Content Management Matters ™

When Xobni was formed in 2006 by two graduate students, it sought to improve, enhance and otherwise fix Microsoft Outlook.

Now, it's taking its efforts even further with a new tool that plugs into Outlook. Their software, free and downloadable, indexes all the e-mail in Outlook and makes those messages easily searchable and readily available.

It's now official, Microsoft has finalized it's tender offer for Fast Search & Transfer. They're pretty excited over at Microsoft these days knowing this deal is done.

FAST will operate as a Microsoft subsidiary and will have a dedicated research and development center in Norway.

John Markus Lervik, FAST CEO will be transitioning to the role of Microsoft Corporate Vice President of Enterprise Search. He gets to work with all the latest and greatest Microsoft search technologies like MS Search Server Express 2008, MOSS search and FAST ESP -- the end result potentially being a single enterprise search platform.

The FAST product will retain it's own FAST sales, service and support teams, they'll just have a wider range of products to sell and support.

Open Source enthusiasts fear not, Microsoft is still very pro-proprietary. According to Kirk Koenigsbauer, General Manager for the SharePoint Business Group, "We’re making a pragmatic decision to continue to delight a core part of FAST’s customer base that has chosen the Linux/UNIX OS. You can bet that we’ll innovate on Windows, too, and over time we hope customers will see .NET as a preferred platform choice."

Now Microsoft can renew it's full focus on Yahoo! -- if it isn't already too late.

You can almost hear them now -- those marketing guys in the Microsoft corner offices -- gotta beat the competition...no...gotta squash the competition...How can we do it? Better product? No...cheaper prices...yeah!

At least that's how we think it went when Microsoft was laying out it's strategy for the release of Microsoft Dynamics Online.

Looking for the scoop and details surrounding what is promising to be “an open, comprehensive and accessible platform that enables developers to tackle increasingly complex problems no matter the device, connection or experience.” Yes, it is Microsoft's LiveMesh -- believe it or not.

Another of the big guns gets in on the mashup craze that is growing like wildfire. With the recent mashup news from IBM (not to mention strings of vague promises) Microsoft is set to jump on the bandwagon.

Microsoft, who has been on quite the buying spree as of late, confirmed its purchase of Seattle-based airfare prediction and travel site Farecast earlier this month for what is believed to be around US $115 million.

There’s some interesting talk in air these days around office productivity suites and the move to using purely web-based products. Some predict the end of Microsoft if they don’t make the move to a SaaS offering. Other reports show something completely opposite.

Big news for Microsoft as they find themselves the proud parents of an ISO 29500 certified OOXML specification -- almost.

The ISO -- International Organization for Standardization's approval of the Open Office XML specification was officially announced on April 2. It is subject to no official appeals from the ISO/IEC national bodies in the next two months and word is there are many questions arising already on the voting process.

Is this the end of the other ISO Office standard ODF -- Open Document Format?

Datawatch Corporation, an Enterprise Information Management heavyweight, has joined Microsoft and a number of industry leaders in the Interop Vendor Alliance (IVA). The IVA, formed in 2006, is a community of software and hardware vendors working together to improve interoperability with Microsoft systems.

Never one to settle in and savor the moment, Microsoft has gone out and done it again. They recently bought Rapt Inc., a web publishing vendor out of San Fransisco. This acquisition is just the latest in a number to fill Microsoft's suite of publishing and advertising tools.

The move “puts us way ahead of what other offerings are available in the market,” Scott Howe, a general manager in Microsoft’s advertiser and publisher solutions group said, likening Microsoft with Rapt to a jet plane, with rivals, including Google, being a bicycle.

Ooh! Burn to Google.

But did they really put their money where their mouth is?

It was back in September of last year that Microsoft first announced that it was going to offer SharePoint (MOSS) as a service (SaaS). When first announced, the offering was available as a limited beta and restricted to organizations with over 5,000 users. We're now onto the next phase and the broader market is being invited to stroll in the fields.

At the recent SharePoint Conference 2008, Gates announced that the hosted services would be opened up to organizations of all sizes, coming to a node near you, so it was said, in the second quarter of this year.

Now considering how well Microsoft has be able to sell the "Be all you can be with SharePoint" dream, this announcement has surely inspired everything from cheers of joy to cynical snickers to shivers of fear.

The online collaboration and content management space is heating up damn fast. And being the nosy CMS'ers that we are, we rung up Tom Rizzo, Redmond's Director of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, to see if he could add a few nuggets of detail to the story.

It was about mid-December, just after Opera Software filed an antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft -- partly focused on Internet Explorer not following web standards -- that Microsoft finally came out and publicly announced their support for key web standards in version 8 of their prolific web browser.

With the recent release of IE8's first Beta the public can now finally find out for themselves just how well they have done that. What is even more interesting -- and perhaps a matter of debate -- is that they have done it in such a way as to not "Break the Web." Or in other words, they plan to deliver IE8 with backwards compatibility by introducing a controversial third operating mode.

Ascentium Corporation, an interactive marketing and technology consultancy, has announced the release of two new search tools for the Microsoft Enterprise Search platform: Search Center Branding Removal and ASP.NET Search Controls.

ADXSTUDIO Inc., a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, has released ADXSTUDIO CMS 6.0, the newest version of their web content management system. Built on the .NET Framework, it offers a number of product enhancements ranging from the support of, and integration with, Microsoft's next generation of server products, to new Social Networking functionality and powerful usability improvements for content authors and website administrators.

SharePoint 2007 (MOSS) is described by Microsoft as an enterprise content management system. However, under the covers it sports web content management, document management, search, collaboration and business intelligence, among other talents.

If you ask the experts, the primary target market for SharePoint is small and medium businesses (SMBs). If you ask SMBs you might get a different answer though -- as the licensing model alone is enough to send most of them running, with tails tucked tightly between their legs.

What if you are a SMB who just wants a solid Web CMS for your external website? Has SharePoint been priced out of your space? What about the companies who bought into Microsoft CMS (MCMS) and were expecting to continue playing with Wild Billy and Redmond Content Wranglers?

The SMB Web CMS market, we assert, has been left high and dry by Microsoft.