Reviews News & Articles

I have been working with Visio for many years now for making mock-ups and wireframes, but a few weeks ago I bought Balsamiq Mockups. It’s a tool that lets you make simple mock-ups that look simple. Here's a quick review.

Vivvo is an Web Content Management System based on the popular LAMP stack of technologies. Built by Serbian software house, Spoonlabs, the product is designed to deliver and manage interactive publishing websites.

This PHP-based Web CMS features a modern AJAX-ified user interface, a clean and easy to use backoffice set of tools, and the ability to create your front-end website without having to write a line of code. Come along as we take a closer look under the covers.

Their website says it all: Clover CMS is a simple web content management system. Designed to provide basic content management functionality, the intent is to bring content management capabilities to organizations with only minimum requirements and a minimum of appetite for learning new technology.

What Clover Content offers is a straightforward way to create content for your website in a hosted environment, delivered to your website via two simple lines of code.

With this Quick Take Review (see more quick take CMS reviews), we show you exactly what Clover Content CMS is and isn't. Come take a closer look.

What is Tridion? Or is it Trillian, Trideon or Tridian? What can we say, it’s tough being a Euro web content management vendor in the U.S. market.

After conquering most of Europe, SDL Tridion started its Web CMS quest in the U.S. in 2006 with their flagship CMS product — Tridion R5 — an offering that has received accolades from such critics as analyst firm, Gartner. R5 comes with a myriad of standard Web CMS features, like inline editing using SiteEdit and some unique functionality such as the Translation Manager.

This Quick Take Review is an overview of SDL Tridion R5.2 with a detailed summary, full of “meat,” at the tail end of this article.

It’s always good to see your name in ink — even in this day of almost everything being virtual. Such is true for open source enterprise content management provider Alfresco, whose Community Edition 2.2 was recently reviewed by Business Computing magazine receiving the Editor’s Choice Award for their June Issue.

Kluster is an online collaboration and decision-making platform that takes the crowdsourcing concept to a new level by including a system of incentives to encourage user participation.

The Brainchild of young entrepreneur, Ben Kaufman, who got his start in the iPod accessory industry, Kluster has the potential to redefine not only the crowdsourcing industry, but the way people think about project management and production.

Adobe is at again…illustrating their dedication to the world of design/development and the understanding that if you’re not focusing towards the web in some fashion, you’re going to end up a day late and dollar short in the end. So they bring you Fireworks CS4 Beta. A program that is quickly becoming an all in one design and development application like never seen before.

Betas are always a joy. They give you the opportunity to review new and upcoming products prior to actual release. You get the opportunity to see what new features are available and help work out bugs in programs to ensure proper functioning when they are actually released. We took the opportunity to try out the new Adobe betas released by Adobe Labs last week — starting with Dreamweaver CS4.

Xythos is a provider of on-premise and hosted (SaaS) document management solutions for organizations both large and small. Their hosted product has a somewhat unique history in that is was designed and developed from the very beginning as a web-based service.

The SaaS version of their document management product, launched in December 2006, is the software we’ve got in our sights today. Xythos on Demand (XOD) is a full featured enterprise document management solution, and true to its name, it is delivered as a hosted service. Join us as we poke around in the binary guts of XOD.

Matchbin is touted as the world’s first ecommerce platform as a service that specializes in both product and service matching. They’ve created something called the Community Marketplace Multimedia Edition. This technical wonder bundle is a fully fledged social media system, web content management system and ecommerce marketplace rolled-up in one.

Hot Banana is a web content management system (Web CMS) with a heavy emphasis placed on web marketing and content optimization, but with a full range of core content management capabilities which attract customers with a broad range of needs.

The CMS is a part of and integrated with the Lyris suite of marketing solutions, most notably with EmailLabs.

The Lyris marketing suite — following a slew of takeovers of top players in core marketing technologie — has now been formally packaged into Lyris HQ, which is comprised of Hot Banana, EmailLabs (email marketing), ClickTracks (analytics), EmailAdvisor (email campaign analysis and toolset) and BidHero (bid-management).

Clickability is a web content management provider with a twist. Their product, the Clickability Platform, is provided On Demand and is a full service solution offering starting with Infrastructure as a Service and ending with what the company calls Innovation as a Service. The package covers both the back office content management interfaces and, importantly, the delivery and rendering infrastructure.

While there’s much more to the Clickability Platform then web content management, it is definitely the central component.

This Quick Take Review is an overview of the Web CMS portion of the Clickability Platform. For the purposes of this review we have restricted most of our discussion on the Web Content Management capabilities — although we do mention some of the additional components in their Software as a Service (SaaS) solution set, as interesting differentiators.

New York-based Quantum Art produces the QP7 content application server. QP7 is geared towards web content management, but aims to break away from the page-based metaphor and provide a framework for developing content centric web applications utilizing QP7 content objects.

San Francisco-based Quantum Art, a provider of content management solutions, delivers their latest product, the QP7.Framework, a content application server.

QP7 Enterprise is notable for its ability to enable business users to easily produce functional web components.

This post was authored in FireFox and so far, with good reason. After not so lengthy a pursuit, we have yet to find a blogging client (free or commercial) with the features and usability that inspire us to click the browser to the curb and start authoring from a desktop app.

As it turns out, we might have better luck if OSX is what we called home, but being Win32 geeks, we do tend to drag that perspective around with us.