Latest Industry News News & Articles

One of the announcements at the Open Source Business Conference happening now in San Francisco, California, is that of the "Most Powerful Voices in Open Source."Let's take a stroll through the who's who of open source MVPs.

Welcome to the weekend. The hyped SXSW is in full swing, check out our ongoing live coverage from Texas. More interesting content management events are coming up: J. Boye Philly and GilbaneSF. But first let's take a look back and see what's been cooking in the Enterprise CMS/Web CMS kitchen this week. Beware of strong social media flavors and spicy debates.

Editor's Picks

• Selecting a CMS: Managing Product Demos. If you followed the advice from the first two articles in this series (How to build a short list and Developing scenarios), you are now ready to move to the next step and start evaluating products against your defined requirements.
  
• 5 Things to Consider when Integrating your Content Management System and Portal. Portals and content management systems are widely used in organizations today. For many, the desire to integrate them into a single collaborative environment is critical. But there's a lot to think about before moving forward.
• CMS Review: Oracle Universal Content Management (UCM). Not all products deserve your attention when you're in the process of selecting a CMS. Here's a detailed review of Oracle UCM to help you decide if this Enterprise CMS is a good fit for you.
• Enterprise Software: To Be or Not To Be Like Facebook. A war has been waged in the name of the future enterprise. On one side, Marc Benioff. On the other, a crowd of naysayers who don’t like the idea of mixing business with pleasure.
• Clickability Extends SaaS Web CMS With Integrated IDE. While Clickability has long claimed to be accessible to a non-technical audience, it can now appeal to developers and web designers.
• Hippo CMS 7.3 Brings Facets, Surf-and-Edit, Pretty URLs. Since version 7.3 was expected in the fall of 2009 (per Hippo’s roadmap of 4 scheduled releases per year) you’re probably anxious to try out the new goodies.
• From Twitter to Yammer to Buzz, 10 Microblogging Must Reads. We’ve put together some must-read happenings that have occurred so far this year. Whether you’re in the mix for business or pleasure, these points are worth the read.
• Telligent Analytics 3.5: New Support Analytics, Updated User Analytics. Telligent Analytics is almost three and a half years old and there's no sign that this solution is joining the market of basic analytic solutions.

Most Popular Articles

These articles were what you fancied most this week, according to Uncle G's analytics data.

• How Document Management Has Evolved in SharePoint 2010. Adam Harmetz, Lead Program Manager for SharePoint Document and Records Management, gives us a tour around new DM features in SharePoint 2010.
• SharePoint Portal Alternatives - A Credible List. We took a look at some of these "SharePoint Alternatives" and let you know what SharePoint functionality they replace. Here's what we found.
• Installing SharePoint 2010 on Windows 7. Did you know you can run SharePoint 2010 environments on both Windows 7 and Windows Vista SP1?
• Google's Marketplace Spells Trouble for Microsoft. Google set off an enterprise-tastic bomb when they announced the opening of Google Marketplace, an online store for business apps. Now, we can’t help but wonder, is Microsoft an impending casualty?
• Google Opens Marketplace for Google Apps: Box.net, Zoho on Board. After weeks of rumors, Google finally launched Google Apps Marketplace, their new online store for business applications that integrate with and extend Google Apps.
• Prepare for a May 12 SharePoint 2010 Launch. The official launch date for SharePoint 2010 is circling the net and like everyone else interested in SharePoint, we have marked our calendar with a great big exclamation mark.
• Sun Microsystems Chief Open Source Officer Leaves Oracle. March 8 turned out to be Simon Phipps' last day at Sun/Oracle. What does that mean for his pet projects, and Oracle's plans for Sun's open source properties? Timing is everything, as we just recently pondered about what the Oracle + Sun merger could mean for content management.

Polls and Your Votes

The release date for SharePoint 2010 is around the corner. So we asked you about your plans, and so far the majority of votes seems to indicate that SharePoint 2010 is not at the top of priorities list.

Do you agree? Click the link below and let us know.

• Poll: Is Your Organization Planning to Implement SharePoint 2010?

