Web Development -- Evolution and Updates

Thursday, August 13, 2009

07/13/09 CMSWire The Latest News: Web CMS Evolution Sparks New Market Trends

Packt Launches Annual Open Source CMS Award

By Geoff Spick

Now in its fourth year, the Packt Awards (news, site) offer US$ 24,000 in prizes to the best in open source content management software. Will Drupal walk off with the gold again? Or will Joomla or DotNetNuke steal the crown?

Nobody Cares About Your Website

By Gerry McGovern

Your customers couldn't care less about your new look, your new design or whether your dog has just had kittens.

Parsing Gartner's 2009 Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management

By Irina Guseva

This year, Web content management (WCM) was promoted to the Magic Quadrant level in Gartner-land. Previously, only Enterprise CMS vendors were MQ-eligible. The firm says the MarketScope approach was no longer suited for "dynamic, evolutionary trends'" happening in the Web CMS space.

Gartner (news, site) hopes that the report will help those with a CMS short-list in hand to make the right decision. While it may not answer all the questions on your WCM mind, it's one way of looking at the market and the players.

Survey: 55% Experiencing SharePoint Infrastructure Pain

By Barb Mosher

In a recent IDG Research Survey of 108 CIO's, 82% indicated that they use SharePoint primarily for file sharing and document management. That falls in line with what we understand.

There is much more to SharePoint than file sharing, and CIOs know that -- 62% say that SharePoint is critical to their technology portfolio, and they want to use it for much more in the year ahead.

But implementing SharePoint properly in an organization is not easy -- 55% reported that SharePoint challenges are impacting their business. According to Ed Durst, portfolio manager of the Microsoft Solutions Group at Open Text, there are a number of challenges related to SharePoint implementations.

Wednesday, August 26, at 2pm ET (11am PT) you can join Ed to discuss the findings of the IDG survey and how you can better manage your SharePoint infrastructure.

You will learn how to:

Generate and manage SharePoint sites, eliminating information silos
Reduce the cost of SharePoint dedicated hardware
Realize your goals for using SharePoint as a leading content and document management system

With big uptakes expected for SharePoint in the areas of records management (40%), application development (35%) and business process management (63%) in the next 12 months, having a SharePoint infrastructure you can build on is critical.

New SharePoint Management Tool Targets Admin Frustrations

By Barb Mosher

Metalogix (news, site) has been in the news a lot lately. From offering a simple tool for restoring SharePoint item level content to a offering a free content archiving solution, they provide solutions to ease the SharePoint administrators life.

Now, they offer a new solution called the Universal SharePoint Manager v2007, designed to make day to day management of your SharePoint environment a little less stressful.

Updated Governance Portal Improves GRC Management

By Marisa Peacock

The Governance Portal, a software platform by Protiviti, has received an update. Version 3 offers enhancements to a GRC tool aimed at integrating proprietary information and expertise with a trusted framework for managing and mitigating the risks associated with compliance and regulatory issues.

From surveys and self-assessments to data collection and audit management, users can implement new features in the Governance Portal to help them manage enterprise and operational risks, optimize internal audit processes while monitoring compliance risks.

Improved User Experience for Document Management Solution docSTAR

By David Roe

New York-based docSTAR has just upgraded and released its v3ten document management solution, which the company says represents a significant upgrade to its platform.

Like the other eight upgrades and/ or releases to the other document management systems that have been covered here since the beginning of August alone, this one, the company says, will revolutionize the document management world.

The principal difference over their 3.9 version, which was released last October, appears to be a better user experience all round.

Drupal CMS Buzzr Snatches eCommerce Site Tipzu

By Geoff Spick

Buzzr acquires its fellow Drupal-based monetize-your-hobby-or-business service Tipzu to generate momentum for the currently-private alpha project.

We love playing join the dots in these stories. Tipzu was founded in 2007 by Chad Gracia, who launched the site on the back of his success with actortips.com. Tipzu, which went with the simple premise of "Start your own online business now" gets snapped up by Ed Sussman (of online media service Mansueto Digital fame) who is partnering with others to launch Buzzr with much the same concept.

As both are based on Drupal, tying the two services together won't be too much of a stretch. What will be of interest is how much better, easier to deploy or slicker Buzzr's drag and drop creation system will be over Tipzu. As a hosted system, Buzzr creates a visual design layer on top of Drupal so users don't have to know how to manipulate the code or worry about the technical side.

There's a rather old but insightful video that you can view, where creation is handled thanks to templates, widgets and a healthy dose of drag-and-drop. The comments to the video provide an interesting angle on the development. It is also easy to imagine how this could have come on in recent months.The interface and usability side are thanks to Karen McGrane of Bond Art & Science, a partner in the venture.

Ignoring the role reversal of the startup buying the established service, this has the potential to boost the popularity of Drupal even if end-users do not realize that they are utilizing it. Other developers have already expressed an interest in mimicking the overlay features for their own ends, so we could also see many clone services, or people taking this idea and running with it in new and cooler ways.

With a private beta planned but no word on an eventual release, keep your eyes open for Buzzr as a better way of building a personal or company site.

FeedRoom Feeds Captioning to Enterprise Video Platform

By David Roe

The announcement by The FeedRoom (news, site) that it has teamed up with 3Play Media is the most recent step by the provider of Web video and digital media solutions to broaden the appeal of its Enterprise Video Platform (EVP).

This new partnership will give The FeedRoom another edge by providing its EVP with the ability to produce high-quality video captions in compliance with Section 508 of the American Rehabilitation Act. This regulation obliges organizations, particularly in the public sector, to make information available to people with special needs or disabilities.

Digital Reef Adds Anacomp eDiscovery Services to Portfolio

By Marisa Peacock

Digital Reef (news, site), fresh of their announcement of a new CEO, has announced a new partnership with Anacomp.

A provider of litigation support and businesses process services and solutions, Anacomp has formed a technology alliance with Digital Reef in an effort to offer advanced document connection, selection, reduction and analysis, as well as early case assessment. Their services aim to reduce eDiscovery costs, as well as to accelerate litigation processes and mitigate risks.

FolderMaestro Adds File Locking to Busy SMB Doc Collab Space

By Chelsi Nakano

For those seeking new file sharing and collaboration solutions on this lovely Tuesday, FolderMaestro has a new offering. Boasting unbeatable prices as one of their advantages over competitors, FileMaestro presents File Check-Out, a relatively inexpensive product that makes it easier to collaborate when you're out of the office and on your laptop. They also seem to think they are taking on Microsoft SharePoint. How interesting.

Kentico Offers Free Connector for SharePoint

By Barb Mosher

Ah, we knew it wouldn't be long until we heard about another new SharePoint connector. This latest one comes from Kentico (news, site) and is called the Kentico CMS Connector for SharePoint. What's different about this one? It's free.

Day Gets a New Captain in the Board of Directors Cockpit

By Irina Guseva

It was back in April of this year, when Day Software (news, site) announced the nominations of Barry Bycoff and David Arnott to the Board of Directors. Both were elected in May at Day's Annual Shareholder meeting in Basel, Switzerland.

Today, board member Barry Bycoff was elected the Board's Chairman, replacing Michael Moppert, the founder of Day.

Moppert assumed the Chairman role in May 2008, after he handed off his Day CEO reigns to a former Interwoven exec Erik Hansen. Moppert is said to remain an active member of Day's Board.

Bycoff took over the steering wheel on a good day, shortly after Day's announcement of positive 1H 2009 financial results.

"I am pleased to be working with Day's CEO Erik Hansen and the remainder of the Board to help Day capitalize on this opportunity and build on its recent success," said Bycoff.

Hansen's initial plan to make Day more appealing seems to be working out so far. Upon accepting the CEO role, he wanted to focus on growing Day's strongest points: the content infrastructure business and the core content management product.

Since then, we've seen CRX new releases and updates, as well as new versions of Web CMS CQ5 and CQ5.2, hit the streets of the content management world.

Packaging CMS and CRM Features for Small Businesses

By Geoff Spick

Hidden Equity (site) is firmly aiming its combined CMS and CRM modules in the product called EquiWeb at the smaller-scale organization.

Twitter Killed the Journalism Star? Nah

By Chelsi Nakano

Friday is usually conducive to a more relaxed state of mind, so we hope as you're reading this you're at ease, enjoying casual wear or some other end-of-the-week perk. Why? Because we're going to talk about Twitter.

TWITTER! The name alone is enough to make many of you twitch, start sucking your thumbs, or fall to the floor in the fetal position and pray that we were just kidding when we said TWITTER! WE'RE GOING TO TALK ABOUT TWITTER! And that's precisely why we have to have this discussion. For many, Twitter is like an uncontrollable giant, taking over things we never gave it permission to take over. Like our minds. Or journalism.

Webtrends Acquires Widemile to Boost Web Analytics Features

By Geoff Spick

Webtrends (news, site) took over Widemile (site) to bolster its analytics systems by analyzing multiple statistics simultaneously. This allows for more thorough and faster analysis and optimization of a website's performance.

MODx Evolution 1.0 Finally Sees Light

By David Roe

It's been a long time coming, but after all the talk over the past few months the latest version of MODx 1.0 (news, site), or at least the latest version of MODx Evolution 1.0, open source web content management system, is here.

Don't confuse it with MODx Revolution, which according to the MODx blog, will be released later this year. This week's release is the final version of Evolution 1.0, which was unveiled in mid-June as a Release Candidate (RC), and which finally updates the non-English language files that are the principal difference between this version and the RC.

Report: ECM Could Save You Billions

By Chelsi Nakano

A report from TowerGroup titled "Beyond the Paper Scourge: Unleashing the Business Value of Electronic Content Management" was recently released on MarketResearch.com. The report covers topics such as: How ECM Works, Unleashing the Business Value of ECM, Innovation in ECM, Supporting Technologies for ECM, and Outlook for ECM Vendors.

Some of the claims include:

ECM enhances business value by improving operational efficiency, customer experience, compliance, and risk management.
ECM spans diverse technology categories that fit together strategically under an umbrella of business process transformation.
Many FSIs use some form of ECM solutions, but these solutions often do not connect with other supporting technologies and fall short of the mark in delivering full business value.
Innovation in ECM lies in preserving information in its original digital form and in its ability to move information through a process, be stored, and be accessed digitally.

Of course, "save" is the key word here. It means you have to be pulling in quite a bit of dough in the first place. It also doesn't change the amount you have to shell out for upfront licensing investment and implementation. Not to rain on your parade or anything--we're just sayin'.

If you're making enough money to save money, open those wallets right up and fork over the US$ 1,750.00 it costs to read the report here. Otherwise, you can stay in the ECM loop with us free of charge here.

U.K. Says Version One Does Business Software Right

By Chelsi Nakano

The candidates for U.K.'s Business Software Satisfaction Awards of 2009 have been announced. On the list for the third time running is Poynton-based Version One (news, site) for their suite of document management and imaging products. Version One is one of four finalists in the Paperless Office Software category, and the winner will be announced at an awards ceremony on 8 October 2009 at The Royal Courts of Justice in London.

Julian Buck, Version One's General Manager, says, "Reaching the final of these respected awards for the third consecutive year is a great accomplishment and we are delighted that end-users continue to endorse the quality of our software and services."

The Business Software Satisfaction Awards acknowledge high standards from U.K. business software providers. Finalists were reportedly selected based on the votes of over 8,100 end users, making this particular survey one of the largest individual pieces of business software research in the U.K.

For more information, including details on how you can attend the ceremony, head on over this way.

The Rise of Information Governance

By Marisa Peacock

In the Terminator series, the evil computer network Skynet leads the rise of machines in an effort to destroy humanity. Hopefully things won't go that far in a new report called The Rise of Information Governance, which tackles the often complex, confusing and confounding issues of information management and all that it encompasses.

The report, written by the 451 Group, attempts to define information governance, as well as examine the market dynamics and drivers, adoption trends and profiles of 15 vendors working towards information governance zen.

KYOcapture 5.0 Enhances Document Capture Workflow Capabilities

By David Roe

Only six weeks after receiving one of BERTL's Best Awards 2009 for its KYOcapture document management product, Kyocera Mita America has announced the upgrade to version 5.0.

