ADLRR2010: Panel: Vendors

Gary Sikes, Giunti Labs

Publishers are restricted from the repository, can't see what they're content is getting there. ADL can have one repository for publishers outside the firewall, and one to publish into within the firewall.
More middleware use in repositories, web services and some API
User-based tagging (folksonomies) and ratings
Corporate education: providing access to digital markets, making content commercially reusable (resell)
Collaborationware and workflow tools, e.g. version comparison, shared workspaces
Workflows including project management roles and reviewing
Content access reporting: who is viewing, what versions are being viewed
Varying interface to repository by role
Challenges: security (publishers outside firewall, users within the firewall). Defining role-based interface. Interoperability. One-Stop Shops being asked for by client. For new implementations: how metadata deals with legacy data.
Standards also important for future-proofing content



John Alonso, OutStart

They provide tools, not knowledge.
Confusion from vendors: what counts as a repository? Google isn't one (referatory/repository confusion)
If we build it, they will not come; they will only come if it is important to them and has value. if too much cost and no return on getting to the content, they will go elsewhere
the clients are not telling him they want their stuff in the repository exposed and searchable
some great successes within the confines of the firewalls --- macdonald's corporate info is exposed to macdonald's local franchises well, motivated by cost efficiency and not mandates
We welcome standards—that people want to use: they lower the cost of entry. Vendors should not be driving the definitions of standards, they just want the business requirements. The buyers don't understand the standards themselves, they just treat them as checkboxes: buyers should articulate the business value of why they are requiring the standard in the first place: there is no business value to implementing the standard, so it never gets verified—or used.
Repositories vs registries: ppl use the terms interchangeably, hence the confusion. Trend is to abstract search, so that back end repositories can be swapped out. But I shouldn't have to write 10 different custom plugins to do so!



Ben Graff, K12 Inc.

Big problem space, many ways of both defining and slicing the problems
It's expensive to do this right, even if you do agree on the problem space: content design, rights management, content formatting & chunking, metadata creation, distribution strategy
The Return On Investment isn't always immediate
Teachers & Profs needs: Applicability (content at right size for right context), Discoverability (find it quickly), Utility (I can make it work in my environment: teachers are pragmatists), Community (peer recommendations, feeding into peers), Satisfaction (best available), Quality (proven, authoritative, innovative)
Students needs: Relevance (interesting & engaging), Applicability (need help finding right thing right now -- though I may not admit it, and I don't know what I don't know: I'm a novice)
Everyone needs: Simplicity (if it's not easy, I'll walk)

Support & respect content wherever it comes from: better exposure of content, greater availability helps society
Improve discovery through author-supplied metadata, ratings, and patterns of efficacy across an ecosystem of use—what we know by analysing usage.
Demonstrate and educate about ROI at multiple levels: government, business, educator, student
Not everyone will need to, want to, or be able to play along for years to come: keep breaking down barriers
Please have *a* standard, not a different standard for each client! content creation and publishing both become bad experiences: each standard becomes its own requirement set


Eric Shepherd, Questionmark

Author once, schedule once, single results set from a student, deliver anywhere, distributed authoring, management of multilingual translations; blended delivery—paper, secure browsers, regular browsers, transformation on the fly: autosense the target platform for delivery. Often embed Questionmark assessment in portals, blogs, wiki, Facebook.
Need to defer to accessibility experts to see if got accessibility right.
Analytics, once data anonymised, to establish quality and reliability of the software
*a* standard is utopian: different standards are targeted at different problems
Driver should not be the standard but the business need; but a vendor cannot survive without standards