Content Management Matters ™

So maybe it's not the end of Microsoft Outlook, but the news coming from Australia this week may be a sign of the changing times for the mighty Marketing machine. Google's Gmail application has kicked Outlook out of the schools by Australia's education sector. The New South Wales Department of Education has announced that Gmail will replace Outlook as the email application for over 1.3 million students.

A big win for Google, a big loss for Microsoft.

The field of virtualization just keeps a-movin'. This time, desktop/server virtualization heavy-weight Parallels is taking server virtualization into the up-and-coming realm of SaaS. Their popular OS virtualization solution, Parallels Virtuozzo Containers, has been chosen by ProServe, one of the leading ISPs in the Netherlands, to deliver a scalable, cost-efficient Online Backup solution through a SaaS model.

CrownPeak, a Gold sponsor of the Gilbane Conference that starts tomorrow in San Francisco, has announced some major new features for its web content management system that should make both developers and end-users as excited as a school boy in a comic shop.

This new set of features includes support for Microsoft developers, better file management and improved web analytics with the flavor of Web 2.0.

Google has launched a new Website Optimizer Technology Partner (WOTEP) program to go along with its Website Optimizer Tool. The Website Optimizer is designed to help organizations increase traffic and turn more visitors into customers. Web Content Management provider Clickability has decided to take advantage of this new technology and is now a partner in the program.

SpringCM, on-demand document management and workflow extraordinaire, has announced SpringCM Version 4.3, the latest version of their SaaS document management and workflow platform. It features numerous new features and enhancements meant to improve business performance and to help automate document-centric processes like contract and proposal management, accounts payable and professional services engagement management.

There's a new game in town for online productivity applications. It hails from Adobe and if you like the look and feel of flash, you will like this suite of applications. The suite is called Acrobat.com and contains three applications that are required for almost all business needs. But does it compare to Zoho or Google Docs? We played around a little to see.

CrownPeak has a little more money in their pocket these days. They have just secured US$ 6m in funding from a second round of venture capital financing bringing the total raised to US$ 10.25m. What are they going to do with all the cash?

The second round brought out a new firm, SunAmerica Ventures, to sit alongside their existing investors - Sigma Partners and Altos Ventures. Troy Fukumoto from SunAmerica will join the CrownPeak board which already has a member from each of the other major investment companies.

So what exactly is a web content management vendor who provides their software as a service going to do with all that money? Well, CrownPeak isn't being explicit about the details, only saying it will be used to accelerate new product development initiatives and spend more money on marketing. It's all about "customer value" they say.

In February, CrownPeak came out with their content management SaaS offering. In January they announced integrated support for Google's Open Social. So maybe we'll be seeing more of a foray into social computing capabilities in their software, especially in the SaaS version of their software.

For those of you in the Washington, D.C. area, on Wednesday, June 4 Gartner, Inc., an information technology research and advisory company, presents Gartner InFocus Day: Government.

Spend a full day exploring enterprise change strategies designed to help you drive change specific to your environment. The conference offers a highly-focused single track and interactive workshop style sessions aimed at everyone from CIOS to IT directors to non-technical, strategic government leaders.

Not so new to the SaaS market, but new to us at CMSWire, Jamcracker, a provider of SaaS delivery services is offering an integration kit that is designed to help you get your SaaS offering to market quickly.

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.

Organizations today understand that a key focus of their marketing activities must be in the social media arena. If they are really smart, they also recognize that user participation is key to successful social media marketing. And what do users like to contribute? Text, video, audio and all the rating, tagging and commenting that goes along with it.

Who better to help these organizations support their social media marketing activities than SaaS User Participation Platform provider Reality Digital? This is a company that not only has the technical experience to create a social media platform with a strong Digital Asset Management backbone, but also has the marketing savvy to understand the key to social media marketing is a combination of user generated and professionally published content.

Virtualization has been taking the IT field by storm, but where is it headed? The theme of November's 4th International Virtualization Conference and Expo is "The Next Generation of Virtualization". They are welcoming submissions from exceptional speakers with high-quality use cases not just on how virtualization maximizes the use of resources and thus saves companies money, but also of how it is altering the way businesses run IT in a fundamental way.

eTouch Systems, the creators of the SamePage enterprise wiki, have announced the launch of SamePage v3.5. What's to note? They implemented a fully multilingual user interface. The first languages available will be French and Polish, but any number of languages will be provided for customers upon request.

That's not the only new feature. SamePage is all about Enterprise 2.0 collaboration, and this release carries a few goodies that may make your team smile.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that Enterprise 2.0 is a hot topic these days and organizations across the globe are scrambling to implement some aspect of it -- when they can actually figure out what it means.

Forrester analysts could now be adding to that frenzy with their newest report that states that Enterprise 2.0 will become a $US 4.6 billion dollar industry by 2013.

SaaS and Virtualization have played a prominent role in the tech industry landscape for a while now, and the latest studies seem to show that they're going stronger than ever. In a CIOZone.com study that ranked the top-60 fastest-growing public software companies of at least $150 million in revenue in 2007, VMware lead the pack and Red Hat came in 12th place boasting a 33.6 percent growth rate.

Even more interesting is the role that SaaS seems to be playing in the success of some of these companies.