Nexus One: A Gadget for Google Addicts
If I haven’t admitted this in my earlier egotistical posts, now would be a perfect time. My name is Irina, and I am a Google addict. Anything Googly you can think of, I use: search (of course!) for anything from which mountain cabin to pick to translations from Dutch, Gmail, Voice, Calendar, Checkout, Maps, GTalk, Documents, Reader, Gears, Picasa, Health, etc. I even attempted to understand Google Wave.
Nexus One was a logical choice for my next mobile toy (to replace two other HTCs of varying ages) due to its tight integration with everything Google. No, I am not an iPhone user. Never owned one, but toyed enough with those belonging to friends, exes, foes, random strangers to get the idea. But this post is not about how Nexus is the iPhone “killer.”
So, my first impressions about Nexus One for those of you who asked. Nothing geeky, just initial thoughts of an end-user. Let’s start from the outside.
It’s very elegant. Gorgeous, in fact. It’s light and slim. It is thinner and lighter than the iPhone, actually. I have pens thicker than this smartphone. And my butt looks more equalized, sans a bulge on one side, when I carry it in the back pocket of my jeans. Talking about priorities 
Tactile pleasures abound, the device is smooth and silky.
Nexus One: Ups and downs
Everything you might’ve read about the tech specs is true:
Beautiful big touchscreen, bigger than the iPhone’s (3.7 inch, 480 x 800 OLED) with self-adjusting brightness is a work of art. Scrolling through three views, 3D, apps screen, re-arrange and add/delete shortcuts, CoolIris in the gallery, vertical-to-horizontal movements and tipping is all just too pretty.
Live wallpapers are eye candy. I am now on the one with lake and falling autumn leaves. When you touch the screen, the water ripples.
Quadband, so it works on European trips.
The trackball I didn’t care much for, and don’t even like the idea of it shining in various colors to alert me of notifications – I have set up beeps for that. Twitter notifications oink, email dings.
Proximity sensor is one of the features I really like about Nexus. You start talking and the screen is disabled to avoid random “Opps, my left cheek (accidentally) hit the hang up button” situations. When you take the phone a little further away from your ear, the screen is enabled and lights up, making it easy to press hold, mute or speakerphone buttons.
The Snapdragon 1 GHz core processor makes it very fast. Really, the fastest I’ve seen even with this kind of heavy 3D and a plethora of apps running at the same time. One minor inconvenience: when you want to kill a running app, it’s not that easy to find it in the UI. But no worries, it will crash on its own.
Camera is a 5MP average camera, but does have built-in flash.
Taken at night with Nexus One
Touch buttons at the bottom of the screen – back (sadly, no forward), home, search, menu — set them to vibrate, otherwise you’d be hard pressed to know whether you actually pressed hard enough to get the desired outcome.
In my experience with Nexus One, I did notice that I was pushing buttons and UI clicking more than I expected to get what I needed.
No physical keyboard takes a bit of an adjustment for those fat fingers. But no worries, because…
Most activities can be performed via voice input: Twittering, texting, emails – pretty much every text field. Good in theory, but Nexus needs a lot more work in voice recognition features. “Voice keyboard sucks indeed” in my Gtalk over Nexus chat was interpreted as “Voice keyboard loving me.” I realize I have an accent, but that undecipherable? Voice activated Google search is, nevertheless, a neat idea.
Battery life is comparable to many other smartphones I’ve used. Meaning the charger is your next best friend.
Compass, cell tower positioning, navigation and GPS receiver – all helpful, even though not entirely accurate.
Having been once accused of owning more cables than an average male geek, I am all about cable interoperability and felt awkward adding yet another one to my arsenal. Nexus uses mini USB cable, so no re-use with my Nikon D90/external hard drives/etc. More to pack.
Market is Google’s alternative to iPhone’s App Store. Google Checkout rocks again with one click buying. Comments and ratings are useful. Not all apps are very stable, and I see a lot of duplication. What’s Google’s approval process, I wonder?
