Content Management Matters ™

Nearing the end of its Content World 2008 Conference, Open Text announced new plans for its eDOCS product line that will give customers the flexibility to leverage the latest ECM technology.

The plan includes new enhancements for eDOCS, more integrations with the Open Text ECM suite and more play time with Microsoft.

Time again to bring you a list of upcoming webinars that may send you straight to the executive office. Learn a little something new and impress the boss, or just the guy sitting next to you who thinks he knows it all.

This time we have have views into open source Web CMS and Enterprise CMS, publishing with XML and developer looks into the world of Alfresco content management.

After releasing the industry’s first CMIS specification draft implementation in its Alfresco Labs 3 in September, Alfresco pours more effort into Content Management Interoperability Services promotion and support. This time -- by releasing Alfresco CMIS Developer Toolbox.

Just over a week after Alfresco Surf 3.0 Code Camp in NYC, they have announced that Boston is now next on the list. Coming next month and hot on the heels of the success of the NYC camp, Boston will be a Code Camp you don’t want to miss.

Mainsoft continues to bridge the divide between Java and .Net. Today they announced the Beta release of Mainsoft Document Collaboration for Rational Jazz, SharePoint Edition.

Open Text kicked off its global Content World conference today in Orlando, Florida. The ECM giant expects it to be the largest conference in history with more than 1500 participants registered to attend.

Pre- and post-conference workshops, breakouts, training, GlobalStar awards, partner schmoozing, showcasing its ECM solutions, Universal Studios trips... Open Text is going to be busy in the next few days.

The event features a conference-within-a-conference program. Attendees tailor their conference experience: product/technology-specific tracks are available in the morning, with broader enterprise views offered in the afternoon.

One of the coolest things about this event, aside from all the wealth of OT and Enterprise CMS knowledge, is that there’s no printed conference brochure. Open Text went green and provided all attendees with wireless PDA-like devices instead of a paper booklet. Delegates can use the device for polling, conference program navigation, attendee profiles search and text messaging.

Conferences are usually coupled with major announcements. Today, Open Text announced that SAP will resell Open Text Vendor Invoice Management (VIM) under the name the SAP Invoice Management application by Open Text. As part of this agreement, SAP will also resell Open Text’s document capture solution Invoice Capture Center, from Open Text’s recent acquisition of Captaris, under the name optical character recognition (OCR) option for SAP Invoice Management.

Open Text clearly shoots for being the ultimate ECM provider, and is here to prove it with all the recent product releases, acquisitions and partnerships. We’ll hear more from Open Text in the next few days, stay tuned! In the meantime, watch daily podcasts on YouTube and follow #OTContentWorld on Twitter.

Many of today's corporate environments are embracing enterprise CMS solutions as a way to disseminate and share information amongst workers and workgroups. Microsoft SharePoint is a popular choice because it aligns well with an existing Microsoft-powered network and project groups’ workflow. However, according to new research from Courion, companies who are deploying SharePoint are doing so in a manner that might be putting crucial data at risk.

Bamboo Solutions dedicates itself to providing web parts and applications designed specifically to enrich the SharePoint platform. Just recently, we walked you through their Project Management Suite for SharePoint which offers things like a project management dashboard, team calendaring and alerting.

They are now taking that offering a step further by creating an OEM agreement with TeamDirection to include the Bamboo SharePoint Project Portfolio Dashboard web part in TeamDirection's IntelliGantt Add-in for Microsoft Project.

Remember Bluenog ICE, the Integrated Collaborative Environment created by a group of ex-BEAers? The Enterprise CMS solution, based on an open source technology stack was announced mid-September and is just one of the latest open source solutions to hit the market.

Today they announce that to help ensure they continue to grow to their solution, they have added a couple of well known open source leaders to their Board of Directors.

Joining current board members Scott Barnett, Suresh Kuppasamy and Sastry Taravai (the three co-founders), and Mike DiPiano and Michael Poise are:

• Andy Astor -- As co-founder and EVP of Business Development for EnterpriseDB, Astor is known for his strong support of independent open source communities such as PostgreSQL. He has been a champion of hybrid open source business models since 2004.
• Anthony Gold -- Gold founded Unisys' global open source practice and currently resides there as VP and General Manager of open source business.

