Content Management Matters ™

The Internet is the place to be, where ever you are. But if you happen to be in Europe, then the Web really is a great place to advertise.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau Europe (IAB Europe) released the findings of its annual advertising expenditure survey for 2007. Considered to be THE guide to the size and value of the European online advertising industry, its results showed that online advertising continues to grow, grow, grow, with "an average growth rate of 40% year-on-year."

David Nuescheler of Day, developers of the once and future JCR standard, will be conducting a session on AJAX and JCR at JavaPolis '07.

The session will occur this Wednesday at the MetroPolis Business Center in Antwerp -- the haven of diamond aficionados and, this week only, the site at which people will shape the future of AJAX.

In particular, Nuescheler will be discussing "repository backed AJAX" (dubbed r-JAX for short).

UK-based Jadu is positioning its latest release, Jadu Blogs for Jadu 1.7 CMS, as something, if not bigger than blog platforms like WordPress and Movable Type, then in a league all its own. A league we foolishly didn't even consider. A league in which blogging is a reason, in and of itself, to start thinking CMS.

To leave no room for imagination, Jadu itself calls its Blogs offering "Blog Content Management." Well, that's something we can run away with.

Marketing and tech firm FourMangos is collaborating with Sitecore, a .NET Web CMS provider, to build a web content management solution that appeals to both marketers and devs.

According to President and CEO Neil Fennessey of FourMangos, "This application, coupled with FourMangos’ innovative creative and web strategy, lets us offer our clients a more flexible architecture which allows them to be more resilient to changing strategies and content requirements."

FourMangos typically provides integrated marketing, enterprise solutions and strategy offerings for organizations worldwide. It is headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts. (A far cry from Sitecore, which is in Copenhagen.)

Aside from news of the partnership, there's no word yet on what the creative and tech-oriented enterprise CMS solution will be. But nothing brings a migraine on like the mental image of creatives and techies fighting over the same toy -- something we addressed after a SEO session at ad:tech Chicago.

Collaboration between the pair will only grow more necessary in the next couple of years, so here's to hoping the solution's an elegant one.

Plus, FourMangos and Sitecore are no strangers to such unlikely harmonies. They've worked together on a few projects previously. And last summer, Sitecore flirted with rich web to help improve corporate intranet technologies.

For "legit" print journalists, the day of reckoning may be approaching more quickly than any of us would like. A survey by web CMS vendor Polopoly reports that, according to European newspaper execs, 40 percent of published content will be user generated.

In the next three years.

Because of this, blogs and other "new media" commodities will become increasingly critical to the news-making populace. And with this trend, personalized online advertising opportunities are also expected to improve.

No one's safe from the M&A bug. UK firm Autonomy has just agreed to purchase Belfast-based Meridio for US$ 40.8 million.

Meridio is a global provider of enterprise document and records management software. Earlier this month, it updated its proprietary offering for easier integration with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) and MS Exchange.

Not a bad relationship for its new parent company to inherit.

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.

Cygnet Tech, a Dutch enterprise content management supplier, has just opened a new office in Staines. The operation will host sales, admin and marketing employees serving the UK and Ireland.

With no time lost around the opening, the company will also be exhibiting at Documation UK on October 17th and 18th.

Cygnet targets small and mid-sized businesses, a particularly savory market for vendors in document and records management; increasingly, in enterprise CMS and email management as well.

Get to know Cygnet better at the company website.

Following the trend of globalized Web content, Toronto-based Clay Tablet, which connects Web content management systems to translation systems, has wedded its way into the European market by developing a partnership with XTRA Translation Services, a translation provider and consulting firm.

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.

mobiSiteGalore, the company that tried bringing standards to mobile Web design, is ringing in another high-billing first for mobile: a complete mobile-oriented Web 2.0 conference.

And it's called Mobile Web 2.0 Conference.

We love conference season. This year, the Federation of Enterprises in Brussels, Belgium will be hosting OX2's Web Analytics Day, which takes place next Friday the 14th of September.

The big news is that Ian Thomas, the gent responsible for the Microsoft Gatineau project, will be doing the first public demo of the beta version.

What's Gatineau, you ask? Why, its Redmond's stab in Google Analytics' back.

If for some odd reason you're burning for an excuse to visit Denmark this fall, drop in for cmf2007, which falls on November 6-8.

This is the third annual cmf international Web conference. It will focus primarily on enterprise portals, intranets, content management and enterprise search.

Amadeus Capital and Northzone have just joined hands with Peter Larsson (via Monterro Holdings) to acquire a majority stake in EPiServer.

Stockholm-based EPiServer, a web CMS purveyor, significantly exceeds estimated industry growth of 13 percent per annum.

CMS Watch points out this is a pretty ambitious series of changes for a company that only hired its first employee outside Sweden last year. But scaling in Scandinavia isn't as easy as one would hope.

EPiServer's biggest competitor, reach-wise, is Sitecore. There's also Polopoly, I guess, but we haven't heard much about them since that pay-per-view blogging thing.

The Amadeus/Northzone/Larsson transaction cost about US$ 23.5 million. Peter Larsson will be taking on the mantle of CEO.

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.