Ez Systems News & Articles

Installing everything needed for a CMS can be quite daunting, so it comes as welcome news that eZ (news, site) has developed an all-in-one installer for those just starting out or switching in the open source CMS world.

Welcome to July 2009 installment of our what's coming from the open source CMS projects in the next 30 days.

If you're looking through here and feel that your project was left out, we invite you to send us an email at pr@cmswire.com with a pointer to who we should contact at your project for updates.

Tony White of the Gilbane Group began his talk on the evolution of the Web CMS market with an observation. White, apparently something of an early-bird, spotted 22 people in his hotel lobby at 6:30 a.m. this morning. Over half of the people there were taking advantage of the free wifi to browse the Web, while only one person was reading a newspaper. He asked the attendees to imagine how different the behavior of his fellow early risers would have been even as little as five years back.

In a fast-paced talk, White went on to share some of his observations as a consultant specialist in Web CMS. He resumed the market briefly as a wide spectrum from low-end point solutions to complex enterprise platforms, with almost no correlation to price, and warned attendees of putting too much trust into analysis that assume a correlation between cost and quality, as it may not be the case.

For his presentation at the eZ Conference, Victor Sanchez of Hachette Media presented a quick overview of his company's implementation of eZ Flow and eZ Find for Woman's Day Magazine.

Woman's Day got its start in the 1930's, but the venerable magazine is taking on the digital age with an on-line portal. 90% of the site's content is original, and Sanchez reports that the editorial staff at the magazine are pleased with the flexibilty of eZ Flow.

Using dynamic blocks and by tracking clicks on the main page, the editorial staff can move around their content on the fly taking into account what is, and isn't working on the layout. This, in turn, has freed up Sanchez and his department to work on new projects (such as an upcoming recipe finder iPhone app) rather than tweaking templates for the site.

As for searching, Woman's Day uses eZ Find, and has worked out a way to tag and search content in order to run a promotional campaign against certain types of content.

The site integrates Brightcove for video, DART, Moniture, WordPress, Silver Pop and some Typepad for blog content.

Sanchez and his team are gearing up for a site redesign. With the platform already in place, the redesign is a simple matter of gathering together the development requirements.

The buzz this morning at the dungeon-esque eZ Conference Developer's Track (it took a while to find the smoky back room) was on implementation of CMIS to integrate Alfresco's document management interface with eZ Publish.

Christian Lundvang from NXC presented on the topic with some help in the question period from Sergey Puschin.

Lundvang demo-ed how documents can be created using Alfresco's MS Word interface or Alfresco administration and then accessed in the eZ Publish Back or Front office. He then presented a case of creating and publishing a document from eZ Publish into the Alfresco space.

While Lundvang did not show a counter case of requesting the eZ Publish content repository using the CMIS interface, it is reportedly in the planning and under development.

The demo and discussions showed the strengths of the standard but also highlighted some potential limitations as pointed by some attendees. For instance, eZ Publish could store more structure contents than simply document oriented content: a folder in eZ Publish might have its own set of meta information when it is a very simple container in both Alfresco and the CMIS standard.

The CMIS standard, which has been advanced as a work-in-progress under the Oasis umbrella, has been provisionally adopted by a number of systems including Alfresco, Nuxeo and Day software. The current version of the standard, 0.61, has been implemented by NXC first to enable integration with Alfresco but it could then be used for any integration with a CMIS compliant solution.

eZ undoubtedly looks to this project as an example of how an eZ partner, like NXC, can contribute to the eZ Publish model: The extension, a collaboration between NXC and eZ Systems, will be integrated into the eZ Publish 4.2 release slated for September.

The eZ Conference and Awards kicked off today in Paris, France. The Norwegen open-sourcers are celebrating their 10th anniversary at this year's event, which for the first time, they are holding outside of Norway.

The choice of Paris is a nod to the growing importance of international markets in general and France in particular for eZ Systems (news, site). But that's not the only advantage of Paris. "Getting to Skien [Norway] is expensive and difficult. eZ has a lot of partners in France, and [the location] is good for them," says Bertrand Maugin of eZ France, and this year's event coordinator.