According to Suresh Kuppusamy, chief executive officer, Bluenog: “Their [Astor and Gold] experiences working with both open source and proprietary technology will be invaluable. We continue to innovate in areas that allow our customers integration options they didn’t have previously."

With individuals like this on the Board of Directors, Bluenog will have no excuses when it comes to creating and enhancing a true open source solution.

Learn more about the entire team at the Bluenog website.

If you have ever seen "content migration" go from being a single line in a project plan to being a never-ending saga of tedious database scripting and failed migration attempts, then take heed: there is a tool available.

Kazeon has been hard at work. We first profiled their work within the eDiscovery industry in October, and then again last week we covered the benefits of their Information Server, which allows for agent-less eDiscovery analysis.

Now, Kazeon has announced the launch of KazForensics, a comprehensive set of forensics capabilities that creates new standards for complete authenticity of data and meta-data, as well as maximum defensibility of the eDiscovery process.

According to Chris Petersen, APAC director of channels at Open Text, it is unlikely that enterprise data will ever go to the cloud due to regulatory issues and bandwidth costs.

In a recent interview with ZDNet Asia, Petersen gave his outlook on the enterprise future in the cloud.

Despite the fact that many and many more companies warm up towards cloud computing, Petersen insists the organizations will continue to store a large part of data in-house and demand on-premise software. He attributes his reasoning to regulatory compliance and the higher bandwidth costs associated with moving data offsite as substantial barriers to mainstream enterprise adoption of cloud computing technology.

The funny thing is that Petersen’s employer tends to think otherwise, judging by Open Text’s recent move into the Windows Azure cloud by offering a "first-of-its-kind” records management and archiving capability for Microsoft’s new cloud-based operating system Windows Azure. Open Text will incorporate these cloud-based capabilities into its Enterprise Library Services offering early next year.

Records management is a pretty extensive part of any enterprise, often taking up massive amounts of server space. Petersen is making his point only to prove that cloud computing is not a threat to the Enterprise CMS industry players like Open Text because the need to keep thorough records of in-house data will persist, he said.

But we all know his attempt is a futile one. Gartner predicts cloud computing to be one of the top 10 strategic technologies for 2009 for enterprise-level businesses. SaaS is thriving, CMS market included, as predicted earlier this year.

If anything, today’s customers with tight IT budgets, especially in the SMB sector, will look beyond such expensive solutions as Open Text and explore cloud- or SaaS-based alternatives.

The Enterprise CMS socialism saga continues... Sense/Net, a Hungarian provider of open source alternative for building Enterprise CMS and Enterprise Portal (EPS) solutions, has implemented a prototype of the burgeoning CMIS spec.

Joining the big guns and attaching your name to a popular concept can be very attractive. Sense/Net couldn’t resist. We talked to them to get the scoop.

Mere days before the long-anticipated CQ5 release, Day presents interim financial results for Q3 2008.

The very Web 2.0-esque CQ5 is currently scheduled to be generally available on November 17. We will tell you more about CQ5 next week (downloading the software for evaluation as we speak).

In the meantime, let’s count Day’s Swiss francs. The company reports increased revenue and presses ahead with market expansion, mainly in Northern Europe.

Overall revenue for the first nine months of 2008 increased by 9% to CHF 20.0 million compared to CHF 18.3 million in the same period last year. Overall revenue increased by 16% compared with the second quarter of 2008.

Revenue from licenses for the nine months until September 30, 2008, amounted to CHF 7.8 million compared to CHF 6.7 million for the same period last year.

Losses were reduced to CHF 524,000 compared to the previous quarter. The technical efforts poured into CQ5 were a cost factor. The cash reserves increased to CHF 16.2 million.

Day’s senior management welcomed new members, including Richard Francis as new CFO and Kevin Cochrane as new CMO.

Not enough good news? How about Gartner placing Day in the Magic Quadrant for Enterprise CMS as a visionary?

While everything on Day's side seems to be quite optimistic at the moment, we will continue to watch the company and report the news to you.

When Visual Studio 2008 came out last November, it was packed with a lot new functionality and features that made many a Microsoft developer's heart go a flutter.

This month, Microsoft unveiled the future of Visual Studio and it's called Visual Studio 2010. To along with the new version, the .Net framework is being upgraded to version 4. There are tons of new improvements expected, along with a rumor that SharePoint development will get much easier.

We took a peek at the changes coming and wanted to fill you in.