Contacts management was a fun exercise. At first, I freaked out when I couldn’t see the contacts from my SIM card. All is lost, I thought, until I found the Import Contacts option. So, contacts imported and synced with Google Voice contacts. Then came contact lists from not-related email accounts, Facebook, as well as attempts to import contacts from other applications. So now, my Google Voice Contacts/Nexus One Contacts are “nicely” synchronized (=a bit of a mess) and include everyone I ever came in contact with in any way over the past decade, and this is not necessarily what I want.
But the good thing about synchronization is that email and calendar (oh well, and contacts) are always completely synced up in real time without having to be attached to a computer or any manual syncing endeavors.
Call quality: As long as you’re not using the provided (stereo) headset that happened to turn my voice into mambo jumbo, you should be good with all that noise-canceling beauty that Nexus One offers. Oddly though, the mic is in the far corner and not in the center of the bottom panel.
Speaking of the headset… I am convinced I just got a bad one… Pandora was one of the first applications I downloaded, gave it a little spin and paused it before jumping on my first conference call on the new gadget. Five minutes later, I was hyperventilating with Massive Attack roaring over the caller on the other side, and me frantically looking for a way to stop the music without dropping the call. Couldn’t find one. See, the headset controls both the built-in mic, as well as music playback. Without “muting” music apps with priority on calls. And I pushed the mic button (also the play button). I guess there’re folks out there who may listen to Pandora while on a conf call. But I – mortified — had to excuse myself, drop the call, kill the damn Pandora and dial back in.
Is Nexus an enterprise phone?
Perhaps. I still cannot get it to work with MS Exchange, as the Nexus app keeps crashing or going as far as displaying a stark black screen for Inbox, while allowing me to compose and send (!) emails through submenus. Additionally, if you’re looking for enterprise phones with all the corporate security policies boogie woogie, you know to look at Blackberry and that same iPhone, which both provide better security options. Unless, of course, your shop is a Google addict just as moi. Then again, there’s this whole cloud storage idea…
There you have it. I’ve been using Nexus for only a couple of days now, but all this hype is just exhausting! It’s just a smartphone. It is definitely better than any other Android device. Nexus One is the (for now) crème de la crème of devices built on the Android stack. No wonder they call 2.1 Éclair. But it is also only the first little step for Google.
To me though, it’s a keeper. Nexus One is the first phone that allows me to free myself from the laptop and still do everything I need to do.
Top 10 CMS Stories in 2009
No year-end predictions, no resolutions. Not even debating the acronyms. Just simple numbers: the top 10 most trafficked posts in 2009 on this blog:
The post was inspired by several years of being an SDL Tridion customer, when the company was Tridion and the product was R5.x.
The Motley Crew’s collaborative Google Wave post, a riot, really, about all things CMS we collectively umm.. dislike. Ah, the power of putting several great minds into one wave
Step-by-step guide on how to develop (and advertise) bad taste in writing CMS marketing materials, including white papers. ‘Nuf said.
Long before Interwoven’s fate moved from acquisition intent to the ranks of a done deal, there were indications of changes and “cost savings” coming.
Still giggle every time I think of that morning.
The first big acquisition of 2009 set some folks, including me, into the pondering mode about Interwoven’s future. Since then the dust settled, some people left, products were Autonomy-zed to some degree, but it’s still fun to look at initial reactions and crystal ball gazings.
CQ5 marked the end of a 3-year-long silence from Basel and Day not Communiqué-ting much aside from a couple of point releases. The world was agonizing in anticipation of what the R&D-focused vendor came up with. I got a chance to install the product and poke around.
Just like in marriage, the expense doesn’t stop at a Vera Wang dress. Or, even earlier, at a short-list.
About this time last year, Vignette let some of its people go (was it à la Moses act of freeing?) in preps for prettifying itself for the Open Text acquisition.
This one is only vaguely CMS-related, infectious as all memes, yet curable. The real #1 of this top 10 list was actually the about me page. Go figure.
CMS Goings-On That (Almost) Didn’t Make it Here, or Blogging Ain’t Easy
Recently, I got an e-mail newsletter (from: company name redacted) – one of those that goes almost immediately to trash following a quick scan. What made me ROFL was this line:
Blogging is easy, usually free, and most importantly, fun!
