Latest Industry News News & Articles

LiveMesh, released earlier this year by Microsoft and still in beta, picked up a major award at the 2008 Crunchies. Amidst a flurry of start-ups, new “2.0” services and power house competition, it was a little surprising to see LiveMesh win the Best Technology Innovation Crunchie. Is the award enough to sway skeptical bloggers’ opinions about the enterprise 2.0 synchronization and collaboration system?

Announcing the Google Blog Converters project! 

Tired of Blogger? Want to move to WordPress? Or vice versa? Problem solved! Google's new Open Source project enables you to easily move blog posts and comments from service to service. 

With e-Discovery a top priority for most enterprise organizations, the decision on which software vendor product to use can be difficult. There are many products and solutions on the market today that claim to help you organize and keep track of your data. For many, research reports from the top analysts are a tool to help in the decision making process.

This is a good thing for ZyLAB, an information access solutions vendor. They have just received the highest rating possible in analyst firm Gartner's MarketScope for E-Discovery Software Product Vendors, 2008. 

The linguistic landscape of the World Wide Web is changing. Though at times English seems like the most widely spoken and used language, we are humbled to remember that there are hundreds, if not thousands of languages.

When it comes to the web, Asia already has twice as many Internet users as North America and by 2012 it will have three times as many. Such stats should serve as a wake up call for the many global businesses still needing to improve the way they create, manage and publish multilingual content.

By making the web much more compatible and engaging for non-English speaking or writing users (who until now have had to suffer through complicated keyboard maps or the struggle of querying in a language that's not their own) globalization innovations will allow all users to connect and communicate in their language of choice.

We knew Microsoft was getting more accepting of open source, but allowing open source .Net Web CMS DotNetNuke reside within the walls of CodePlex wasn't something we thought we would see anytime soon.

When it comes to Digital Asset Management, most of the players are divided between low-end solutions and high-end solutions. According to the recent DAM report from CMS Watch, the mid-market offering is going by the way side. One would think this is somewhat odd, considering the middle market is probably the largest one out there.

Signs of economic unrest usually include a push to pander to a different or wider demographic. During 1992's economic recession, it was declared the Year of the Woman, a nod to the 34 women in the House and Senate. This year, we also celebrate a record-number of women in the 111th Congress. And again, it has been declared the Year of the Woman.

However, this time, a woman's representation expands to the Web, where a number of female-centric sites are kicking butt and taking names. Web sites targeted to women are growing in numbers, serving up content across a wide swath of subjects and age groups. From the looks of it, there seems to be something for everyone.

More good things are coming from old partnerships, the latest being a global strategic alliance between Ricoh Americas Corporation and the ever-popular IBM, spearheaded by Ricoh's new offering - Document Security and Management Services.

It's amazing that since its inception, the internet has remained more or less unregulated. While attempts have been made, most have been thwarted thanks in part to the first amendment and an overall sensitivity to censorship – at least in the United States.

However, change is in the air.

There was a time when inline editing, the ability to edit a piece of web content without going through an admin screen or a clunky submission form, was a key differentiator between web content management systems. That time is no longer.

Now we find ourselves in the age where content management systems and browser add-ons are friendly parts of the same sentence. Follow along with us as we see where Estonian Web CMS vendor is taking this technology relationship.

Why would a highly-diversified Enterprise CMS technology corporation with licensing revenues in the billions of dollars be interested in a tiny company that specializes in support software for open source projects?

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

This week:

• TechCrunch's Arrington Loses It With PR Firms
• StockTwits Raises Funding
• Macworld Sans Steve
• Facebook Developers Grumble, but FB Platform 'Still Most Attractive Option'
• Read Write Web's Best Apps of 2008
• Random Scandal of the Week — Slave Labor at HuffPost

TechCrunch's Arrington Loses It With PR Firms

In a wild, Chris-Crocker-style rant which had everyone asking "who spiked his non-foam double-latte?", Michael Arrington declared war on the PR firms that dare to ask TechCrunch to hold off on breaking news until they say so. Scared children cried and hid behind their mothers' petticoats, grown men slunk away.

Said an anonymous 'insider': "Yes, Arrington's done himself no favors with this tirade. Just in case he's damaged his reputation, perhaps he should look into hiring in some PR."

Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb meanwhile wasted no time in telling Arrington he was wrong. He immediately reposted an older article on How and Why  Embargoes Work.

