Former Open Text-er Takes Nuxeo CMO Job

She is well-versed in matters of Enterprise CMS, Enterprise 2.0, collaboration and social media; specializes in VQA wines, weaves in candy and aspirin into one sentence and posts some of the yummiest foodie tweets out there.

Soon after her resignation, the former Open Text-er was asking on Twitter whether 6 pairs of shoes would be enough for one week in Paris, there was a chance that French bistros, Père Lachaise and walks down Canal Saint-Martin were not the sole purpose of the trip.

Meet Cheryl McKinnon, who, as of today, is the new Chief Marketing Officer of the Paris-headquartered open source ECM vendor Nuxeo.

As the new CMO, McKinnon plans, first of all, to put the right team in place (Will we see former Open Text-ers there?) “to make a big bang in the U.S.” and work on Nuxeo’s messaging across the web, print and other channels to deliver “what business and technical buyers need to hear about.” We should expect to see at least 15 more hires in sales, product development and engineering in both Boston and Paris, according to Nuxeo.

After learning the ropes of Nuxeo Enterprise CMS product (including Nuxeo EP and Nuxeo DM), McKinnon admitted she was “pleasantly surprised by the usability factor and a clean, intuitive UI.” “This is not a product you would struggle to use.”

With virtually non-existent experience, exposure or previously declared affection for open source, McKinnon sure did learn some lessons from the proprietary enterprise content management space that should translate well into both French and doing business the open source way. “There’s only so much you can learn in one place. The more that you wait, the more time that you waste.”

Why Nuxeo?

Quite a few of you are probably puzzled as to why someone would leave a position on the growth track at one of the ECM giants. McKinnon has the answer; she is a “big believer in leaving at the top of the personal game.” The last year of her career at OTEX “was the most fun and fulfilling,” due to being able to learn new products, explore social media and start writing again. But it was time to “take all lessons learned and apply [them] to a company on the brink of making a jump to the next level.”

In addition to that, Eric Barroca, Nuxeo’s CEO, “reached out and painted a picture.” No, he didn’t exactly DM her on Twitter, but this level of personal recruitment made McKinnon feeling “obliged to return the call,” even though she returned none of head hunters’ calls.

More on CMSWire: Former Open Text-er Takes CMO Job at Open Source Nuxeo

Open Text Web CMS Saga With Vignette and RedDot Continues

Personally, I cannot wait for October to arrive. Open Text Content World will be in the lovely Orlando, and we all should expect to be enlightened on OTEX’s product map and strategy for its two web content management arms: Web Solutions (aka RedDot) and the recently acquired Vignette.

Commenting on my previous post on the Open Text WCM saga, Markus Giesen et al. — representatives of an unofficial RedDot blog — raised several worthwhile questions. Not with publicity in mind, but in an effort to get some real, transparent answers I reached out for comments to Open Text.

Disappointingly, we did not succeed in squeezing a ton of clarity from Open Text’s Marci Maddox — their Director Global Product Marketing for Web Solutions.

The official party line is that no product migrations, discontinuations and code mergers will happen for Vignette and RedDot. RedDot is not dead, and Vignette will continue to get R&D money. A “singular solution” — whatever that means — is still on the roadmap for the next 2 years.

The response from the community is still “Yeah, we’ve heard that before…” as many are thinking of Gauss and Obtree.

Without more answers, the Vignette acquisition looks to be more of an impulse buy. And hey, most of us do impulsive things every now and then (more often than we’d like to admit), only to find ourselves stricken by a profound “Oh, my…” moment, then scrambling to put the puzzle back together again.

Granted, decisions of this magnitude are unlikely to have been made impulsively. They are also not easy to pin down in a relatively short period of time.

However, reflecting on the recent communications strategy, opinions like “The botched messaging around RedDot speaks unbelievably poorly of OTEX leadership, IMHO” are nothing but expected.

Ektron Inadvertently Leaks CMS400.NET v8 Release?

Apparently, there was a little mishap in the Web CMS vendor Ektron’s scheduled publishing activities.

The new major v8.0 release of CMS400.NET (that wasn’t supposed to see the light of day for at least another week or so) surfaced in production, online, for all to see in its full video-and-all glory on this microsite. Should  it no longer be available when you read this, there are some screenshots below.

Ektron’s preceding version was 7.6.

Ektron seems to be prematurely (?) reporting that version 8 of its CMS product includes such new and/or improved features as:

• New GUI for workarea
• New features for activity streams and micromessaging
• Multivariate Testing capabilities
• Calendaring integration
• PageBuilder enhancements
• eCommerce engine improvements

Without much detail into what each new feature entails, it doesn’t look like the landing page was quite ready to be workflow-approved and pushed into production. Oops.

Ektron CMS400.NET V8 Landing Page

Ektron V8 “Smart Desktop”

Ektron V8 Video Frame

Jahia Cloud: Amazon EC2 for CMS is What Zipcars for Renters

Many in the content management industry (and beyond) seem to be slightly obsessed with the buzz that the “cloud” is. The opinions can be quite polar, but for now we’ll concentrate on those embracing virtualization.

In today’s interview, Emmanuel Garcin, VP and GM in North America for open source CMS provider Jahia, shared his thoughts about cloud trends and told us how Jahia is going about it with the newest release of Jahia Cloud.

Did you ever think Zipcars were a more flexible option than, say, Hertz? Jahia is transferring this principle to web content management (+/- one JVM).

From Zipcars to JVMs

In his brilliant Zipcars analogy, Garcin explained how he thought the service was really cool, alluding that the ECM industry could use more flexibility. You can rent a car with Zipcars for even a half an hour, depending on your need. You have a choice of a Chevrolet one day and a BMW the next day, depending on, for example, which girlfriend/boyfriend you are going to pick up that night ;). It is all about the flexibility and responding to customer needs.

The content management industry could use the same levels of flexibility when it comes to hardware in the cloud. It would be a different business model, depending on a customer’s needs, where customers can pay per JVM, if JVMs are only used on demand. The point of this story and the main goal of Jahia is to allow flexibility for the customers, concluded Garcin.

More on CMSWire: Jahia Cloud: Conquering Amazon EC2 for More CMS Flexibility

KnowledgeTree Goes to Zend for CMS Performance Zen

Well, if it isn’t open source CMS and PHP companies playing friendly again… Open source, PHP5-fueled Enterprise CMS vendor KnowledgeTree announced its embrace of the PHP-driven Zend Technologies in a partnership that aims to increase speed and performance of KnowledgeTree’s products.

Part of the partnership revolves around the forthcoming version 3.7 of KnowledgeTree’s on-the-premise commercial edition (due in Q4 2009) being deployed on Zend Server.

Looking for instant gratification? According to Philip Arkcoll, product manager at KnowledgeTree, the Zend partnership “represents the coming together of two PHP players whose goal is bringing enterprise-grade PHP products to the marketplace. KnowledgeTree on Zend Server delivers speed, performance, and reliability, particularly in Windows environments.

In fact, early tests show response time improvements of close to 40% when using Zend Server, and that’s with no changes to our application.” No word on how Linux behaves, but the vendor say this OS is supported as well.

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CrownPeak CMS Gets URL Shortener, Goes Social Media-Friendly

CrownPeak recognizes the importance of URL shortening for social media and social networking, while retaining the ability to measure that content through web analytics tools.

The news release of the CrownPeak URL Shortener allows CrownPeak CMS users to take advantage of the automatically generated short URLs, or modify them manually to create a customized URL. Voila, and we are social media-ready.

A job that can be done by services like bit.ly and 3.ly, is now handled within the CMS itself to generate CPeak.us and alike URLs.

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