in harvesting content from the Web, Generate was taking this content, brushing up its quality and enabling it to shine in high-end business applications that help sales and marketing professionals to understand quickly how to translate Web content into sales and business development opportunities. Instead of focusing just on the mass markets Generate was the first company that tried to turn harvested Web content into a high-end business information application.

A great story, but if it was so great why go the acquisition route now? I see two factors that made this a good time for Generate to cash in with Dow Jones. First, Dow Jones brings the Generate team a much larger and entrenched sales force already selling Factiva and Dow Jones feeds, products which have proven themselves but which are not likely to make huge new sales strides in a rougher economy. Adding Generate to their sales kit will enable them to penetrate more accounts more quickly without the "will this startup survive or not" question hanging over their heads. The second factor, though, is probably more important: having corralled all of the Web content that they could get their hands on through Web harvesting, how was Generate going to add more value to the product? Well, inevitably the answer would have been to add more content from licensed databases and from client databases.

Adding Factiva content to the Generate quiver of content sources is certain to give a boost to their value-add analysis capabilities. The question is, how many more sources can be integrated quickly with Generate's platform - or any other Web harvesting platform, for that matter. Web harvesting is a highly potent way to gather great business information - it's something that MuseGlobal does as well - but it's hardly the end point for making a great workflow application for today's enterprises as quickly as possible. Internal databases, subscription databases, file management platforms, Web site content management systems - all of these need to be sources for enterprise applications that are going to deliver the most valuable answers to today's professionals. Web harvesting is tuned to do just that - to get the most important content out of Web pages as efficiently as possible. Integrating content in from other sources, including real-time feeds, is not necessarily Web harvesting's strength.

Web harvesting engines are essentially Web search engine crawlers with special processing to extract specific fields of content from Web pages. That's great for what it is, but that's not necessarily going to get you timely content from other sources such as document servers, databases and datafeeds. Access methods, protocols, update cycles, security and logins, proprietary data formats - all these and more can make it difficult or downright impossible to use the same software that you use for Web harvesting to access other content sources and return the freshest information available. Our ten years of experience in developing content integration technology shows that it's a far better approach to let Web mining do what it does best and to use other techniques to integrate content from other sources into applications driven by federated content sources.

This is where content integration technology from MuseGlobal can help Web harvesting applications to shine. Instead of trying to get Web harvesting software to integrate other sources, why not use The Muse Content Machine to let Web harvesting do what it does best in a content integration architecture that's already able to integrate both Web harvesting and thousands of other types of content sources? The Muse Content Machine will enable you to take search engines, subscription databases, Muse Web harvesting or your own Web harvesting technologies, client databases, real-time news and data feeds and any other content source you need and get them to produce rich, federated content for your Web sites and client applications quickly and effectively. We can configure The Muse Content Machine to integrate all of the content sources that you need and return results from a single query into a single or multiple streams of updates or alerts tailored to your specifications - or build front-end applications with easy-to-use Muse application development tools that can federate content from all of your key content sources into rapidly developed user applications.

So our hats are off to Dow Jones for picking one of the most valuable up-and-coming companies harvesting insights from Web content. Generate's Web harvesting and semantic analysis combined with Dow Jones databases is sure to accelerate the power of business information in today's major enterprises. The Muse Content Machine can help these kinds of integrations of Web harvesting to move from concept to reality far faster than you may imagine. Then again, if you're familiar with track record as the leader in OEM content integration, perhaps you can imagine it.

Why are Search Engines Still Searching for Answers to Content Integration?

Recently I read an interesting article on Redmondmag.com, entitled "Searching for an Answer in the Enterprise." The article notes that enterprises are beginning to come up against the uncomfortable fact that today's enterprise search engines were never really meant to deal with all of the various types of content resources that the typical major enterprise uses to store information. While your typical search engine can be trained fairly well to traverse some of the more common data sources such as major databases and document servers there's a wealth of legacy systems, document management systems, content management systems and ERP systems that store much of the typical enterprise's internal wealth of content.

Unfortunately search engines aren't designed to deal with such a wide variety of content sources easily. Search engines are designed to look at accessible documents and to make an index of all of the information that's in them, so that someone can come along later and search that index. That's great - if you have access to all of the documents that you need to index on a regular basis. Unfortunately in many enterprises that's a very, very difficult thing to arrange. Many enterprise databases and other data repositories are enormous and are being updated constantly. To incorporate their contents in a separate search engine index would take enormous resources both for allowing the search engine to crawl such a database with some regularity and to update and store the search engine index - not to mention questions about security and data integrity that such a crawl might raise. In an era in which data leaks can mean huge legal and public relations issues solving search can be a lot easier than it sounds in slide presentations.

