Content Management Matters ™

PBwiki, the world’s largest provider of business and educational hosted wikis, announced that two new programs have been created that will donate up to US$ 25 million of award-winning wiki-based collaboration software.

Educational web managers are often lonely, misunderstood geeks who are crucial members of the communications staff but get unfairly lumped in with IT.

These dedicated souls must synthesize content for a variety of audiences (faculty, administration, parents, alumni, students) while also single-handedly updating calendars, uploading forms, and managing schedules.

Giunti have a pretty impressive track record when it comes to educational materials - in 1841, Alessandro and Felice Paggi set up the printing and publishing company Giunti Editore in Florence, specialising in the publication of school textbooks and books for children and young people.

Giunti have continued in the same tradition up to the present day, but with modern refinements, and Giunti Labs is now one of Europe’s leading e-learning and mobile content management solution providers.

So it is interesting to hear that Giunti Labs has acquired the Australian federated digital repository system HarvestRoad®.

A is for Apple, B is for Beta-testing, E is for...eCopy?

At least that's what software developer eCopy would like today's educational institutions to believe. They are delving into the world of education with their new line of document imaging and management solutions targeted toward -- yes -- educational institutions.

Not many are aware of the immense value of marketing in education -- that is, opening up the world of the classroom to the eyes of the public. Yet it's often difficult to let visitors and prospective students catch a glimpse of what life is like in the labs or in seminars without causing major disruption or offsetting the curriculum.

Enter iTunes.

Apparently the open source crowd isn't the only circle suffering from pinched toes, courtesy of Microsoft.

Becta, the education technology branch of the UK, has just filed a complaint with the Office of Fair Trading regarding Microsoft's "anticompetitive practices" in the academic software license sector.

The University of California, Davis has been tinkering with the idea of implementing a Web content management system since 2005.

To help decide which road to take, the school initiated a survey of what other campuses were using. The results were published this week and offer valuable insight into who is currently winning the Web CMS war.

The results also betray how universities, which face among the greatest content management challenges of all, cope with web content issues.

CMS Watch and AIIM are joining forces to help enterprises in North America and Europe better understand business process management.

CMS Watch is an analyst firm that releases industry-oriented reports, while AIIM serves as the international authority on ECM, providing courses, certification and awards in the sector.

Government institutions and higher education purveyors have major content issues. Increasingly, they're turning to the pros to help assist them - not a bad deal for the enterprise and Web CMS industries at large.

With this in mind, content infrastructure vendor Day was selected by Oklahoma University to assist in developing the institution's online personality across a user-scape of over 17,000 unique daily visitors.

Despite a broad track record across the digital space, the notion of wikis in the workplace still makes enterprises twitch with fear. Whether because they don't fully understand what a wiki is, or because the word itself conjures up visions of Lord of the Flies (employees running amok, unmanageable access to all kinds of information), many fail to realize the benefits of this helpful collaboration tool.

Wikis can help employees share information, track workflow and allow users to edit and author information with ease, often saving time and money.

We've said for awhile now that the European CMS market is cluttered with a menagerie of small and mid-sized contenders. Overall, however, it awaits the arrival of a real rallying gem.

To gauge whether a vendor meets that higher call, we can typically look at the impact it's made on both enterprise and education.

Enterprise-wise, Ireland-based ECM firm TERMINALFOUR showed some classy color with Site Manager 5.3. And now it's making waves in the latter category, too.

In a collaboration with the Center for Applied Special Technology, the RFB&D has launched Learning Through Listening, a site for educators with students experiencing unique setbacks.

The site was put together with NetReach's web CMS cmScribe, keeping the site's information fully compliant with Section 508 of the US Rehabilitation Act and the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines presented by the W3C.

Yes, even educators have a compliance line to walk.

With the introduction of its Premiere Apps suite into the marketplace, we posited Google was getting its ducks in order to turn Apps into a major enterprise-ready contender.

But the search giant has pulled a surprise move, having released their "educational" edition of Apps, dubbed the Google Apps Education Edition, to registered non-profits in the US at no cost.