Also, check out our previous poll results:

• Poll Results: Web Analytics Need More Love
• Poll Results: Usability is Top DAM Challenge

Content Management Jobs

Here's what's been brewing lately in the CMS jobs and careers field. Both seekers and employers, catch the best fish of the season on our content management job board.

Featured Jobs

• Analyst, Serving Customer Intelligence Professionals at Forrester Research
• Senior Sales Rep at Clickability
• Project Manager/Digital Media at http://www.tmgcustommedia.com
• LiveServer/RedDot/OpenText - CMS Developer at LP Associates
• Lead Developer (Drupal) at Sandusky Newspapers, Inc

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 Industry Events Calendar to see what's happening in your area.

Featured Events:

• Mar 16, 2010 – Webinar: Smart Fixes for Slacker Web Pages
• Apr 21, 2010 – Drupalcon San Francisco 2010
• Apr 22, 2010 – AIIM International Expo 2010
• May 5, 2010 – CMS Expo 2010 (Evanston)
• May 20, 2010 – Gilbane Conference San Francisco

 March 8 turned out to be Simon Phipps' last day at Sun (news, site) / Oracle (news, site). What does that mean for his pet projects, and Oracle's plans for Sun's open source properties?

Another week is over. While the content management community on Twitter was debating whether WordPress is a CMS (see Word of Pie's blog post and CMS Myth's take), many other Enterprise CMS, Web CMS and related happenings took place.

Here's the top news you might've missed along with our most popular reads, new job posts, featured events and more.

Editor's Picks

• Autonomy Interwoven Combines WCM, Search, Rich Media in Single Platform. Cha-cha-changes coming to Autonomy Interwoven, as the company announces major enhancements for its web content management system with integrated WCM, search, optimization and rich media.
• Key Questions Rarely Asked About Website Content Migration. Benjamin Franklin said, “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.” Obviously, Ben wasn’t thinking about migrating content from one Web CMS to another. But we all know how his words apply here.
• Alfresco Offers Cloud-based SMB Edition of its Enterprise CMS. Alfresco now has something for the little guy. An Amazon EC2-based SMB version of Alfresco's Enterprise CMS is in beta. Just pay and go. Using shampoo and conditioner is now a more complicated task.
• 10 Important Issues For Risk and Compliance Managers (Part 1). Based on conversations with industry experts and customers, we've compiled 10 of the most important issues for compliance professionals. Here you give you a look at the first 5.
• SharePoint Portal Alternatives - A Credible List. We took a look at some of these "SharePoint Alternatives" and let you know what SharePoint functionality they replace. Here's what we found.
• A New ASP.NET Security Framework Comes with Bitrix Site Manager 4.6. To test the product, it was let loose at the a recent Russian hacking event, Chaos Construction 9, where it staved off thousands of attempted attacks.
• eZ Systems Targets iPhone, iPad Publishing with Mobile WCM Toolkit, Services. The wired world is jibber-jabbing about iPhones, iPads and the next generation of publishing. Open source Web CMS eZ Publish now includes a new iPhone and iPad content delivery product.

Most Popular Articles

These articles were what you fancied most this week, according to Uncle Google's analytics data.

• How Document Management Has Evolved in SharePoint 2010. Adam Harmetz, Lead Program Manager for SharePoint Document and Records Management, gives us a tour around new DM features in SharePoint 2010.
• Red Hat Launches Opensource.com. Red Hat, one of the poster children of the Linux and open source communities, has launched a new online community to promote open source across various industries.
• 8 Ways Web Content Management has Improved in SharePoint 2010. Some say that Microsoft hasn't really made many changes to SharePoint 2007's web content management functionality for SharePoint 2010. While the underlying architecture may not have changed, there are some improvements.
• Microsoft Compares Their Hosted Service to Google Apps. We know there is increasing competition for cloud-based services. But one of the biggest competitions — between Google and Microsoft — just got a little more interesting.
• Social Media Marketing with Facebook and Omniture. The point? No, measuring Facebook stuff is nothing new, but it looks like this year it's going to become increasingly important.
• Installing SharePoint 2010 on Windows 7. Did you know you can run SharePoint 2010 environments on both Windows 7 and Windows Vista SP1?

Polls and Your Votes

The release date for SharePoint 2010 is around the corner. So we asked you about your plans, and so far the majority of votes seems to indicate that SharePoint 2010 is not at the top of priorities list.