Now, I am not perfect (well, am nearly ) and could use more self-blogging discipline, but whoever wrote that statement must’ve never blogged a single line in his/her life. It sure is ain’t that easy (Oh, yeah, after all, I live in the South).
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After working very hard (yet, effortlessly ) on diligently neglecting this dear child of a blog, let me recap the past 68 days. Yes, it’s been that long – LinkedIn is very good at rubbing it in with their WordPress widget day counter. So, here are the CMSWire stories and happenings that have been on my radar in those 2+ months:
ECM
- Open Text unveiled its 2010 product roadmap at Open Text Content World in Orlando, highlighting many rebranding changes that are to come, including those for RedDot/Web Solutions and Vignette. The community still doesn’t appear to be appeased. But business is business. In the meantime, I am revisiting Shakespeare’s Hamlet in preparation for my next piece on Open Text planned for early January 2010.
- Open Text appeared in the news again with the announcement on expanding its ECM solutions portfolio for Oracle.
- IBM continued to focus on analytics as a way of better management of unstructured and structured content.
WCM
- Crownpeak integrated its SaaS CMS with the Website Optimizer Experiment Management API, which is based on Google Website Optimizer, alleviating the pains of tedious cut and pastes of those pesky JavaScript snippets into your content or templates.
- OmniUpdate continued to work the hi-ed crowd with new version 8.10 featuring multi-lingual and multi-output previews.
- Sitecore v6.2 saw the light of day (I, personally, wasn’t much impressed) and took a bite of online engagement and social communities through Telligent Community integration.
- Ektron’s “big guns,” including the newest addition to the team Tom Wentworth, previously of Interwoven, showed off the new version 8 of CMS400.NET (yes, the one that was inelegantly leaked some time before the official release).
- Nstein walked me through their “New Kind of Site Search” with 3S (Semantic Site Search), interesting ideas there with multi-index federated search, embedded Text Mining Engine, semantic widgets and a more flexible presentation layer.
- CMS Watch sliced and diced the market in its Web CMS Report 2010.
- EPiServer entered into a partnership with Mediachase in order to add eCommerce capabilities to its Web CMS and Relate+ community platform offerings.
- Web publishing vendor WoodWing turned to celum for a DAM integration.
J. Boye ‘09 in Aarhus
While in the handsome town of Aarhus (aka the City of Smiles), heaps of content management fun were on the menu (topped off with duh! delish herring), including:
- Jarrod Gingras and Peter Sejersen’s look into the pitfalls and best practices of selecting a CMS.
- McBoof, Janus Boye, et al’s attempt to #fixwcm, while heatedly debating some of the inconvenient truths and challenges of the content management industry.
- David Nuesheler’s of Day Software session on top 8 trends in web content management architecture and standards (CMIS, JCR 2.0, JSR-283).
- BJ Fogg’s preso on “hot triggers,” “cold triggers,” persuasive technology and why Twitter and Facebook are winning.
- A myriad of fantastic, thought-provoking, brain-activity-inducing conversations in hallways, at dining tables, at social events, while braving the rain and the cold – you know who you are.
PS: I miss Århus. Thanks, Janus!
Gilbane Boston 2009
The who is who of content management came to Boston for the Gilbane conference. I was fortunate to moderate a Content Management in Practice session, and attended a few others:
- Content migration, the dirty little secret of content management, where content migration challenges, stumbling blocks and techniques to avoid them were discussed. One of the simplest, yet most often overlooked takeaways: Know your content.
- One of the hottest topics of the event – open source and its rise in content management. One little tidbit of info signaling a broader acceptance of open source even just looking at Gilbane — there were virtually no OSS vendors here 4 years ago. This year, there were 6.
PS: Great fun seeing/meeting the usual CMS crowd suspects IRL and chatting about royal matters of the content management kingdom 
Thanks, Frank!
Open Source CMS
- Hippo held its ForgeFriday as planned (read event recap here from Tjeerd Brenninkmeijer) and released Hippo CMS 7.2 aiming to deliver more TLC to end-users with several Hippo Site Toolkit (HST) treats.
- Bill Beardslee called to say he moved to Miami and left Percussion for dotCMS.
