Sxsw News & Articles

I don't think I have ever referred to an analytics dashboard as beautiful, but I can think of no more appropriate word for the free cloud-based Impact Dashboard that hosts, aggregates and visualizes data in real-time that was just demonstrated at South by Southwest Interactive.

This year’s South by Southwest Interactive, SXSWI, kicked off in Austin, Texas, on Friday. Not familiar with SXSWI? Imagine being inside a real-world Twitter feed for five days and 10,000 of the people you are following decided to launch their emerging technology startup over it. Welcome to SXSWI.

One of the things the chief Drupalister Dries Buytaert is good at is creating buzz. His SXSW session (see our event coverage here) struck a chord for many. Entitled R.I.P. Content Management System, it is one of our most popular articles this week.

With open source CMS, Drupal and SXSW being quite the highlights, we also did a review of Drupal Gardens, a hosted version of the Web CMS stemming from the Acquia/Drupal project and based on Drupal 7 pre-release code.

Editor's Picks

• CMS Review: Drupal Gardens SaaS Web CMS. Until the announcement of Drupal Gardens and its competitor, Buzzr, there was no hosted option for Drupal. Both products are still in development, though both grow ever closer to release.
• Enterprise 2.0 Roll-up: The Great Google vs. Microsoft Debate. We’re not gonna lie, folks. The battle field is ugly. Many of those in favor of Google are keen on proclaiming their love for the openness of the cloud, and shutting down anything that doesn’t follow that strategy.
• Nuxeo Reports Growth, Plans Big for Open Source ECM in 2010. Nuxeo has rounded up 2009 with reports of triple-digit growth in revenue and subscriber base numbers, as well as a look at how the open source Enterprise CMS vendor plans to tackle the overcrowded and mature ECM market.
• Oracle Enhances its ECM with Imaging and Process Management. Oracle has announced two major additions to the document management module of its Universal Content Management (UCM) Enterprise CMS today: Forms Recognition software and Imaging and Process Management 11g.
• Mobile Web Publishing - The Future is Here. The iPhone, Droid, Blackberry, App Stores, 3G connectivity, and VPN support are commonplace mobile tools and services now, but where do they stand in terms of managing your web content from the road?
• SharePoint 2010 Document Sets: Organize Related Documents for Project Based Work. Already in use internally in Microsoft and by some of the company’s clients who are doing proof of concept trials with SharePoint 2010 beta, Document Sets sit between documents and sites.
  
• Autonomy Explore: Customer Interaction Analytics Covering All Channels. Imagine how handy it would be to have an all-inclusive customer voice. Autonomy Explore aims to be exactly that by mashing together customer interactions.

Most Popular Articles

These articles were what you fancied most this week, according to Uncle G's analytics data.

• #SXSW: R.I.P. Content Management System. Despite the misleading title (or was it the whole intent?), the session got a lot of attention at the event and from CMSWire.com readers.
• Is Microsoft's New Windows Phone 7 Smartphone Competition for iPhone? The mobile space is always ready for a good dust-up, will Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 be the one to shake the Apple tree?
• Installing SharePoint 2010 on Windows 7. Did you know you can run SharePoint 2010 environments on both Windows 7 and Windows Vista SP1?
• April 12 is the New Release Date for Visual Studio 2010. Originally scheduled for late March, Microsoft withdrew the delivery date saying they needed more time for testing due to performance and virtual memory issues. The new date? "Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 will launch on Monday, 12 April 2010."
• CMS Review: Oracle Universal Content Management (UCM). Not all products deserve your attention when you're in the process of selecting a CMS. Here's a detailed review of Oracle UCM to help you decide if this Enterprise CMS is a good fit for you.
• 5 Things to Consider when Integrating your Content Management System and Portal. Portals and content management systems are widely used in organizations today. For many, the desire to integrate them into a single collaborative environment is critical. But there's a lot to think about before moving forward.
• How Document Management Has Evolved in SharePoint 2010. Adam Harmetz, Lead Program Manager for SharePoint Document and Records Management, gives us a tour around new DM features in SharePoint 2010.

Polls and Your Votes

Many organizations either have a portal platform in place today or are considering implementing one. What is your take on portals? Do you have one? Do you plan to implement a portal technology? Here are the preliminary results:

This poll will remain open until March 31. But don't wait until then, vote now and watch how the results unfold.

Also, check out our previous polls:

• Poll Results: Web Analytics Need More Love
• Poll Results: Usability is Top DAM Challenge
• Poll: Is Your Organization Planning to Implement SharePoint 2010?

Content Management Jobs

Here's what's been brewing lately in the CMS jobs and careers field. Both seekers and employers, catch the best fish of the season on our content management job board.

Featured Jobs

• Web Designer at BuzzFeed
• Sales Engineer at Vibes Media
• Sr. Ruby on Rails Developer at ChallengePost
• Internet Marketing Analytic Optimization at eBay
• Web Content Director at Bodybuilding.com

Traveling or Virtual, There are Events to Attend

Wondering how to spend your time in the next few weeks or months? Attend a conference, or maybe just a webinar or two. Have a look at our Industry Events Calendar to see what's happening in your area.