Do you agree? Click the link below and let us know.

• Poll: Is Your Organization Planning to Implement SharePoint 2010?

Also, check out our previous poll results:

• Poll Results: Web Analytics Need More Love
• Poll Results: Usability is Top DAM Challenge

Content Management Jobs

Here's what's been brewing lately in the CMS jobs and careers field. Both seekers and employers, catch the best fish of the season on our content management job board.

Featured Jobs

• Technology Bloggers for Justmeans.com at Justmeans
• Development Project Manager at Objective
• Experienced UX Designer at Tanagram Partners
• Sales Executive/Representative at Socialtext
• Technical Writer - Software Applications at Bamboo Solutions

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 Industry Events Calendar to see what's happening in your area.

Featured Events:

• Mar 16, 2010 – Webinar: Smart Fixes for Slacker Web Pages
• Apr 21, 2010 – Drupalcon San Francisco 2010
• Apr 22, 2010 – AIIM International Expo 2010
• May 5, 2010 – CMS Expo 2010 (Evanston)
• May 20, 2010 – Gilbane Conference San Francisco

IDC (news, site) has a new research report available on growth of worldwide IT spending and while it's improving, it's not by much.

Welcome to the February installment of our what's coming from the open source CMS projects in the next month.

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.

Everyone has an opinion on who we all should be paying close attention to this year. IDC has their lists, Gartner and Forrester point our theirs in research reports. Even CIO Magazine has their top 20 and there are more than a few you might find interesting.

In order for real communication to happen, especially among people from different regions and dialects (let alone people from different countries and languages altogether), terms have to be clearly defined so that everyone is starting from the same point. The problem with such definitions is that the devil really is in the details.

December was a busy month for industry research giant Gartner. They started the month announcing the acquisition of AMR Research and they ended the month with the acquisition of the Burton Group.

Here we are on the brink of the night before Christmas, if that's your kind of thing. And this time we're indulging ourselves by shuttering the shop from now until the first Monday of 2010.

For us it's reflection season. In that spirit we've cooked up a concise retrospective of 2009, including items our readers took particular interest in, and some things we found generally interesting.

Without further ado we leave you to some holiday reading. May the end of 2009 treat you and yours well.

Enterprise CMS Highlights

It was largely business as usual in the ECM sector this year, with a few notable exceptions.

• SDL's acquisition of XyEnterprise made sense.
• But it was Autonomy's acquisition of Interwoven that was the most talked about.
• That is until Open Text's acquired Vignette — although many suspected Vignette was on the market.
• In November Forrester fingered EMC, IBM, Microsoft, Open Text and Oracle as the leaders in their Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Content Management while Autonomy, Day Software, Alfresco and SpringCM were placed in the visionaries box.
• In early Q4 at Open World Oracle announced plans to integrate their enterprise Applications with their ECM document services. Details were slim, so we'll have to look for more facts there in 2010.

Beyond acquisition activity, open source players stepped up their game and look to be positioned well for some 2010 combat.

• Alfresco got more attention from analysts and chalked-up an important DoD certification. Adobe and Alfresco continued to work together on Adobe's LiveCycle Enterprise Suite. The company also made strides with their cloud offering via a partnership with RightScale.
• Paris-based Nuxeo launched US operations in the ever popular Boston area, added Digital Asset Management (DAM) to their offering and hired Cheryl McKinnon — previously of Open Text — to run global marketing programs.
• The DoD was on our radar again as it voiced support for open source software in the procurement process, in the form of a DoD memo.

SharePoint in the Limelight (still)

• SharePoint remained so dominant that vendors big and small rushed to build integrations and connectors. All year long people found the topic of Web Content Management with SharePoint intriguing. However, we heard more about frustrations than successes.
• The anticipation and early previews of SharePoint 2010 dominated the annual (and sold out) SharePoint Conference 2009. The event brought tidbits for technical administrators, covered the 2010 upgrade plans, and spurred partners to announce support for the product.
• For project managers, Dux Raymond Sy wrote up a brief on project management with SharePoint 2010. He followed up this article with a two-part treatise on why SharePoint ignorance is not bliss.
• The SharePoint 2010 beta was released this past November. And Microsoft — ever keen on inspiring upgrades and enabling the partner channel — followed up this month with the launch of an official SharePoint 2010 upgrade service offering.
• Yet despite progress in the field, many organizations still struggle to go beyond using SharePoint as a file sharing service. Still, dear Steve Ballmer's confidence is higher than ever. He even described how SharePoint is like the PC.