- And soon after, dotCMS announced its intent to embrace CMIS.
- Nuxeo now has their very own DAM system in addition to the existing ECM and DM products — all tightly knit together. Another first is their international user conference planned for March 2010 – NuxeoWorld.
- Magnolia CMS concentrated on hierarchical content modeling and interoperability (still based on the JSR-170 standard) in version 4.2.
- Alfresco started offering an option for fault-tolerant, load-balanced, complex configuration deployments of its ECM product in the cloud with help from RightScale.
Social Media
- The CIA continued its investment in open source and technology and got more visibility into social media (=open source = data in public domain) after giving some $$$ to the social media monitoring firm Visible Technologies. Any social content (open or hidden) can be scraped, scored and displayed in a nice dashboard.
Things We Hate About Content Management
It was a lovely Friday morning/afternoon, and we were Waving. The experiment initiated by McBoof (yes, that one) brought together 6 CMS folks from around the world. The event gathered together analysts, journalists, vendors, system integrators to Wave on a topic that was decided at that very moment. We had one hour (in between conference calls and other job thingys) to pick a topic and Wave it.
A little collab on what exactly to Wave about later, we decided to do “a mindmap of things we find annoying in CMSs.” To up the ante, we also decided to take the original bullet points (deemed “too easy”) and convert the whole thing to prose. Was the tool given really up to the task? Were our minds flexible enough to wrap around this kind of realtime collaboration?
In the beginning – we blame the tool — we were Drowning, not Waving. We (almost) didn’t fight about edits. We almost didn’t step on each other’s toes. All in all, it turned out to be a fun and productive collaborative exercise. Read on to see for yourself.
Cosmetic Issues
There really should be a CMS UI fashion police. As there should be a Magic Quadrant for shoes and handbags. Why? Well, there’s a couple of issues.
For instance, sloppy, non-designed design. You know the kind of thing that has not been thought about and reworked and made to feel right. The sort of thing coders do if you don’t force them. But at the same time, over-designed interfaces can be just as bad: the designers and developers really need to be on speaking terms.
When building a system that works, you can’t have the development team in the basement on a sustenance of Jolt coding away into the night, and the designers in the penthouse in turtleneck sweaters sipping espressos. Too many CMS designs end up being programmer vs. end-user friendly. And this is not the best way to charm away those marketing and web content folks.
Developers and designers need to talk to each other and essentially, both should talk to users - not just eat your own dogfood – but listen to what dogs like to eat. A developer or UI designer are not content editors, marketers or knowledge and information workers.
Some vendors say that the agonizingly and depressingly black UI backgrounds are hip and modern. Well, they are not, really. Who told you that? Especially if you add a Star Trek theme to it and sprinkle in some stars and cosmic swirls, because if Apple does it, it must be cool right? Not pointing any fingers, but I would quit if I were a content manager having to spend my 9-5 staring into the “black hole” of some of the CMS UIs that are out there on the market.
Even pop-ups seem less annoying when compared to dark UIs. Which brings us onto…
Interface Issues
Interfaces need a comfortable lived in feel. Content management is something people work with every day, it is their interface to their job. You meet people who hate the interface, and that makes their work a heap of pain. I have seen people who describe the 44 clicks it takes to insert an image. You have a responsibility to these people, to make them love the content and make the tool disappear.
We all hate it when the interface does something on its own that ruins your context. E.g. a page refresh, or in Wave the jumping around of the scrolled window in some cases ;-) Or the lack of an easy way to bookmark, so you can reference someone to the content. Remember people will be collaborating and need to send links around. Make sure the UI is a proper web application with URLs. And why do tasks that are easy to describe and often repeated in exactly the same way still take more than a few clicks? (Or maybe even dozens of clicks.) With bonus points for forcing users to use dialogs or tabs to enter mandatory information. Remember people do not have all the information in the right order.
Also, we need sane conflict merges. Check in and check out is too extreme for most uses. But people want to edit offline still. Of course Wave doesn’t have an offline: Google thinks this problem is going away, it’s real time so there are never conflicts (that’s defined in the XML protocol; it’s quite interesting if you are that way geeky). Does Google have the right answer here? Well, the Motley Crew is struggling here, and some browsers lost sync during this experiment.
