Content Management Matters ™

And we all stood back and applauded heartily as the giant knelt down and handed over the blueprints to his castle...what? you didn't applaud too?

Yesterday, Microsoft announced the release of Version 1.0 technical documentation for Microsoft Office 2007, SharePoint 2007 and Exchange 2007 as an effort to drive greater interoperability and foster a stronger open relationship with their developer and partner communities. They also posted over 5000 pages of technical documentation on Microsoft Office Word, Excel and PowerPoint binary file formats on the MSDN site royalty-free basis under Microsoft’s Open Specification Promise (OSP).

This is a good thing isn't it? It clearly demonstrates Microsoft's commitment to interoperability and data portability.

Not everyone agrees...

Sitecore recently announced the coming version of their flagship web content management system and today the product is officially out the door.

Our technical and editorial teams had an opportunity to test drive the new Sitecore 6 product last week. And with this latest version out of the gates today, we thought it apropos that we share a bit of what we saw.

In a very few words, version 6.0 is a nice corner-rounding release that demonstrates both that the company cares about its customers and that it has a successful process of building client feedback into the product development cycle.

So maybe it's not the end of Microsoft Outlook, but the news coming from Australia this week may be a sign of the changing times for the mighty Marketing machine. Google's Gmail application has kicked Outlook out of the schools by Australia's education sector. The New South Wales Department of Education has announced that Gmail will replace Outlook as the email application for over 1.3 million students.

A big win for Google, a big loss for Microsoft.

It’s well known that Microsoft relies heavily on partners to help develop extensions or integrations to their software. That doesn’t mean however, that they sit back and wait for the cool tools to come to them. Such is the case with social networking. At the Enterprise 2.0 conference last week they demoed a social networking solution they had been testing internally called TownSquare.

Microsoft is starting to dole out its 2008 Partner Awards. One excited vendor is happy announce they have been selected as one of two finalists for Microsoft's Partner of the Year in ISV/Software Solutions, Innovation.

Kentico has released a new version of it's web content management system. This new 3.1 version combines the power of e-commerce directly with content management. Something very few CMS vendors consider doing... or do they?

Microsoft may still be riding high from obtaining ISO certification for its OOXML specification in April, because they are now openly offering to support ODF in their Office 2007 productivity software. It's a ploy, some open source camps are whispering. It's about time, says others.

Microsoft is known for documentation and support of their products. So it comes as no surprise that they have launched a new partner-delivered offering for Microsoft SharePoint. Called the SharePoint Deployment Planning Services (SDPS), the service is tailored to help organizations who have enrolled in Volume Licensing Software Assurance successfully plan and deploy their SharePoint initiatives.

There's a survey report out that ranks the best Web 2.0 development platforms by the people who actually use them. The big surprise is that Microsoft tops the list of developer platforms with providers like Google, Amazon S3 and Yahoo trailing behind. In the same survey last year, Microsoft ranked last in some areas. Wonder what has changed so quickly?

When Xobni was formed in 2006 by two graduate students, it sought to improve, enhance and otherwise fix Microsoft Outlook.

Now, it's taking its efforts even further with a new tool that plugs into Outlook. Their software, free and downloadable, indexes all the e-mail in Outlook and makes those messages easily searchable and readily available.

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.

You can almost hear them now -- those marketing guys in the Microsoft corner offices -- gotta beat the competition...no...gotta squash the competition...How can we do it? Better product? No...cheaper prices...yeah!

At least that's how we think it went when Microsoft was laying out it's strategy for the release of Microsoft Dynamics Online.

Looking for the scoop and details surrounding what is promising to be “an open, comprehensive and accessible platform that enables developers to tackle increasingly complex problems no matter the device, connection or experience.” Yes, it is Microsoft's LiveMesh -- believe it or not.

Another of the big guns gets in on the mashup craze that is growing like wildfire. With the recent mashup news from IBM (not to mention strings of vague promises) Microsoft is set to jump on the bandwagon.

Microsoft, who has been on quite the buying spree as of late, confirmed its purchase of Seattle-based airfare prediction and travel site Farecast earlier this month for what is believed to be around US $115 million.