KYOcapture comes in two versions, the use of which will depend on the size of the users business. KYOCapture Express is a simplified document capture workflow solution designed for small to medium sized business, while KYOcapture Workflow a comprehensive document capture workflow solution for enterprises.

KYOcapture is said to be scalabe, flexibile and capable of streamlining document capture and workflow activities through a new, customizable interface.

Amongst the other new features are:

Improved bi-directional search functionality
SSL encryption and user authentication
Easy connectivity with other DMS
Long-term after sales contracts

The new version works in conjunction with Kyocera's black and white, and color MFPs. It should also allow users ingest just about any document you can think of and direct it into virtually any document management system.

But then don't they all do that? What's more, in this case, there is no pricing available that might push the perspective buyer in their direction, rather than in the direction of one their gazillion competitors.

If we sound less than enthusiastic about it, its probably because Kyocera is not really selling itself very well. It's not that we don't believe there might be something about v5.0 that's special, they are just not saying what it is. And saying you have won a 2009 BERTL's Best Award is not enough to sell it. To give the product a try, download a trial version of KYOcapture 5.0 here.

eFileCabinet Engages Zumasys to Resell Document Management

By Chelsi Nakano

This particular document management showed up on our radar earlier this year when version 4.0 was released.

eFileCabinet does the typical document management dance by providing online backup services, and assisting with the capture, management and protection of business-critical documents and data. Now however, they're cutting a rug with an infrastructure solutions company called Zumasys.

The pair announced that their new reseller partnership will allow Zumasys to offer their customer base of 2,000+ the eFileCabinet software. On the flip side, Zumasys will provide eFileCabinet clients with infrastructure solutions that solve common business challenges.

"We're pleased to welcome Zumasys to the eFileCabinet partner network," said Matt Peterson, president and CEO of eFileCabinet. "Our relationship with Zumasys has made it that much easier for businesses looking for reliable document management, to obtain their technology from two companies they know and trust."

For more info, Zumasys encourages you to check out their annual Customer Solutions Summit, Zoomapalooza, where they will be debuting their partner relationship and product suite.

Web Publishing Roll-Up: Online Advertisers Pursued, Stockbrokers Flashed by Technology

By Marisa Peacock

Web publishing roll-up tackles the crazy ups and downs of online advertising and the misunderstood nature of innovative technologies.

New BizCom CMS Release Focuses on Compliance, SEO, Non-Techiness

By Geoff Spick

An "Internet solutions company" and a newish player on the Web CMS and Simple CMS markets, BizCom (site) released a new v2.5 version of its modular content management system.

Some updates in this release are around compliance, SEO and form-building tools -- all with a strong emphasis on non-technical users.

Optimizing Your Website for Microsoft Bing

By Brandon Hess

As many a blog entry will reiterate, as of late, there's been a good amount of buzz around the launch of Microsoft's new Bing search engine.

Moreover, there's been a decent amount of speculation on what the growing popularity of Bing -- along with their recent agreement with Yahoo -- will mean in regards to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) practices. As with any buzz in the online world, many marketing blogs, including Forrester, began to postulate what effect Bing will have on SEO, even before it officially launched.

Industry Event Planner (06-Aug-2009)

By Chelsi Nakano

Ah yes, this is indeed a glorious era for learning and networking. There are conferences and webinars coming out our ears, wifi spots a-plenty, 3G data services galore and if you're lucky, sponsored drinks at the bar.

So, what say you to some mingling? If you'd like to get out and partake in a solid (or virtual) handshake or two, our weekly events list is designed to help. Every Tuesday (or sometimes Thursday) we plug as many relevant events as we can find into the big list and publish it, just for you.

Are we missing something? Don't hesitate to add your event to our events calendar (view all events). And if you've got feedback on the coming events -- good or bad -- do share it in the comments below.

August Events

August 6 (London): Umbraco Meetup

A day of Umbraco fun, networking, socialising - we've got swag to give away including umbraco.tv subscriptions!

August 8-9 (Los Angeles): Drupal Camp

DrupalCampLA is the annual FREE conference organized by LA Drupal to unite and improve the Drupal Development Community in Los Angeles and the Greater Southern California Area.

August 10-14 (New York): Intensive Alfresco Training

If you are about to start an Alfresco development project, Alfresco are offering an accelerated option to get you up to speed as quickly as possible to develop with Alfresco. This intensive course is for new developers on Alfresco.

August 11-14 (San Jose): Search Engine Strategies

Each year, marketers, corporate decision makers, webmasters and search engine marketers (SEMs), including pay per click (PPC) advertisers and search engine optimization (SEO) professionals gather here to attend SES San Jose. Approximately 6,000 search and digital enthusiasts are expected in 2009. Your customers, colleagues and competition will be in attendance -- will you?

August 12-13 (San Francisco): Open Source World

LinuxWorld Conference & Expo® is expanding to become OpenSource World^(TM) and is co-locating with Next Generation Data Center^(TM) and CloudWorld^(TM) to offer an end-to-end view of enterprise technology within the data center.

August 12-13 (San Francisco): Cloud World

CloudWorld will bring together the users of Web-centric software, infrastructure and services designed to drive acceptance and deployment of cloud computing in the data center.

August 17 (Reno): Joomla Beginner Training

Learn all about Joomla 1.5 and begin managing your website like a pro. You'll learn how to build a Joomla website, from content organization, optimization, working with extensions and basic web marketing.

August 24 (New Orleans): Joomla Beginner Training

August 28-29 (Ukraine): Drupal Camp Kyiv

The largest conference for Drupal developers in Eastern Europe - DrupalCamp Kyiv

DrupalCamp Kyiv is a two day period of close contact between the Drupal developers from Ukraine, Russia and Belarus. This year the event will gather around 200 specialists and enthusiasts for communicating, experience and ideas exchange.

September Events

September 1 (Paris): DrupalCon

Building on the success of previous DrupalCons we have included all the core features you'd expect, high quality sessions and keynotes from Drupal leaders. Plus, for the first time, we are introducing a Business day and a Drupal Job fair to further increase your networking opportunies.

September 9-10 (San Francisco): Aberdeen's CMO Summit

Aberdeen's CMO Summit 2009: Best-in-Class Marketing Insights for Enhancing Customer Relationships

September 9-11 (San Francisco): X Change Web Analytics Conference

X Change is the premier conference for professionals in web analytics. At X Change we bring together a select group of the best minds in web measurement in a world-class setting for two days of in-depth conversation in a unique peer to peer format.

September 10-11 (Switzerland): Magnolia CMS Conference

This technical conference brings together Magnolia users, developers and administrators in one place. Through expert instruction, hands-on tutorials and case studies, attendees will gain the knowledge they need to rapidly build simple open source content management solutions with Magnolia CMS.

September 14-15 (San Francisco): TechCrunch 50

Last year, we hosted 250 start-ups and early-stage companies pitching to nearly 2,000 attendees, including 200 corporate buyers, VCs and angels and more than 150 members of the press.

We're proud of our irreverent history, and we're back for v3.0.

September 15-16 (Toronto): IDEA Conference

IDEA2009 brings together the world's foremost thinkers and practitioners: sharing the big ideas that inspire, along with practical solutions for the ways people's lives and systems are converging to affect society.

September 19 (Atlanta): Drupal Camp

Drupalcamp Atlanta is an attendee driven, completely volunteer initiative modeled after the open, participatory nature of barcamps. The event is catered towards those who have a like-minded interest in Drupal or simply want to find out more about Drupal in general.

September 24-25 (Huntsville): Collaborate Conference

The Collaborate Conference affords clients, VARs, and Partners an opportunity to explore best practices and see all the newest features and functionality of CNG's solution first hand.

September 26-27 (Sheffield): CMS Made Simple Geek Moot

The developers of CMS Made Simple have finalized plans for the yearly developer conference. However, there is one major change... we're inviting you to join us.

On 26-27 September, CMSMS will host the first public Geek Moot event at The Showroom in Sheffield, UK. There will be plenty of presentations by the devs and others, events, networking and just general geeking out. There are plans for evening events in the works and they will be announced soon.

September 28-29 (Atlanta): Hannon Hill Cascade Server User Conference

Last year's Cascade Server User's Conference was a huge success, and we're already working on making this year's even better. We'll be offering more user-driven sessions, more hands-on functionality-related demos, more basic-user intro sessions, and more case studies. You'll have the opportunity to learn more about Cascade, interact directly with the Hannon Hill team, and learn from and share your experiences with other users

September 30 - October 1 (Washington, DC): Rethinking Corporate Communications

In its second year, RETHINKING CORPORATE COMMUNICATIONS is an interactive and intimate conference for corporate, government and non-profit communicators. Learn from the most perceptive thought leaders the skills and best practices essential for business success this year.

October Events

October 1-2 (Paris): Open World Forum

The Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) movement is revolutionizing IT strategies and the software industry.

October 4-7 (Los Angeles): Adobe MAX

MAX 2009 is an extraordinary opportunity to learn new skills, explore emerging technologies, and connect with thousands of other industry leaders, Adobe products users, and Adobe teams.

October 8 (Utrecht): Hartman Event

The HartmanEVENT will teach you everything about strategies, methodologies, techniques and tools to get value from your information. On October 8, meet national and international gurus and peers who will combine theory and best practices in an educating and interactive style.

October 11-15 (San Francisco): Oracle Open World

Oracle OpenWorld 2009 is your opportunity to be a part of the conversation. And this year, based on your feedback, we're inviting customers, partners, and developers to play an even larger role in the show.

October 12-15 (Vienna): IFRA Expo

IFRA Expo is the international communication platform for the newspaper industry and its suppliers, covering the entire range of products and services for newspaper magazine production and bringing together the right people in the right atmosphere

October 12-13 (London): CDN Strategies Summit

This event will evaluate the rapidly changing CDN landscape, and using case studies examine market entry and expansion strategies, and options for technical architecture. The event is designed as a forum for executives in the CDN market, their suppliers and investors to educate their investment decisions.

October 15 (London): Global Information Management Conference

Hear the challenges our customers faced when supporting their global markets, how they addressed their multilingual content requirements by adopting a Global Information Management strategy, encompassing authoring, content management and translation.

October 15-18 (Orlando): 54th ARMA International Conference

This is the premier event in the records and information management field, drawing more than 4,000 professionals from around the world.

October 19-22 (Las Vegas): Microsoft SharePoint Conference

If you're an IT Professional, an IT Decision Maker, an Architect or a Developer you will find a deep set of technical content to give you a kick start for SharePoint 2010 and further your skills and knowledge with SharePoint Server 2007.

Want your event in this list? Submit it here.

SDL Reports Strong Interim 1H 2009 Financial Results

By David Roe

With all the aplomb of a wet Monday in November, SDL (news, site) (which refers to itself in a recent press release as the ominous sounding "The Group") announced quite casually this week that it has made lots of money in the first half of this year. Net interim cash of £32.9 (US$ 56) million to be precise.

Mollom Spam Control Add-On for IIS Environments

By Chelsi Nakano

Dries Buytaert is somewhat of a CMS superhero. Between founding the mega popular open source platform Drupal, co-founding the commercialized Drupal cure-all Acquia, and probably saving babies from burning buildings, Buytaert also found the time to launch a spam-killing service called Mollom.

Recently the service got some attention from a company called Zion Security. After tinkering in Mollom's open API, Zion announced a Microsoft IIS module utilizing the spam killer. The release has opportunity for other CMS and web application platforms written all over it.

5 Ways to Improve Content Re-use

By Robert Bredlau

How efficient is your content re-use?

Today's buzz word in the content management arena is "re-use." We must all re-use content to save time and money. We must repurpose what already exists to become more efficient and to re-publish that across multiple channels to ensure message consistency and effectiveness.

And yes, there are considerable advantages to re-using content in multiple locations on a website, on multiple sites, or even in different formats.

Nielsen: Ready or Not, Here Comes Enterprise 2.0

By Marisa Peacock

If we can trust Jakob Nielsen and his latest report studying social networking on intranets, then next year is going to be interesting.

