Smb News & Articles

This week, new research shows a huge increase in the use of video email in SMBs. In the meantime, Symantec released email security SMB edition with simplified licensing.

ECM company Alfresco (news, site) heads for the clouds with a small biz beta version of its social ECM, hosted on Amazon EC2.

If you want to get involved with the Interactive Knowledge Stack(IKS) Early Adopters program then now is probably a good time to start looking at your options.

The Interactive Knowledge Stack, or IKS (news, site) has just announced details of how it intends to proceed with its prototypes: an Alpha Version available between July and September this year and a Beta Version -- which you could be a part of -- targeted for April to June next year.

This week we turn back to social media and a new report that shows most companies are still only dabbling with social media as a business tool, while the Parallels 2010 conference confirms what most of us suspect: the SMB cloud market is going to be huge over the next five years.

We have a mixed bag of news for SMBs with conflicting views on whether social media is good or bad for business. There was a lot of other research published this week giving a considerable amount to think about for companies in, or thinking about entering the tech fray.

A sure sign of the tough times we’re living in at the moment is the number of companies that are starting to offer SaaS, including solutions for security, data backup and analytics. The last week has seen a lot of activity on this front in the SMB sector.

It's a new year and we bring you a new weekly column with a roll-up of what’s happening in the global document management software space. This series will focus on major news events, research and trends, it will complement another new column which will focus on document management and enterprise 2.0 news exclusively for SMBs (stay tuned).

Despite a slow start to the year this week has brought some interesting research from Gartner and AIIM, a stack of fancy awards for Autonomy and some intriguing new partnerships.

Document management software developer Cabinet NG (news, site) continues to develop v6.0, this time with the release of v6.2.1.241, which is specifically designed to work with Windows 7/Windows Server 8 R2 and improve its user interface.

The company says the benefits of this minor upgrade to users is that it will give them new and intuitive user interfaces, improved security and reliability features, as well as a new tools to keep them connected to data stored on the Web.

Already a very well-endowed document management system, Cabinet NG says the upgrade required very few changes to the existing system.

However, what is worth noting here is that the company says the changes will serve as a new base level for future enhancements and enable CNG-SAFE to keep in step with developments in Microsoft technology.

The other upgrade with this minor version is improvement to the interface, although the company hasn’t said exactly what shape those improvements have taken.

In this respect you might recall that in September, CNG was voted a ‘Top 20’ CRN-tested SMB product with the management consoles described as easy to navigate but not as “flashy”, or graphically appealing as some. Cheeky!

Could it be that Cabinet NG in a pique of vanity went out and upgraded CNG-SAFE interfaces while they were upgrading it for Windows 7? This latest version is available now.

Browser-based collaboration for anyone to use is the basis of Ubidesk, a new SaaS solution to the growing group-working conundrum.

  Cabinet NG (news, site) and Tigerpaw Software have integrated their respective document management and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems. Marriage of these two products, at least superficially, looks like a good match.

In April Atlassian (news, site) launched the Atlassion Stimulus Package, a 5 day offer to purchase a 5-user license for Confluence or JIRA for only US$ 5. All proceeds of the sale of those licenses went to the Room to Read Charity.

In the end, the sales totaled US$ 110,000, and Atlassian concentrated their donation on Cambodia, building 16 libraries, providing a year of education to 68 girls and publishing one Khmer Language Storybook.

Today, they come out with a new offer, again aimed at the small business market, with all proceeds going to the Room to Read charity. But this time there is no end date for the offer.

For US$ 10 you can get:

• JIRA: Issue tracking and project management -- 10-users
• Confluence: Enterprise Wiki -- 10-users
• GreenHopper: Agile Project Management for JIRA  -- 10-users
• Bamboo: Continuous Integration Server -- 10 plans, unlimited local agents, 0 remote agents
• FishEye: Source Code Repository -- 10 committers, 5 repositories
• Crowd: Single-sign on and Identity Management -- 50-users

All software is fully functional and supported by Atlassian. In addition, they are renewable at the same price yearly.

According to Laura Kahlil of Atlassion, "Atlassian is making a commitment to help small teams keep their costs down and to provide continued educational opportunities for children who need it the most."

Atlassian joins a number of other content management industry vendors doing something to make the world a better place. Others include: Kentico (Kentico Goes Green, Plants a Tree for Every Bug in v4.1) and KnowledgeTree (KnowledgeTree's Green Initiative, Plants a Tree for A New Sale).

Document management provider Cabinet NG's (news, site) CNG-SAFE is easy to use and economical as well, according to the latest list of Top 20 SMB Products from the CRN Test Centre.

While a lot of companies brag a lot about these two particular aspects of their products, in this case the claims have to be taken at face value as even the testers in their report said they started the testing skeptical, and came of out it impressed.

When CMSWire spoke with Reality Digital on the state of social media and SaaS-based solutions, CEO Cynthia Francis hinted that big news was coming in the near future. Well that future has arrived in the form of a self-service white-label social media platform for the small to mid-sized business called Reality Digital Harmony.

Don’t need the complexities of enterprise-level document management, but still want some of that functionality? You’re not alone, and you have quite a few solutions to choose from.

The latest on the document management solutions market is DOCCENTER’s DocLanding — a new Document Management System built on Microsoft’s .NET framework, offered as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and designed for an “average user.”

The twists, turns and tips you need for staying up-to-date by the water cooler.

Highlights of the Week

• Drupal 6 Officially Released: No-Gamble Blogger Fury. The major new release of the Mothership of community-building Open Source Web CMS is ahead of schedule.
• SharePoint Web Content Management Licensing was Botched. The SMB Web CMS market, we assert, has been left high and dry by Microsoft.
• (Interview) Feed.us Skins Web Publishing Cat with SaaSy Cache and XML Gadgets. Come along for the ride as we spent some time in the mind of web publishing geek and Feed.us co-founder, Rick Stratton.
• Quick Take: Clickability’s SaaS Web Content Management Platform. More SaaS for you. Clickability cmPublish has been rebranded as the Clickability Platform. We’ve poked under the covers. Here’s what we found.
• Convio Introduces Social Media To Nonprofits. Embracing social media and Web 2.0 technologies can be a challenge for non-profits. Convio can help.
• Microsoft Embraces Interop, Apocalypse Imminent? In one of the more abrupt u-turns in recent corporate history, Microsoft announces changes to both development and business practices intended to “increase the openness of its products and drive greater interoperability, opportunity and choice for developers, partners, customers and competitors.” Holy $#@$, we never saw that coming.

Most Popular Articles

And these are the articles you couldn’t get enough of — if page views are anything to go by, anyways. So what was your fancy? Popular CMS, SharePoint Proliferation and Managing Content better.

• Results: Most Popular CMS in Technorati’s Top 100
• Web Content Management with SharePoint MOSS 2007 (Part 1)
• IBM’s Fight to Stop the SharePoint Proliferation
• Web Content Management with SharePoint MOSS 2007 (Part 2 - Workflow)

The Economy is in the Dumps but Content Management is Booming

If you’re looking to advance your career, or if your org has got empty seats in need of savvy CMSers, you’re in luck. Catch the best fish of the season on our content management industry job board.

Featured Jobs:

• Web Designer at InfoStar Productions
• Development Lead at Microsoft Corp
• Program Manager at MSN AdCenter
• Project Manager at RotoHog
• Strategic Content Manager at HP
• Software Marketing Manager at Executive Sales Network, Inc.