Content Management Matters ™

KIT digital, a provider of IPTV enablement technology and video-centric marketing solutions, recently announced that it has completed an agreement to acquire Morpheum, an Australian provider of LanternCMS software.

Ingeniux, an enterprise 2.0 WCM provider, has recently started offering three new SaaS packages for Ingeniux OnDemand, its hosted web content management solution.

The new approach is called "web content management by the slice" (hungry yet?) and allows customers to buy exactly as much of the Ingeniux CMS software as they need -- without the headaches of hardware and bandwidth -- all in a hosted environment.

Microsoft Gold that is. Yes Bitrix Systems, provider of the Web Content Management System Bitrix Site Manager, has been made Gold Certified Partner with competencies in ISV/Software Solutions. They have clearly demonstrated their capabilities in portal and content management technology by receiving Microsoft's highest certification, but what will you get out of it?

Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 is now available for download by the public. Microsoft certainly needs to push IE8 out soon -- especially when considering the recent developments within the Web browsing market. The company is touting the premise that IE8 is the most secure, reliable and privacy-aware version of the product to date. Will it be enough to impress the users of other browsers while keeping up with the expectations from current users?

Outsourcing to India, China and Ukraine doesn’t surprise us anymore. What we found interesting, however, is an emerging trend in the world of offshoring that doesn’t revolve around India and Chennai, in particular.

Chennai may be losing its top placement on the list of offshore capitals of the world, as Lima, capital of Peru, comes in. Peru is starting to be seen as the new destination for general web development, as well as more specialized projects such as CMS implementations.

What are the implications?

XOOPS, a portal system going the way of the Web CMS, is receiving significant upgrades. XOOPS 2.3 is claimed by the developers to be "the best version ever of XOOPS." The purpose of 2.3 is to build a bridge to the next generation of XOOPS. While version 2.3 has not been released, it is steadily approaching fast as the second release candidate is available for download.

Packt Publishing has announced the finalists for each category of its 2008 Open Source CMS Awards. Last year, Drupal was the overall winner, pushing the ’06 overall winner, Joomla!, to the second place.

This year, both are finalists in two categories. But there are many other contenders that may change the final results.

Alfresco Software, creator of the open source Alfresco ECM system, has announced that Adobe Systems has implemented Alfresco's ECM capabilities into the Acrobat.com website. The system will now maintain hundreds of thousands -- if not millions -- of documents that can be uploaded, shared, converted and collaborated. This marks a giant step forward for Alfresco and all of the open source development community.

Acquia, the commercialization entity that resulted from the Drupal project, has finally released a private beta of Carbon -- its commercial Drupal distribution. They've only been talking about the project since the end of April.

Another one bites the dust -- er -- makes the list. KMWorld's List of Trend Setters for 2008 also includes Ektron and their CMS400.Net content management solution.

Now you all know who Ektron is, they are the little guy that beat out the likes of Vignette, Microsoft, Open Text, Oracle, SDL Tridion, Sitecore, EMC and others for top spot in Gartner's MarketScope for Web Content Management 2008. The only one they didn't "beat" was Interwoven.

According to Hugh McKellar, KMWorld editor-in-chief, "Ektron has proven that they are committed to providing both quality and excellence in their solutions that benefit the customer experience."

Other than winning all these awards, Ektron's been pretty busy this year. They opened offices in Canada, brought social networking into the office as part of their solution offering, integrated CMS400.net with Silverlight, launched a new partner portal and more. Whew...busy little beavers aren't they.

Now on version 7.5 of the web content management solution CMS400.Net, we expect to see even more from these guys over the next little while.

While we don't argue with these vendors making the list -- in fact, in most cases it's easy to see why they do -- it would be nice if KMWorld was a little more specific on what "trend setting" really means and how it applies to each vendor. Maybe we'll see more detail in the Septemeber issue of the magazine when the list is released in full.

Houston developer Arche Solutions has launched a new modular Web CMS framework for developing and maintaining highly customized web solutions. Arche's new offering is aimed at the small/medium size market and the modular approach will, they assure us, help keep deployment costs and development time to a minimum, while enabling a higher level of customization than rivals currently offer.

The 12th annual KMWorld and Intranets Conference and Exhibition is scheduled for September 23 – 25, 2008, in San Jose, California. This year's theme, Driving Enterprise Innovation and Achievement: User-Focused Tools and Practices, emphasizes the myriad of new ways to communicate, collaborate and exchange knowledge within the enterprise.

The event will also cover such hot topics as ECM, intranet and portal strategies, enterprise 2.0, knowledge sharing, enterprise search and much more.

Concursive has decided to provide users with the opportunity to use its flagship product, ConcourseSuite 5, for free while having avoided placing the many limitations that a user would normally expect from an offering like this. This package is a culmination of several separate modules -- solutions like CRM, CMS and Collaboration -- that have been brought together in a single solution to assist companies with managing information and enabling collaboration.

The eZ Publish system has received many updates from its developers. The latest release -- eZ Publish 4.0.1 -- has had over 300 bug fixes. While the fixes are plentiful, a significant fundamental issue with the URL aliasing system has been addressed as well.

So an integrated marketing platform provider went out and bought a web content management company. That was story several months ago for Alterian and Mediasurface. But now that it's all said and done, what's the plan going forward? Alterian lays out their new platform strategy.