In the case of a doctor performing emergency surgery, getting the correct information makes all the difference in the world. Mark Logic's Server technology helps publishers like Elsevier and Wolters Kluwer deliver critical information to healthcare professionals. These professional can execute complex, fine-grained queries within seconds from deep within digital content repositories. "The ability to fine-grain search is critical. Physicians need to get the answer; they don't need to get the link to what might be the answer," states David Kellogg, president and CEO of Mark Logic, an XML content server provider.

High Touch-High Value
"One of the strongest aspects to personalization is customer retention management. Its net effect is generating perceived value in someone's head," Gauranaccia of RedDot says, adding, "When you generate value, you generate goodwill and customer retention is all about goodwill." He cites banks as masters in creating advanced personalization tools to capture customers; endearing them to online banking for instance. "The banks are geniuses with their entanglement strategies, making switching costs high to the consumer." RedDot offers personalization and integration platforms specifically geared for the mid-market although a host of household names like FedEx and Starbucks run its systems. As Gauranaccia emphasizes, making Web platforms agnostic in nature, highly useable with an applications-centered approach, as opposed to a content-centered approach, is a smart way to go on the road of creating customized content and accessing information quickly.

German car parts maker Wabasto, which uses RedDot's LiveServer application to push out information to employees, suppliers, and dealers, has a relatively sophisticated website which personalizes the experience for the user. "Wabasto started with employees logging onto the system and now the same tools are redirected and repurposed toward other audiences to get their jobs done," Gauranaccia says. This means suppliers downstream can see orders to date and a view into the materials resource planning pipeline. "Many portals stop here and fail to provide a rich set of context in relation to the application. In this case, you have to allow the OEM buyer to see what's going on in the pipeline and call up documents relevant to what they're trying to do," he says.

Similarly, consider the case of Sloan Valve. The U.S.-based plumbing valve maker is endearing itself toward key audiences like architects and builders as well as plumbers who all access the same website, easily getting information they need via drop-down menus and other at-a-glance navigational tools to access spec sheets, installation instructions, and other critical information. RedDot's Guaranaccia says Sloan's plan is to create even more personalized content for its distributors which can repurpose content on Sloan's site toward their own needs.

Dynamic Content Gives Way to Dynamic Publishing
"Dynamic content, which means it's created on the fly, is the same as personalized content but it's more than just personalization on the Web," explains Ann Rockley, president of the Rockley Group, an ECM consultancy. "It's being able to rapidly customize content to share into a variety of channels which can make something so much more powerful and effective. For instance, you can do a marketing campaign generated from information based on a user's profile," she says. Whatever you call it-customized, personalized, or dynamic- it's content that helps users pinpoint information by providing them with the right content at the right time and in the right format. "Dynamic content minimizes the amount of searching and relevance testing users must do to find the information they need," Rockley explains. She notes metadata capabilities are absolutely required in a content management system in order to identify content appropriate for the user. Why? Because standard search mechanisms don't allow users to find what they need unless they have the exact search terminology. "So a user might not know that the content they do find is relevant to their query. It can be a time-consuming process and users may incorrectly determine that the information is appropriate to their needs," Rockley says.

Rockley suggests personalized content is the current Big Thing. "Personalization has become more popular in the last three to five years where you have a lot of B2B and consumer websites that offer various forms. Certainly, personalization is a lot easier than publishing to the Web with less requirements," she says. Rockley points to the localized and personalized searches by major players such as Google, MSN, Yahoo, Mapquest, Metacarta, and FastSearch as spurring developments in personalized content.

Taking a cue from localized, personalized searches, dynamic publishing promises to be the Next Big Thing. "With Google and other search engine companies constantly investing in new technology to deliver specific, personalized information to consumers or B2B users, publishers are looking at how they can deliver exactly the information that their users need and are interested in," says Jeff Catt, vice president of sales and marketing for ThomasTech Solutions, a software and systems integrator.

Catt says in addition to search engines, new technologies like RSS (Really Simply Syndication or Rich Site Summary) increasingly give consumers the ability to create personalized digital news channels to keep track of exactly the information they need. "In this changing landscape of news and information, publishers are hard at work developing content management systems to deliver their data via multiple platforms and distribution methods," Catt says.

High-tech Publishing
Indeed, Google has set the bar high in search and its outgrowth of customization. "People want things on company intranets to be as good or better than Google," says Max Schireson, vice president of service and alliances at Mark Logic. Too, a range of software applications supported by service-oriented architecture (as opposed to transaction-oriented) brings customized delivery of content and dynamic publishing to new heights.

