Content Management Matters ™

Web forms are the one thing that consistently stand between the customer and the product, as well as between companies and their profits. If the web form proves successful, the customer receives his product and the company, their money. Yet, if the form isn't successful, the company can bet that they have not only lost revenue, but a customer as well.

Thanks to a new book published by Rosenfeld Media, Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks, author and Senior Principal of Product Ideation & Design at Yahoo! Inc. Luke Wroblewski lays out the basic principles needed to apply toward the right design solutions for your web forms.

Quantifying design is a concept that many consider blasphemous. Yet, we realize that the value of design is under scrutiny. Often we are asked "what is the value of good design?" or "how much does good design cost?" As we know, 'good design' is subjective and can vary greatly, depending upon your organization, audience and product.

To better understand what 'good design' is, it's best to evaluate if your design is fulfilling the needs of its users. To help simplify the process and to outline useful design strategies, the folks at Rosenfeld Media offer Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior.

We told you at the beginning of April of the upcoming release of Andrew Connell's book on SharePoint. Well we finally found it available at almost all book retailers.

Called Professional SharePoint 2007 Web Content Management Development: Building Publishing Sites with Office SharePoint Server 2007, the 456 page book published by John Wiley and Sons is the only book known to cover the Web Content Management aspects of SharePoint in detail.

Andrew is a big proponent of SharePoint's ability to create highly engaging web content management sites and this book is his attempt to sell us all on it's potential.

Chapters in the book cover everything from master pages and page layouts, to content types, navigation, accessibility, workflow, content deployment and a lot more.

Oddly enough, the book comes at a time when we hear more about SharePoint's collaboration capabilities than its content management. It seems like lately we don't talk too much about what SharePoint can do from a web content management standpoint. Now that's either because we've finally all settled on the fact that it isn't quite there yet, or we are just way too caught up in this whole social computing discussion where Microsoft seems determined that SharePoint is a leader.

In either case, this is a book I would personally like to read, especially considering it's coming from someone who has dedicated his career to learning and understanding how SharePoint works from a web content management perspective.

If a book isn't enough for you, Andrew is set to teach some WCM courses -- both online and in person over the next couple of months on SharePoint and Web Content Management.

Our friends at eZ Publish are coming at you with their latest offering, eZ Publish Advanced Content Management. It's a book that caters to the needs of content managers and webmasters, offering a comprehensive and advanced guide to managing content with open source eZ Publish Enterprise CMS.

If you are one of those developers who likes both Microsoft and open source, then you are probably already familiar with the DotNetNuke application framework. If you are then Packt Publishing has just released a book you might be interested in called DotNetNuke Skinning Tutorial.

Have we learned all we need to know about Web 2.0 and how it impacts our organizations? O'Reilly thinks not and so has decided to enlighten us with a new book on the subject: Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide -- Business Thinking and Strategies Behind Successful Web 2.0 Implementations

Drupal 6 was released in February, which means there's a lot more learning to do for users adopting this latest CMS platform. Luckily, the folks at Packt Publishing are on it with their update to David Mercer's best selling Drupal 4.7 book: "Building powerful and robust websites with Drupal 6".

If you are a religious SharePoint follower then you've heard of Andrew Connell -- known best as the expert on Web Content Management with SharePoint 2007.

Well Andrew and a team of other SharePoint experts have been hard at work writing a new book: Professional Professional SharePoint 2007 Web Content Management Development: Building Publishing Sites with Office SharePoint Server 2007 and it's finally finished and getting ready for publication.

The book is aimed at developers who build publishing sites with SharePoint 2007 -- something many believe is not easy. WCM is considered one of the weakest components of SharePoint. Andrew may argue this as he's spent lots of time working on it, training people on it, talking about it at conferences. So this book should be the answer to many a dream...

A quick scan of the table content reveals much about the information that will be provided in the book. Some of the Chapters include:

• Embarking on Web Content Management Projects
• Minimal Publishing Site Definition
• Site Columns, Content Types and Lists
• Navigation
• Accessibility
• Leveraging Workflow
• Authoring Experience Extensibility
• Authentication and Authorization
• Implementing Sites with Multiple Languages and Devices
• Content Deployment

Definitely sounds like a book I'd like to read. You can preorder on Amazon or sit back and impatiently wait for the June release.

Packt (pronounced Packed), published its first book in April 2004. From then on, they began to publish books on specific technologies and solutions, allowing developers and administrators to adapt and customize today's systems, applications and frameworks.

Their dedication to open source has been apparent through their awards for "The Best Open Source CMS”, and their numerous books covering the ins and outs of a number of open source technologies and content management systems like eZ Publish and osCommerce.

And now their dedication to Open Source goes even further.

It used to be that you had to be a living legend or a deceased author before an anthology of your work could be assembled. In addition, it used to be that a first edition copy was a rare and coveted find. Well, thanks to Web 2.0, the rules of publishing are being rewritten.

LibreDigital, a Division of NewsStand, Inc., which provides an integrated, dynamic digital publishing solutions to book publishers worldwide, recently announced the launch of eCompile Service, a technology enhancement that allows publishers to provide consumers with book "mashups" - customized books made from content compiled from different book titles in publisher portfolios.

From the Annals of Anyone Can be a Writer comes a new launch from WordClay - a do-it-yourself book publishing Web site. After completing a beta period that enrolled 5,000 book projects, they initiated a general availability launch last week.

WordClay allows writers of all experience levels to self-publish their books. Instead of concerning themselves with margin measurements and bookbinding, WordClay allows users to focus more on writing and marketing.

Packt Publishing, your friendly provider of books for IT professionals, by IT professionals, has just released a book on marketing and optimizing osCommerce projects.

The book is particularly aimed at those who already run an osCommerce-driven online business, but there is also plenty in here for those who are sounding out options for putting together an eCommerce solution.

Too often in our plight to design beautiful, engaging websites, we overlook the unique abilities and disabilities of our users. Sure, we know their demographics, their wants, their desires and maybe even their top tasks. But do we really design with their abilities in mind?

Packt Publishing, whose Open Source CMS awards we covered in considerable depth recently (here, here and here), is a book publishing company who specialize in producing books by and for IT professionals.

Their latest title deals with the eZ Publish Web CMS product, and provides a comprehensive guide to deployment and management of eZ Publish based projects, as well as general information and tips on Web CMS project-management.

With its Book Search feature, Google smugly drives home the point David Bercovich tried to make when he called the company "the world’s largest content management system." (We totally called that, by the way.)

What could demonstrate that ambition more soundly than trying to index the world's libraries?

But for those getting skittish about Google's ever-blossoming ECM-savvy, there are always other alternatives.