Nielsen went straight to various companies -- from Sprint to IBM to Johnson & Johnson -- to see how they are dealing with the increasing expectation that Web 2.0 will drive Enterprise 2.0. The quick answer, they're not.

Brava Boosts Performance, Adds New Redaction Functionalities

By Marisa Peacock

Last November, Informative Graphics Corporation (news, site) released version 6.1 of its Brava software suite for multi-format document and image viewing, annotation and secure content delivery.

Since then, many enhancements have been in the works and have come together in their latest release. The recently updated Brava Family features new redaction functionalities, improved capabilities for integrators and resellers, as well as fidelity and performance updates.

Friday, July 31, 2009

Microsoft, Yahoo link up in challenge to Google

Wednesday, July 29, 2009

New York: Internet search firm Yahoo and software giant Microsoft announced Wednesday a 10-year deal in search and advertising operations in a bid to challenge the online dominance of Google.

Under the terms of the agreement, Yahoo will use Microsoft's new search engine on its sites and handle some advertising sales for Microsoft.

The two companies - Yahoo in Sunnyvale, California and Microsoft in Redmond, Washington - said in joint announcement that Microsoft would provide the underlying search technology on Yahoo's popular Web sites.

At the same time, the agreement would give a boost to Microsoft's revamped search engine, which has been renamed Bing, on which the company's hopes for challenging Google's dominance are pinned.

Since its launch a few weeks ago, Bing has been widely praised as a worthy competitor to Google.
"This agreement comes with boatloads of value for Yahoo, our users, and the industry, and I believe it establishes the foundation for a new era of internet innovation and development," Yahoo Chief Executive Officer Carol Bartz was quoted as saying by the Wall Street Journal.

Google controls some 65 percent of the US internet search market, with Yahoo ranked a distant second with 19.6 percent and Microsoft third with 8.4 percent. Combined, the latter two would hold a 28 percent share of the market.

Microsoft almost bought Yahoo for $47.5 billion last year, but the move was scuttled at the last minute by Yahoo co-founder and chief executive Jerry Yang, who later resigned following widespread criticism.

Microsoft has since refused to revive the buyout offer, but Yang's successor, Bartz, confirmed in May that the two companies were holding talks on search collaboration.

The 10-year agreement calls for Microsoft to license Yahoo's search technologies, with Yahoo initially receiving a whopping 88 percent of search-generated ad revenue.

"Through this agreement with Yahoo, we will create more innovation in search, better value for advertisers and real consumer choice in a market currently dominated by a single company," said Microsoft chief executive Steven A. Ballmer.

News Source : Business News, MSN India.

Anyways....will Microsoft and Yahoo! really succeed in their mission to over power the Giant Google ?

07/31/2009 Latest CMSWire Articles:Free Archiving, Free Data Recovery for SharePoint

Free Archiving and eDiscovery Tool for SharePoint

By Barb Mosher

It's kind of starting to feel like a race to see who can offer the best solution to the SharePoint community for free.

It started with AvePoint and their free item level restore solution, moved to Bamboo, who is giving away free software to SharePoint Community groups and it now lies with Metalogix (news, site).

Metalogix has decided to provide Metalogix Archiving Express for SharePoint for free, offering SharePoint users a better way to manage archived content and support eDiscovery processes.

Say Hello to Movable Type 4.3

By Chelsi Nakano

It's here, it's here, it's here. After a flirty beta dance, Movable Type 4.3 is finally taking the stage.

We already threw together and pushed out a couple posts about the bread crumbs Six Apart dropped before the release, and since this is sort of like a lightweight Christmas for you MT fans we'll get straight down to business and tell you about the biggest new features in 4.3:

Microsoft Wave Smashes Google Wave, or Not

By Barb Mosher

Oh, shush now. What's in a name anyways? A wave by any other name might be just as wonderful, no?

Microsoft's absolutely random decision to use Microsoft Wave as the name of a new project -- not long after the Google Wave announcement -- confuses many and irritates more. But it sure does generate some publicity. Here's what the splash is about.

What's Coming for Open Source CMS in August 2009

By Dee-Ann LeBlanc

Welcome to the August 2009 installment of our what's coming from the open source CMS projects in the next 30 days.

If you're looking through here and feel that your project was left out, we invite you to send us an email at pr@cmswire.com with a pointer to who we should contact at your project for updates.

Multi-Channel eCommerce with hybris Suite v4

By David Roe

It's said to be faster, easy to configure, full of simple-to-user interfaces, has full data management functionality and it has just been released. hyrbris has just launched Release Suite 4.0 after a relatively long period of quietness.

This latest version, according to ecommerce software developer hyrbris, represents a seminal point for many of the products in its current stable.

It features a lightweight service-orientated architecture that is scalable up or down, and will, through a number of features make it accessible -- and no doubt usable -- to even novices.

WordPress Gets Wicked, Blog from Your BlackBerry

By Chelsi Nakano

As you hardcore bloggers may or may not know, WordPress kicked out a beta version of their first application for the BlackBerry earlier this month and, mirroring their official platform release pattern, has since announced about a thousand (six) tiny iterations.

Since the announcement of the native application, a few similar offerings from competitors have come out of the woodwork. Wicked, an application from a company called ScreamingToaster, is one such solution that caught our eye. On the downside, it costs money. On the up, it seems (for the time being) to be relatively advanced as it saves blogs in the cloud, comes with a social GPS feature and integrates with popular tools like Twitter.

Bid Farewell, WordPress 2.0.x is Dead and Buried

By Chelsi Nakano

"We bit off more than we could chew," admits Mark Jaquith, a lead WordPress developer, on the WordPress development blog.

Jaquith's comment is in reference to the recent decision to axe the 2.0.x legacy branch, even though it was was slated to make it to 2010. The decision was mainly based on the amount of security improvements to the new versions of WordPress in the last couple of years, and what it would mean to port those changes (a crap-ton of work, instability, the possibility of new bugs).

"Additionally, far fewer people stayed on the 2.0.x branch than we anticipated," continues Jaquith. "I take that as a testament to the new features in WordPress and perhaps even more the features offered by plugins, many of which don't support older versions of WordPress!"

A post about the possible multimedia features in version 2.9 was also on the schedule this month, but so far we've seen neither hide nor hair. Perhaps with the 2.0.x weight off their shoulders, the WordPress heads in develoment will take the month's remaining day to throw something together. Cross your fingers and keep watch with us here.

The Next Generation Web CMS, Has Modera Got Answers?

By Barb Mosher

Web Content Management 1.0 is dead! So says Forrester Senior Analyst, Stephen Powers. There are few that would disagree with him -- I mean hey, there's like "2.0" all over the place these days. We need some for CMS too, right?

But more importantly, what's next? That is indeed the question.

And so when we saw Modera (news, site) take a £1.3 million (roughly US$ 1.8 mil.) investment and announce intentions to build its next generation web application framework, we were intrigued.

Have they got the secret sauce for generation deux-point-zero content management? We went to Siim Vips (great name!), CEO of Modera, for the answer to that question. Here's what we learned.

Push Your SharePoint Content to Non SharePoint Websites

By Barb Mosher

Who says you have to pay for all those SharePoint licenses to have your SharePoint content available on a public website? GOSS Interactive says you don't -- if you use the GOSS iCM SharePoint Connector.

Ah, there are workarounds for everything these days aren't there?

The Social Media Minute (29-July-2009)

By Jason Harris

Social media moves so fast, it's hard to keep up. Here are the week's top stories in scan-friendly format:

More Adults Using Social Networking
Conference Attendees Love To Tweet
Google Extends OpenIDs to Google Apps
Disney Deletes Alice in Wonderland Trailer Off YouTube

Ibml Unveils Multi-Lingual Document Capture Solution

By David Roe

For anyone that thinks current technologies are a bit one-sided in their cultural orientation -- that they are focused on English speaking, or at the outside, European-language speaking countries -- then the launch of ibml's global language in-line document scanning will probably be a surprise.

Sure, DocNetics, which is ibml's image analysis and interpretation platform, and into which the new multilingual solution will be integrated, can take in the usual culprits like French, Italian, Spanish or even Japanese, but ibml says the new solution can also scan documents in Middle Eastern and Asian languages including Arabic, Persian (Farsi, Dari), Pashto, Urdu, Hebrew, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Korean and Russian.

Memopal Cloud Search: Search Your Content From Your iPhone

By Geoff Spick

Memopal (news, site) improves its mobile access and search to the company's cloud storage facility with Cloud Search 2.0.

If you already use Memopal's online storage service (which we've covered recently), you can use its Cloud Search 2.0 feature for free. It lets mobile users, with a particular focus on all those lovely iPhone owners, search their own files which are kept remotely stored for easy access, from anywhere on the planet.

The search engine makes use of Memopal's own Memopal Global File System (MGFS) to provide rapid results. So, if you have masses of data stored on the service, you can track down documents, data or other files faster than manually opening them all on a computer and wading through them manually.

The files that you access in the cloud when using the Memopal service are monitored, so the most commonly used are prioritized at the top of the search stack and more readily accessible.

While you can't open the files on a mobile device, you can make them available to others. So, when the inevitable call comes in from a boss or client for all documents about "Company X", you can provide the answer and access, wherever you are and without needing a laptop at hand.

There is a 30-day trial for those wanting to try out, those wanting a little more involvement can join a beta test for 60 days.

Hyland Takes SaaS-based Enterprise CMS Solution to Europe

By David Roe

Ohio-based Hyland Software has announced that it has launched its SaaS enterprise content management system OnBase in Europe with its first operation centre already opened in London.

As a specialist in medical document management, they really couldn't have picked a better location as the English National Health Service, like its counterparts across Europe, are just about bankrupt and will be in the market for any solution that will cut costs.

PayPal's New Open Commerce Platform, Gets MS Endorsment

By Chelsi Nakano

A few years ago, after Amazon threw developer-friendly Amazon Payments into the mix and Google made things more interesting with Google Checkout, the Web payments throne was seized from PayPal and it was every payment service for themselves.

Today it's still that way, but it seems PayPal has finally upped the ante. The service is opening up its platform to third-party developers this fall, meaning global payment options (different countries, different currencies, different devices) can be plugged into applications from the start.

Web Publishing Roll Up: Hiding and Surviving the News

By Marisa Peacock

This week, the web publishing roll up is letting our content hang out. Consider us the bizarro version of Associated Press, who, last we checked, was busy policing the Web and developing "a system to track content distributed online to determine if it is being legally used." Apparently that didn't work out to well because now the AP has set out to create a news registry to protect their online content from copyright violations.

Google Apps, Docs Get Secure Backup Service

By Chelsi Nakano

In the cloud, a rainy day would consist of massive amounts of lost information without explanation or recovery options.

It could happen.

In case of such a hosted apocalypse (or, in the event of a much less serious instance, like when documents need to be accessed offline), a company called LTech has released Google Docs Backup, a downloadable tool for improved backup, archiving, and management of Google Docs. As the reported first enterprise partner of Google to offer such a solution, their credibility is already turning heads.

Kazeon Brings E-Discovery Management to Lotus Domino

By Marisa Peacock

In May, Kazeon (news, site) released their fourth generation eDiscovery software. Opening it up to the likes of corporations, legal service providers and law firms, working smarter and faster got easier. Continuing in the same direction, Kazeon recently announced the arrival of the Kazeon eDiscovery Domino Manager.

The Domino in question refers to IBM's Lotus Domino, which provides enterprise-grade e-mail, collaboration capabilities and a custom application platform. With Kazeon's Domino Manager, companies can implement a streamlined and transparent workflow for litigation responsiveness. By combining Kazeon's eDiscovery solutions with Domino, direct native connectivity can deliver comprehensive and defensible eDiscovery across the enterprise.

Alfresco Community 3.2 Now Runs on Ubuntu Server

By Barb Mosher

Yes, it's true, the open source enterprise content management system that seems to live to support just about any environment has added another server to the list.

Alfresco (news, site) has announced that their Community Edition 3.2 can now be easily installed on Ubuntu Server Edition, free!

