Jboye News & Articles

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.

Bob Boiko and Erik Hartman are at the J Boye Conference in Philadelphia and they want webmasters, knowledge managers and anyone and everyone who works with information to step up and think of themselves as information managers -- and tell everybody.

An open expert roundtable at the J. Boye conference. Panelists included Lisa Welchman, Welchman Pierpoint; Tony Byrne, founder of CMS Watch; Martin White, principal of Intranet Focus; and moderator and conference host Janus Boye.

Here's a quick review of the discussion held at the roundtable.

David Pogue, tech columnist for the New York Times, shares his viewpoint at the J Boye Conference on three tech trends that are likely to make a difference in the next few years.

Bob Boiko, author of Laughing at the CIO and a speaker at the 2009 J. Boye conference in Philadelphia, advises information managers to get comfortable with saying no. You don't do it by practicing in front of a mirror, even if you're shy. Instead, you practice laying the groundwork to justify the no. In the process, you'll make better decisions and work with more effective people.

Everyone says that information is power, but what does that really mean? Some people talk about information strategy, but that's even murkier. How does an information manager -- a content manager, Webmaster or anyone who works with information -- make sense of all this? And what happens when the boss wants to make your tile and flooring company's intranet "more like Facebook"?

At the J. Boye conference in Philadelphia, Bob Boiko, author of Laughing at the CIO, had some great insights on using information the way that finance uses numbers: to make points and make things happen.

SilverStripe (news, site) is using this year's J. Boye Conference to boost awareness of its open source CMS product by taking part in the Web Idol competition that adds some speed and humor to the event.

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.

It seems a little strange in this day and age that an organization may not understand the value that a Web Strategy brings to them. At a time when the web has become such an integral part of any business plan, the web strategy process still seems to be lacking in focus.

J. Boye (news, site), a vendor neutral analyst firm, is offering some support to web managers to get their Web Strategy off the ground and headed in the right direction. Whether you want checklists, steps, a list of deliverables, common pitfalls or just some "been there, done this" real world examples, this report will serve as a good guide.

Yes, we know we have already mentioned the J. Boye Conference coming up in Philly this May. It's just that... some good conferences are really worth mentioning more than once. And this one fits the bill. If you are looking to get more information on web content management and all that comes with it, then this conference is definitely one to attend.

J. Boye has just produced a new research report on the ever popular Microsoft SharePoint. This report, Best Practices for Using SharePoint for Public Websites - A Business Person’s Guide, outlines some of the thought processes organizations have gone through when selecting SharePoint for their public facing websites, some project recommendations and dispels some of the often heard arguments for a SharePoint-based solution.

Online collaboration has become a top priority in organizations today as they struggle share information that is contained within a wide range of applications, directories, desktops and people’s minds. According to a recent report, many of these organizations are looking to the wiki to resolve their collaboration issues due to its ability to support unstructured information using a more bottom up approach to information sharing.

But the wiki may not be living up to all the hype and sales pitches from the technology vendors. There are a number of challenges to implementing and supporting wiki-style collaboration and some best practices that you need to consider before moving forward with your wiki implementation.

London-based Alfresco Software is reaching out to the Spanish speaking CMS aficionados of the world. They’ve just launched a new website and collaboration forum for the Spanish language market.

The company has had some success in the space already. They count Barceló Viajes, the Government of Catalonia, the City of Mijas, the Government of Andalucia, Punto Inmobiliario, TUI and the University of the Balearic Islands amongst their current customers.

Alfesco’s CEO, John Powell, points to strong CMS market expansion, both in Spain and in South America, as the driving force behind their investment in the Spanish language resources.

Other open source CMS vendors — notably eZ Publish — have also been doing well in both Spain and Latin America.

eZ Publish is more strictly a Web CMS platform which has been gaining ground in the online publishing space in Europe, Latin America and now in the good old US of A. In Latin America — where Bogotá-based Aplyca has been leading the charge — La Pensa, the largest online publisher in Honduras, is running on the platform and Spanish-owned Grupo Santillana, a member of the Groupo Prisa media group both run their Intranet on and are currently implementing an eZ solution for at least one title.

The Open Source Initiative has officially approved a pair of shared source licenses Microsoft recently submitted. This means the licenses in question are officially open source.

For those going, “Huh?” on account of the endless drama going down between Microsoft and the open source community, the OSI addresses that in a statement:

“In spite of recent negative interactions between Microsoft and the open source community, the spirit of the dialog was constructive and we hope that carries forward to a constructive outcome as well.”

The OSI acts as a kind of gatekeeper for Open Source Definition and its license review process. In July, the collective officially approved Socialtext’s Common Public Attribution License after nine months.

Formal evaluation of Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL) and Microsoft Reciprocal License (Ms-RL) began in August.

Usually I write about how traditional print publications are adapting to the Web. But what about the Web’s impact on the design of print publications?

Let’s face it, attention spans are short. Web designers and bloggers alike know this. They design in a user-friendly format and write no more than 500 words.

But if you’re a print magazine with pages to fill, how to do keep your readers well-informed without overwhelming their hurried, distracted eyes?