Subscribe to the RSS feed

I've read a few interesting pieces lately discussing how platforms traditionally associated with blogging are morphing into content management systems. It's a natural extension, really, with many organizations that run simple sites wanting to provide both blog-like newsfeeds as well as static content pages.

Comment on this blog entry

Xyleme last week announced the release of Xyleme LCMS 3.2, its flagship learning content management system. This update includes more than a dozen new features and is intended to improve ease-of-use for both content creators and end users.

Comment on this blog entry

Competition in the hosted blog arena has ratcheted higher in the last couple of weeks, with the launch of the latest version of Squarespace's Web publishing platform. Squarespace Version 5 has generated excitement and good word of mouth, and ups the ante with its mix of simple administration and robust functionality.

Comment on this blog entry

July was a good month for Interwoven as it posted strong Q2 profits, acquired an e-discovery vendor, was selected as the content management system for the largest municipally owned energy company in the country, and received accolades from Gartner.

Comment on this blog entry

Alfresco, whose open source enterprise content management (ECM) software has earned it a significant following, is making more waves with the release this week of Alfresco Labs 3, an open source alternative to Microsoft SharePoint.

Comments(1)

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, a Web usability-centric column published every two weeks, focused recently on enterprise intranet portals. It's been three years since the Nielsen Norman Group last took a detailed look at the enterprise portal industry, and in its latest report, it notes that while many things have changed, certain key principals -- such as usability, governance and effectively measuring return on investment (ROI) -- are still critical.

Comment on this blog entry

Bamboo Solutions is probably a familiar name to the IT staffs at enterprises running SharePoint. The company made headlines in couple of months ago when it released information on how to run SharePoint on a Vista box, but it's also one of the best known and most successful vendors of plug-in modules intended to enhance SharePoint's base functionality.

Comment on this blog entry

Lots of factors go into choosing an open source content management system: ease-of-use, compatibility with existing systems, support options, user communities, functionality. And while you don't want the selection process to turn into a popularity contest, knowing what systems are building critical mass and increasing (or decreasing) in popularity can be helpful.

Comment on this blog entry

Open Text has had a busy couple of months, with certifications, partnerships, and a couple of acquisitions to round out its already robust enterprise content management (ECM) product offerings. These will serve to extend their reach internationally, as well as bolstering the functionality of its flagship ECM Suite.

Comment on this blog entry

A number of bloggers in the content management community have been buzzing about why Oracle recently migrated its internal and external blogs to Movable Type instead of one of its own tools. It's a fair question, but the migration is understandable, as Movable Type is a solid platform, and well-suited to the type of work they are doing. But I'm interested in a more pragmatic question: How did Oracle manage to migrate all of that content?

Comment on this blog entry

It's good news all around from EMC this week, with the one-two punch of strong second quarter earnings and the release of the feature-packed Documentum Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Suite Version 6.5.

Comment on this blog entry

The newest Documentum platform emphasizes collaboration, and also offers new tools to help manage information compliance.

Comment on this blog entry

The July/August issue of AIIM E-DOC Magazine features an interesting document and content management case study by John Harney this month titled "Making a Case for Content Management." The return on investment in the case study is stunning -- a government agency was able to save nearly half a million dollars in taxpayer funds a year by going from a manual to an automated system.

Comments(1)

With Contenta 4.0, the latest version of its flagship XML Content Management Systems, XyEnterprise is focused mainly on expanding the number of operating systems and databases its systems will run on. Most notable are the edition of support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Windows Vista Service Pack 1, and support for MS SQL Server databases on the back end.

Comment on this blog entry

Despite repeated promises that the paperless office is just around the corner, the completely paperless office remains "just around the corner." Nevertheless, bMighty's brand new Imaging How-To Center can show you how to leverage document imaging to save money, improve your company's workflow, and even go a little green.

Comment on this blog entry

Cynapse has just released version 2 of its open source cyn.in enterprise collaboration and knowledge management platform, including multiple new features and enhancements. But beyond the feature set is an even more interesting twist -- you can chose to download and run it on your own server, have Cynapse run it for you in a fully hosted software as a service model, or buy it as an all-in-one server appliance.

