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Ruby on Rails 3.0 is available

I'm not much of a programmer but I can appreciate the value of a good programming language when I see it. While I know Python and dabble with PHP, I've always appreciated Ruby and Ruby on Rails. There is something about the Ruby development scene that perks my interest in this programming language.

Ruby on Rails 3.0 was just released this week. The development of Rails 3.0 has been two years in the making. David August writes:

Rails 3.0 has been underway for a good two years, so it’s with immense pleasure that we can declare it’s finally here. We’ve brought the work of more than 1,600 contributors together to make everything better, faster, cleaner, and more beautiful.

Some of the biggest changes and additions in Rails includes:

• New Active Record query engine - makes it easier to build complex queries over several iterations.
• New router for Action Controller - the syntax has been modified to to favor the REST style
• New Action Mailer
• Manage dependencies with Bundler - Bundler allows you to specify the libraries, frameworks, and plugins that your application depends on.
• XSS protection by default
• Encoding issues resolved
• Active Model: Validations, callbacks, etc for all models
• Official plugin APIs
• Documentation

If you're interested in Ruby on Rails 3.0, check out the download page at RubyonRails.org.

Content Management System Built for Cities to have Presence at NAGW Annual Conference

Auctori:city, a web content management system designed for municipalities and built for SEO, is a sponsor of the National Association of Government Webmasters (NAGW) National Conference which will be held at the Millennium Hotel in St. Louis, Missouri September 22-24, 2010.

A silo of the search engine optimization friendly web content management system, Auctori, an innovation of Unidev, the Auctori:city solution provides cities with the opportunity to strengthen their Internet presence and their overall brand reputation by giving users a professional city website design and the power to maintain their web content in real-time.

“We are looking forward to attending this highly anticipated conference and introducing Auctori:city to the NAGW community,” said Andrea Bemis, Brand Manager, Auctori. “Our unique CMS integrates controls that give individual departments the power to edit components of their website, such as news, community calendars and business directories, making the general maintenance of a city website very straightforward and less time consuming for webmasters."

In addition to standard content management features, Auctori:city is equipped with modules to meet the unique online needs of municipalities. A few of these city-centric features include: a photo gallery, community calendar, a business directory, an articles and news module, and a form builder (which can calculate the statistics of online surveys). Auctori:city is also equipped with social media modules including Twitter and Facebook. With the Auctori:city Facebook module, an article, news, event update or press release will automatically populate a city’s Facebook page through an RSS feed.

Auctori:city has partnered with online interactive agency, The Net Impact, to offer custom city web design, web development and Internet marketing services to Auctori:city clients. In addition to city web design and Internet marketing services, through their partnership with The Net Impact, Auctori:city offers social media marketing services such as city social media design and management.

“Today’s citizens want a more active, participatory relationship with their government and to have 24/7 access to reliable and valuable information that affects their lives, and there is no better vehicle to reach a community than a city’s website,” said Steve Thomas, President of The Net Impact. “We are happy to have the opportunity to work with Auctori:city clients to offer services such as web analytics, user-testing, search engine optimization and web design to help these cities build a more effective, appealing and user-friendly website.”

The NAGW National Conference is the premier conference for government webmasters, which focuses on local, state and regional government web. Attendees will learn about the latest trends, get hands-on training with the newest software, and hear presentations from leading professionals from the government and private sectors. As a Gold Sponsor of the conference, Auctori:city will have an exhibition booth. The booth will feature live demonstrations, informational pamphlets, giveaways and Auctori:law representatives on hand to answer questions. This will be the first ever presence of Auctori:city at the NAGW Conference.

About Auctori:city™

Auctori:city™, an innovation of Unidev®, is a high capacity, high performance Web Content Management System (WCMS) built for search engine optimization and designed for municipalities. Auctori:city gives cities and governments an easy to use tool for managing their web presence. For more information on Auctori:city or for a free demonstration, please visit www.auctoricity.com, or call (888) 629-4672.

About The Net Impact®

The Net Impact, a full service Internet marketing and web design, is a division of Unidev®. Since 1997, The Net Impact has been a web development leader, empowering clients with highly creative search engine friendly websites. Professional services encompass search engine optimization and Internet marketing solutions, Internet strategy development, training and seminars, social media marketing and design, and web design and development. For more information on The Net Impact, please visit www.thenetimpact.com, or call (636) -787-7800.