While Mark Logic Service database platform technology enables users to rapidly build content-centric applications using information locked inside documents from a range of formats such as Microsoft Word, PDF, HTML, SGML, and XML, it's easy to understand why Mark Logic favors XML technology for its ability to keep content neutral. Its Mark Logic Server application is being used by a new custom or dynamic publishing service offered by SafariU, a venture with O'Reilly Media and The Pearson Technology Group, offering academia and corporate trainers a fast, affordable alternative to expensive print textbooks or print-on-demand services.

Kellogg of Mark Logic explains a professor can sit down at the SafariU website and literally create their own "textbook," selecting their own articles, chapters, or other excerpts from a range of book publishers (primarily in computer sciences and technology, including Prentice-Hall) and various articles from O'Reilly's databases. "A table of contents and index is automatically generated. It's all put into a PDF and mailed to the printer. The printer prints it out and ships it to the campus bookstore where it is sold for around $125 each," Kellogg says, noting the process is remarkable in speed and ability to cull from a broad range of sources. An ISBN is even assigned to the book. [Note: See related sidebar on dynamic publishing.] Mobius Management Systems, an ECM software provider, helps big business sift through massive amounts of documents in various formats to serve up customized content. Acquisitions by Mobius in the last few years have allowed it become increasingly more integrated in its offerings, which now include Web publishing and workflow applications.

As David Winkler, vice president of product marketing at Mobius says a "repository independent" approach is best taken particularly for large companies, which on average maintain more than 15 different data repository areas residing in old legacy systems, enterprise applications, or other areas. Winkler says industry estimates suggest that unstructured content, that is, non-database content, represents about 75% of all enterprise information.

Winkler says consumer-based companies, such as financial and insurance firms, are really good at basing customization platforms on explicit personalization and implicit personalization. Explicit personalization uses strictly-defined parameters of information, such as in the case of filling out an insurance form online, in order to serve information back to the user. On the other hand, implicit personalization, what's known as click stream analysis, is highly relevant to the e-commerce side of business. Here, background intelligence learns users behavior to render customized content on the fly, often in the form of similar products or subject areas. One example of a great use of implicit personalization, Winkler says, is seen in bookseller Amazon.com's customized messages to frequent visitors of its site based on their past searches and orders.

Mobius takes the approach that a comprehensive or total content management system-based on the premise of enterprises having content stored in multiple, disparate repositories across any number of software platforms-needs to effectively manage application output, presentations, documents, database extracts, email, and a host of other electronic forms. "Companies are now realizing that they must manage content as a strategic asset and develop an integrated content infrastructure. Personalized content is part of that," Winkler says. So to the aim of pulling from all enterprise content, companies such as Fidelity and Bank of America rely on Mobius' products, such as ViewDirect Continuity for Web publishing or its ViewDirectTotal Content Integrator for searches across data repositories. "In many cases, this relevant content can be tailored to the user based on what's happening in the background when the business rules are formulated on the fly depending on the information you are pulling on frequently," Winkler says.

Getting Set Up
In Winkler's opinion, the world of customized content and ECM is definitely moving toward service-oriented architecture, which incorporates XML by its nature. "An evolution in the marketplace is going to a level above that, toward service oriented architecture which employs open standards to allow for interoperability of information, that is, data exchange," he says.

Winkler says this open-style architecture renders the capability to slice and dice information to create a highly personalized Web experience. For example, a large insurance company can easily offer their agents individual portals for their own marketing efforts and customer access. "Or, in vision care, an optometrist can make a personalized Web experience for their customers leverage content from various eyewear makers, pulling information from product catalogs in XML," he says.

Perhaps it's that ability to create documents and render information on the fly that is so phenomenal about customized content today. "Ten different users need to get the same set of documents but will access the documents 10 different ways through various queries," Theresa Kollath, director of product management for content management at ASG, a Naples, Fla.-based enterprise software provider. Kollath notes it's the "electronic redaction" capabilities of customization tools which allow users to erase certain parts of documents and mark them up. "So in the healthcare setting for example, this is an amazing technology where there's the responsibility to block out patient names or eliminate personal information in some situations," she says. Kollath gives the example of the University of Wisconsin which runs ASG's recently acquired Cypress content management software. "Internal users receive detailed reports, such as for HR, payroll, etc. Collaboration and customization is allowed for," she says.