Comment on this blog entry

Microsoft this week announced the release of a number of search-centric enhancements for SharePoint, as well as enhancements and bug fixes for content deployment. These fixes, along with some patches for MS Office Project 2007 and MS Office Project Server 2007, are being collectively packaged together as the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 Infrastructure Update.

Comment on this blog entry

Mollom, a content management system plug-in designed to block comment spam and junk user accounts, has had a good few weeks. It just announced the release of a WordPress plug-in, following closely on the heels of Joomla support earlier this month.

Comment on this blog entry

WordPress, the popular blogging and content management software, released version 2.6 today. The release includes new features for content creation, as well as a number of incremental improvements and nearly 200 bug fixes.

Comment on this blog entry

The voting for the 2008 Open Source CMS Award opens today, with Drupal certainly looking to repeat its victory for the content management system of the year from last year. The awards, now in their third year, are sponsored by Packt Publishing, and are designed to "encourage, support, recognize, and reward" popularity and quality in the many open source content management systems available.

Comment on this blog entry

Schoolwires, one of the leading vendors in the education space, debuted Centricity, its newest offering, at the National Educational Computing Conference a couple of weeks ago. Centricity brings together a suite of new and existing tools and capabilities, ranging from content management and communication features to new features centered around community-building tools.

Comment on this blog entry

Earlier this week, Drupal 6.3 and 5.8 were released to fix multiple bugs and patch some recently discovered security issues in the popular open-source content management system. These fixes, which are detailed in the release notes, don't add any new functionality, because all enhancements are being saved for the release of Drupal 7.

Comment on this blog entry

Gartner’s MarketScope for Web Content Management 2008 was published late last month, and it's filled with valuable information and guidance on the industry in general, as well as what vendors to seek out (and which to avoid.)

Comments(2)

From a site visitor's perspective, good content management should be transparent. As the volume of content on a site increases, the challenge of managing it while maintaining a good user experience jumps exponentially. Few sites maintain that balance while consistently innovating like the New York Times Online.

Comments(1)

Website optimization has long been a bit of tricky topic. Just about everyone has opinions on how a site should look and work, and in the past, optimizing the landing page had been more art than science: mock up some pages, put them in front of a focus group, and listen to what everyone has to say.

Comment on this blog entry

Apache recently formally announced the first release of Sling, its new Web framework that uses a Java Content Repository (JCR) to store and manage content. This is sure to be interesting news to enterprise Java developers with content management needs, as Sling is intended to simplify the development of basic applications while providing a framework for more complicated content-centric applications.

Comment on this blog entry

Webhosting is one of the most critical choices you can make when it comes to the decision of how to build and run a site. For most organizations, this isn't a place you want to cut corners -- responsive customer service and respectable uptime can come at a premium, but are usually worth it in the long run. That said, sometimes having a free Webhost for testing things out or to use as a sandbox is just what you need.

Comments(1)

Bitrix Software has historically made a name for itself by providing a feature-rich content management system at a low price point. This approach has won it a substantial customer base, both in the U.S. and abroad. With Site Manager 7.0, the newest incarnation of their flagship CMS, it looks poised to make even further inroads; it includes strong support for multiple languages as well as a solid set of new features.

Comment on this blog entry

Fatwire Software has strung together and impressive set of wins, most recently with the one-two punch of the introduction of its Content Integration Platform and the recent announcement that Military.com has migrated onto its Content Server product.

Comment on this blog entry

Managing quality is obviously a critical issue for companies of all sorts, but few have the strict guidelines and need for process of those in the pharmaceutical and life sciences industry. Broadly including pharma companies, biotech firms, medical equipment manufacturers and others, life sciences companies have to balance both internal process with regulatory requirements. Managing all aspects of this can be a challenge.

Comment on this blog entry

The process of selecting a Digital Asset Management solution can be daunting. The licensing costs alone can be staggering, even before adding in the additional expenditures for integration, consulting, and user training. Beyond just cost, though, lie other potential pitfalls: too few (or too many) features, poor integration with existing system, or a lack of vendor support.

Comments(1)

The popular, powerful Drupal may seem a bit intimidating for the uninitiated, but for those looking to start out, here are some recommended resources to start learning the ropes.

Comments(2)

Buzzword, Adobe's Web-based word processing application, has made quite a splash over the past few weeks as it launched as part of Adobe's new Acrobat.com site. But while it's a neat tool, it faces some very strong competitors in the online document collaboration arena.