Using BPM and Workflow to Drive Work Efficiently Across the Enterprise

Do you remember the first time you rode your bike without gripping the handlebar? “Hey—look—no hands!” you probably exclaimed with excitement. If you’re lucky, you ended the trip on your bike, bearing a bright smile rather than a skinned knee.

Planning for a business process management (BPM) and workflow implementation bears some resemblance to riding hands free, only on a larger scale. Whether or not you stay on course isn’t just a matter of luck. You need to know where your business is headed; understand what you are striving to achieve; streamline your processes to ensure efficient routing; anticipate the unexpected; keep a sharp eye out for change; and make changes on the fly so you remain steady till the end.

Presuming you’ve read the first two articles in this series (Developing an Enterprise Vision for Business Process Automation and Indexing for the Enterprise: Retrieve Your Documents 100% of the Time), you already learned the importance of establishing a clear organizational vision. You also know ECM is data driven, and you learned tips for effective indexing so information can be found when it’s needed and leveraged enterprise-wide. BPM and workflow build on these successes.

Whether your processes revolve around documents, represent a series of events, or both, your data is a launching pad to drive work and decision making efficiently across your organization. If you understand the unseen as well as the obvious benefits of automation, you will visualize more clearly the long-term value across the enterprise. Knowing what questions to answer before you start helps you approach your project confidently.

The real benefits of BPM/Workflow

Beyond streamlining procedures and shortening turnaround, many significant benefits aren’t immediately evident:

• Redistribute work based on employee absenteeism—sharing work equally, allocating it to the person with the emptiest Inbox, or by position;
• Change organizational hierarchies and roles without affecting the flow of work, since BPM adjusts immediately to new information;
• Change spontaneously how work is processed without retraining staff;
• Predict and react to bottlenecks in work—adjusting hierarchies, tasks, and rules to prevent slowdowns;
• Extract data from multiple sources into one at prescheduled intervals or in real time for easier, smarter decision making.

Intelligent automation means faster service and easier tracking. It eliminates redundancy by reusing data enterprise-wide, following your rules. It also ensures consistent customer treatment, preventing tasks from being overlooked or pushed to the bottom of the pile. Detailed tracking of every action facilitates audits and regulatory compliance.

Questions you need to answer before you start

Smart BPM/Workflow automation not only requires robust technology; it depends on asking and answering the right questions. Here are a few to help you think your way down the path of automation.

Ask yourself:

What’s the primary reason we are automating this process? To save money? Make service faster or more convenient? Mitigate risk?

Take care that those involved—department managers, employees, vendors—understand and agree on the project purpose so the implementation delivers what you expect.

For which processes is each document type in our organization used? How will automation in one area affect another?

Even if you are automating a handful of processes for one department, examine the organizational labyrinth of everyday procedures and understand their interaction. Otherwise, you’ll miss opportunities to optimize efficiency. Purchasing may interact with inventory control. Contract management processes may interact with vacation approvals, performance reviews, and payroll. Understand how everything works together.

Is every step in this process necessary? Can some be eliminated or combined?

Automating streamlined processes and maximizing concurrent actions or decision making gives you the upper hand in service. You may cut turnaround time from weeks to days, or even hours.

How are exceptions handled?

Although most processes follow standard rules, many have anticipated exceptions. Make sure you plan accordingly and establish rules to handle them.

How can process automation improve records management strategy?

Know the document lifecycle for each record you process. Will you need to automate disposition schedules after your records have exceeded their mandated retention periods?

Is there data in legacy or software applications that is needed for this process? Do multiple searches occur during processing that involve disparate systems?

Tap into staff and talk through the details. When workers are served task lists, will they have to log into other systems to access information or make decisions? Make sure your chosen BPM solution integrates seamlessly with email, fax, legacy, and line-of-business applications for optimal performance.

What training can we offer employees to help them embrace automation and succeed?

Training is an investment in success. When employees understand what to do, why they are doing it, the benefits of adopting a new way, and have the tools and knowledge to proceed confidently, they will succeed. Without adequate training, your project may not be fully accepted and you may suffer unwittingly from underperformance.

What criteria will we use to measure success? How will we recognize achievements so we can multiply them?