Today's program includes a late morning talk by Christian Lundvang of NXC on the CMIS Interface for eZ Publish, but for now it's the keynote address with Steve Powers, a senior Analyst with Forrester.

If one thing's for sure, it's that it ain't exactly 'eZ' (sorry) to score major investments—especially in economical freak-out times like these. That's why all of our kudos for the day go to eZ Systems (news, site) for successfully romancing Hasso Plattner Ventures. Co-founded in 2005 by Hasso Plattner, the Germany-based venture capital fund was created to "support young entrepreneurs with the successful transformation of their ideas into marketable products."

eZ Systems is certainly in the expansion stage. The Norwegian company has managed to find and maintain a successful place in Europe and as we recently reported, has been making moves to beef up its North American team. Additional efforts include those made last year to extend their presence in Japan.

Ez’s main bread and award winner is eZ Publish, which enables its users to manage their digital content for use in Web publishing, media portals, intranets, e-commerce and extranets.

“eZ combines an excellent technological solution with the advantages of an open source business model, as a look at their top tier clients shows, said Eran Davidson, CEO of Hasso Plattner Ventures. “We are confident that eZ Systems will continue to grow on a global scale during the next year.”

With all the crisp new cashmoney from Hasso Plattner, it’s hard to imagine that Davidson is anything but exactly right. Keep tabs on eZ here to see where they make their next move.

The J. Boye Conference's 2009 Web Idol competition was fiercely fought, with eZ Systems, Ektron and SilverStripe presenting Web Content Management Systems and Isys demonstrating an enterprise intranet search.

While Isys, SilverStripe and Ektron presented compelling demos, Bård Farstad's eZ Publish Web CMS proved the winner, with an elegant drag-and-drop interface and on-the-fly photo integration.

After snapping a few shots of the judges, Bård uploaded them into a gallery he created with a few clicks.

For light- to medium-weight sites and rich blogs -- eZ Publish supports video, naturally -- this Web CMS makes creation, well, eZ.

Paris in June! eZ Systems (news, site) 10th anniversary as Open Source CM vendor. The Champs Elysées. Over 300 delegates. Three subject streams.

All this and more at the eZ Conference and Awards 2009 to be held for the first time ever outside Norway at the end of June.

Gathering in Paris, delegates from 30 countries will discuss and analyze three main themes over the two day conference that will include contributions from some of the top people in the field.

Just when you thought the dust had settled following the recent launch of eZ Publish 4.1, open source content management vendor eZ Systems (news site) has initiated an aggressive recruitment campaign for its core development team eZ Labs, indicating that the next version of eZ Publish may come sooner rather than later.

eZ Systems is turning 10 this year -- a notable achievement in the open source content management world. And with the upcoming eZ Conference and Awards in Paris this June, we figured it was an opportune moment to have a chat with the eZ Systems folks and see just how the commercial open source world works, from their perspective.

eZ Publish (news, site), from 10 year old Norwegian vendor eZ Systems, is an open source web content management system and PHP component framework licensed respectively under the GPL and New BSD open source licensing schemes. The product has had much success in the online media space in Europe and is now making strong moves into the U.S. market.

Version 4.0 of eZ Publish was released back in December 2007. And there's been a rather notable pause as v4.1 was readied. But the company asserts that this was for good reason and that 2008 was largely a year of consolidation. Let's have a look at what they've delivered in 4.1.

eZ Systems continues its big push in North America. The Norwegian based open source web content management company has been on the move in North America, particularly in the U.S. over the last three months. And they have nabbed a former RedDot exec to help run their team.

Even in an “economic downturn” some companies are thriving. The open source enterprise solutions provider, eZ Systems, has been on the move in North America over the last few months. And their progress is paying off to the tune of new strategy and hiring plans in the United States.

Care to celebrate Friday with a story about eZ Systems, the self-proclaimed content management ecosystem? Either way we leave you no choice. The company recently released a significant update to their eZ Find search plug-in. The latest update enhances relevancy controls and allows you to search multiple eZ websites and non-eZ Publish data sources. Read on, there's more.