Yesterday sparked an unprecedented rush to fix browser security issues. With the announcement of Internet Explorer’s security flaws, both Microsoft and Mozilla have released fixes for their respective browsers. The fixes for both Internet Explorer and FireFox are available now.

Less than 24 hours after news was released about security issues with Internet Explorer, Microsoft has released a hack patch for the security flaw that affects all versions of IE version 5 to 8 beta. According to Microsoft, there was not a security patch due out until January 13, 2009, but with the recent announcement and the push for users to switch browsers, Microsoft opted to push the release today.

To update your Internet Explorer all you need to do is simply visit the Microsoft update center, run the check for updates, and it will show up as a high priority update labeled “Security Update for Internet Explorer (your version number)”. You can either install express or custom, but it is recommended that your antivirus software also be checked and updated and full scan be run to ensure that no breaches occurred.

Mozilla has also released a group of fixes for their FireFox browser. These updates come at a time when neither party wants bad publicity, largely due to the heavy competition between the two browsers. FireFox 3.0.5 and 2.0.0.19 are both available for Windows and Linux now. The update to 3.0.5 fixes 3 major XSS issues including crashes with evidence of memory corruption. These issues have been labeled critical on top of five other minor security fixes.

As for FireFox 2.x, the patch fixes 10 issues, four of which are critical. These vulnerabilities are again tied to XSS issues, but these fixes also address an issue related to additional XSS attack vectors in feed preview. The bad news for FireFox 2.x users is that after this update there will be no further support for 2.x. Mozilla urges FF users to upgrade to 3.x as soon as possible. Updating your version should happen automatically when you log in to your browser. If it does not, under "Help" in your menu there is an option to check for updates. You can upgrade your version from FireFox 2.x to 3.0.5 here.

So whether you are an Internet Explorer die-hard or a FireFox advocate, both browsers have acknowledged severe security vulnerabilities. It is urged that you update your browser.

OpenKM 3 has just lauched, with a range of new features including workflow management, better format support, and better handling of multimedia. The new version is available to download either as a free community version or as a licensed, supported version.

OpenKM delivers browser-based document management, and is built off a low load infrastructure incorporating JBoss and Java (and GWT — Google Web Toolkit). Via Opera, Safari, IE or Firefox, the user can manage all of an enterprise's docs: find them, share them ,assign permissions, assign them to folders and so on. This AJAX-y app allows the user to do so in an intuitive and fast manner — enabling drag'n'drop and the kind of direct manipulation we've come to expect from our favorite cloud apps. 

In companies of all shapes and sizes, one of the key frustrations is dealing with faxes. Faxes have been around for a long time and are still used in today's businesses, and organizations are looking for ways to better manage these cumbersome documents.

To help combat fax management issues, Open Text, an Enterprise CMS provider, announced a new version of their Open Text Fax Server. The Fax Server software serves as an electronic way to deliver and manage paper faxes. Along with the news about the Fax Server update, Open Text has also revealed their Open Text Fax Server Connector for MOSS. This connector software will allow organizations to capture and deliver fax documents within SharePoint.

And so it has started. The end of the year is upon us and everyone is thinking about what's ahead. Independent analyst firm CMS Watch has offered up their 2009 predictions. If the results of how they faired with last year's round are any indication, we may all do well to pay attention.

Internet Explorer has long been the topic of negative conversation in the tech community. And today is no different as a major security flaw has been announced that affects IE5 through the new IE8 beta.

The flaw allows serious and far reaching attacks that are not just theoretical in nature. According to sources this particular issue is already in wide use with attempts to steal game passwords. There are a reported 10,000+ websites infected with the code necessary to take advantage of this breach.

We've written a lot lately about mobile solutions in content management and social media. The market for mobile content is trending strongly upward especially with the release of the iPhone and the enhancements to the Blackberry.

Oddly enough though, e-Spirit has found that only 35% of organizations they surveyed in the UK have optimized their websites for mobile devices. This a potentially huge market. Failing to address it is a mistake.

Are you in the loop on this? The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.0 (WCAG 2.0) has been approved by the W3C. With it, comes discussion among W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative about what’s new with these guidelines as well as the resources that will be available for web developers and designers.

Amazon Web Services, the hosted application environment from Amazon.com, announced the availability of the Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) in Europe. Having Amazon EC2 in Europe will mean developers and businesses can build applications and websites on the EC2 platform with less latency, as computational data will not have to travel across the Internet as a part of the workload.