Standards News & Articles

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has announced drafts of two standards that address Internet privacy concerns. The standards, which focus on users’ ability to specify online tracking preferences, are likely to draw lots of attention, given recent controversies at Google and Twitter due to disclosure of personal information.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) (news, site) has been busy making the web a more accessible place. In focus today is a project dubbed the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG) -- it aims to help software vendors make better web content authoring and management tools, including WYSIWYG editors, word processors and web content management systems.

Cascading style sheets (CSS) has been in use now for over a decade for controlling web page appearance. However, the “standard” has long been a mess of implementations, specifications and varying levels of browser support that can, quite frankly, drive web designers mad, or at least to annoyance. The latest release of the CSS standard by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) (news, site), CSS 2.1, should make styling sites a little less painful.

Just when we thought the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was ready to take a break, it has announced its membership numbers are expanding. Facebook, Sony and Netflix, among others, have joined the venerable web standards organization.

The W3C (news, site) has certainly been busy as of late. Many are only focusing on the standards monstrosity HTML 5, which includes more than 100 specifications, but the international standards organization has been doing a lot more.

The Internet is such a ubiquitous part of daily existence that its omission from Maslow’s hierarchy of needs must have been accidental. The last three decades of the World Wide Web have fueled technical innovation at a rate that could only be described by its own measurement metaphor -- Internet speed. The pace, however, has also resulted in a chaotic set of standards and practices for using the web. What’s a techie to do? Not to worry -- the standards organization W3C (news, site) is already on the job.

There has been some debate recently about the “demise” of the JCR specification. One of the factors blamed for JCR’s demise is the relatively new CMIS standard. This begs the question: what is to prevent CMIS from the same fate as JCR?

Florent Guillaume, the head of R&D at Nuxeo (news, site), brought the wonders of CMIS to the attendees of Nuxeo World.
 

In one Ignite Chicago panel, Day’s own scientists and experts gathered to address any possible question about Day, JCR, CQ5, CRX and open development coming from the audience starving for answers. Here’s the scoop.

HTML5 defines the 5th major revision of the core language of the Web. In a recently published work the W3C details the differences between HTML 4 and HTML 5 and provides insight into the thinking behind the changes.

OASIS requires a minimum of 15% votes to ratify a spec as an official standard -- that amount of votes for CMIS v 1.0 has been reached yesterday. Unless something earth-shattering happens, or people wake up in the next few days leading up to April 30 and decide to vote against, we can safely declare CMIS as the newest OASIS standard.

We chatted with some of the Web CMS and Enterprise CMS vendors and contributors to the standard to get their commentary on the latest development.

Here we are on the brink of the night before Christmas, if that's your kind of thing. And this time we're indulging ourselves by shuttering the shop from now until the first Monday of 2010.

For us it's reflection season. In that spirit we've cooked up a concise retrospective of 2009, including items our readers took particular interest in, and some things we found generally interesting.

Without further ado we leave you to some holiday reading. May the end of 2009 treat you and yours well.

Enterprise CMS Highlights

It was largely business as usual in the ECM sector this year, with a few notable exceptions.

• SDL's acquisition of XyEnterprise made sense.
• But it was Autonomy's acquisition of Interwoven that was the most talked about.
• That is until Open Text's acquired Vignette -- although many suspected Vignette was on the market.
• In November Forrester fingered EMC, IBM, Microsoft, Open Text and Oracle as the leaders in their Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Content Management while Autonomy, Day Software, Alfresco and SpringCM were placed in the visionaries box.
• In early Q4 at Open World Oracle announced plans to integrate their enterprise Applications with their ECM document services. Details were slim, so we'll have to look for more facts there in 2010.

Beyond acquisition activity, open source players stepped up their game and look to be positioned well for some 2010 combat.

• Alfresco got more attention from analysts and chalked-up an important DoD certification. Adobe and Alfresco continued to work together on Adobe's LiveCycle Enterprise Suite. The company also made strides with their cloud offering via a partnership with RightScale.
• Paris-based Nuxeo launched US operations in the ever popular Boston area, added Digital Asset Management (DAM) to their offering and hired Cheryl McKinnon -- previously of Open Text -- to run global marketing programs.
• The DoD was on our radar again as it voiced support for open source software in the procurement process, in the form of a DoD memo.

SharePoint in the Limelight (still)

• SharePoint remained so dominant that vendors big and small rushed to build integrations and connectors. All year long people found the topic of Web Content Management with SharePoint intriguing. However, we heard more about frustrations than successes.
• The anticipation and early previews of SharePoint 2010 dominated the annual (and sold out) SharePoint Conference 2009. The event brought tidbits for technical administrators, covered the 2010 upgrade plans, and spurred partners to announce support for the product.
• For project managers, Dux Raymond Sy wrote up a brief on project management with SharePoint 2010. He followed up this article with a two-part treatise on why SharePoint ignorance is not bliss.
• The SharePoint 2010 beta was released this past November. And Microsoft -- ever keen on inspiring upgrades and enabling the partner channel -- followed up this month with the launch of an official SharePoint 2010 upgrade service offering.
• Yet despite progress in the field, many organizations still struggle to go beyond using SharePoint as a file sharing service. Still, dear Steve Ballmer's confidence is higher than ever. He even described how SharePoint is like the PC.