Alfresco just released the Community Edition 3.2 earlier this month. The latest version of the community edition of their open source enterprise content management software also includes some updated records management capabilities, improved Forms, IMAP support and a nice solution for the iPhone.

According to their 2008 Open Source Barometer report, which is a survey that reaches out to their 74,000 content community members to find out the preferences of open source technologies in the enterprise, Ubuntu was tied with Red Hat at 31% as the Linux operating system of choice.

"Ubuntu Server Edition is the most popular Linux distribution amongst the Alfresco user community. We see many open source community members looking to use a combination of Alfresco as their content management solution and Ubuntu as their chosen operating system," said Martin Musierowicz, VP Alliances, Alfresco Software.

If that's true, why didn't Alfresco support Ubuntu from the beginning? We suppose the important thing is they do support it now.

Alfresco Community Edition 3.2 can be installed by users of Ubuntu Server Edition 9.04. Download your copy of Alfresco now using Ubuntu's Package Manager functionality from Ubuntu's Partner repository.

Packt Seeks Oracle, Microsoft, IBM Book Ideas and Authors

By David Roe

If you feel your writing talents are not being appreciated or if you've finally decided to stop hiding your literary light under a bushel, then Packt Publishing (news, site) is looking for you.

Yep! This is probably the first time since the invention of the Nuremberg printing press over 500 years ago that a book publisher is looking for authors -- and paid authors at that.

The snag -- if it is, in fact a snag -- is that you really have to know your subject, and those subjects should include Oracle, IBM and Microsoft amongst others before you go looking for your first contract. Additionally, you need to be able to explain in less than five million words, what your particular 'thing' is.

Best known for their open source books, Packt Publishing produces a range of publications from large developer's guides like the guide to Oracle SOA Suite 10g R3, or shorter and task-specific books that show how to get specific jobs done, like SharePoint Designer Tutorial, for example.

Packt aims to share the experiences of IT professionals in adapting and customizing current systems, applications and frameworks.

And now they are looking to extend their stable of talent. They plan to advance their line up of enterprise focused titles this year with an expected publishing list of over 30 titles.

Packt is inviting developers, architects, consultants and administrators alike, to send in their title suggestions and area of expertise to author@packtpub.com.

Digital Reef Gets a New CEO, Founder Takes on CTO Role

By Marisa Peacock

eDiscovery and storage solutions provider Digital Reef (news, site) has announced its new president and CEO.

Bob Lentz, an established veteran of the technology industry will lend his experience with growing innovative startups in highly competitive market segments in an effort to oversee and market Digital Reef's success. Effective immediately, Mr. Lentz will assume the presidency and role of CEO allowing Digital Reef's founder Steve Akers the time to spend on product innovation, while assuming the role of CTO.

Lentz sees data management as a priority, saying that "unstructured content represents both the lion's share of enterprise data and the most difficult data management challenge." Digital Reef offers a data management platform, offering many eDiscovery solutions that can be used across a wide variety of platforms and environments. Additional solutions include data discovery for risk mitigation, compliance and automated data discovery and classification tools that enable storage reclamation.

Over the past few months, Digital Reef launched the Digital Reef Partner Program, which makes unstructured data management more accessible to companies that can complement their services with Digital Reef technology solutions. With FAST, Mimosa and EntropySoft among the featured partners, customers will be looking to Mr. Lentz to provide the leadership necessary to promote and support forthcoming partnerships.

Here at CMSWire, we look forward to seeing what Mr. Lentz will bring to Digital Reef's expansive data management solutions.

SpringCM Updates SaaS Enterprise CMS, Adds Custom Dashboards

By Chelsi Nakano

This post is brought to you by the number 36 and the company SpringCM (news, site), providers of on-demand document management and workflow solutions.

Today the company announced the latest version of their content management platform. Major highlights in the 36 new features and enhancements include custom dashboards, enhanced document rules and solution packaging.

Kentico Partners to Provide Hosting Services for Web CMS

By Geoff Spick

Kentico (news, site) expands its presence in the market with a new enterprise hosting solution via its new partner, Intermedia. Intermedia is a comms specialist offering email and messaging, which all adds up to a practical and convincing services bundle.

Wednesday, July 29, 2009

29/07/09 Latest CMSWire Articles:39 More Ways to Get Your Twitter Fix

39 More Ways to Get Your CMS Twitter Fix

By Barb Mosher

In an age where millions of otherwise rational humans find it perfectly reasonable to share the constituent parts of their waking moments with the world, one might find the topic of content management a safe haven. Lord knows, we do.

If you're like us and the dirty demon of your Twitter fix is more CMS than cornflakes oriented, we've got good news for you. Jon Marks, blogger, techy, chess geek and nice guy has done some homework. He's assembled the Top 40 List of CMS Tweeters so you don't have to.

Jon refers to the list as the "creme de la creme of the CMS Twitterati". @CMSWire makes the list. As do two of our lead editors: @Irina_Guseva and me, @barbmosher (thank you Jon).

Yes, we are on the list, so we're unabashedly self-promoting. But hey this is 3/40ths self promotion and 37/40ths selfless public utility. On the Internets, we reckon that ratio ain't half bad.

Have a gander at the list, and then head over to Twitterator to follow us all.

Alterian Adds Social Media Analytics To Marketing Platform

By David Roe

Alterian (news, site) has just bought Techrigy, a social media and analytics software developer, which only goes to show that if companies don't have all the tools they need, it's a smart idea to buy a company that does have the tools instead of starting from scratch in-house.

In Alterian's, a provider of integrated marketing solutions, case, the unspecified sum of money involved in the deal will probably have put quite a dent in their £ 6.1 million (US$ 10.1m) pre-tax profits from the last financial year.

But both seem happy. It was a meeting of minds rather than a boardroom bloodbath they say, with the deal adding interesting new elements to the Alterian package as well as signaling a shift away from mass marketing to marketing targeted at individuals.

Scan and Merge Your Documents into PDF with eCopy PaperWorks

By Barb Mosher

eCopy (news, site) has released a new solution today that should help improve your productivity when working with a mix of electronic and paper-based information. The solution, called eCopy PaperWorks, lets you scan your paper documents and then merge electronic documents into a single PDF. And that's only the beginning.

Industry Event Planner (28-Jul-2009)

By Chelsi Nakano

So, what say you to some mingling? If you'd like to get out and partake in a solid (or virtual) handshake or two, our weekly events list is designed to help. Every Tuesday we plug as many relevant events as we can find into the big list and publish it, just for you.

Are we missing something? Don't hesitate to add your event to our events calendar (view all events). And if you've got feedback on the coming events — good or bad — do share it in the comments below.

July Events

July 27-August 1 (Sydney): Usability Week

Usability Week 2009 takes you beyond the typical conference experience, offering a three-day usability camp, a three-day intensive session on interaction design, and several specialized, day-long tutorials on core usability topics.

August Events

August 6 (London): Umbraco Meetup

A day of Umbraco fun, networking, socialising - we've got swag to give away including umbraco.tv subscriptions!

August 11-14 (San Jose): Search Engine Strategies

August 12-13 (San Francisco): Open Source World

LinuxWorld Conference & Expo® is expanding to become OpenSource World™ and is co-locating with Next Generation Data Center™ and CloudWorld™ to offer an end-to-end view of enterprise technology within the data center.

August 12-13 (San Francisco): Cloud World

CloudWorld will bring together the users of Web-centric software, infrastructure and services designed to drive acceptance and deployment of cloud computing in the data center.

August 17 (Reno): Joomla Beginner Training

August 24 (New Orleans): Joomla Beginner Training

September Events

September 1 (Paris): DrupalCon

September 10-11 (Switzerland): Magnolia CMS Conference

September 15-16 (Toronto): IDEA Conference

September 26-27 (Sheffield): CMS Made Simple Geek Moot

The developers of CMS Made Simple have finalized plans for the yearly developer conference. However, there is one major change… we're inviting you to join us.

September 28-29 (Atlanta): Hannon Hill Cascade Server User Conference

September 30 - October 1 (Washington, DC): Rethinking Corporate Communications

Want your event in this list? Submit it here.

Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g: A One Stop Shop for All Your IT Needs

By Barb Mosher

We've already talked about Oracle's WebCenter Suite 11g, but there's more to the new Fusion Middleware 11g platform that we haven't told you about. So let's take a little tour into the world of Oracle (news, site) and see what's in store.

Hot Banana Web CMS Gets Broadened Reach with New Resellers

By Geoff Spick

Hot Banana (news, site) from Lyris signs up a bunch of resellers to improve its presence in the CMS market.

We were impressed with Hot Banana when we reviewed it last year, rating it very highly in website optimization and multi-lingual support. We recommended it to "those who run small and medium size organizations, for whom marketing and branding is a priority, and for whom ease of use is important."

Buoyed by that success, the company has spent the time garnering new partners left, right and center. Among those signing up to join in the party are Foxhollow Technologies, Xtent and Tzero Technologies. Each has a raft of clients who will be moved over to Hot Banana, to take advantage of the flexibility provided by the web content management system.

The announcement was made at ad:tech Chicago, where brand performance and digital marketing are hot topics.

ApacheCon US 2009: Like No Other ApacheCon Before

By Irina Guseva

This year, ApacheCon US returns to the San Francisco Bay Area — the home of the Apache Software Foundation, which celebrates its 10th birthday in 2009. The conference will span over several days (November 2-6) and promises to be an "exciting celebration" of a decade of great coding, while offering a peek into the future of Open Source.

This conference should be like no other ApacheCon before with a feast of BarCamps, Get Togethers, featured tracks, evening events and a birthday bash to celebrate and acknowledge the achievements of the ASF committers and members. Another perk is that this year's conference is cheaper and offers many free sessions to get you out of that bad economy blues.

TIMAF Call for Best Practices in Information Management

By Irina Guseva

Feel passionate about Information Management (IM) and related disciplines? The Information Management Association Framework (TIMAF) invites you to submit your Proposal for Best Practice or Presentation Proposal, if you want to be considered for the first ever TIMAF Best Practices Benelux Award.

Deadline for the best practices proposal submission is August 15, 2009. The award will be announced at the HartmanEVENT 2009, scheduled to take place on October 8 in Utrecht, the Netherlands.

All accepted proposals within the Benelux area will be automatically considered for the award, which is designed to give recognition to an Information Management project that have succeeded in getting more value out of the often messy enterprise content.

Head over here and share your experiences with the world.

Weekly Roll-Up: Top Stories, Memes and Moments (25-Jul-2009)

By Marisa Peacock

The twists, turns and tips you need for staying up-to-date by the water cooler.

Highlights of the Week

39 More Ways to Get Your CMS Twitter Fix. In an age where millions of otherwise rational humans find it perfectly reasonable to share the constituent parts of their waking moments with the world, one might find the topic of content management a safe haven. Lord knows, we do.
Vignette Stockholders Said Yes to Open Text Acquisition. Open Text said it's a done deal. The planned acquisition of all of the issued and outstanding shares of Vignette (worth approximately US$ 321 million) has been completed late yesterday following a shareholders' meeting where the voting and approval took place.
Connecting Saleforce.com and SharePoint. The Salesforce Connector enables you to access data in Salesforce.com CRM applications and Force.com cloud-based applications within SharePoint search.
Google Docs Get eDiscovery and Archiving Support. Google Apps customers can now employ a sort of safety net to protect corporate documents and files in Google Docs.
Oversights by Bluenog Spark Open Source Community Anger. The subject of open source software licensing is rarely considered titillating. More often it inspires early afternoon naps. Well, there's been a change in the script and we've got a small civil war on our hands.
Zimplit CMS Lets You Use Someone Else's Web Design. In yet another rebranding-centric attempt, Simple CMS provider Zimplit released its "borrow another site's design to create yours" feature.
Kaltura Unveils Free, Open Source Edition Of Video Platform. It may just be that in launching the Community Edition of its self-hosted online video platform Kaltura has created a monster by giving everyone and anyone the ability to put their videos out onto the Wild Wild Web.

Most Popular Articles

And these are the articles you couldn't get enough of during the past week — if page views are anything to go by, anyways. So, what was your fancy? SharePoint 2010, Records Management, Google Wave and Gmail tools.