By the same token, external users to the University of Wisconsin portal can render documents or the records they need on the fly, Kollath says. "The students log into the student portal and can retrieve a copy of their report card, get their transcripts, all with their student account number," she says, noting the enterprise application is PeopleSoft which uses the ASG (Cypress) application to assemble the information. Alana Dzwonkowski, solutions support engineer at ASG, notes sophisticated software can render highly personalized content among the maze of enterprise documents that corporate employees are bombarded with daily. "Using a list of attributes about documents and based on user preferences, the user can simply right click and acknowledge things that are most relevant to them. As soon as it's generated from the application, they immediately get a copy of relevant documents," she says. Or, the system can created hyperlinks that can be accessed at any time.

Rockley echoes ASG's point about collaboration and customization being enabled by XML. "In the last couple of years, XML has made personalization and dynamic content accessible, allowing for collaboration," she says, noting that dynamic content performance can be improved by use of an XML-native content management system. In her book, Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy (New Riders Publishing, 2002), Rockley says that a good content management system needs to match content user requirements with the appropriate content in the repository. She cites the following essential steps to support dynamic content:

• Identify user needs by conducting thorough audience analysis and developing user personas.
   

• Design metadata and user profiles. Requirements of the content are defined in the user profile. The metadata further ensures that content is retrieved appropriately.
   

• Identify dynamic elements in models. Dynamic content relies on detailed information models to ensure the correct content is assembled in correct order and context.
   

• Define business rules for the assembly of the dynamic content. Rules determine what content is to be displayed and under what circumstances.

In today's business environment, it's no understatement that a revolving door of CIO and other executives can render an enterprise with a quilted patchwork of applications. The beauty of a comprehensive content management systems then, Kollath of ASG says, is to allow enterprises to literally "turn off a legacy system or an enterprise resource planning system and yet still have all the information you need." She adds, "The true value of organizations is their intellectual property, which could be in documents." However, there's always a downside to electronic utopia. "If you lose that, it can be catastrophic. That's a constant in this really scary world of information overload." Winkler of Mobius concludes, "Regardless of where the information sits, you should be able to serve the information to end users. The challenge of software vendors is they have to get to this information regardless of where it resides."

Marcia Jedd is president of MJ & Associates (www.marciajedd.com), a marketing communications and research consultancy in Minneapolis.

Personalized Best: Expert Tips on Designing and Delivering Customized Content
Whether you are an early adopter in providing personalized content or new to the game, consider these tips from experts:

• Remember: content is different from data. Plan for content being irregular. Don't build too rigid an infrastructure. Employ testing and short development cycles to see what works.
   

• Custom publishing requires a content-neutral and presentation- neutral format. Hence, XML works well.
   

• Make sure data output strategies are incorporated into the original project plan.
   

• Understanding your end users and customers is critical so take an "outside in" view. Bring in the voice of the customer early on in order to make software selections which yield the most breadth.
   

• Understanding end user requirements is essential. Don't let technology dictate what you can and can't do. Technology should be implemented to support user needs and user requirements.

• Don't skimp on developing the content architecture because the quality of your structure, all the rules around it, will determine the quality of the outcome.
   

• Act on the information you collect to show immediate value to the user. For example, if a user provides their zip code, tell them what's going on in their area.

- Marcia Jedd

Mighty Dynamic Publishing Market
Improved accuracy. Greater consistency. More meat and less fat. These are just a few benefits of dynamic publishing. Enterprises that adopt dynamic publishing can improve how they communicate by efficiently producing essential, customized business documents and publications to address very specific audiences. As seen in the SafariU example (see main article), the mushrooming field of dynamic publishing includes academia, training-development, and a range of other uses applicable to the business world.

Dynamic or customized publishing is a small but fast-growing component of personalized content says Sue Feldman, research vice president of content technologies at IDC, a technology consultancy. "Dynamic enterprise publishing solutions generate significant volumes of customized documents with appealing layouts on demand by applying a structured document description and paginated presentation model to content components and back-end data," Feldman explains. She says the major vendors in this category are Adobe, StreamServe, and Arbortext.

Feldman notes the dynamic publishing market is closely allied with software used for active documents, authoring, and for output management. IDC estimated the dynamic publishing market at just under $250 million in 2005, with growth in the double digits each year to make for a market size of more than $1 billion by 2009.

Feldman says dynamic enterprise publishing can even incorporate a simple mail-merge, for example, in creating customized letters or postcards to highly personalized delivery of information. "Using embedded rules and logic, dynamic publishing becomes more interesting particularly inside the enterprise. People don't have to go between all the various applications to get the information they need," she says.