The clear goals you established initially will help you define benchmarks for achievement along the way. With a solid plan and strong technology, success should be inevitable—but you must never take it for granted. Change is stressful for employees, so you need to set clear expectations and recognize and celebrate them as they’re met. As employees gain confidence and experience, they may generate additional ideas for improvements that you wouldn’t want to miss.

BPM helps you reach your destination—every time

Remember riding a bike with no hands? There was always a risk you might misjudge and fall over. In contrast, when your BPM and workflow systems are up and running, the risk of miscalculation disappears. Your processes follow your established rules every time, without fail.

BPM frees your hands from time-consuming tasks, assuring you that your customers and business will be handled consistently every time, by every employee. Timely, accurate information helps you make smart decisions with confidence. With your hands free from timeconsuming search, document delivery, analysis, and more, you can focus on your next goals and push onward toward victory.

Optical Image Technology offers an integrated suite of imaging, document management, and workflow software, including document archiving, lifecycle management, electronic forms, and email management products. To learn more about our products and services, visit our website at www.docfinity.com, email info@docfinity.com, or call us at 800-678-3241.

Plone 4 Reaches Release Candidate Status

The Plone 4.0 Framework Team and release manager Eric Steele are pleased to announce the first release candidate for Plone 4.0.

Plone 4.0 brings massive performance and scalability improvements, a brand new default theme and a revamped user interface.

 

New Plone Theme

Other new features include:

• An improved first-run experience, particularly creating a new Plone site
• Streamlined user account creation and extensible member profiles
• Upgraded infrastructure: Plone now runs on Python 2.6 and Zope 2.12 making for easier deployment and a smaller memory footprint
• Built-in file-system storage for Image and File content types makes databases with large binaries easier to manage
• Pop-up forms for login and many management functions
• TinyMCE visual editor improves formatted text editing
• Full-text indexing of East Asian languages
• Group dashboards
• The new standard theme utilizes a flexible, grid-based layout that provides a better base for clean, modern theming
• Hundreds of bug fixes and tweaks
• A well-tested upgrader that makes upgrading from Plone 3 fast and easy
• Performance increases that nearly double pages per second in typical situations.

How you can help

Release candidates serve as proposed final releases for the project.  While Plone 4.0 has been tested by many members of the Plone developer community, and is already running in production on a number of sites, it needs wider testing to flush out any remaining critical bugs before we can stamp it as a “final release.”  And that’s where we need you.

Here’s what you can do to help:

1. Test our installer packages by downloading and installing Plone 4.0 RC1 from the Plone 4.0 downloads page.
2. Help us test the upgrade scripts by migrating a copy of your site’s data.
3. Report any errors to the Plone bug tracker.

BigBlueButton and Multilingual Improvements Emerge from TikiFest Ottawa

BigBlueButton and Multilingual Improvements Emerge from TikiFest Ottawa

At the most recent TikiFest in Ottawa, Canada, several Tiki Community members met to socialize and contribute their talents to the future of Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware. For four days (August 15 – 18), the attendees (including several remote participants) discussed, planned, and coded many features and enhancements planned for Tiki 6.

The TikiFest ended with a wine-and-cheese social at the Code Factory in Ottawa, hosted by Citadel Rock, Blindside Networks, Pondstone Communications, and AvanTech.net, all of whom are active participants in the Tiki and BigBlueButton communities.

The cornerstone of the TikiFest was to improve the integration between Tiki and BigBlueButton that was first introduced in Tiki 5. Additionally, a full day of the event was reserved for various internationalization (i18n) topics, including:

• Establishing a collaborative multilingual glossary
• Creating a translation server
• Making it easier for the Tiki Community to contribute translations

See http://tiki.org/TikiFestBigBlueButton to review all items from this event (including pictures and video from the event).

Several TikiFests are planned for the upcoming months in Montréal, New York City, and Berlin. See the Tiki Community calendar at http://tiki.org for details.

For information on Tiki 6, the next generation of Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware (planned for October 2010), see http://dev.tiki.org/tiki6.