SharePoint 2010, A Business Collaboration Platform. Now Microsoft gives us a bird's eye view into what SharePoint 2010 is really going to look and behave like. Time to take a little tour.
Open Text, Autonomy, IBM Among Leaders in Records Management. It's always good to get recognition from the analyst firms because many organizations pay attention to what these guys say. In the ever evolving area of records management, this recognition can help a lot.
Want to Join the Google Wave Testing Movement? After 6,000 active developer accounts and 20,000 more reportedly rolling out over the next month, the job is yours. Google plans to pass the baton to 100,000 users on September 30th.
Shareflow Emerges as Competition for Google Wave. E-mail: It's fast, it's convenient, it's simple, it's…outdated?
Email, Discovery and SharePoint: 3 Key Document Management Issues. Earlier this year AIIM released its annual State of the ECM Industry 2009 report which found that overall, electronic content at an organizational level is in a mess.
5 Gmail Tools We Can Live Without. So, Gmail labs is pretty cool, right? Engineers throw an experiment at us and we get to play until we're either bored with it or wonder where it's been all our lives
Learning Drupal CMS? Here's the Book List. Oh Drupal, you open source hottie, you. You've managed the content of many, kicked out release after release, even inspired projects like Acquia and Open Atrium.

The Economy is in the Dumps but Content Management is Booming

If you're looking to advance your career, or if your org has got empty seats in need of savvy CMSers, you're in luck. Catch the best fish of the season on our on our content management job board.

Featured Jobs:

Product Marketing Manager at Bridgeline Software
Content Associate at Modern Feed
Copywriter at Hyland Software
Web Architect Instructor at Sitecore
Customer Satisfaction Engineer at Day Software

Whether Traveling or Virtual, There are Events to Attend

Wondering how to spend your time in the next few weeks or months? Attend a conference or maybe just a webinar or two. Have a look at our new Events Calendar to see what's happening in your area.

Featured Events:

Usability Week Sydney 2009 July 27 - Aug 1, conference
Drupalcon Paris 2009 September 1, Conference
IDEA Conference 2009, Toronto, Canada September 15-16, Conference
Adobe MAX 2009, Los Angeles, CA October 4-7, Conference

EtherPad, the Really Real-Time Wiki

By Chelsi Nakano

EtherPad first started to gain momentum when it stepped onto the scene late last year. Though it was often poked fun at for having a less than attractive setup, the simple tool did its job and did it well.

Today, the real-time wiki from AppJet is back for a second go, this time with a sleeker look and improved functionality.

Office Productivity in the Clouds: ThinkFree Online

By Barb Mosher

There's Zoho, Google Apps and soon Microsoft Office Online. Do we really need another online productivity suite? Maybe not. But have you heard of ThinkFree Online? It is also an online office productivity suite that includes word processing, spreadsheets and presentation software than can be used both off and online, and touch of collaboration to boot.

Let's take a look at how this suite sizes up.

FeedRoom Goes SaaS With Enterprise Video Platform v4.0

By David Roe

The announcement that The FeedRoom (news, site), New York-based provider of Web video and digital media solutions, has released a SaaS version of its v4.0 Enterprise Video Platform (EVP) is not really surprising.

Given the popularity of video at the moment, and the costs involved in developing live video streaming, it was only a matter of time before the company went down that road as companies like Kaltura lead the race to the (price) bottom by making its open source video solution free.

However, The FeedRoom is targeting companies that have large public relations or press departments and argue that public organizations will have to take to video in a market where transparency appears to be the buzz word.

Shareflow Emerges as Competition for Google Wave

By Chelsi Nakano

E-mail: It's fast, it's convenient, it's simple, it's…outdated?

Zenbe, promoter of enlightenment and inner-peace via e-mail overload solutions, operates under this belief. Their newest offering is called Shareflow, and is described as an answer to the question: What if we could create a separate conversation, invite a specific audience to that conversation, and make it accessible on the Internet?

Basically, it's a real-time collaboration service that combines e-mail, instant messaging and social networking. Sound familiar? Probably.

Open Source for America: Change We Can Believe In?

By Marisa Peacock

When the new administration at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW boasted transparency, they weren't necessarily talking about open source. But some people, a group called Open Source for America for instance, thinks that government agencies should at least consider open source software as an option in their buying decisions.

Considering that the U.S. government might be out to save a few bucks, OSA's claim that open source applications can help save the government money might just hold some water. Afterall, open source is change we can all believe in. It needn't be limited to health care and economic stimulus.

Oracle Goes for Gold with Real-Time Data Integration

By Chelsi Nakano

If size matters, then Oracle (news, site) certainly hangs out with the popular crowd. In recent news, the whale of an enterprise software company unveiled a WebCenter Suite, updated its collaboration platform, and added Datawatch to its growing collection of partners.

Partnerships. What glorious things. But why stop there? Oracle sure hasn't. Yesterday the company announced their purchase of San Francisco's GoldenGate Software, providers of real-time integration software and a partner of Oracle's for more than a decade.

"With the addition of GoldenGate, Oracle expects to help our customers achieve better performance through improved business intelligence and business continuity with real-time information," said Hasan Rizvi, senior vice president of Oracle's Fusion Middleware Product Development.

Buying up companies isn't something new for Oracle. In fact, the software giant has purchased roughly three dozen over the past five years, spending, as reported by Reuters, more than US$ 34 billion. And again, they're not stopping there. Oracle also has plans to purchase Sun Microsystems, and Virtual Iron as well.

If only we all had that much money to blow, right? Live vicariously through Oracle's fat wallet here.

Secure Document Management for Medical Industry

By David Roe

This week's release of RapidReveiw v2.0 by MediConnect Global sees an upgrade to a document management system designed specifically for the medical profession, and goes another step towards getting rid of illegible paper records from surgeries.

As a scalable system that maintains a beginning-to-end track of all alterations to medical records, this latest version will code, index and extract all necessary data need to construct a complete medical profile of patients.

And, MediConnect says, the system is completely secure with strict permissions to reassure people who are afraid that their medical history could end up on a public Facebook site once it has been ingested into the system.

Book: Plone 3 Theming

By Chelsi Nakano

Last year we noted that the mid-size open source CMS Plone (news, site) looked like it was gearing up for a bigger and better 2009. Many things since then have solidified that observation, including the launch of a user feedback system, a relicensing policy, and much talk about the upcoming Plone 4 and 5.

Before we get too ahead of ourselves though, let's slow down and take a look at Plone 3. Author Veda Williams has just announced the release of her new book Plone 3 Theming through Packt Publishing.

Williams' book reportedly teaches best practices of Plone theme development, focusing on Plone 3. The book covers topics such as configuring the development environment, creating a basic theme product, add-on tools and skinning tricks, integrating multimedia with Plone, and configuring a site's look and feel through the Zope Management Interface (ZMI). Finally, for you future fiends, there is a sneak peek into the future of Plone's theming system.

Williams has worked in software development for a whopping 18 years. Her experience includes a three-year stint as a Plone skinner, and she is currently the editor for the documentation section of plone.org. In other words? This lady knows what she's talking about.

If you're a professional Web designer working with Plone and would fancy some theming help, you can pick up your electronic version here.

Kiersted Systems Launches Mobile eDiscovery Services

By Marisa Peacock

It's no secret that regulatory policies often dictate the way that information can be accessed, shared or otherwise managed. Internationally-based companies face challenges posed by privacy laws, like the U.S. Patriot Act and the EU Data Protection Directive, which prohibits the transportation of electronically stored data from the U.S and Europe.

Kiersted Systems has addressed this issue by launching a mobile service for processing electronic discovery data. Prompted by such challenges, Kiersted's mobile processing capability allows companies to perform eDiscovery wherever clients may be: down the street, across the country or around the globe.

Kaltura Unveils Free, Open Source Edition Of Video Platform

By David Roe

It may just be that in launching the Community Edition of its self-hosted online video platform Kaltura (news, site) has created a monster by giving everyone and anyone the ability to put their videos out onto the Wild Wild Web.

The announcement that the Community Edition is finally ready for download came at O'Reilly OSCON 2009 and now puts easily integrated, customizable, interactive rich-media functionality in the hands of anyone who wants it.

What's more, Kaltura says that it is breaking the build-vs-buy and vendor lock-in conundrum by allowing users combine it with any other technology or services platform without being beholden to Kaltura.

Launchpad Takes Off Into Open Source Space

By Chelsi Nakano

Canonical (news, site), commercial sponsor of the well-known Ubuntu Linux distribution, Bazaar, Launchpad and several other projects, has just opened up. Wide.

The company announced that Launchpad, a software development spring board, collaboration platform, and Ubuntu's personal bug tracker (among other things), was being prepped to join the open source world about a year ago. The claim was that all but two components of the code would be set free in roughly 12 months. Today, not only has Canonical lived up to their time frame promise, they've also surprised the community with the release of the entire code base.

Saturday, July 25, 2009

My Article on Web2.0 in FINER Bulliten - June'09 Issue

Current Web Standards – "Web 2.0" The Buzz Word

Article by –

Rittik Deka,

IT professional, Team Leader (Web & Design Services), Xpression

Email – rittik@rittik.in

The "World Wide Web" is an essential part of our day to day life today. The .com revolution has added a new dimension in the field of information sharing and distribution. Be it some important information that the Government want to issue to the public or an internal memo, a business house portraying its business verticals to the clients, selling products to a wide range of customers, friends keeping in touch with each other through social networking sites, students getting their examination results, the Web is everywhere in our lives and in modern times, none can deny the important role it plays.

Today, all surf Websites for different needs, but very few actually know what goes on behind these attractive pages on their computer screen. These WebPages are efforts of many dedicated designers and developers so that the common public can get all the information they need.

People all over the world in general and the North Eastern part of India in particular know little about the standards that need to be followed inorder of design and develop a Website. Many people have a common perception that Websites are mere magazines on screen which are exactly same as the printed magazine in their desk. Hence, in approving a Website design, they look at it with the perspective of approving a cover page design of a magazine, book or brochure. They do not understand the basic idea that the best creative match that might be highly appreciable and appropriate for an object of print media is not exactly what should be for a Website. Right from the colour combinations, to the layout and content, the advertisements, etc. there exists very little parity between objects of print media and electronic media. Even the colour modes are totally different when there is a comparison between electronic media and print media.

One more important thing most people forget or maybe do not understand is that Websites are viewed in browsers, which have a different understanding or colours than other softwares. So a colour combination and layout which is displayed in a Photoshop file or an image might act differently in the web browsers. Anything might be possible to design in a Photoshop file, but for developing that into a webpage, at a primary level, the designers and developers have to write codes (HTML/XHTML) and Cascading Style sheets (CSS) so that the information is available globally.

This is a humble attempt made to make people aware about the guidelines and standards that need to be followed for a website. These guidelines in today’s age should be followed both from the development point of view and also from the clients’ point of view. Its ultimately the clients’ message which would be conveyed globally, hence even rather than developers, the clients or the people who need website for their business, should be aware of it so that they can make most of its from the investment they do for getting their website developed.

The current day web standards and guidelines are commonly referred by one word – “Web 2.0 Guidelines “. Web has come a long way from its evolution as a classified US Military Project, to what Sir Tim Berners Lee, one of the greatest inventors of our time who wrote the first WebPage, had developed to the present day RIA ( Rich Internet Applications). Today, they are just not mere text written in some markup language but something more and just one look at them conveys the message they are developed for.

"Web 2.0" refers to what is perceived as a second generation of web development and web design. It is characterized as facilitating communication, information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design and collaboration on the World Wide Web. It has led to the development and evolution of web-based communities, hosted services, and web applications. Examples include social-networking sites, video-sharing sites, wikis, blogs, mashups and much more!

Many people use the term "Web 2.0" to describe:

A resurgence in the Web Economy

A new level of technological interactivity between web sites and services

Or social phenomena deriving from new types of online communities and social networks

To sum up "Web 2.0" design in one word, it would have to be "simplicity”. Today's simple, bold, elegant page designs deliver more with less:

They enable designers to shoot straight for the site's goals, by guiding the site visitor's eye through the use of fewer, well-chosen visual elements.

