Opens Source News & Articles

Open source dotCMS (news, site) announced that the upcoming 1.9 release will feature an implementation of CMIS v1.0, which is currently in public review.

According to the vendor, Will Ezell, CTO, has been working with other content management vendors supporting CMIS -- IBM, Alfresco, others -- who are part of the founding members of the specification.

dotCMS says it plans to invest in CMIS to help decrease the amount of connector and integration work on the customer’s part. “The big win is the huge increase in the amount of content available to all. dotCMS felt that CMIS would be very attractive to larger enterprises -- a key target for the company,” said Bill Beardslee, SVP, strategy and development.

“Fresh, highly relevant content is the most crucial aspect of building traffic and converting visitors into customers. CMIS unlocks the power of a content repository, creating opportunities for those organizations that know how to pair content with commercial opportunities,” added Ezell.

dotCMS, who is also an OASIS TC member, plans to roll out their CMIS implementation iteratively. Version 1.9 is scheduled to go GA in Q1 2010 and will include a draft implementation that will be finalized by release 2.0 some time in Q3 2010.

And for those of you having as much fun as we are at Gilbane Boston, check out dotCMS' product lab on Thursday.

Notice a trend? Open source is "stealing" away closed-sourced content management talent. The most recent one to be charmed away is Bill Beardslee, who, until recently, was a SVP, marketing and business development, at the Web CMS vendor Percussion.

Who knows whether it’s better weather (think Miami), or more chocolate, but open source vendors seem to be finding more and more ways of attracting employees from proprietary CMS players.

We had an opportunity to have a quick chat with Beardslee about where dotCMS stands now, where it is going in 2010 and what he plans to achieve in his new role as SVP, strategy and development, of the Java-based, open source CMS provider dotCMS (news, site).

Got a Hippo heart? Hippo (news, site) will open its doors to all supporters of open source and open source content management software on October 30, 2009. The event called #ForgeFriday is scheduled to take place in Hippo offices in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and Petaluma, CA.

With the goal to possibly grow its Forge Project, Hippo invites all to participate and build a Hippo CMS plugin, a portlet, a repository add-on, a Hippo Site Toolkit component, or something else that you think would be cool enough to win “The Wow! Factor” award.

When and where:

• Amsterdam 14:00 -- 21:00 CET, Oosteinde 11 1017 WT Amsterdam (20)-5224466
• Petaluma 9 AM -- 4PM PDT, 185 H Street, Suite B, Petaluma CA 94952 (707) 773-4646

Can’t come over? Join online and follow the event through tweets and webcams. We should expect to see links with more info on the above on Hippo’s website shortly.

The online participants should also be able to upload ideas, code, screenshots or videos to the site. But in the end, no slides or code is allowed. The only thing you'll be judged on is the running demo.

Back in August, Hippo held its first Forge Friday filled with “pure hacking, a big BBQ, beers and, of course, geeky prizes.” Add to that 20 kilos of meat and 60 liters of beer, and it sure looks like a fun geeky event.

What’s the government’s excuse now? That’s the question that will be on the minds of many at Alfresco, now that it’s official. Alfresco has achieved DoD 5015.2 certification -- the first open source Enterprise CMS to do so.

The fanfare isn’t so much that Alfresco is the first, (although congrats, anyway!) but rather that after delivering what the G-Men said they wanted, it's time for the government types to start buying in.

Open Source is in Favor

The open source movement has gained considerable momentum in recent years and especially since the Obama Administration came to power. But Alfresco’s Chairman and CTO, John Newton, assures us that’s not what drove their ambition, and further that they've been working on this for quite some time (there are, one might note, Alfresco Records Management tutorials on YouTube dating from April 2008).

But are there any G-Men lined up at their door now since the certification was posted publicly? While no  one on the Alfresco team would say for sure, it is understood that three of the government’s largest agencies have shown interest. And let’s not forget about the non-government workers -- rumor has it that they were slobbering over it at the recent ARMA conference.

On First Blush They Are Looking Good

The beauty of the DoD certification is that everyone is covered, and gets to share in the fun. For many, the DoD certification is standard checkbox when evaluating candidate records management solutions.

Thanks to Carlos Miguens, Alfresco's global training director, (and all around project manager guru for the DoD certification initiative), CMSWire was treated to a demo of the certified solution. And we can confidently say that it’s going to be hard to resist the temptation to go open source.

