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Home > Archives > February 2006

Tuesday, Feb 28 2006

KMWorld magazine has published its annual "100 Companies that Matter in Knowledge Management" list for 2006. Published since 2000, KMWorld's list is compiled through discussions with colleagues, KM practitioners, theorists, analysts, vendors and their customers, and recognizes companies that have lead the way in knowledge management. We've compiled the Web CMS and Enterprise CMS vendors who found their way into the ranks this time around.

Monday, Feb 27 2006

The Long Tail theory believes that the Web marks the end of the blockbuster era and rise of the niche. Perhaps true. But there may be some significant unexpected consequences.

Friday, Feb 24 2006

From simple scripts to enterprise-class web applications, PHP is one of the most popular programming languages in the world. Yahoo!’s new PHP Developer Center is all about enabling developers who want to interact with their Web Services APIs. As a bonus there are lots of high quality, general topic articles and links to other respectable PHP resources.

The site includes:

• HOWTO Articles
• Code Samples you can use as a starting points for your own applications
• Other Resources out on the Web to help you use PHP and the Yahoo! APIs
• Community Resources where you can tune into mailing lists and discussions

Friday, Feb 24 2006

The Microsoft ASP.NET team have released a pretty nifty add-on toolkit for VS 2005 ASP.NET 2.0. Scott Guthrie has a nice step by step pictorial tutorial on his blog.

The RSS toolkit includes support for consuming as well as publishing RSS feeds in ASP.NET applications.

Features:

• RSS Data Source control to consume feeds in ASP.NET applications
• Caching of downloaded feeds both in-memory and on-disk (persisted across process restarts)
• Generation of strongly typed classes for RSS feeds (including strongly typed channel, items, image, handler) based on a RSS URL (the toolkit recognizes RSS and RDF feeds) or a file containing RSS definition. Allows programmatically download (and create) RSS channels using strongly-typed classes.
• Support for generation of RSS feeds in ASP.NET application including:
  • RSS HTTP handler (strongly typed HTTP handlers are generated automatically by the build providers) to generate the feed.
  • RSS Hyper Link control (that can point to RSS HTTP handler) to create RSS links
  • Optional secure encoding of user name into query string to allow generation of personalized feeds
• Set of classes for programmatic consumption and generation of RSS feed in a late-bound way, without using strongly typed generated classes

The toolkit is packaged as an assembly that can be either placed in GAC or in the “bin” directory of a web application. Full source code is included in the package. Download it now.

Thursday, Feb 23 2006

Oh my Googleness, they’ve done us in now. Call it CMS colored glasses, but we can’t help but describe the new Google Page Creator as Google’s less than subtle entry to small business Web CMS.

Sure you can argue that Blogger.com long predates. No doubt about it. That’s true. But here we have Pages, not Posts. And as members of the CM Pros community, we are downright obliged to state that dem ain’t the same things.

Wednesday, Feb 22 2006

Now who could criticize this: Google has hired Dr. Evil ….oops I mean Dr. Brilliant.

Concerned about the recent $38 Billion loss in market capitalization? Worried about the US GOV getting their hands on your search and browsing history? Don’t like watching the free information behemoth bend the knee to self-censorship (despite honorable claims)? Ah, fear not, Dr. Brilliant to the rescue.

Well, I’m not entirely kidding. Google did hire Dr. Brilliant, but he may not have the remedy for any of the above ills. Mr. Larry Brilliant (MD, not PhD) has been hired as executive director of Google.org. Google’s philanthropic tentacle.

How can one resist commenting…

Friday, Feb 10 2006

Seth Gottlieb, Content Management Practice Lead of Optaros, recently published a white paper comparing 15 open source CMS offerings.

The stated goal was primarily to assess the utility of the resources (books, online documentation, and community/forum support) for a given CMS offering, but each assessment also contains a quick overview of the product and describes its basic use and a few architectural details. Seth puts the onus back on the consumer for the assessment of system fitness, stating quite reasonably that this depends greatly on the project requirements.

For those of you in the midst of a very time consuming CMS product assessment exercise, this report is worth getting your hands on.

Content Management Problems and Open Source Solutions