Intranet News & Articles

On July 17 Open Atrium (news, site) was introduced to the world. The software is a distribution of the popular open source Drupal CMS framework (news, site) packaged up in the form of an intranet and knowledge management tool.

A mere 75,000 downloads later, Open Atrium now support 31 languages at varying levels of translation. The team behind this social business software used by small groups working together as well as large, geographically distributed organizations, has some firm ideas about the future.

The J. Boye Aarhus Conference is just around the corner. If you are headed there to soak up some new knowledge, by the looks of things you won't be disappointed.

Although originally a conference dedicated to content management topics, the gathering has evolved to include web strategy, user experience, online communications, information governance and more.

Experts in the Field

The list of speakers is lead by the opening keynote Design for Behavior Change: Why Facebook & Twitter Are Winning by BJ Fogg. Fogg is a researcher from Standford University where he has done cutting-edge research on the persuasive powers of software. He is listed as one of CNN Money.com's 10 new Gurus Your Should Know. Snazzy, eh?

Fogg's keynote focuses on how technology such as mobile and social media is influencing human behavior. Fogg will explain how three elements --  motivation, ability and triggers -- combine to influence human behavior and how social media sites like Twitter and Facebook leverage these elements.

The J.Boye Conference in Aarhus is gathering of practitioners. This means that many of the speakers come directly from the trenches and speak to you plainly about what they've learned. Some of the notable names include: Bob Boiko, author of Laughing at the CIO and The Content Management Bible, Shawn Shell, SharePoint Expert and Jane McConnell, Intranet and portal strategy specialist.

Sessions and Tutorials

If the speakers aren't enough to entice, the tutorials and sessions should be. Included in these are:

• Persuading People with Digital Media tutorial with BJ Fogg.
• Two SharePoint tutorials: A governance perspective with Martin White, and Managing a Successful SharePoint Project with Shawn Shell.
• And if you are going to learn more about Intranets, then you will want to attend Jane McConnell's tutorial, Intranet Governance: a powerful tool, where she will reveal for the first time the results of her company's 4th annual Global Intranet Strategies Survey.

Sessions run the gamut from Content Management Marketplace and Trends to Intranet governance, to social media, to a number of actual case studies and much more.

Taking place November 4th - 6th, the J Boye event is packed with best practices, lessons learned and advice from industry experts. If you haven't already registered, it's time to do so.

It may not be the sexy end of the content management spectrum, but Sitecore, which has just released v3.0 of its intranet portal, doesn’t really seem to care.

For anyone that has tried to deploy an intranet in a very large company, they will know the problems.

OK so you don’t have to deal with a very fickle public the way you would with an external website, but in large companies you have to walk a fine line between all the different interests and warring departments.

It is probably for that reason that Sitecore’s Intranet Portal 3.0, which is built on Sitecore’s Web CMS platform, comes with so many out-of the-box features that contain something for everyone.

Pre-built features include blogs, wikis, forums, search and workflow features as well as the normal run-of-the-mill features like calendars and scheduling. It also offers inline editing for content authors to enable direct editing on web pages from an interface consistent with Microsoft Office applications.

So who cares, you ask? Well, even if you don’t, maybe you really should. Think for, example, compliance, disaster recovery, rules and regulations and team building and you get an idea of the tack Sitecore is on with this release.

With this version companies can manage these processes with structured content publishing that can be adapted to any enterprise.

This is just the latest addition to the Sitecore stable. Only last week it announced the release of its multisite management tool Foundry 3.0, which also comes with upgraded inline editing.

Wonder what they’ll be at next week!
 

Development Seed, a communication shop dedicated to creating handy Drupal-based solutions, today announced the availability of a whole kit and caboodle of open source intranet wonder.

Open Atrium, now officially in its public Beta phase, is an open source starter intranet package that includes popular tools like blogs, wikis, a calendar, to-do lists, a ticketing system and microblogging.

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.

There are a lot of solutions on the market today that you could implement to provide social software to your employees and customers. And they all offer very similar functionality. So there is a need to differentiate and offer specific point solutions based on that technology.

This is what MindTouch (news, site) is doing. Today they announce the first of three collaborative network solutions based on their open source collaboration platform: MindTouch Collaborative Intranet.

There is a wonderful future ahead for internal communicators who focus on content as a productive asset.

ThoughtFarmer has changed the name of their intranet solution to better define the market it supports. Now called Social Intranet Software, the latest version out offers a host of new features that will get your employees collaborating and sharing their knowledge.

It hasn’t been an easy year for anyone in the Content Management industry, so it really wasn't too much of a shock that earlier this month it was announced that Vignette (news, site) was being taken over by Open Text (news, site) and that they had a year-on-year first quarter drop off in revenue of 24.2% to US$ 33.9m.

Everyone’s feeling the pain and Vignette’s Q1 results were just a continuation of a trend that saw their total 2008 revenues drop-off by 11.6% over 2007.

But its not how you behave in the good times that marks you out as a market leader, its how you respond to difficulties and Vignette appears to be tackling the current economic downturn head-on.

Bitrix's (news, site) enterprise 2.0 Intranet portal gets a big upgrade to help get both the big and little messages across the company intranet through a host of collaboration tools.

Looks like Alfresco isn't the only vendor offering a SharePoint alternative. Australian vendor Intranet Dashboard says they have the perfect alternative to SharePoint, offering an all in one solution for creating Intranets, Extranets and portals. 

First time we've heard of them. So let's take a closer look.

The J. Boye Conference coming to Philadelphia May 5-7 is getting closer by the day. If you've signed up, you've already seen the wide array of educational sessions that will fill your day on topics such as web content management, web strategy and governance, building, managing and optimizing intranets, user experience and even SharePoint.

All those sessions will bring you closer to your desired website or intranet nirvana. But looking more closely, there's also a specific track focused on intranets which you don't see at most conferences. If making employees more effective sounds good to you, tuning in here is likely worth your time.

Traditional managers often lack the skills required to understand if an intranet is successful or not.

The DOW is in a free fall, your retirement plan is worthless and your dog has up and decided to fend for himself. Times are bleak and that means it’s time to break out the one true no-nonsense money making machine. That’s right, now is the moment to cash in on your company’s intranet.

Web CMS vendor Bitrix announced new editions of Bitrix Site Manager for managing enterprise portals, media portals, large e-stores and other sites with high traffic or content volume.

You can now choose from the Bitrix Site Manager Premium or Ultimate Editions — both touted as “robust and proven technology frameworks.”