“Power users” (those who use it all day long) of CMSs needed to have a “Desktop” experience. What does Desktop Experience mean? Well, it doesn’t really have to be on the desktop – these days it is perfectly possible to get very close to a hitherto Desktop experience in a browser or similar. these are qualities: very low latency from action to response, no page refreshes, modal and modal-less dialog boxes as appropriate, “push” notification.
Architectural Issues
Architectural issues of the wave overtook any architectural issues of Content Management Systems. The fact that we authored this entire article in a single blip didn’t help, and slowed everything down enormously. McBoof learned the hard way that he really need a new laptop and spent most of the session giving his machine CPR. Next time we’ll do each paragraph in its own blip to stop FireFox going down like a Led Zeppelin.
Monolithic systems. Build it out of pieces that the client can not use all of. Obviously your pieces may work together better, but there should be components. Do not try to reinvent all kinds of wheel. ”Best of breed,” though, is just another weasel marketing idea, as if systems are pinnacles not about meeting requirements.
Marketeers are adroit at using the term Best Practice to position Their Way as the only way that a particular matter can be solved. (Many of us live in that netherland of having to pedal that point of view, but it is a falsehood that the careful buyer should try to see through.) I think this devalues genuine best practice, vendors should cite references
Most often a marketeer’s Best Practice view is the only one they subscribe to as their product development has paddled up the wrong stream and cannot or won’t reverse their architectural design (probably because of the cost of doing so). This intransigence most often causes a product to doom itself. (Think of IBM and The Mainframe Is The Only Way To Do Serious Business).
Who really still believes that there is a place in this world for Flash or Java Applet based Rich Text Editors? TinyMCE, FCKeditor and others are filling the gap left by Ektron when they bit the hand that feeds and entered the CMS market. Ephox is trying to spread, but I find it difficult to come up with an excuse to use an Applet over HTML with javascript these days. Stick with the standard.
Business Issues
Where you are buying into something that you may very well need to change or integrate with there is strong benefit in considering Open Source. Open Source used to frighten commercial software companies but we have come along way on that road to understand that commercial organisation can operate in an Open Source world and benefit. This does not necessarily mean that their prized system needs to be fully opened up, but taking the spirit of it to mean that you are completely open to people seeing and learning from your code how it operates.
Exactly what you need to see opened up varies. In a CMS there may be a subsystem that stores the content or one that allows a Rich Text Editor. These arguably don’t need to be opened up, but when a CMS ships with modules for, for example, an RSS feed widget, calendaring tool, prebuilt webforms, users who then want a variation on this module can benefit from seeing how the “pros” did it, they can then use it as a starting point for their own different implementation.
We really don’t need vendors that pay lip service to the buzzwords. When they think the new CMS buzzword “engagement” is just a screenshot of Google Analytics. Or when they add an image picker and call it DAM. And a cross-over between WCM and ECM? Don’t think WCM is like ECM and it’s about organizing content, not about effectively communicating with the audience. And don’t think that if you organize the content, you can aut omatically communicate effectively.
Completely different, but equally frustrating, is procurement (and the procedures that go with it.) Procurement folk don’t recognise the importance of user adoption to the success of the project — of the black background and all the UI issues pointed out previously. If a CMS is procured according to procedure, the selection is a success to them. But those same rules are often a recipe for ignoring what the users really need.
At the same time, budgets that aren’t transparent are an issue - customer and vendor should be able to have a sensible grown up conversation. As a customer, of course you want good value, but how cheap are you? But to vendors: many licensing models don’t make any sense, and force you to do stupid things. People are scared to have that conversation - the best architectural fit first I say, lets figure out an appropriate license around that.
Conclusion
So much hatred rolled up into a tight little ball of anti-CMS rage. Who would have expected it from such a respected bunch of CMS folk. We hate the designs, the interfaces, the architectures and the business. Time for a beer/wine? Wave good bye!