They use fewer words but say more, and carefully selected imagery to create the desired feel.

They reject the idea that we can't guess what people want from our sites

The list below is a summary of many of the common features of typical "Web 2.0" sites.

1. Simplicity

2. Central layout

3. Fewer columns

4. Separate top section

5. Solid areas of screen real-estate

6. Simple navigation

7. Bold logos

8. Bigger text

9. Bold text introductions

10. Strong colours

11. Rich surfaces

12. Gradients

13. Reflections

14. Cute icons

15. Star flashes

Clearly, a site doesn't need to exhibit all these features to work well, and displaying these features doesn't make a design "Web 2.0" - or good!

Simplicity - Web 2.0 design means focused, clean and simple.

"Use as few features as are necessary to achieve what you need to achieve"

Web design is simpler than ever, and that's a good thing.

Why simplicity is good

Web sites have goals and all web pages have purposes.

Users' attention is a finite resource.

It's the designer's job to help users to find what they want (or to notice what the site wants them to notice)

Stuff on the screen attracts the eye. The more stuff there is, the more different things there are to notice, and the less likely a user is to notice the important stuff.

So we need to enable certain communication, and we also need to minimize noise. That means we need to find a solution that's does its stuff with as little as possible. That's economy, or simplicity.

Central layout – Basically, the vast majority of sites these days are positioned centrally within the browser window. Relatively few are full-screen (liquid) or left-aligned / fixed-size, compared to a few years ago.

Why a central layout is good

This "2.0" style is simple, bold and honest. Sites that sit straight front & center feel more simple, bold and honest. Also, because we're being more economical with our pixels (and content), we're not as pressurized to cram as much information as possible above the waterline/fold.

We're using less to say more, so we can be a bit more free and easy with the amount of space used, and pad out our content with lots of lovely white space.

When & how to use a central layout

Fewer columns -A few years ago, 3-column sites were the norm, and 4-column sites weren't uncommon. Today, 2 are more common, and 3 are the mainstream maximum.

Why using fewer columns is good

Less is more. Fewer columns feel simpler, bolder, and more honest. We're communicating less information more clearly.

There's also a by-product of the domination of centered layouts. Because we're not filling the whole screen so much, and not trying to get as much on-screen at any one time, we simply don't need as many columns of information.

Separate top sections

This means making the top of the screen (the main branding & navigation area) distinct from the rest (the main content).

Of course, there's nothing new about this approach. It's a good idea, and has been used for ever. But it's being used more than ever now, and the distinction is often stronger.

Why distinct top sections are good

The top section says "Here's the top of the page". Sounds obvious, but it feels good to know clearly where the page starts.

It also starts the site/page experience with a strong, bold statement. This is very "2.0"-spirited. We like strong, simple, bold attitude.

When & how to use a distinct top section

On any site, both the main branding and main navigation should be obvious, bold and clear.

So it's a good idea to create a clear space at the top of a web site design that positions the logo and navigation boldly.

Always put your logo right up the top of the screen. I'd always recommend putting your main navigation right after it.

It's definitely a good thing to mark the top of the page with a section that marks out the high-level screen features as separate from the main site content.

The top section should be visually distinct from the rest of the page content. The strongest way to differentiate is to use a bold, solid block of different colour or tone, but there are alternatives.

Solid areas of screen real-estate

Leading on from the clearly differentiated top area, you'll notice that lots of sites define the various areas of real-estate boldly and clearly.

Real estate comes in various forms, including:

Navigation

Background / canvas

Main content area

Other stuff

Callouts / cross-links

The strongest way to do this is using colour.

Simple navigation

Permanent navigation - your global site navigation that appears on every page as part of the page template - needs to be clearly identifiable as navigation, and should be easy to interpret, target and select.

A web 2.0 design makes global navigation large, bold, clean and obvious.

Inline hyperlinks (links within text) are typically clearly differentiated from normal text.

Why simple navigation is better

Users need to be able to identify navigation, which tells them various important information:

Where they are (in the scheme of things)

Where else they can go from here

And what options they have for doing stuff

Bold logos

A clear, bold, strong brand - incorporating attitude, tone of voice, and first impression - is helped by a bold logo.

Strong, bold logos say "This is who we are." in a way that we can believe.

Your logo should:

Work visually in its main context, and any other uses in which it may be used

Be recognizable and distinctive

Represent your brand's personality and qualities on first viewing

Bigger text

Lots of "2.0" web sites have big text, compared to older-style sites.

When you've made more room, you can choose to make more important elements bigger than less important elements (if they're still there).

Making things bigger makes them more noticeable than lesser elements. This effect has been used throughout the history of print design, on headings, title pages and headlines.

Not only does big text stand out, but it's also more accessible to more people. That's not just people with visual impairments, but also people looking on LCD screens in sunlight, people sitting a little further from the screen, and people just skimming the page. If you think about it, that could be quite a lot of people!

Bold text introductions

Leading on from the big text theme, many sites lead with strong all-text headline descriptions.

These normally set out the site's USP, elevator pitch or main message.

They tend to be graphical, rather than regular text. The reason for this is that designers want a lot of control over the page's visual impact, especially early on in a browsing experience.

When & how to use a bold text intro

Only use one if you've got something bold to say. v (If you haven't got something bold to say, maybe it's worth having a think about the purpose of your page/site and coming up with something worth saying boldly!)

If you have a simple message that you want to be seen first, go ahead and headline it. Make it clear by putting it against a relatively plain background.

Strong colours

Bright, strong colours draw the eye. Use them to divide the page into clear sections, and to highlight important elements.

When you have a simple, stripped-out design, you can use a bit of intense colour to help differentiate areas of real-estate and to draw attention to items you want the visitor to notice.

Rich surfaces

Most 2.0-style sites use subtle 3D effects, sparingly, to enhance the qualitative feel of the design.

Realistic surface effects (like drop-shadows, gradients and reflections) help make a visual interface feel more real, solid and "finished".

They may also remind us of certain tactile or aesthetic qualities of real-world objects, such as water droplets, shiny plastic buttons, and marble floors. Making stuff look solid and real can make it look "touchable", which is likely to appeal.

Gradients –

Web 2.0 design has more gradients than the Alps.

Why gradients are so useful -Gradients soften areas that would otherwise be flat colour/tone.

Reflections -The illusion of reflection is one of the most common applications on gradients.

These commonly come in 2 kinds:

Highlights caused by light reflecting on shiny surfaces

That shiny table effect!

Cute icons-

Icons play an important role in Web 2.0 design. Today we use fewer, better icons that carry more meaning.

Icons can be useful when they're easily recognizable and carry a clear meaning. In lots of other cases, a simple word is more effective.

In the old days, icons were sometimes overused. It seemed that everyone wanted an icon for every navigation link or tab. Now, we use clear text more extensively, and are less ready to litter a page with icons.

Where Web 2.0 designers do employ icons,

Where they are reserved for higher-value spots.

Simpler, more spacious designs demand less attention and allow for a richer icon.

Star Flashes

These are the star-shaped labels that you see stuck on web pages, alerting you to something important.

They work by evoking price stickers in low-cost stores. For this reason, they suit the start-up ethic of many Web 2.0 sites, but for the same reason may cheapen other sites.

They can really work well, but of course should only be used to draw attention to something important.

These are some points by which we can make most out of just one site or rather just page. Hope this enlightens all people who have heard of the Buzz word – “Web 2.0 “but are unaware of its features and what actually goes around the WebPages.

Courtesy –

www.wikipedia.org

www.webdesignfromscratch.com

www.orelliy.com

Special Inputs from Web Development Team @ Xpression

23/07 Latest CMSWire Articles: Google Docs Get Compliance, GMail Labs the Chopping Block

5 Gmail Tools We Can Live Without

By Chelsi Nakano

So, Gmail labs is pretty cool, right? Engineers throw an experiment at us and we get to play until we're either bored with it or wonder where it's been all our lives. The whole concept has been a pretty sweet deal since Google initially released it in June of 2008.

But Google giveth, and taketh away. We saw some particularly gruesome casualties earlier this year when Jaiku, Google Video and Google Notebook were kicked to the curb. Now Labs has started their own downsizing, beginning by sending right-side labels to the chopping block. Understandably, loads of you are still mourning the loss. Our advice? Prepare for even more heartache; word on G-Lab Street is another round of slashing is about to take place.

Google Docs Get eDiscovery and Archiving Support

By Marisa Peacock

Google Apps customers can now employ a sort of safety net to protect corporate documents and files in Google Docs. Called CloudSave, users are able to conduct legal discovery and "un-delete" previously deleted documents as needed.

CloudSave comes courtesy of Salvair, a company that works to increase organizational efficiency through cloud computing solutions. They recently announced the release of version 2 software for Google Docs Archival and eDiscovery.

Zimplit CMS Lets You Use Someone Else's Web Design

By Geoff Spick

In yet another rebranding-centric attempt, Simple CMS provider Zimplit (news, site) released its "borrow another site's design to create yours" feature.

By any stretch, this is a brave move by Zimplit. The new Zimplit v3.0 allows you to pick any favorite web site that you like the look of and use that as the basis for your own site's design.

Telerik Eats Own Dog Food, Launches Sitefinity.com

By Geoff Spick

Telerik (news, site) launched a new site to highlight the power, flexibility and compatibility of its ASP/.NET-based content management system.

The best advertising for any product is to see it in use, which is why Telerik's showcase site looks pretty slick and features a gallery of about 375 real-world examples of Sitefinity CMS in use.

This Web CMS offers Silverlight tools and controls, and .NET reporting and management, which gives it wide appeal.

Perhaps, Telerik chose now to show off as it is starting to face a lot of competition with the open source, .NET-based Umbraco CMS proving itself in the market and Kentico with its new release due any day now.

Packed with a Flash tour, demonstration admin interface and a long list of awards, there is plenty of self-congratulation but also a decent guide to the systems behind the site.

There are also separate pages for business users and IT developers highlighting how those groups could benefit from deploying Sitefinitiy.

Facebook Connect Goes International

By Marisa Peacock

About a year and a half ago, Facebook launched the first translated version of Facebook in Spanish. Since then, they've been busy working with community translators to translate the site into oodles of languages. From French, German, Japanese, Chinese and Italian, they worked their way up to 55 languages.

Now, they'd like you to know that thanks to its community translators, a la user-driven translation program, Facebook is available in 64 different languages. And that's not all.

Facebook is extending its translations to Facebook Connect, the platform that lets third-party websites offer Facebook login to their users and push information back to the News Feed.

Adobe Goes Open Source With Two Media Tools

By David Roe

Adobe (news, site) has announced that is has taken another two of its products targeted specifically at the media and publishing industries and gone open source with them.

Partnership Extends SharePoint Image Management Functions

By David Roe

That Psigen Software (news, site), a fourteen year old company that has focused on "perfect, simple imaging", and Atalasoft (news, site), a provider of scanning and imaging technologies have gotten together is no real surprise given Pisgens's recent form.

Psigen is mostly known for its capture solution for SharePoint — PSI:Capture — and has been busy using it to fill one of the holes in the SharePoint platform, notably its ability, or lack thereof, to provide a decent document image capture function.

Atalasoft's crown jewel is the sophisticated, but user-friendly, image viewer VizitSP that adds viewing, cleanup, classification and annotation abilities to even the poorest system.

The Social Media Minute (22-July-2009)

By Jason Harris

Social media moves so fast, it's hard to keep up. Here are the week's top stories in scan-friendly format:

Google Reader Gets A Bit More Connected
IE 6 Must Go The Way of the Dodo Bird!
Twitter's Security is Terrible
MySpace Continues To Fall In Entertainment Space

WordPress Encourages Communication, Changes Changelogs

By Chelsi Nakano

Communication is key in any relationship, including those between plugin authors and plugin users. Promoting such healthy unions is team WordPress (news, site), who recently announced some improvements made to their changelogs in order to further detail the changes made between versions.

"We feel that all software should have a changelog that details, at a high level, what changes have been made in each version so that the user can make an informed decision about when to upgrade and how much testing they should do with their site," said Peter Westwood, Lead Developer, WordPress.

