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Wednesday, Apr 30 2008

Drupal, recent winner of a Webware Top 100 place is at it again. The open source Web Content Management powerhouse has created a new addition to their framework. It’s going to mean either more frequent releases or (ideally) better releases.

It’s now official, Microsoft has finalized it’s tender offer for Fast Search & Transfer. They’re pretty excited over at Microsoft these days knowing this deal is done.

FAST will operate as a Microsoft subsidiary and will have a dedicated research and development center in Norway.

John Markus Lervik, FAST CEO will be transitioning to the role of Microsoft Corporate Vice President of Enterprise Search. He gets to work with all the latest and greatest Microsoft search technologies like MS Search Server Express 2008, MOSS search and FAST ESP — the end result potentially being a single enterprise search platform.

The FAST product will retain it’s own FAST sales, service and support teams, they’ll just have a wider range of products to sell and support.

Open Source enthusiasts fear not, Microsoft is still very pro-proprietary. According to Kirk Koenigsbauer, General Manager for the SharePoint Business Group, “We’re making a pragmatic decision to continue to delight a core part of FAST’s customer base that has chosen the Linux/UNIX OS. You can bet that we’ll innovate on Windows, too, and over time we hope customers will see .NET as a preferred platform choice.”

Now Microsoft can renew it’s full focus on Yahoo! — if it isn’t already too late.

Remember when WordPress fans held fast to 2.0.x after the release of 2.1.x? Was it just an reluctance to change? Well, hopefully this is not the case with the newest version of the prolific publishing platform. WordPress v2.5 offers better functionality and continues the ease of use tradition — all in a more aesthetically pleasing packaging that works better for you…at least that’s the idea. Read on for the details.

Wednesday, Apr 30 2008

It was late January when Systems Alliance released version 4 of their web content management suite SiteExecutive. At the time, we noted the lack of the social networking capabilities.

Well, they were either listening very closely to us or to their own customers because only three months later they have announced their Enhancement Pack 1 for SiteExecutive 4.1 - and it looks packed with “facebook for the enterprise” like features — well sort of.

It’s a rare organization that does not track at least a minimum set of web analytics for their customer facing websites. The problem is rarely that there’s no data. Rather it’s what to do with that information once you have it in your hands. More often than not, it’s under utilized and probably finds it’s home in that virtual pile on your desktop.

It doesn’t have to be that way. There’s an upcoming Webinar co-hosted by Bridgeline Software and the Gilbane Group that will show you how to better use your analytics data to make decisions and improve the customer experience, and in the end improve your bottom line.

Today, South River Technologies edges Basic Content Services into the mainstream with the latest release of their secure document management and collaboration solution GroupDrive 5.0. This version has a strong focus on security across the network and the internet.

Tuesday, Apr 29 2008

Have we learned all we need to know about Web 2.0 and how it impacts our organizations? O’Reilly thinks not and so has decided to enlighten us with a new book on the subject: Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide — Business Thinking and Strategies Behind Successful Web 2.0 Implementations

Tuesday, Apr 29 2008

The Interwoven enterprise content management product suite has been getting quite a lift this last week or so with announcements coming out of their GearUp Conference on new product enhancements and partnership opportunities.

One of these new partnerships is with a company called Informative Graphics (IGC). IGC specializes in viewing, collaboration and redaction technology and they have created something special for Interwoven WorkSite.

Even since the Web descended down from the heavens (through a series of pipes and tubes, of course), we web folks have been obsessed with gathering, analyzing and spouting our wisdoms about metrics. By far the most popular metric these days is the length of time spent looking, reading or otherwise examining the screen in front of us.

It is to be accepted and otherwise unquestioned that the longer the time a user spends on a page, the better. So you can imagine the relief of online newspaper publishers when they learned of the results from data collected by Nielsen Online in March 2008.

The open social party is apparently the place to be. Even old Microsoft just announced LiveMesh). Now Yahoo, who’s Flickr photo sharing site is the second most popular used API on the web, has rolled out a limited preview to the developer platform they announced in February called SearchMonkey.

Acquia, Drupal founder Dries Buytaert’s new company, took to the stage last Thursday at the Launch Pad session at the web 2.0 Expo in SF. Although they didn’t win the people’s choice for best startup (this honor went to Triggit), their soon to be released Carbon and Spokes programs are still plenty enticing.

eTouch Systems, the creators of the SamePage enterprise wiki, have announced the launch of SamePage v3.5. What’s to note? They implemented a fully multilingual user interface. The first languages available will be French and Polish, but any number of languages will be provided for customers upon request.

That’s not the only new feature. SamePage is all about Enterprise 2.0 collaboration, and this release carries a few goodies that may make your team smile.