DotNetNuke Corp. Introduces Enterprise Edition of Industry Leading Web Content Management Platform

DotNetNuke Corp., the company behind the most widely adopted Web Content Management Platforms for Microsoft .NET, today announced the release of the DotNetNuke Enterprise Edition. The Enterprise Edition includes the new DotNetNuke Content Staging feature that allows users to edit and approve content on a staging server prior to pushing the site to production. In addition, the DotNetNuke Web CMS includes a new Content Localization feature that enables easy management of multi-language web sites. The Content Localization feature is included in all Editions of the platform including the Enterprise, Professional and Community Editions.

News Highlights

Exclusive to the Enterprise Edition, Content Staging allows users to create a separate staging server where all intended production web site changes can be implemented and tested before being published to the production server. Ideal for organizations with many content contributors and tight restrictions on web site content publishing and review, the highly advanced system compares the staging server configuration to the production server to identify missing components and provides a detailed view of all planned changes. Other features include:

• An audit tool that creates a record of all publishing events
• A “white list” in which users can define which modules should push both their settings and content during publishing and which should push only the module settings
• A simple, secure publishing function which allows users to easily push their site from staging to production

All Editions of DotNetNuke including the Enterprise, Professional and Community, now feature a new Content Localization capability that helps users manage translated versions of all or some of their web pages. Ideal for multi-language web sites, the feature includes management and configuration-mapping tools to keep translated pages synchronized across a web site.

With the introduction of the Enterprise Edition, DotNetNuke will no longer offer the Elite Edition, which will now comprise the Professional Edition plus Elite Support. The new Elite Support option – available for the Professional and Enterprise Editions – features extended support hours, faster guaranteed support, priority management of support tickets, installation upgrade assistance, and source code access to the proprietary Professional or Enterprise Edition modules.

DotNetNuke is the fastest growing open source web CMS ever with nearly 900 subscription customers, 33,000 Snowcovered marketplace customers, and 400 percent year-over-year growth. Connect with us online: Twitter.com/dnncorp (company) or Twitter.com/dnnsc (Snowcovered marketplace); DotNetNuke blogs; and the DotNetNuke Community LinkedIn Group.

“The new DotNetNuke Enterprise Edition includes Content Staging which allows organizations to edit and approve web site changes on a staging server prior to publishing to production. Content Staging meets the requirements of our mid-sized and large customers who have formalized rules, guidelines and policies around publishing content. We also added a new Content Localization feature to the DotNetNuke core. The availability of Content Localization in our Community Edition demonstrates our continued commitment to the open core model and to the community at large. Content Localization will benefit our users who build, deploy, and maintain multi-language web sites.” – Navin Nagiah, CEO

About DotNetNuke Corp.

DotNetNuke Corp. is the steward of the DotNetNuke open source project, the most widely adopted Web Content Management Platform for building web sites and web applications on Microsoft .NET. Organizations use DotNetNuke to quickly develop and deploy interactive and dynamic web sites, intranets, extranets and web applications. The DotNetNuke platform is available in a free Community and subscription-based Professional and Enterprise Editions with an Elite Support option. DotNetNuke Corp. also operates Snowcovered where users purchase third party software apps for the platform. Founded in 2006 and funded by Sierra Ventures, August Capital and Pelion Venture Partners, DotNetNuke Corp. is headquartered in San Mateo, Calif. For additional information, visit www.dotnetnuke.com.

Packt launch fifth annual Open Source Awards

The 2010 Open Source Awards was launched today by Packt, inviting people to visit www.PacktPub.com and submit nominations for their favorite Open Source project. Now in its fifth year, the Award has been adapted from the established Open Source CMS Award with the wider aim of encouraging, supporting, recognizing and rewarding all Open Source projects.

WordPress won the 2009 Open Source Content Management System (CMS) Award in what was a very close contest with MODx and SilverStripe. While MODx was the first runner up, SilverStripe, a Most Promising CMS Award winner in 2008, made its way to the second runner up position in its first year in the Open Source CMS Award final.

The 2010 Award will feature a prize fund of $24,000 with several new categories introduced. While the Open Source CMS Award category will continue to recognize the best content management system, Packt is introducing categories for the Most Promising Open Source Project, Open Source E-Commerce Applications, Open Source JavaScript Libraries and Open Source Graphics Software. CMSes that won the Overall CMS Award in previous years will continue to compete against one another in the Hall of Fame CMS category.