Specifically, the development team has added support for a Changelog section in the plugin readme.txt file. This information is then displayed as its own little tab in the plugin directory, and also in the back-end of the user's WordPress blog.

The team delicately pointed out that a large number of plugin authors aren't leaving notes on the reasons behind changes to subversion plugin repositories. Not helpful folks, not helpful at all.

We think the message here is pretty clear: If you want to be a contributing member of the Web CMS society, take a few minutes out of your day to provide for the people who take a few minutes out of their day to familiarize themselves with your work. Even-steven.

MindTouch 2009 Gets Collaborative Video, Content Staging

By Barb Mosher

The latest version of MindTouch (news, site), an enterprise open source collaboration platform, has just been released. Dubbed MindTouch Minneopa, this release adds three new features to MindTouch 2009 including collaborative video, application packaging and content staging.

All three new features build upon the concept of MindTouch as a collaborative network offering capabilities beyond what we are seeing today in many other social computing solutions.

emagiC Web CMS v9 Features New WYSIWYG Editor

By Geoff Spick

Just about six month's after the last release, emagiC CMS.Net (news, site) hits with a new and improved version that is now pretty much browser-independent and offers full WYSIWYG editing.

Want to Join the Google Wave Testing Movement?

By Chelsi Nakano

Hey, remember when Big G revealed Google Wave at this year's Google I/O? The uproar the announcement caused in the blogosphere was so great that unless you're a cave-dweller, then yes, you probably remember. The highly anticipated ecosystem for communication and collaboration has certainly turned many heads with its innovative nature, but whether or not it'll make waves or become a natural disaster, webverse style, no one knows.

Today, we're a teensy bit closer to finding out. After 6,000 active developer accounts and 20,000 more reportedly rolling out over the next month, the job is yours. Google plans to pass the baton to 100,000 users on September 30th.

Social Business Software Working for Jive

By Barb Mosher

It appears that Jive (news, site) may be making all the right moves with its Social Business Software. Today they announce solid growth for their platform for Q2 09 with an 80% increase in revenues year over year.

Along with strong revenue growth, they have recorded the largest booking quarter to date, having some significant customer wins.

It has been a busy time for Jive Software as social computing solutions have appeared to remain fairly popular during this down period. Here's a look at some of things that have helped Jive's momentum.

Vignette Stockholders Said Yes to Open Text Acquisition

By Irina Guseva

Open Text (news, site) said it's a done deal. The planned acquisition of all of the issued and outstanding shares of Vignette (worth approximately US$ 321 million) has been completed late yesterday following a shareholders' meeting where the voting and approval took place.

While Vignette (news, site) is busy nostalgizing, Open Text says it's working on the strategic aspects of what may come next. Let's not forget that Open Text already has a WCM-centric group called Open Text Web Solutions. Offering an even broader range of (quite similar) products is going to take some brain activity. Then again, this would not be the first quilting exercise for Open Text.

In the meantime, there's still some Vignette cash to recognize on OTEX's balance sheet.

According to the "big brother," support will continue for Vignette's products and (the relatively quickly decreasing) installed base (bringing in the licensing revenue). The same applies to existing Web Solutions products and customers. No comment has been made in regards to new(er) Vignette products.

There is a talk about a "combined product," but no details on what it will be, except for providing a supersized meal of a "full set of feature options, from… fast-to-deploy web publishing application, to… enterprise-class e-business platform for large-scale deployments."

Vignette's social media, DAM and personalized content seem to be some of the most palatable notes in this content management connoisseur combo. Open Text also expressed intent to potentially leverage some of Vignette's components in its ECM Suite.

More details on the product strategy and the product roadmap are not likely to be announced earlier than October, when Open Text's annual conference — Content World 2009 – will take place.

Restructuring is expected. We should know more about the range of that initiative around the end of August.

Jahia Goes Beyond Canada, Opens U.S. Headquarters

By Irina Guseva

The next wave of European content management vendors hitting the U.S. market is yet again upon us. This time, the ripples are coming from the open source Enterprise CMS vendor Jahia (news, site).

The vendor launched its U.S. mission two years ago, continuing it with today's formalization of efforts by opening its North American HQ office in Washington, DC. Emmanuel Garcin, Jahia's VP, will serve as the GM for North America.

A little before that, a new R&D and Support office was opened in Montreal, Canada.

In the meantime, Jahia has also been shaking hands with integrators like Quoin, Sapient and Avantia, trying to cater to all its Java-devoted customers in and outside of the Americas.

These are some of the highlights of what Jahia's been up to lately, in case you need a reminder:

Extending U.S. reach via its partner Quoin
Launching GPL Community Edition
Working on multi-source content management with Content Bus
Adding more enterprise features to the content integration software

With local as well as other European open source vendors (like Hippo and Nuxeo), it may get pretty crowded in the enterprise CMS U.S. market. Closed-source ECM vendors like IBM, EMC and Open Text are surely paying attention.

WordPress Fixes an XSS Goof, Releases 2.8.2

By Chelsi Nakano

Aaand we're back with another teeny tiny WordPress (news, site) release update. The team announced the availability of "Baker" 2.8.1 Candidate 1 earlier this month after a couple Beta versions, but a pesky bug managed to slip through the cracks.

The "XSS vulnerability" caused funky comment author URLs when displayed in the admin. The development team pointed out that this goof could be exploited to redirect users away from the admin to another site. Definitely no good.

WordPress 2.8.2 can be downloaded here, or you can go to the Upgrade page of your blog's admin for an automatic fix.

Other than a few hiccups, WordPress "Baker" is cookin' and version 2.9 of the popular platform is already well underway. What we know so far about the upcoming release is that a good chunk of the development team's focus is going to improving multi media features. A few hints on exactly what's coming have already been dropped, but a solid list of the anticipated 2.9 features will reportedly be posted some time this month, after the priority has been determined

Until then, we're waiting at the Web CMS table, fork and knife in hand. Feel free to join us.

Non Profit Media Companies Jump for Open Source CMS

By David Roe

Throw television content provider WNET.org and New York digital developer Tierra together and you get a new content management system that will provide web-based support for TV programs, particularly for the public broadcasting sector.

Built on the open source blog platform WordPress Multi User (WordPress MU) and some custom themes and plugins such as WPDB Profiling, project leaders claim that the new platform has made it considerably easier and cheaper for WNET.ORG to roll out multiple user-friendly sites.

According to the company, they were only able to launch one or two websites sites per month until the new web content management system was developed. Now, they say, they can develop five to ten sites per month and at a fraction of the cost.

Open Text�s FirstClass is Finally iPhone-Friendly

By Irina Guseva

Remember Open Text Social Media? FirstClass is a communication and collaboration platform that was used as the underlying engine in that product. If you use FirstClass for your e-mail, calendaring, etc., we have good news for you.

FirstClass (brought to Open Text via the Centrinity acquisition) went mobile.

Available from the App Store for the iPhone and iPod Touch, the long-awaited app promises "a broad range of rich features" when accessing messaging and collaboration services. Secure login can be accomplished from the above devices to any FirstClass server.

From there, users can get to their FirstClass Desktop and manage e-mail, bookmarks and content from shared collaborative spaces. It wouldn't be the iPhone-friendly deal, if the replay of video and audio files and sharing images wasn't included.

Those using FirstClass Unified Communications can play voicemail messages stored as MP3s on their mobile devices. iPhone users can also access their FirstClass calendars and contacts via the ActiveSync support built in to FirstClass Sync Services.

The FirstClass Mobile App includes support for multiple languages, including US English, Canadian English, UK English, Swedish, Finnish, Danish, Norwegian, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch and Japanese.

Kiiro Lets You Collaborate and Manage Projects with SharePoint

By Barb Mosher

We know that SharePoint (news, site) is used often at the team level for project work. Out of the box though, there is no project management site.

Yes, you could download one of the free site templates from Microsoft, but wouldn't you rather go with a vendor solution that includes a number of collaboration features along with project management?

Kiiro, a provider of project management solutions for SharePoint, thinks you would. Here's what they offer.

Oversights by Bluenog Spark Open Source Community Anger

By Irina Guseva

The subject of open source software licensing is rarely considered titillating. More often it inspires early afternoon naps.

Well, there's been a change in the script and we've got a small civil war on our hands. Tempers and tensions have risen between US-based Bluenog and Netherlands-based Hippo — both companies deal in the content management space, both are tinkering with open source.

Now it's not the fight we're interested in — though it's been a fun interlude of Days of Our [Software] Lives. Rather, it's the principles behind the issue that are worth paying attention to.

In short, Bluenog has been accused of violating Hippo's and Apache's software licenses by using Hippo's code and not properly giving attribution. We had a chat with both parties. Here's what they had to say.

Learning Drupal CMS? Here's the Book List

By Chelsi Nakano

Oh Drupal (news, site), you open source hottie, you. You've managed the content of many, kicked out release after release, even inspired projects like Acquia and Open Atrium. Now, as you gear up to dazzle your fans with the Drupal 7 Code Freeze, potential new Drupal followers are beginning to peek their heads out from behind their present content management systems.

Readers, if you fall into this category, don't worry, we won't tell. But you should know that learning this fully loaded CMS is no easy task, so here are some recommended starting points:

Email, Discovery and SharePoint: 3 Key Document Management Issues

By David Roe

Earlier this year AIIM (news, site) released its annual State of the ECM Industry 2009 report which found that overall, electronic content at an organizational level is in a mess.

Revisiting the report in the cold light of day AIIM President John Mancini summed up the findings of the report on the Digital Landfill blog recently.

Hardly a day goes by that we don't find ourselves covering some of the eight facts about document management that he raises. Three of these in particular, strike a chord with us, as we are sure they do with you.

Email Exposure
Legal Discovery
SharePoint Deployments

Industry Event Planner (21-Jul-2009)

By Chelsi Nakano

July Events

July 20-22 (Seattle): Web Design World

The design conference for the here and now. These days, everyone's having to do more with less. We get that. That's why Web Design World Seattle is all about teaching you what you need today.

July 27-August 1 (Sydney): Usability Week

July 27 (Pheonix): Joomla Beginner Training

August Events

August 6 (London): Umbraco Meetup

A day of Umbraco fun, networking, socialising - we've got swag to give away including umbraco.tv subscriptions!

August 11-14 (San Jose): Search Engine Strategies

August 12-13 (San Francisco): Open Source World

August 12-13 (San Francisco): Cloud World

CloudWorld will bring together the users of Web-centric software, infrastructure and services designed to drive acceptance and deployment of cloud computing in the data center.

August 17 (Reno): Joomla Beginner Training

August 24 (New Orleans): Joomla Beginner Training

September Events

September 1 (Paris): DrupalCon

September 10-11 (Switzerland): Magnolia CMS Conference

September 15-16 (Toronto): IDEA Conference

September 26-27 (Sheffield): CMS Made Simple Geek Moot

The developers of CMS Made Simple have finalized plans for the yearly developer conference. However, there is one major change… we're inviting you to join us.

September 28-29 (Atlanta): Hannon Hill Cascade Server User Conference

September 30 - October 1 (Washington, DC): Rethinking Corporate Communications

Want your event in this list? Submit it here.

Friday, July 24, 2009

07/21 Latest CMSWire Articles:Trend: Magazines Ditched in Favor of Social Media

More Moms Ditch Magazines, Turn to Social Media

By Marisa Peacock

Once, all that was needed to identify a mom was her jeans. Now, it's her twitter handle.

New research presented by BabyCenter has introduced the 21st Century Mom. She spends more and more of her time online within the realms of social media.

The report points to how moms are using social media. It also tells us how they are not using other forms of traditional media, like newspapers and magazines.

Surreal CMS Wants to Migrate Away CushyCMS Customers

By Irina Guseva

Looking at Surreal CMS (news, site) one wonders whether this web content management provider is coming from a James Bond-like background, or is under some sort of a perpetual NDA. The absolute lack of product version numbers or release notes makes it all quite umm... surreal.

Our intelligence forces have intercepted a message via a little-known transmission channel called Twitter that there was a new (unnamed, unnumbered) version of Surreal CMS released. And now we can share some super minimal (rest must've gotten scrambled), almost top secret details with you.