Comment on this blog entry

With the upcoming relaunch of its Web site, Encyclopaedia Britannica is making some interesting changes. It's taken steps to embrace certain aspects of the collaborative nature of Wikipedia (and the Internet in general), but at the same time, it reasserts the need to rely on experts with strong voices and distinct points of view.

Comments(1)

Findability. For our purposes, it describes how easy it is for your user community to find the content and resources they need to do their jobs. And if yours is like 49% of enterprises in a recent survey, your findability stinks.

Comments(3)

Six Apart's Anil Dash posted an interesting piece recently comparing the security of Movable Type, their blogging/CMS platform, to that of WordPress,which has suffered a number of security issues over the past few weeks. The results were surprising, to say the least.

Comments(2)

Despite the notable departure of a few key executives over the past few weeks, Alfresco, the open-source enterprise content management provider, has kept up its forward momentum with the well-timed announcement of two significant deals with Activision and Adobe.

Comment on this blog entry

While many off-the-shelf and open source content management solutions may offer specialized modules intended to support the travel and hospitality industries, sometimes a dedicated, customized solution is a better fit.

Comment on this blog entry

Open Text last week announced a number of interesting enhancements to round out its portfolio of Enterprise 2.0 solutions. It's a buzzword-heavy mix, as it embraces social networking, personalization, and Web 2.0 collaboration. But the most interesting features may appeal most to legal and regulatory departments.

Comment on this blog entry

Developing a sound strategy for a successful enterprise content management rollout can be challenging, but, fortunately, numerous resources offer advice on best practices and pitfalls to avoid.

Comment on this blog entry

SpringCM is on a roll, with a user base that doubled in 2007, $14 million in fresh funding and an aggressive release schedule (about every quarter, as of late) that is adding significant new features to its core document management system at a rapid rate. With version 4.3 of its software as a service (SaaS) flagship product, a number of these features caught my eye.

Comment on this blog entry

Your company (probably) has rules about how frequently systems get backed up, e-mail gets deleted, and other data-retention issues. But would those policies hurt if your company was suddenly yanked into litigation, especially noncompete, patent infringement, or trade-secret cases?

Comments(2)

IntranetBlog's Toby Ward recently said that "IBM has the best intranet in the world." That's a strong statement, but you'll have a rare opportunity to see for yourself when IBM gives the world a look on Thursday, June 12.

Comments(2)

SharePoint developers who use Visual Studio 2008 should be happy to hear that the Visual Studio 2008 Extensions version 1.2 (VSeWSS 1.2) was released last week. This follows the release back in February 2008 of the Visual Studio 2005 Extensions version 1.1 (VSeWSS 1.1), which had multiple new features.

Comment on this blog entry

According to recent data from Akismet, some 89% of all blog comments are spam. If you're running a blog with unmoderated comments without some sort of anti-spam measures, your signal noise ratio is going to be a mess and your comment threads will be virtually unreadable.

Comment on this blog entry

The newest version of Sitecore's flagship content management system, Web CMS 6.0, focuses on further refining and enhancing its core strength -- a great-looking, intuitive user interface.

Comment on this blog entry

Good news for the Movable Type user community: As of last week, Movable Type 4.2 Release Candidate 1 is now available for download. Movable Type 4.2 is intended to address some of the most common pain points users face: search speed, template management, and anti-spam functionality for blog comments.

Comment on this blog entry

Bamboo Solutions announced late last month on its community site that it has devised a way to run Microsoft SharePoint on a Vista box.

Comments(1)

As the school year comes to a close and students and faculty start to thin out, it's a good opportunity for campus IT departments to look at making the upgrades and system changes they've been delaying until they have minimal user impact. For schools looking at upgrading or evaluating a content management system, OmniUpdate's latest revision to OU Campus, its flagship CMS, comes at the right time.

Comment on this blog entry

The Clickability On-Demand Web Content Management Platform recently won the 2008 CODiE Award for Best Content Management Solution. While some awards don't carry too much weight, the CODiE award submissions are judged by industry peers and members of the SIIA, which means there's no monkey business with the ballot box. This win for Clickability is a nice feather in its cap.

Comment on this blog entry