These new categories will ensure that the Open Source Awards is the ultimate platform to recognise excellence within the community while supporting projects both new and old. “We believe that the adaption of the Award and the new categories will provide a new level of accessibility, with the Award recognizing a wider range of Open Source projects; both previous winners while at the same time, encouraging new projects” said Julian Copes, organizer of this year’s Awards.

Packt has opened up nominations for people to submit their favorite Open Source projects for each category at www.PacktPub.com/open-source-awards-home . The top five in each category will go through to the final, which begins in the last week of September. For more information on the categories, please visit Packt’s website http://www.packtpub.com/blog/packt's-2010-open-source-awards-announcement.

Pixie needs your help

At the end of last week the Pixie CMS project submitted a tiny application to the 10k Apart competition. The competition aims to explore what is possible with just 10k of code and the latest bleeding edge web standards.

Our entry is nanoPixie (votes are appreciated), an CMS that makes use of the HTML5 feature contentEditable. nanoPixie is a very basic CMS but it occurred to us that this finally brings true WYSIWYG editing to the web. We saw the future.

We are now on the lookout for three people to join the core Pixie development team to help nanoPixie become Pixie 2.0. If your interested in joining please read "the plan" to find out more.

TomatoCart Comes Up to A New Stage——2010 Open Source Awards

TomatoCart as an innovative open source shopping cart with a combination of functionality and flexibility, are now stepping into a new stage, that is, to be mature and better known to the world.

How? Regular release and award campaign can help!

We do believe an open source application can make progress and satisfy shopping cart users on a regular basis. After several releases,TomatoCart is soon to be released with more fascinating and powerful features,which shop owners can have easier access to gaining large traffic and high-volume sales with.

In addition to the updates, an open source application can grow up quickly in an award campaign, gaining more attention from the publich.Thus, TomatoCart are taking part in 2010 Open Sourece Award Campaign for Most Promissing Open Source Project and Open Source E-Commerce Applications Award! The public has a say on the final winners through nomination and voting for their favored open source products. The nomination opens on August 9, 2010, and closes on September 17, 2010. Please nominate and vote for TomatoCart if you do think it a good open source product.

Nomination Entries:
Nominate TomatoCart as Most Promising Open Source Project:
http://www.packtpub.com/open-source-awards-home/nominate-most-promising-open-source-project

Nominate TomatoCart as your favorite Open Source E-Commerce Applications:
http://www.packtpub.com/open-source-awards-home/nominate-best-open-source-ecommerce-application

Name of project: TomatoCart
URL of project: http://www.tomatocart.com

As a dynamic and growing product, TomatoCart appreciates this chance to take part in the award campaign. A good result will surely boost our morale and encourage us to devote more to the open source application. We wish all our fans and TomatoCart users help push TomatoCart forward.

P.S. You will also be pleased to hear that by nominating or voting for your favorite Open Source project, you will have chances to win a fantastic Amazon Kindle! Don’t let the chance slip away!

Open Source Awards Timelines:
August 9 | Nominations Open
September 17 | Nominations Close
September 27 | Voting Begins
November 5 | Voting Ends
November 15 | Winners Announced

Mi-Dia Forum 1.0.0 Released

The first version of Mi-Dia Forum ( version 1.0.0 ) is now released for free under the GNU GPL licence.

Mi-Dia Forum is a simple and efficient Forum System written in php and mysql. Its simple interface allows ease of use for both user's and administrator's.

Originally designed as an Add-on for Mi-Dia Blog, this forum gives an extra level of desired functionality, allowing your site to be more than just an every day blog. Mi-Dia forum can use as a standalone forum script or can be integrated with an existing blog.
Like the blog, Mi-Dia Forum is also built upon the Mi-Dia Core script, sharing the same security and management technology making being a Forum Admin as easy as being a Blog Admin. Designed to be used by everyone.

EmbryoCore - brand new system gets first stable release

EmbryoCore is a brand new blog / content management system written from the ground up to take advantage of PHP5's latest features. It's highly customizable, XHTML:Strict compliant, with full integration of jQuery for dynamic ajax-powered content.
A full list of features can be seen here

Main site: http://embryocore.com
Extend site (themes, plugins etc): http://embryocore.com/extend/

BC Place Facilitates Internal Communication with Intranet Connections During Post-Olympic Construction

August 18, 2010 – Vancouver, BC -- Intranet Connections (www.intranetconnections.com) is pleased to announce the intranet launch for BC Place, the venue for the opening and closing ceremonies of the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Winter Games.  BC Place launched their Intranet Connections Intranet 2.0 CMS Software in July with goals of improving corporate communication, increasing employee involvement, and enhancing information sharing within the organization.