EMEAI Regions Get a Dose of Social Media Monitoring

By Chelsi Nakano

It seems like no matter how popular we report social media outlets to be, it's still going to sound like an understatement. The phenomenon continues to grow not only up, but also out, around, through and directly into every corner of the Internet-accessible planet.

How to deal with the explosion of information? That is the question.

Affino Offers Community-Enhanced eCommerce Solution

By Geoff Spick

eMojo (news, site), a British eCommerce specialist, is offering a new and enhanced version of its Affino eBusiness Suite that speeds up development for non-technical types and helps add a sense of community to your online store.

Connecting Saleforce.com and SharePoint

By Barb Mosher

BA Insights, a provider of content connectors, has just released the latest in a line of application connectors for SharePoint: Salesforce Connector for SharePoint.

The Salesforce Connector enables you to access data in Salesforce.com CRM applications and Force.com cloud-based applications within SharePoint search.

Open Text, Autonomy, IBM Among Leaders in Records Management

By Barb Mosher

It's always good to get recognition from the analyst firms because many organizations pay attention to what these guys say. In the ever evolving area of records management, this recognition can help a lot.

According to the report: The Forrester Wave(TM): Records Management, Q2 2009, a number of key enterprise content management vendors lead the wave for records management including Open Text, IBM, EMC and Oracle. Autonomy and CA are also leaders, with Interwoven and HP noted as strong performers.

We took a closer look at what features brought some of these vendors to the top of the pile.

Tips & Tricks for the Governance, Risk, Compliance Equation

By Marisa Peacock

We all know that all companies risk losing or leaking information. But do we really know what to do about enterprise risk management? Best practices aren't always relevant to enterprise environments, nor do companies always have the proper benchmarks in place to implement them.

Taken together, GRC is an oft-used acronym that refers to the way in which organizations manage, store and share information. Taken individually, there are integral pieces of the process.

Commercial Drupal Firm Acquia Lands $8 Million More Funding

By Chelsi Nakano

Show Acquia (news, site) the money, and it'll be nothin' new. The commercialized cure-all for the Drupal publishing system has raised a whopping US$ 8million in their second round of venture capital funding, according to a recent SEC filing.

The sizable chunk of moolah is just an addition to their nest egg, as the company scored US$ 7million back in December, during round one. First time around funders included North Bridge Venture Partners, Sigma Partners and O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. Said Dries Buytaert, founder of Drupal and co-founder of Acquia, "The funding allows us to quickly bring together a world-class team, rent office space, buy equipment, etc. Starting a great company is not cheap, especially if you have big dreams and plans."

The million dollar improvement certainly reflects well of the company, and we presume new CEO Tom Erickson (the "world domination" guy) is especially pleased. Before replacing Acquia co-founder Jay Batson in March of this year, Erickson was an active participant as a member of the Advisory Board.

Another increase in numbers includes the amount of funders. While Acquia saw three generous hands last December, a reported total of four reached out in March. The money is said to be for working capital.

Will Acquia divide and conquer? If things keep going the way they are, then we think some serious domination is definitely within reach.

Web Turns Marketing and Communications on its Head

By Gerry McGovern

Traditional marketing and communication is about getting people to do things. Web marketing and communication is about helping people do things.

Procrastinators: Joomla 1.0 End of Life is Here

By Kristoffer Sandven

Yes, it's summer and you're probably thinking more about sun, surf and sand than systems administration. Who can blame you?

But then, the world moves on, now doesn't it? Today we have the pleasure of reminding you Joomla procrastinators that it's the end of the road for Joomla 1.0. Yep, it's time to upgrade.

The Joomla team gave the world a heads-up back in November 2008 and now the official end-of-life is upon us. Here's a quick recap of how we got to this point and some important considerations for Joomla site managers.

Weekly Roll-Up: Top Stories, Memes and Moments (18-July-2009)

By Marisa Peacock

The twists, turns and tips you need for staying up-to-date by the water cooler.

Highlights of the Week

SharePoint 2010, A Business Collaboration Platform. Coming down the pike is the latest version of Microsoft's SharePoint. Here's an early peek.
Nuxeo Galaxy: Extending Enterprise CMS to CEVAs. Nuxeo, being quite a busy bee lately, launched their Galaxy Program. No, astronautical adventures are not included.
Plone Web CMS Update - What's Coming in v4. Following the PLIP process, the Plone 4 Framework Team has polished off their list of what's to be included in this release.
A Quickie with Microsoft Office 2010. The ol' suite is most certainly a seasoned player, which, so far, has proved its ability to keep up with the changing times.
Hannon Hill Updates Web CMS to v6.2, Improvements Aplenty. After only a month of testing Cascade Server 6.2 Beta, which was released on June 9th, the official release of v6.2 incorporates all the major changes in the beta version plus a few fixes.
Mark Logic Launches New Application Services, Updates Core Software. World, meet both MarkLogic Server 4.1 and MarkLogic Application Services 1.0.
New Software Glues Alfresco Enterprise CMS to Scalable Storage. It was inevitable that tighter integration between the two was on the way, and yesterday they formally announced the launch of the Alfresco2CAStor connector between the two platforms.
Socialtext Offers Cheap Microblogging for Your Intranet. Take a look at the new Socialtext Microblogging Appliance. It's like Twitter for your Intranet, and it's only a dollar per user, per month.

The Economy is in the Dumps but Content Management is Booming

If you're looking to advance your career, or if your org has got empty seats in need of savvy CMSers, you're in luck. Catch the best fish of the season on our on our content management job board.

Featured Jobs:

CTO with Drupal experience needed in San Francisco at Drupal Staffing
Jr. Drupal CMS Engineer at North American Travel Journalist Assoc
Drupal Developers needed in San Francisco (relocation ok) at Drupal Staffing
Software Engineer - Knowledge Management at Amazon
Visual Designer at Lime Wire

Whether Traveling or Virtual, There are Events to Attend

Wondering how to spend your time in the next few weeks or months? Attend a conference or maybe just a webinar or two. Have a look at our new Events Calendar to see what's happening in your area.

Featured Events:

Usability Week Sydney 2009 July 27 - Aug 1, conference
Drupalcon Paris 2009 September 1, Conference
IDEA Conference 2009, Toronto, Canada September 15-16, Conference
Adobe MAX 2009, Los Angeles, CA October 4-7, Conference

A Quickie with Microsoft Office 2010

By Chelsi Nakano

Ah, numbers. The universal language. 500 million is an awful lot no matter where you go or what's in question; hence, we think it's safe to say that an awful lot of people use Microsoft Office--with totally appropriate italics for emphasis and everything.

The ol' suite is most certainly a seasoned player, which, so far, has proved its ability to keep up with the changing times. Lucky for Microsoft, especially considering how much the way in which we work has changed since the 2007. As Microsoft gears up for the Office 2010 release, we wonder, will it be another hit, or will half a billion people be disappointed? Let's take a look at the breadcrumbs they've dropped so far.

Box.net Aims for a Chunk of SharePoint's Market

By Geoff Spick

Box.net (news, site) is gunning for SharePoint users in a big way, holding up a mirror to all of the product's foibles and failings. But for all the marketing mayhem they are putting out, there's still a little recognition that SharePoint is a viable option -- in some instances.

Document Capture Yields Happy Customers and Positive ROI

By David Roe

A new AIIM (news, site) survey for the EMC Corporation (news, site) that has just been released probably provides few surprises concluding that investment in document capture technologies is ultimately going to save companies money.

However, in all such surveys there are always one or two points that really make you stand back and go "Wow'! I wouldn't have thought that at all!"

And this one is no exception. In this particular case the 'Wow factor' comes from the revelation that while most organizations have already invested in capture technologies, two-thirds were only scanning 50% of possible documents.

Bamboo Offers Free Software to SharePoint Community Groups

By Barb Mosher

Keeping with the theme of pricing and SharePoint today, we have a little something coming from Bamboo Solutions (news, site).

Bamboo, a provider of SharePoint solutions, web parts and other add-ons, has announced that they are giving away software to SharePoint Community groups as part of an initiative called The Bamboo SharePoint User Group Community Project.

Vamosa Picks Up SchemaLogic for a Compliant Good Time

By Chelsi Nakano

If you've been following Vamosa (news, site), a company that specializes in the analysis and migration of enterprise content, then you know all about their special feelings for governance and compliance.

Everyday the importance of regulatory standards grows more and more apparent. In accordance with that, Vamosa has been on a beeline path to help companies find their own personal Enterprise Content Governance (ECoG) utopia. This path has recently included Vamosa's Check & Fix feature, a website content monitoring service that automatically fixes errors.

No longer alone in their endeavors, Vamosa recently announced their new partnership with SchemaLogic, an Information Managment software vendor that's certainly no stranger in these parts. Virtual hand in virtual hand, the two companies have founded the ECoG Alliance, and through it will offer a one-stop shop for tools that analyze, cleanse, migrate, monitor and maintain unstructured content types.

As for the motive: "The ability to store, access and share content is integral to the running of an organization but even the best designed content management system can be ruined by poor content quality," said Lowell Anderson, vice president, Marketing, SchemaLogic. "We've teamed up with Vamosa to ensure enterprises can obtain a standard of content quality that is built in at the point of creation." And from Nic Archer, senior vice president, Vamosa: ""Partnering with SchemaLogic will allow Vamosa to offer customers improved content governance, thereby improving findability and reducing costs for the enterprise."

Vorsite Adjusts Prices To Help Transition to SharePoint

By Barb Mosher

Adjusting your pricing model to bring more customers to your door has become a common theme lately. Vorsite (news, site), a provider of enterprise content connectors, has offered up their new pricing model designed to not only help them, but SharePoint as well.

SharePoint 2010: Developer and IT Professional Outtakes

By Barb Mosher

Yesterday we had a look at an overview of SharePoint 2010, focusing on the updated User Experience. But there's a lot more to the next version of SharePoint (news, site). In this sneak peek, let's look at what's new for developers and IT professionals.

Web-Based Project Management with TrackerSuite.Net 3.0

By Marisa Peacock

It's hard to think of a job at the enterprise level where collaboration isn't a part of one's job description. For better or for worse, no one really holes up in their office/cubicle/basement, refusing engagement with the outside world. In fact, many of us can't even go on vacation and disconnect fully from our jobs.

The issue is no longer a question of should we collaborate, but rather how can we best collaborate and get our work done effectively and productively. Enter Automation Centre. They provide advanced team collaboration software and they've announced the release of TrackerSuite.Net 3.0, a major new update of their Web-based project management and virtual office platform.

KnowledgeTree Adds an Office Add-In to SaaS Enterprise CMS

By David Roe

The enterprise content management provider KnowledgeTree (news, site ) released v3.6.1 on June 19, and already it has announced that it has upgraded its SaaS solution to include all the functionality of the on-site version.

Focusing on businesses that have a large dependency on documents, and consequently document management solutions, the company says the SaaS upgrade will eliminate the need for new hardware, or in-house training for the IT department.

The principal feature that is now available on KnowledgeTree Live is the Microsoft Office Add-In. In addition, the ability to integrate with Zoho Writer makes it possible for users to access and edit documents remotely without high-cost desktop software.

Cashing In On The iPhone Age: Are Web CMS Vendors Missing a Trick?

By Robert Bredlau

Only by living on Mars could one have avoided hearing about the iPhone or BlackBerry and their entrances into the corporate world. Millions of consumers and business people are testament to the popularity of the handheld devices that have made accessing the web on the move cheaper and easier.

The new iPhone 3G S could well hasten this trend as its applications can now potentially operate twice as fast.

Plone Web CMS Update - What's Coming in v4

By Dee-Ann LeBlanc

It's been a busy summer for the Plone (news, site) project. In particular, they put out a call for Plone Improvement Proposals (PLIPs) for Plone 4. They also split the initial vision for Plone 4 into a more do-able Plone 4 for this year and a more far-reaching update for Plone 5 slated for next year.

Following the PLIP process, the Plone 4 Framework Team has polished off their list of what's to be included in this release.