Web CMS a Super Dynamic Space

Perhaps it's been web content management that has seen the most change this year:

• Vignette and Interwoven acquisitions were mentioned above, but we'll shed a tear and pay them homage one more time here. Confusion was voiced fairly broadly around the Open Text grab of Vignette, notably around their 2010 platforms roadmap. There were also some whispers and chirps about Open Text layoffs. More on that in 2010.
• Yes, we like strong opinions as much as the next fella. Catering to such appetites analyst firm Forrester Research announced that Web CMS 1.0 was officially dead. Weee!
• We all learned that the second most used Web CMS, Drupal, will — with the brains and funding of Acquia — go from not so user friendly framework to easy as pie SaaS with the release of Drupal Gardens (now in early alpha). This something to watch in 2010.
• At the J Boye conference in Aarhus, Denmark key practitioners voiced some inconvenient truths and focused on web content management industry challenges. Our recent article Emerging Trends in Web Content Management touched on this again. Certain voices from the field are calling for the death of the WCM acronym, but suitable replacements have yet to be put forward, with a straight face. Stay tuned to the vocabulary space. We're either going to move forward, move backwards, or stay put. I think that about covers the options.
• Mass market WCM options shifted around a bit in terms of brand strength and popularity. Yet  the most popular open source Web CMS products remained Drupal, Joomla and WordPress. You can get the skinny on the top 20 open source CMS brands in the 2009 Open Source CMS Market Share report.

Standards Abound, Gain Ground

The subject of standards was never far from anyone's mind:

• Enterprise CMS and document management vendors realized part of the key to their success is the ability to interoperate via CMIS. The greatest common factor interoperability specification made good progress over the course of 2009 and version 1.0 is now out for public review.
• HTML 5 continued to gain traction even if it's more years away than we like to admit.
• CSS3 brought support for mobile and multi-column layouts
• Increased use of the mobile web brought the need for standards.
• Even Microsoft expressed support for open standards and interoperability
• At J Boye Aarhus in November, Day Software's David Nüscheler, covered 8 Key Trends in Web Content Management. They fit well with Day's plans and offerings, but nevertheless were good food for thought and quite standards oriented.
• Discussions at the Gilbane San Francisco event also shone light on standards. Irina Guseva's article Content Integration Standards — CMIS, JSR-170, JSR-283 is a worthwhile read.
• For a great overview of hot content management standards, read Jon Mark's article WCM Field Notes: The Skinny on JCR, CMIS and OSGi.

Enterprise 2.0

The adoption of social computing in the enterprise was big news this year.

• Google took the beta tag off its apps to show it was enterprise ready
• Then they released Google Wave, supposedly the next generation collaboration platform.
• We learned four reasons you should adopt social media in the enterprise
• That Twitter and Facebook are the most persuasive technology of all time. And now the real-time fire hoses are open (watch what you say!).
• But despite all the hootin and hollering, not everyone thought this Enterprise 2.0 thing was necessary.

Industry Themes: Search, Speed, Analytics, Semantics, Real-time, Open Source and more…

You can't go through a year without major industry shifts, 2009 had its share:

• Microsoft challenged Google in the search arena with Bing. Have the Search Wars begun in earnest this time?
• Google brought new meaning to less is more with the Chrome browser.
• Just about everyone was talking about the real-time web. Google unveiled real-time search, Twitter opened the real-time fire hose for all developers, as did Facebook.
• The analytics space was taken for a roller coaster ride when IBM acquired SPSS for US$ 1.2 bil and Adobe acquired Omniture for US$ 1.8 bil.
• The semantic web pushed forward with an HTML+RDFa Draft, RDFa metadata moving it the Drupal core and some interesting research on applying semantic web metadata to large data sets. Tim Berners-Lee continued work on linked data and semantic web technologies, with an official mandate in the UK.
• Open Source went to the White House in the form of the Drupal Web CMS. And the U.S. Department of Defense said open source software was a-OK for them.
• Looking forward, CMS Watch recently made their 2010 predictions.
• And looking backwards (to October 2008), Gartner predicted the Top 10 Strategic Technologies of 2009 …were they right?

