CMS Going-Ons That (Almost) Didn’t Make it Here

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.

Day to Ignite CQ5 CMS Discussions in Europe and U.S.

Day’s customer? Evaluating Day CQ5 CMS? CMS geek generally curious about the present and the future of web content management? Check out Day’s customer summit that is scheduled to take place in Zürich (October 14-15, 2009) and Chicago (October 28-29, 2009).

Day’s plan for this event is, mainly, to share strategies and customer stories around CQ5 Web CMS that was released in November 2008. CQ5.2 that came out earlier this year included new DAM and Social Collaboration features.

There are several tracks planned at the summit, including business and technical. The business track is focused on CMS project objectives, CQ5 selection and criteria, and CQ5 business results. In the technical track, attendees will look into CMS project objectives and implementation plan, CQ5 deployment details, and lessons learned in best leveraging Day’s CQ5.

Very often, it’s best to get right into the vendor’s camp if you want to get more insight into what’s going on with the company and where it is going. While, as we reported, Day has had many good days lately, nothing beats a chance of being able to talk to the actual customer who had already put a check mark next to that line that says “CMS implementation.” Getting direct access to Day’s management and technical teams wouldn’t hurt either.

A bit of gazing into the crystal ball is also on the menu with one of Gartner’s analysts leading a discussion on where Day and the content management industry are headed in 2010.

Don’t miss:

• Unveiling of CRX 2.0: the JCR 2.0 (JSR-283) content repository
• Day’s 2010 roadmap

Cherry on top: Day’s CTO David Nüscheler will give a sneak peek of the upcoming CQ5.3. Now, that should be interesting.

Day’s customer? Evaluating Day CQ5 CMS? CMS geek generally curious about the present and future of web content management? Check out Day’s (news, site) customer summit that is scheduled to take place in Zurich (October 14-15, 2009) and Chicago (October 28-29, 2009).

Day’s plan for this event is, mainly, to share strategies and customer stories around CQ5 Web CMS that was released in November 2008. CQ5.2 CMS that we saw earlier this year included new DAM and Social Collaboration features. There are several tracks planned, including business and technical. The business track is focused on CMS project objectives, CQ5 selection and criteria, and CQ5 business results. In the technical track, attendees will look into CMS project objectives and implementation plan, CQ5 deployment details, and lessons learned in best leveraging Day’s CQ5.

Very often, it’s best to get into the vendor’s camp if you want to get more insight into what’s going on with the company and where it is going. While, as we reported, Day has seen many good days lately, nothing beats a chance of being able to talk to the actual customer who had already put a check mark next to that line that says “CMS implementation.” Getting direct access to Day’s management and technical teams wouldn’t hurt either.

A bit of gazing into the crystal ball is also on the menu with one of Gartner’s analysts leading a discussion on where Day and the content management industry are headed in 2010.

Cherry on top: Day’s CTO David Nuescheler will give a sneak peek into the upcoming CQ5.3.

Day Gets a New Captain in the Board of Directors

Back in April 2009, when Day announced the nominations of Barry Bycoff and David Arnott to the Board of Directors. Both were elected in May at Day’s Annual Shareholder meeting in Basel, Switzerland.

Today, board member Barry Bycoff was elected the Board’s Chairman, replacing Michael Moppert, the founder of Day.

Moppert assumed the Chairman role in May 2008, after he handed off his Day CEO reigns to a former Interwoven exec Erik Hansen. Moppert is said to remain an active member of Day’s Board.

Bycoff took over the steering wheel on a good day, shortly after Day’s announcement of positive 1H 2009 financial results.

“I am pleased to be working with Day’s CEO Erik Hansen and the remainder of the Board to help Day capitalize on this opportunity and build on its recent success,” said Bycoff.

Hansen’s initial plan to make Day more appealing seems to be working out so far. Upon accepting the CEO role, he wanted to focus on growing Day’s strongest points: the content infrastructure business and the core content management product.

Since then, we’ve seen CRX new releases and updates, as well as new versions of Web CMS CQ5 and CQ5.2, hit the streets of the content management world.

Originally published on CMSWire

Autonomy Puts Its Meaning-Based Technology to Media Use

Autonomy has partnered with VMS, a provider of media intelligence solutions. VMS will use Autonomy’s meaning-based computing software to build tools for media analysis and competitive intelligence.

VMS is planning to enhance its own PR and advertising solutions for media monitoring, measurement, analysis, competitive advertising and marketing intelligence, workflow management, analytics and PR measurement across all types of media.

Autonomy Interwoven web content management system — powered by Autonomy’s Intelligent Data Operating Layer — will be used by VMS as an integration point for developing tools that can analyze different types of content and act accordingly.

Digital Asset Management (DAM) will also be part of the offering with Virage MediaBin, where meaning will be extracted from video and digital media.

More on CMSWire: Autonomy Puts Its Meaning-Based Technology to Media Use

Continued Quilting Exercise With Open Text WCM

Open Text Web Solutions, formerly known as RedDot Web Content Management (WCM), has gone through a major new release and is now in version 10. There are improvements to the technology stack, more ECM and SAP integrations, updated UI — and OTEX didn’t stop there.

Marci Maddox, Open Text’s director for global product marketing, was kind enough to share the details of the Web Solutions 10 release.

Open Text, understandably, continues to weave its multiple platforms into a coherent patchwork. ECM, DAM and the SAP NetWeaver Portal are some of the touch points.

Open Text Livelink ECM integration is coming as part of the integrations update release around September. Same goes for SharePoint 2010.

Integration with the recently unveiled Open Text Social Media is also in the plans, according to Maddox, who says that there’s already a “small integration” in place, but it is not a released item yet.

Shooting for Seamless Quilts

Open Text is in an interesting position of piecing together so many different systems that are either their own or were acquired. Seamless would be the ideal way for cross-system access to all relevant information.

Not many vendors are able to deliver that seamlessness, which comes with efficiency and ease-of-use. It’ll be interesting to see how Open Text does in this application quilting area, and how Vignette will be part of this entire patchwork.

More on CMSWire: Open Text Continues Quilting Exercise With Latest Web CMS Release

Vignette Media 7.1 Promises Better DAM, Other Improvements

I covered Vignette Media when it just came out late last year. I wasn’t much impressed. Vignette wasn’t impressed with my coverage either — so unimpressed, in fact, there is Part Une and Part Deux to the story.

Now, it seems that Vignette is readying for another release of Vignette Media. We shall see what they’ve got in store for us.

Despite going through turbulent times, Vignette announced upcoming availability of an update to its Vignette Media product.

The new Vignette Media 7.1 is still positioned as a digital media publishing platform aimed at TMEs (telecommunications, media and entertainment) and CMEs (communications, media and entertainment).

There doesn’t seem to be much detail yet on what new and/or improved functionality will be available in the upcoming release, but there’s a microsite here if you want to poke around. Some of the known Vignette Media 7.1 features seem to include improved DAM and ingestion of large volumes of media assets.

Vignette Media 7.1 should be available in the second half of 2009. By then, all logistics of the Vignette acquisition by Open Text should be sorted out, but I don’t expect Open Text to have much influence on the upcoming release.

Full story on CMSWire: Vignette Media 7.1 Promises Better DAM