Web Content Management System (CMS) News & Articles

One of the most known analyst firms — the Gilbane Group (news, site) — has been on the research and consulting market since 1987. Today marks another historical point for the firm – their acquisition by Outsell, Inc., a younger analyst company that was founded in 1998. The transaction between the two started at a breakfast meeting one day and has been in discussions for the past 5 years. We talked to Frank Gilbane, who gave us some insight into the merger.

DotNetNuke (news, site) is having a little party today to celebrate the landing of US$ 8 million in additional Series B funding for their open source .NET web content management platform.

The financing, led by new investor UV Partners and including August Capital and Sierra Ventures (existing investors), will — of course — help fund product development and marketing and sales initiatives.

2009 was a strong year for DotNetNuke, with a new version of their Web CMS platform, a revamped partner program, the launching of their commercial edition(s) and the acquisition of Snowcovered (catch all the news here).

With this additional funding, we should expect even more things from the open source company this year, even though as President and CEO Navin Nagiah says, they didn't really need the money:

DotNukeNuke had phenomenal market traction during our first year. We signed nearly 500 customers for our subscription products and closed nearly 40,000 transactions to 15,000 customers on Snowcovered.com, our online marketplace for third party add-ons. While we did not need capital given our revenue traction, we liked the partnership and the terms so we decided to close a new round. We welcome and look forward to working with UV Partners.

Need it or not, the funding will go a long way to expanding the existing platform and perhaps a move into new markets. We want to know what they will spend on the money on exactly. Come on DotNetNuke, leak the roadmap!

There has been a lot of discussion around what is better, integrated analytics or third party analytics solutions. But the discussion doesn't start there. It should start with just how well you use your analytics to drive your business decisions and user experience improvement decisions.

And thus our question for you this week is this:

The poll will be open through Sunday, February 14th, so have your say now. Stay tuned for the results of our Top DAM Challenges poll from last week.

The Red Herring list of the most impressive worldwide 100 private tech companies features some familiar names to the CMS crowd.

It is time for marketers and communicators to stop treating customers like little children and start treating them like intelligent adults.

Who says you need a mobile app in the app store to make it big? A new survey by Bango reveals that developers are more focused on maximizing distribution and revenues than making it into the App Store top 10.

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.

Business processes are at the heart of every organization and the ability to design and deploy them quickly is always in demand. Enter Salesforce.com (news, site) with their new Visual Process Manager for Force.com. Let's take a look.

The Gilbane (news, site) San Fransisco conference is a few months away, but things are already starting to take shape. Depending on your area of interest — web content management, enterprise content management, internet, intranet — there will be something new for you to learn.

The pre-conference workshops have just been announced, here's a look:

• Insider's Guide to Selecting WCM, Collaboration, and Social Software: Join Tony Byrne of CMS Watch to get a better understanding of the converging marketplace, who the key players are and how to traverse the roadmap to making the right technology/vendor decision for your needs.
• Learn to Develop an Actionable Intranet Strategy: Scott Liewehr, a Gilbane senior analyst, will take you through the steps required to build an actionable intranet strategy
• Managing Smart Content: How to Deploy XML Technologies across Your Organization: In this workshop, Gilbane senior consultant Dale Waldt and other members of the Gilbane practice on XML technologies will talk about their XML experiences and provide practical usage strategies.
• A Methodology for Web Governance: Christine Pierpoint of WelchmanPierpoint, will guide you through the component of a Web governance lifecycle, take a look at the steps to create a Web governance framework and discuss best practices and model.

You can also take a closer look at the conference schedule which is broken down into tracks for Colleagues and Collaboration, Content Publishing, Customers and Engagement, and Content Technology.

The Gilbane San Francisco conference takes place May 18-20, 2010 at the West Market Street Hotel in San Francisco. Registration is open and every Conference Plus Package comes with a free Kindle.

The Interactive Knowledge Stack, or IKS, has reached its second year. In that time they've made promising headway, but like the rest of the semantic web, they're really just getting started.

There have been some rumors circling around about Alterian (news, site) discontinuing its Immediacy Web CMS brand. Morello, their other CMS, is part of that goodbye story as well.

So, is it true that it is finita la comedia for Immediacy and Morello? We had a chat with Alterian’s VP of WCM product strategy Ian Truscott to find out.

If you don’t remember when CrownPeak (news, site) added their own testing, targeting and measurement tools last November, then don’t worry. They’re adding similar tools — again — but this time it’s via integration with Omniture (news, site).
 

 Open source Web content management provider XOOPS (news, site) is making some solid headway—a fact recently highlighted by Alexa.com. According to the Web information company, XOOPS’ reach increased by 57% over the last three months:

The official launch of the Windows Azure (news, site) cloud is now upon us. It's been in the works for a few years, and well tested — even if Microsoft does not fully utilize it themselves.

Modern organizations have armies of people trained in producing and publishing information, but there is a huge and growing lack of people who are skilled at organizing, analyzing and prioritizing it.

It is easy to see why most companies struggle with the CMS selection process. The market is flooded with hundreds of products and there does not appear to be a "safe", market-leading choice.

Ultimately, you want to select a content management system that supports your requirements and that your users will find usable.  But evaluating CMS software for functionality and usability takes time.  You don't want to waste your time getting intimate with the wrong products, yet battling your way to a reasonable short list is easier said than done. There are some shortcuts, here's how to get started.

Yes, you've got a modern website but no, it's not converting at the rate you think it should be. Is this the fault of your web content management system? Probably not.

It's more likely that you aren't using your CMS as well as you could. From where we sit, 2010 looks to be a year focused on improving the use of WCM tools for user experience optimization.

AMR Research is teaming with Sitecore and says they know how to get you moving on this smarter WCM road. On February 17 at 2pm EST, they will detail how 4 new strategies are changing the traditional way of managing web content.

The webinar, Beyond Web Content Management: 4 Essential Strategies for Advancing Your Website's Business Impact, will walk you through each of these four strategies, showing you how to implement them and how they will work together to increase your website's value.

As a takeaway bonus, you'll get the first of four studies on the topic of Beyond Web Content Management from AMR Research. Register here to learn more.

For dotCMS (news, site), eCommerce + Web CMS seems like a match made in heaven. Reason #1: Everyone wants to do eCommerce nowadays. Reason #2: Java+Java == Eternal love in the marriage of two Java-based software companies: KonaKart (eCommerce vendor) and dotCMS (open source Web CMS provider).

If you swear allegiance to both Internet Explorer and Google Apps, as of March 1st you may find yourself in an uncomfortable predicament, and frankly speaking, we're rather happy about all this. Google's recent decision will effect apps ranging from GMail to Google Docs. Enterprise folks, pay attention.

In full support of the rapidly growing e-reader trend, Atex (news, site) has just announced that their Web CMS offers direct publishing to devices all the way from the Kindle to the iPad.