Federated search technology can help to overcome these limitations. Instead of trying to build one enormous index of every document that someone might need to search a federated search engine will take one search request and then formulate queries for each of the sources where there's content that might answer someone's question. Instead of relying on occasionally updated Web search indexes a federated search enables the index associated with each content source to be traversed separately. This means that as soon as each of those individual indexes is updated you're going to have access to the most current information. The results from each source are then combined to display the most relevant content available from all sources.

This certainly helps to solve the problem of getting the very precise results that the typical enterprise user expects - they don't want a pretty relevant report on last quarter's results, they want THE report on last quarter's results - but it's an approach that only works when you have access to every source of content that someone may need. If you don't then people will be disappointed and go off to use another way to find the information that they need. In other words, your investment in search technology will be ignored.

So to do federated searching the right way you need access to ALL of the possible content sources that someone may need to access. Yet this article points out:

In addition, Microsoft has moved to the forefront in the promotion of new federated search capabilities based on Creative Commons' OpenSearch standard. Several companies, including Open Text Corp., Business Objects, Cognos and EMC Corp., are developing federated search connectors to enable Microsoft's enterprise search customers to connect to their information systems.

Well, this is good news, I suppose, but why settle for "some" when you need all? This is of course where Muse comes in. We've been doing nothing but develop technology for federated content integration for more than ten years. Of course our thousands of pre-built source connectors can help you to do all of the federated searching that you need, but that's just where federated content integration starts. In addition to search engines, databases, ERP, ECM and the other alphabet soup acronyms that make up today's universe of enterprise content repositories Muse technology enables our partners to deliver content from the Web, from subscription content sources, from datafeeds and from web mining applications as well. Our partners get OEM software from Muse that enables them to equip any search service, Web application, email newsletter service or enterprise software application with all of the content that they need to deliver.

So our hats are off to all of those enterprise software solutions who are working hard to address some of the solution to federated content integration. You're doing great, but let us know when we can help you with a solution to all of your federated content integration needs. We're ready when you are!

Comprehensive Federated Search for Enterprises – Tomorrow from SAP and Oracle, Today From Muse

As we make the rounds with analysts and platform partners there’s more chatter than ever about federated content for enterprises. It’s not that federated search in enterprises is any thing new, of course – Muse has been doing it for ten years in thousands of enterprise installations around the world. But the position of federated search as an enterprise solution is beginning to shift. Years ago we started introducing federated search to enterprise libraries – the specialists in search for their organizations – to bring together collections from across an organization into a common electronic library interface. But as search engines became more popular in enterprises as the “go-to” starting points for finding content in a wider variety of enterprise repositories all of a sudden search engines began to trigger a turf battle with the major player in enterprise content integration.

It’s all about desktop and server room dominance: whose platform will be on top as the one into which everyone else’s content and services integrate? It used to be that vendors such as Oracle and SAP were the key content repository builders for enterprises through applications built around the capabilities of their platforms. While search engines from FAST/Microsoft, Autonomy, Google and others have gained a lot of popularity as one-stop shopping for search needs, there’s a comprehensive list of sources and interfaces that enterprises want to see integrated into search services.

It’s not just a matter of breadth of sources, either: many tricky issues such as database and network security, being able to assemble the most relevant content and being able to build a wide variety of outputs rapidly and cost-effectively all are major factors in getting a federated search environment working properly. There’s a long list of items that your customers will want checked off before they’ll take your solution seriously.

In theory this should play into the hands of platforms like SAP and Oracle – and in fact both have been moving to develop federated search applications for their current platforms. But when they say “yes” to being able to do federated search, just how broad is that answer? Does it include being able to manage security and access issues on the widest array of enterprise and Web databases possible? Does it mean being able to traverse any kind of network configuration to bring together and disseminate federated search results – including even the latest mobile platforms and legacy network protocols? Can they assemble not just raw search results from each source but also just the right content that makes sense in a given context?

These are hard questions for any content platform vendor to answer – unless they happen to be one that uses content integration solutions from MuseGlobal. With a decade of experience in developing successful solutions using federated search Muse has integrated more kinds of search engines, feeds and databases with more kinds of configurations for more kinds of content platforms than any one else. Muse federated search solutions are designed for optimal maintenance with a minimum of administration and hassle-free security and network management for the widest possible range of configurations.

Best of all, you can decide just how to integrate Muse’s capabilities around your platform – as a “back end” solution that can feed in the results of federated searches into your own platform or as a framework that can enable your platform to provide well-organized federated search results from both your own platform and other platforms combined into your own custom front-end solutions. Either way your clients will see it as your solution all the way – and keep you in the driver’s seat as your clients choose who is best at federating whom.

