[updated] EPiServer Gearing Up for U.S. Expansion

Breaking news!!! An EPiServer contact sent me a note, saying: “You’re the first one to know outside Sweden.” 😉

The news is not really official yet, but I was told that the .NET-focused Web CMS vendor will soon be opening its first office in the U.S. It’s about time EPiServer breaks out of its European reign and conquers America 😉

Now that I am allowed to leak this info… 😉 The new office will be located either on the East Coast or in (a more prominent part of) Mid-West. The initial focus will be on — duh — sales. More details tomorrow.

This Swedish vendor shows a lot of potential, IMHO. I am working on a full-blown review of their latest CMS 5.0 R2 — coming soon!

[updated] More details here: EPiServer Readies for U.S. Expansion the EPi Way

Ektron Opens Offices in Cali, Texas

From East to West… Ektron is now ready to jump into those cowboy boots and embrace the oh-so-desired Bay Area. The Web CMS vendor (quite predictably so) announced the opening of two new offices — in San Francisco, California, and in Austin, Texas.

The addition of the new offices will extend Ektron’s market reach and provide additional support and services critical to the company’s expanding customer base and partner channel.

Full article on CMSWire: Ektron Makes a Move to the West

PaperThin Grows, Talks About Future

PaperThin, the producer of ColdFusion-based Web CMS CommonSpot, announced that its 2008 Q2 and Q3 revenues shattered all company records, having grown an average of more than 50% year over year. Furthermore, the company’s average deal size increased by more than 30%.

The company attributes its growth rate to the strength of its Channel Partner relationships and increase in Professional Services projects; while maintaining the 95%+ subscription renewal rate, according to Bob Cellucci, SVP for sales and marketing.

Now, it’s time to update the product, perhaps. And PaperThin plans on doing so in 2009. The last major product release from PaperThin was in October, 2007, when CommonSpot 5.0 came out.

Hold on to your ummm… (whatever it is you hold on to) ’till I get a chance to review CommonSpot 6.0 some time in Q2 of 2009.

Full article on CMSWire: PaperThin Reports Growth, Talks About Future

Open Text and New Roadmap for eDOCS Product Line

Open Text is making lots of announcements at its Content World 2008 Conference in Orlando. Do they even have time to hit Disneyland? 🙂 Isn’t that what folks do at “conferences”? J/K.

In a nutshell, it’s all about more flexibility to leverage OT’s ECM technology and keeping records management customers happy (and within the OTEX family of products). The new roadmap includes new enhancements for eDOCS, more integrations with the Open Text ECM suite and even more play time with Microsoft, in the Windows Azure cloud included.

Full article on CMSWire: Open Text Maps Out the Future for eDOCS

Alfresco Puts Together CMIS Developer Toolbox

Every effort counts. Alfresco put together a CMIS Developer Toolbox, which has some useful stuff in it along with fluffy materials like survey, white paper and Q&A. The useful parts of the toolbox, in my opinion, are:

CMIS Trial: A downloadable trial of the draft CMIS implementation

CMIS Sample Dashlets: Demonstrating how to use the CMIS REST API

Alfresco released the industry’s first CMIS specification draft implementation in its Alfresco Labs 3 in September, 2008, and it’s really cool of them to share it in a downloadable trial form. Alfresco just keeps on pouring more effort into Content Management Interoperability Services promotion and support.

Full article on CMSWire: Alfresco Packages CMIS Developer Toolbox

More Day CQ5 WCM Hype

I still think CMS Watch (out of the blue) was too nice to CQ5. But that’s OK. A demo over lunch sounds much more lekker (my fave word in Dutch) than getting your hands dirty with the new release. 

InformationWeek is also hyped about CQ5. Hagopian is quoting me again (thanks, Peter):

For an in-depth overview of CQ5.1, check out Irina Guseva’s detailed piece on CMSWire.com. She also features a review of the release on her personal blog as well as a run-through of the installation experience. Together these pieces offer a hands-on uderstanding of the ups and downs of CQ5.1.

What I am really curious about is how upgrades from CQ 3.5.x and CQ 4.x are going with that “update tool”/update wizard still in beta. If, of course, customers are, indeed, jumping into the upgrade so soon after the release.