That's it for the holiday brain food fun. Thanks for supporting us in 2009 — we'll see you right back here in January.

Big news in the analyst world today as Gartner announces it has entered into an agreement to acquire AMR Research.

"AMR Research is an excellent strategic fit for Gartner.  The firm is the market leader for research related to supply chain management, which is inextricably linked to IT and has become a central and growing issue for many organizations."

The acquisition offer which has been in the works for weeks, will cost Gartner US$ 64 million in cash. AMR is expected to bring in US$ 40 million in revenue for 2009.

A good deal for AMR as Gartner is 32 times the size of the smaller research firm. To Gartners 650 analysts and 1000 sales reps, AMR adds 40 analysts and 45 sales reps.

AMR's Chief Research Officer, Bruce Richardson, said in a post that he looks forward to becoming part of the Gartner family. He notes benefits such as access to a wide range of research, global reach, a wider audience and more verticals.

He also notes it will be business as usual for AMR — for now at least.

Ah yes, this is indeed a wonderful era for learning and networking. There are conferences and webinars coming out our ears, hotspots a-plenty and if you're lucky, sponsored drinks at the bar.

Our weekly events list is designed to help you plan ahead. And if we've missed something, don’t hesitate to add your event to our industry events calendar.

November Events

January Events

February Events

Welcome to the December 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.
 

After a return to some sort of form with IE8, can Microsoft (news, site) transform its browser for the lean and lite generation?

This week Packt (news, site) has announced one winner a day for its 2009 Open Source CMS awards. Already they've revealed that:

• Plone (news, site) won 2009 Best Other Open Source CMS
• Drupal (news, site) won 2009 Best Open Source PHP CMS and the first inaugural 2009 Hall of Fame award
• ImpressCMS (news, site) won 2009 Most Promising Open Source CMS

Today's category is the last: 2009 Overall Best Open Source CMS.

Congratulations to WordPress (news, site) for taking home the crown. Tied for runners up are MODx (news, site) and SilverStripe (news, site).

The WordPress project receives US$ 4,000 in prize money, while MODx and SilverStripe each receive US$ 2,500. In addition to the money, WordPress also becomes eligible for the Hall of Fame category next year.

In the winners' announcement, Packt Publishing stated that, "After Pixie and Pligg [tied for runners up] for the Most Promising CMS category, this is the second time the combined opinion of judges and the public was evenly divided for two CMSes, awarding each of them a first runner up spot."

Welcome to the October 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.

We expect the CMIS OASIS Technical Committee is feeling pretty good right now. Yesterday they voted CMIS specification draft 0.70b to be the official Committee Draft and approved it for submission to the OASIS public review process.

Now the fun part really begins.

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?

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.

At this year’s Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference, Microsoft (news, site) confirmed the upcoming commercial availability of their cloud services platform, Azure. Then they slapped a price tag on it.

Microsoft's cloud computing platform was initially released last fall and offers an operating system and developer services that can be used individually or together. The whole shebang will hit the virtual shelves at the Professional Developer Conference in November of this year.

Once available, Azure will be offered through a consumption-based pricing model. This method will allow partners and customers to pay for the services that they consume, and nothing more. Exact pricing for Azure’s OS will reportedly be US$ 0.12 per hour for computing, and US$ 0.15 per Gigabyte per month for storage. Plans include a basic US$ 9.99 per month basic edition and a US$ 99.99 per month business edition which comes with a 10 Gig database.

Cloud Computing is kind of a huge thing right now so naturally, at the initial release of Microsoft's platform, we considered the possibility that the company was "betting the farm on Azure." Do we still think that's the case? Perhaps. Earlier this year we saw upgrades aimed to woo developers and the pending commercial availability certainly speaks to the needed openness. It looks like these collective baby steps lead in one direction: up!

Follow us as we follow them and let's see how they do.