(Note: This is a cut/paste (as is, no edits) from Google Wave)
Open Source Nuxeo ECM and DM Go OpenSocial-Friendly
Open Source ECM vendor Nuxeo included several new features in the latest release of Nuxeo Document Management. Nuxeo DM 5.3 highlights include support for OpenSocial API, tagging, SharePoint and interoperability with CMIS Server as an add-on component.
On top of that, Nuxeo EP 5.3, the vendor’s enterprise content management system core, reached the RC stage.
Nuxeo DM 5.3
This time around, Nuxeo concentrated on the increasingly popular social applications support and a few other things that many DM users may find helpful and welcome.
Using Nuxeo’s support for OpenSocial — a common API for social apps access across various websites — users can add and/or build social networking gadgets, for example.
Nuxeo DM 5.3 serves as both the publisher of gadgets and the OpenSocial container. Just for comparison, other known OpenSocial containers include MySpace, Ning, LinkedIn, iGoogle and many others.
CrownPeak, a SaaS Web CMS vendor, also did an OpenSocial integration back in early 2008.
Microsoft SharePoint can be accessed from Nuxeo DM 5.3 for basic library services and common file operations. For those die-hard fans of Windows Explorer, there’s a native integration, so they may not even know they’re working with another document management system.
There’s also a Microsoft Office integration that allows opening, saving, editing of files directly to/from Nuxeo DM.
It was about time Nuxeo put more effort into tagging and metadata capabilities of their DM system. The new tagging service is fairly easy to use and allows users to categorize content by applying existing or adding new tags. Tagging can then result in more ways for retrieval and display of content stored in Nuxeo DM.
Tagging recommendations and dynamic tag cloud are also part of the deal.
Nuxeo DM 5.3 Tag Cloud
The vendor also says they improved search and indexing, which should play in nicely into the tagging offering.
Having been longtime fans of CMIS, Nuxeo added interoperability into this release as well with their add-on CMIS Server, which is based on the CMIS draft 0.62. The most current (and the official OASIS Technical Committee) CMIS draft is 0.7.
The idea here is that organizations can use Nuxeo DM, while also being able to search across multiple ECM, ERP, DM and other systems.
Nuxeo EP 5.3
Currently an RC, the new version includes that same WSS (MS SharePoint), tagging and OpenSocial widgets support we’ve seen in DM 5.3. In addition to that, the import/export service was improved and performance is said to be enhanced following some benchmarking efforts.
The Nuxeo EP 5.3 RC also features a CMIS implementation based on Apache Chemistry that we discussed early spring — both with Nuxeo’s Florent Guillaume and Day Software’s David Nuescheler.
It would be unreasonable not to notice the wave of recent activity at this Paris-based open source ECM vendor. With new people on board and an aggressive product roadmap, Nuxeo (if not disrupting) is clearly starting to gain more traction in the global enterprise CMS market.
In the end, when it comes to open source, successes can be measured by the activeness of the community, as well as customer growth — among other metrics. In the U.S., for example, Nuxeo still has quite some space to spread its wings, if the vendor wants to. And we tend to think it will.
Cross-posted on CMSWire.com: Open Source Nuxeo EP and DM 5.3 Support OpenSocial
Open Source CMS Jahia Kicks Off Non-Compete Partner Program
Jahia, an open source CMS vendor, is on a quest to further penetrate the U.S. (among others) market in addition to its French operations. The new global Jahia Business Partner Program gives partners more control and flexibility with free presales support and various levels of certification, including those for VARs and SIs scenarios.
According to Jahia, they don’t want to compete with their partner network when it comes to CMS implementations. Hence, the “non-compete guarantee.” That means Jahia plans to refer almost all of the integration work to its partners – around 70 of them in 15 countries around the globe. Some of Jahia’s partners are in the U.S., the market to which Jahia is paying more and more attention.
While having an implementation partner network is a common approach in the industry, why not do that work in house? Why not move toward a native Professional Services approach? Sure, it’s more costly and requires to have, grow and nurture the in-house subject matter expertise. While it’s certainly not a deal-breaker in many CMS selection processes, different organizations may feel differently about partner vs. vendor implementations.
More on CMSWire.com: Open Source CMS Jahia Gives More Control to Partners
Irina Guseva