So whether you’re using Oracle, SAP, FAST, Microsoft Sharepoint Server, Google, Vignette, EMC/Documentum or another content platform to provide federated search solutions there’s one partner that you can call on that’s been there, done that and got just about every t-shirt there is to wear in content integration. It your time to spend trying to come up with a winning solution for federated search – why not spend it signing up more customers who will keep you on top? We’re glad to help you do it, too.

Saleforce.com's Salesforce Content Platform is Just the Beginning for Sales-Friendly Content Federation

It's interesting to look at the announcement of Salesforce.com's new Salesforce Content service and to see how they are becoming an ever-stronger player in managing content for the enterprise. Part search engine, part social tagging tool, part document management, part distribution service, Salesforce Content makes it easy for sales teams and marketing departments to get sales collateral and other key materials into the right hands at the right time easily.

Looking beyond the relatively limited scope of content in this product introduction, though, it's clear to me that SFDC is defining an interesting niche between traditional content management services for enterprise portals and document management services. In other words, why make your users wrestle with getting content into and out of repositories that have little to do with one's job focus when you can manage it in a collaborative, workflow-oriented workspace that their eyes are glued to every day?

This move by Salesforce.com places pressure on more traditional repository vendors to provide their content in workflow-oriented environments more easily and quickly. That's where Muse can come in, obviously: why hassle getting enterprise content from multiple sources into an environment like Salesforce.com when you can have The Content Machine from MuseGlobal take care of those interfaces for you? Workflow platforms like Salesforce.com are becoming the front end for many types of professionals. You can't afford to have them leave your own content platform behind as enterprise content migrates into these environments. Help your customers bring their own content along for the ride - and let us partner with you make it easy for them to do it.

Congratulations to Salesforce.com for another step forward in putting the most valuable content that sales and marketing professionals need to succeed in the right place at the right time. It's Muse-ic to our ears. Sorry, couldn't resist...

Content Federation and Muse: Finally the World Gets It

Welcome to MUSEings, our new weblog on which I’ll be sharing my views every week or so on what’s happening in the content industry and with MuseGlobal products and services. To everyone who may be coming to our site for the first time, welcome to the leader in federated content integration services. Muse has been developing our federation and content integration capabilities since 1998 and now finds itself in the enviable position of having become masters of a way of delivering content that many publishers and enterprises are just beginning to look at in a new light. To those of you who know us from “back when,” guess what? Federation is now the hot thing! And it’s for a very good reason.

When Muse was focused mostly on providing federated search results from multiple search engines federation was something that was interesting mostly to people in libraries and a few publishing houses where there were a lot of specialized databases that needed to be pulled together into a common search results page. Muse technology enables that process by querying multiple content sources that can be assembled in a common format “on the fly.” Instead of having to build one enormous normalized search database from multiple sources Muse gives you what’s available right now from each source in its freshest form in a common, relevant format.

We still do that, to be sure, but since those earlier days Web technologies have matured a great deal and have changed the way in which people pull together content for viewing and analysis. With Web mining tools, XML site feeds for blogs and wikis, widgets and enterprise data solutions galore there are more than just search engines that need to be federated into content applications. Muse’s integration technology makes it easy to pull all of these and any other kind of content source together into a common format that can be consumed as a feed by your publishing platform or used to build any kind of Web page or other display filled with the freshest content available.

And federation has become just that – a process that enables all sorts of new content applications to be developed quickly using content that’s been pulled together on the fly by using services like Muse content integration technology. Search engines still help to deliver a lot of this content inside Muse’s technology but now the search engines are like specialized feeds that queue up raw content on an on-demand basis for federation and integration by Muse.

Management dashboards, competitive intelligence portals, ecommerce applications, collaboration platforms, enterprise search engines – all of these and many more can benefit from the federation approach. Instead of waiting for development teams to get information integrated into an existing database or having to look it up on multiple services you can move from wanting to get content to having it at your fingertips in your most important content applications rapidly and very cost-effectively.

Speaking of collaboration and enterprise search, hopefully you know that Muse already provides content federation for people using or considering Microsoft Office SharePoint Server and Microsoft’s newly acquired FAST search engine platform. More on that in a later post on MUSEings.

I hope that this was a fun read for you, I’ll be keeping these entries light-hearted, informative and as insightful as I can manage, so please stay tuned for more from MUSEings. Next week: a few thoughts about what I got out of the Software and Information Industry Association’s Information Industry Summit. Have a great week!