Content Management Matters ™

Sheffield in England is famous for stainless steel and the movie “The Full Monty”, but you may not have heard of Fooshy. Fooshy? Right.

When I first heard, nay read, the word Fooshy, I swore that somebody must have made it up. But it’s there in the Urban Dictionary alright, and apparently means sleep, being similar to the sound of snoring. Believe it or not, Fooshy is a actually the moniker attached to a new Web CMS created by Illuminaries (now there’s a name I can live with), a software development company based in that city of steel, although Fooshy itself appears to be a separate company.

.NET developer Kentico has announced details of the new version of it's Web CMS product which hits the shelves in mid-March. Dedicated as ever to the Microsoft stack, the Czech company's new offering assures support for Windows Server 2008 and the soon to be released SQL Server 2008.

In addition, Kentico 3.1 will also support Visual Studio 2008 and IIS 7.0. Compatibility with Server 2000/2003 and SQL Server 2000/2005 is preserved in the new release.

Czech Republic CMS provider Kentico has expanded the toolset supported to develop it's CMS solutions now including support for Visual Studio 2008.

Kentico, which just recently released Web 2.0 capabilities in its CMS 2.3 version, has gone even further with this new version to enable developers to include even more social networking functionality.

Working to keep up with the blistering pace of the Web cms market, Telerik releases an update to their Sitefinity product, and lo, its brimming with usability improvements.

Czech firm Kentico has released v2.3 of Kentico CMS, an ASP.NET-specific web content management system.

Kentico CMS 2.0 was released in late '06, so the company has had a bit of time to tweak and toy with v2.3.

In particular, this fresh iteration of the v2 series soups up the old offering with community-building and blogging capabilities. In short, it better equips you to talk to strangers more easily - and improves the chances of strangers talking back.

Isn't it a beautiful world?

20,000,000+ page views per day. 1,000,000+ active user accounts. As exciting as those numbers are for the executive team, they are absolutely terrifying for the IT department.

While the CEO is slapping high-fives with the marketing department and watching the bottom line grow, the tech staff are working all night to keep the servers from melting down. Now there's one more tool in the scalability kit for Microsoft shops.

After 18 months of steady baking, the Umbraco version 3 release candidate has finally seen the light of public day.

Umbraco is a nifty open source CMS and (gasp) ASP.NET Web CMS product driven by an energetic Danish team of developers. The version 3 release focuses on updating the WYSIWYG editor to TinyMCE and supporting the .NET 2.0 platform.

While PHP and Java have been increasingly labeled the tech platforms of choice for Web CMS solutions, .NET remains a favorite for many ISV's. And even if the pairing of .NET and content management typically inspires thoughts to wander towards MOSS, a plethora of other options certainly exists for those looking.

One such candidate is Telerik's Sitefinity Web CMS.

Let's say you're a growing Microsoft Windows shop and your web presence has expanded to a point where maintenance has become a nightmare. You know you need a web content management system but your budget does not cover the cost of an enterprise CMS and you are just not comfortable with bringing an open source solution into your Windows shop.

What do you do?

New Hampshire-based Ektron, a popular provider of Web CMS and Document Management solutions for the mid-market has unwrapped their latest release of CMS400.NET.

Version 7.0 of the product is tuned into the ever present Web 2.0 theme and proudly sports new Wiki functionality, better forums, enhanced blogging tools, and advanced navigation features.

The Web CMS software purveyors at Ektron have announced the launch of the Ektron Certified System Administrator Training Program for web masters, web admins and the other geeks who keep the wheels of so many company websites turning.

Each certified training course lasts for two days and will be held twice monthly in Amherst, NH -- where the company's training facility is located.

SmartPart v3, also known as the "SmartPart for SharePoint 2007" has been released. This is a container WebPart that can host any ASP.NET 2.0 Web User Control (ASCX). If you ever needed an excuse to get started with MOSS development, this is certainly it.

CMS vendors continue to update their applications to be compatible with IE7 and Vista. The supposed 85 percent marketshare of IE is definitely causing a real and broad scramble in the field. The latest in the wave of releases is Ektron's eWebEditPro+XML rich text editor. Along with IE7 support comes a host of new features sure to please the the content managers.

Czech Republic-based Kentico just released Kentico CMS 2.0, an updated version of their existing web content management system that enables the creation of dynamic websites through a browser interface, without having to write custom code. Kentico focuses primarily on ASP.NET developers and on making it easy to develop ASP.NET websites quickly and without significant coding.

The latest release of the Kentico Web CMS now supports both ASP.NET 1.1 and the emerging Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0 platform, Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005.

The platform options support both developer preferences and migration status as well as the potential to take advantage of Microsoft's free Express Editions of Visual Web Developer and SQL Server 2005.