Web CMS a Super Dynamic Space

Perhaps it's been web content management that has seen the most change this year:

• Vignette and Interwoven acquisitions were mentioned above, but we'll shed a tear and pay them homage one more time here. Confusion was voiced fairly broadly around the Open Text grab of Vignette, notably around their 2010 platforms roadmap. There were also some whispers and chirps about Open Text layoffs. More on that in 2010.
• Yes, we like strong opinions as much as the next fella. Catering to such appetites analyst firm Forrester Research announced that Web CMS 1.0 was officially dead. Weee!
• We all learned that the second most used Web CMS, Drupal, will -- with the brains and funding of Acquia -- go from not so user friendly framework to easy as pie SaaS with the release of Drupal Gardens (now in early alpha). This something to watch in 2010.
• At the J Boye conference in Aarhus, Denmark key practitioners voiced some inconvenient truths and focused on web content management industry challenges. Our recent article Emerging Trends in Web Content Management touched on this again. Certain voices from the field are calling for the death of the WCM acronym, but suitable replacements have yet to be put forward, with a straight face. Stay tuned to the vocabulary space. We're either going to move forward, move backwards, or stay put. I think that about covers the options.
• Mass market WCM options shifted around a bit in terms of brand strength and popularity. Yet  the most popular open source Web CMS products remained Drupal, Joomla and WordPress. You can get the skinny on the top 20 open source CMS brands in the 2009 Open Source CMS Market Share report.

Standards Abound, Gain Ground

The subject of standards was never far from anyone's mind:

• Enterprise CMS and document management vendors realized part of the key to their success is the ability to interoperate via CMIS. The greatest common factor interoperability specification made good progress over the course of 2009 and version 1.0 is now out for public review.
• HTML 5 continued to gain traction even if it's more years away than we like to admit.
• CSS3 brought support for mobile and multi-column layouts
• Increased use of the mobile web brought the need for standards.
• Even Microsoft expressed support for open standards and interoperability
• At J Boye Aarhus in November, Day Software's David Nüscheler, covered 8 Key Trends in Web Content Management. They fit well with Day's plans and offerings, but nevertheless were good food for thought and quite standards oriented.
• Discussions at the Gilbane San Francisco event also shone light on standards. Irina Guseva's article Content Integration Standards -- CMIS, JSR-170, JSR-283 is a worthwhile read.
• For a great overview of hot content management standards, read Jon Mark's article WCM Field Notes: The Skinny on JCR, CMIS and OSGi.

Enterprise 2.0

The adoption of social computing in the enterprise was big news this year.

• Google took the beta tag off its apps to show it was enterprise ready
• Then they released Google Wave, supposedly the next generation collaboration platform.
• We learned four reasons you should adopt social media in the enterprise
• That Twitter and Facebook are the most persuasive technology of all time. And now the real-time fire hoses are open (watch what you say!).
• But despite all the hootin and hollering, not everyone thought this Enterprise 2.0 thing was necessary.

Industry Themes: Search, Speed, Analytics, Semantics, Real-time, Open Source and more...

You can't go through a year without major industry shifts, 2009 had its share:

• Microsoft challenged Google in the search arena with Bing. Have the Search Wars begun in earnest this time?
• Google brought new meaning to less is more with the Chrome browser.
• Just about everyone was talking about the real-time web. Google unveiled real-time search, Twitter opened the real-time fire hose for all developers, as did Facebook.
• The analytics space was taken for a roller coaster ride when IBM acquired SPSS for US$ 1.2 bil and Adobe acquired Omniture for US$ 1.8 bil.
• The semantic web pushed forward with an HTML+RDFa Draft, RDFa metadata moving it the Drupal core and some interesting research on applying semantic web metadata to large data sets. Tim Berners-Lee continued work on linked data and semantic web technologies, with an official mandate in the UK.
• Open Source went to the White House in the form of the Drupal Web CMS. And the U.S. Department of Defense said open source software was a-OK for them.
• Looking forward, CMS Watch recently made their 2010 predictions.
• And looking backwards (to October 2008), Gartner predicted the Top 10 Strategic Technologies of 2009 ...were they right?

That's it for the holiday brain food fun. Thanks for supporting us in 2009 -- we'll see you right back here in January.

WCM Fields Notes is a regular column written in collaboration with Jon Marks (@McBoof), head of development at LBi. This first issue looks at evolving standards in the content management space and how they might influence you when selecting and implementing a web content management system.

Recently, the open source Magnolia CMS (news, site) saw its 4.2 version light that brings hierarchical data modeling, simpler integrations with external data sources, updated STK and a new node-builder extending the JSR-170 standard.

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.