Content Management Matters ™

Webware, C|Net's Web 2.0 blog-monkey, has launched the second annual Webware 100 poll. There are awards and there are awards, but popular voting awards under the C|Net banner are worth noticing. With half a million votes from Web users last time around, we will watch developments here with interest.

There is a wide range of categories to vote in including Audio, Browsing, Productivity and Video; but the battles we are primarily interested in will be conducted in the "Publishing and Photography" category.

Another big day for the gang over at Clickability. The SaaS Web Content Management Provider has been selected as a Finalist for Best Content Management Solution for the 23rd Annual CODiE Awards.

And the award for 'Earliest Awards Giveaway 2008' goes to... InfoWorld, which has already announced 2008's Technology of the Year winners. Oracle and Tridion are the big winners in the content management space, picking up the Enterprise CMS and Web CMS gongs respectively.

One could argue that the usefulness and importance of an organization's intranet is a key indicator of said organization's health as a company.

In other words, successful and progressive companies understand that an intranet is a vital tool for the daily productivity of the workforce. Struggling and backward-thinking companies see an intranet as a nice-to-have but with no real strategic value.

In an effort to recognize the companies that understand the competitive advantage that can be gained from a thriving corporate intranet, Australia-based intranet experts Step Two Designs are happy to announce the recipients of the 2007 Intranet Innovation Awards.

A global competition, the awards are intended to highlight specific intranet improvements and not intranets as a whole.

The managing director of Step Two Designs, James Robertson, describes the awards like this:

“While almost every organisation has an intranet, it is often gets little visibility. This is about bringing the true value of these sites into the light”

The 2007 winners include:

• Fiat - Platinum Award Winner, for its "Avanti e Veloci" web portal ("Fast and Forward")
• QBE - Gold Award Winner, for the online "Investigator Wizard"
• Perkins Eastman - for the creation of "Practice Area Communities"
• The City of Casey in Australia and SunGard AvantGard - for enhancements to the intranet staple: the Phone Directory
• The Environment Agency in the UK - for the development of a new set of staff personas
• Nycomed - for bringing product information from across a global enterprise into a single location

If you are proud of your company's intranet and want to be in the running for the 2008 awards, entries can be submitted beginning in March.

For more information, please visit the online home of our friends at Step Two Designs.

In London last week, open source ECM provider Alfresco was awarded an InfoWorld "Bossie."

This recognition is part of InfoWorld's commitment to acknowledge the "best and most innovative open source software projects," according to information from the company.

Previous winners have included Apache, MuleSource and SugarCRM.

I am always skeptical of any "Year's Best" award given out well before the year has finished. I liken it to movies that premier in January and call themselves the "must-see movie of the year." It always seems a little too premature.

In this case, I'll make an exception. Nstein's Ntelligent Content Management Suite, which has the unique ability to relate to both publisher and consumer, has deservingly been crowned one of the “Trend-Setting Products of 2007” as named by KMWorld magazine.

Version One, a company that does all kinds of document management and imaging-type stuff, has just been proclaimed a finalist for the Paperless Office Software Category for Sift Media's Business Software Satisfaction Awards '07.

Riding the wave of 72 nominations and 15,000 votes, Joomla! was declared winner of Packt's 2006 Open Source CMS Awards. With much fanfare, the Awards are back, and nominations are now open.

Who will win open source gold?

You can never quite escape the high school popularity contest, and that's okay as long as you're on the winning team. Gartner, a technology analyst firm with worldwide accolades, just labeled Vamosa a Cool Vendor in Content Management. Vamosa is a market leader in processing, analysis and content migration. This comes hot behind Vox's acquisition of a Shiny Media award for Best Web 2.0 Innovation, kicking off awards season in the enterprise content management world.