Alfresco Records Management - The File Plan

Bundled with Community and Enterprise Versions

Their Records Management Module was introduced with Alfresco Community 3.2 -- so it's available both in the free community product and in the non-free enterprise version -- and is built on the Alfresco Share/Surf platform. It sports the following components:

• a Forms system
• metadata management
• lifecycle management
• open import/export capabilities
• enhanced auditing
• improved workflow controls

With its simple but sophisticated UI and automated controls that let administrators set permissions, disposition and access across a single scalable repository, we reckon users will be able to effectively save time and cut costs.

Alfresco Records Management -- Record (Document) Preview with Metadata

By enhancing the already sleek tools offered in Alfresco Community 3.2, the government-certified version is simple enough for novice records managers, yet powerful enough for the most savvy (hint, hint US Archives).

But will this be incentive enough to entice the government to address what some have called the massive hemorrhaging of the US government's electronic history? Here's three cheers to the records managers who say, "Yes we can!"

Note: If you want to learn more about Aflresco Records Management, you can tune into the company's upcoming webinar on Alfresco Records Management, running on October 29th at 11am Eastern time.

Jahia (news, site), an open source content management system vendor, is on a quest to further penetrate the U.S. market (among others) in addition to its French operations. The new global Jahia Business Partner Program gives partners more control and flexibility with free pre-sales support and various levels of certification, including those for VARs and SIs scenarios.

According to Jahia, they don’t want to compete with their partner network when it comes to CMS implementations. Hence, the “non-compete guarantee.” That means Jahia plans to refer almost all of the integration work to its partners -- around 70 of them in 15 countries around the globe. Some of Jahia’s partners are in the U.S., the market to which Jahia is paying more and more attention.

"Being open source and not competing with services partners is unique within the open source industry… We are focusing on software and its related support…," said Emmanuel Garcin, Jahia's VP and GM for North America.

While having an implementation partner network is a common approach in the industry, why not do that work in-house? Why not move toward a native Professional Services approach? Sure, it’s more costly and requires you to have, grow and nurture the in-house subject matter expertise. While it’s certainly not a deal-breaker in many CMS selection processes, different organizations may feel differently about partner vs. vendor implementations.

[Editor's Note: See our recently released report on the top 20 open source content management systems (including Jahia).]

That is a conclusion Basex, an analyst and research firm, came to in a (at times, admittedly questionable) report entitled Content Management Systems: The New Math for Selecting Your Platform released in September 2009.

The researchers are saying the content management market is set to explode in the next several years, and open source CMS vendors are contributing to this growth, as well as to how customers are changing their CMS selection processes. Let's take a look at details -- some of them you may find quite amusing.

dotCMS (news, site), a J2EE/Java-friendly open source CMS, released a Windows installer for dotCMS v1.7 (famed for its plugin architecture). The installer should give users of different technical levels the ability to simply breeze through the dotCMS installation and get it up and running in a reasonable time.

The installer includes other bits of software needed for a dotCMS instance: the Java Runtime Environment 6, PostgreSQL 8.3 database, Apache Tomcat web server and the dotCMS itself with a starter site. Given the above, don’t be surprised at the substantial installer file size (over 200MB).

Configuring ports in a dotCMS installation

According to the release notes, dotCMS can run on Windows XP/Vista/7/200x Server and requires 1GB of free RAM and 500MB of free hard drive space.

dotCMS can work with four different database types. You can configure those parameters and/or add new databases by modifying the ROOT.xml file in the dotCMS directory under \conf\Catalina\localhost.

Note that dotCMS will not automatically create the database for you, but it will create the schema and the starter site.

Want to give it a try? The Windows installer is available for download here. Alternatively, watch this how-to video before doing the install yourself.

Apache Lucene (news, site), the popular open source search engine, is now available in version 2.9.0. This version is the last minor release before the big step to Lucene 3.0, but the developers didn't hold back all of their improvements for later.

She is well-versed in matters of Enterprise CMS, Enterprise 2.0, collaboration and social media; specializes in VQA wines, weaves in candy and aspirin into one sentence and posts some of the yummiest foodie tweets out there.

Soon after her resignation, the former Open Text-er was asking on Twitter whether 6 pairs of shoes would be enough for one week in Paris, there was a chance that French bistros, Père Lachaise and walks down Canal Saint-Martin were not the sole purpose of the trip.

It's that time. Time to have a look at the finalists for the Packt Publishing (news, site) 2009 Open Source CMS Awards. Announced in August, the Open Source Awards offers US$ 24,000 in prizes to the best in open source content management solution.

Here's a look at who made the finalist list and what happens next.