Featured Events:

• Apr 21, 2010 – Drupalcon San Francisco 2010
• Apr 22, 2010 – AIIM International Expo 2010
• May 5, 2010 – CMS Expo 2010 (Evanston)
• May 6, 2010 – J Boye Philadelphia 2010
• May 20, 2010 – Gilbane Conference San Francisco

Twitter (news, site) announced a tool called @anywhere at this year’s SXSQ event. The new feature enables users to enjoy the Twitter experience (almost) anywhere and anytime, without signing into their actual account.

Are you reminded of Facebook Connect? Yeah. Us too.
 

Going into the R.I.P Content Management System session -- led by Drupal project founder Dries Buytaert -- at SXSW (news, site), I was not too sure what to expect. I know of Drupal Web CMS and their very large developer community that contributes to the overall success of this open source content management system.

I also understand that Drupal is behind hundreds of thousands of websites, so I was interested in hearing what Buytaert was going to present.

We’ve certainly heard plenty from CEOs about privacy being dead and all, but considering the heat coming from related debates, perhaps it’s time to hear from the opposing team.

Danah Boyd, social media researcher for Microsoft, took the stage at this year’s SXSW conference, and with her 10+ years in the social realm, claimed privacy is alive (but not well), and schooled us on the intricacies of screw-ups from some of the biggest names out there: Google and Facebook.

On Sunday, I attend the “Search Patterns: Tangible Futures for Discovery” session at SXSW hosted by Peter Morville, whose library and information science background really helps him to understand how things should be managed, so that they can be easily found.

He set the stage of the session with the metaphor – bad search can be like the Winchester Mystery house.

Unless you’re living off the grid, or a paranoid rendition of Tony Soprano operating on a cash basis and only taking in-person meetings -- your life is full of streams of data that track what you are doing. 

This is the first time that I have attended SXSW and after yesterday, I can say that it definitely lives up to its billing and all of the stories that you have heard are true.

The networking opportunities are tremendous. Yesterday I ran in Pete Cashmore CEO and founder of Mashable in the Hotel lobby and Dharmesh Shah, founder of Hubspot, provider of Inbound Marketing Software at an event sponsored by Oneforty, which is a company that helps to people find, rate, collect and share twitter applications.

There are sessions here for everyone and the tracks are well organized. However it can be a little overwhelming if you do not prepare your tie in advance. I was told that I should try to pick out 3-4 sessions -- 1 per day -- that you really want to attend and make sure to get to those, but other than that, try to find out where others are going, or just play it by ear, because you never know who you will run into and what information that they have to share with you.

During registration they hand out a 256 page booklet that has everything that you need to know about SXSW -- except for the “off of the grid” networking opportunities and parties that are pretty tough to find out about. The booklet helps to set the tone of each day, but thankfully they also provide you with a ‘Pocket guide” to all of the sessions and you don’t have to lug the 3 lb booklet around.

So what am I expecting out of the conference? I am hoping to validate my feelings and thoughts around Social applications for businesses, both for internal and external purposes. I am hoping to learn from thought leaders in the industry and see what their current and future thoughts are. I am also hoping that I can reconnect with people that I have met over the last 10 years.

I am happy to say that so far the conference is meeting and exceeding my expectations. I hope that you enjoy my perspective of the conference and please look for daily updates on this site.

The Interactive portion of SXSW kicked off today and we start our coverage with the UX of Mobile. Thanks to the iPhone we now have a whole new benchmark on the user experience of smartphones.

Content Circles (news, site) keeps right on connecting. The company burst onto the scene not too long ago with their innovative, server-free collaboration solution. Shortly after the debut, they released a Xerox DocuShare connector which allows DocuShare users to share documents with a specified team, sans server. Now, the company is expanding their circle again by adding a similar connector, this time with Alfresco Software.

Who needs an internet connection? Not Content Circle users. The new connector enables Alfresco ECM users to share, collaborate, track and manage content offline or online.

Social media moves so fast, it's hard to keep up. Here are the week's top stories in scan-friendly format:

• It's all About Location, Location, Location at SXSWi
• Guy Kawasaki Launches Personalized Alltop
• MySpace Enhances Data Portability
• Twitter Search Traffic to Pass Google Blog Search
• Kevin Rose Launches Twitter User Directory WeFollow

In an Iron Chef-like match-up, a team of developers from Drupal (news, site), Joomla! (news, site) and WordPress (news, site) had 100 hours to build a website based on a specific list of specifications and design. Then representatives of each team got to meet face to face to show off their hard work during the South by Southwest Interactive festival in a session called "The Ultimate Showdown of Content Management System Destiny."

It was a battle to the end, with a mix of good humor and serious competition among developers from the open source web content management community.

The registration booths don't open for another 10 days and the moment of truth for what is being called the Ultimate Showdown of Content Management System Destiny is not until 11:30am on March 16th. Nevertheless, the teams competing for the prized moment of Web CMS glory have had their sleeves rolled-up for a while now, and their competition websites have just been turned in and are now available for public viewing and, of course, critiquing.