After the 2010 Winter Games, BC Place was scheduled major construction to revitalize and modernize the facilities, including the largest retractable roof of its kind in the world.  When the Administration team at BC Place learned that half of all full-time staff would be moving to temporary offices at the Vancouver Convention Centre and the other half would remain at BC Place, they immediately became aware that a corporate communication tool was needed to unify the two locations.  The IT team spearheaded the project, identifying an intranet site as the best means to facilitate internal communication and provide a central repository for staff information.

In evaluating intranet solutions, BC Place knew they wanted to find a turnkey product that did not require any programming or custom development in order to get their site up and running. 

“We ultimately selected Intranet Connections as an intranet solution because it was out-of the box and it required minimal administration overhead.  Intranet Connections also came highly recommended, was proven in the market place and was developed by a Canadian company.  We really liked the fact that Intranet Connections was a local organization.”  says Winnie Mok, Information Services Manager at BC Place.

Since this was BC Place’s first intranet implementation, Intranet Connections’ suite of ready-to-use applications allowed the intranet development committee to focus efforts on the key success factors for a well received rollout.  Priorities for the launch included: educating users about the role of an intranet, developing dynamic and relevant content and establishing site usage guidelines.

The new intranet has become a central part of BC Place’s multi-location communications and information management strategy.  Construction news, press updates, updated policies and information about their upcoming road show are all posted on the intranet to keep employees at different facilities up to date and in the know.

About BC Place

BC Place is the largest sports, exhibition and entertainment venue of its kind in British Columbia, hosting the province’s most notable events, including the Opening and Closing Ceremonies of the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Winter Games. Upon re-opening in 2011, BC Place will be the new home for the Vancouver MLS franchise, will continue to be home to the BC Lions Football Club, the 2011 Grey Cup and many other exhibitions, community and entertainment events. Visit http://www.bcplacestadium.com/  for more info.

About Intranet Connections

Intranet Connections Intranet 2.0 Software is out-of-the-box intranet software that combines core tools, intranet tasks and employee collaboration in an easy to use and turnkey environment.  More than 1400 organizations world-wide have chosen Intranet Connections as their intranet software provider and the company has a strong vertical within financial and health sectors.

If you’d like more information about this topic, please contact Rachel Lai at 604-924-9770 or visit the Intranet Connections web site at http://www.intranetconnections.com.

Packt's 2010 Open Source Awards now open

The 2010 Open Source Awards was launched yesterday by Packt, inviting people to visit www.PacktPub.com and submit nominations for their favorite Open Source project. Now in its fifth year, the Award has been adapted from the established Open Source CMS Award with the wider aim of encouraging, supporting, recognizing and rewarding all Open Source projects.

WordPress won the 2009 Open Source Content Management System (CMS) Award in what was a very close contest with MODx and SilverStripe. While MODx was the first runner up, SilverStripe, a Most Promising CMS Award winner in 2008, made its way to the second runner up position in its first year in the Open Source CMS Award final.

The 2010 Award will feature a prize fund of $24,000 with several new categories introduced. While the Open Source CMS Award category will continue to recognize the best content management system, Packt is introducing categories for the Most Promising Open Source Project, Open Source E-Commerce Applications, Open Source JavaScript Libraries and Open Source Graphics Software. CMSes that won the Overall CMS Award in previous years will continue to compete against one another in the Hall of Fame CMS category.

These new categories will ensure that the Open Source Awards is the ultimate platform to recognise excellence within the community while supporting projects both new and old. “We believe that the adaption of the Award and the new categories will provide a new level of accessibility, with the Award recognizing a wider range of Open Source projects; both previous winners while at the same time, encouraging new projects” said Julian Copes, organizer of this year’s Awards.

Packt has opened up nominations for people to submit their favorite Open Source projects for each category at www.PacktPub.com/open-source-awards-home . The top five in each category will go through to the final, which begins in the last week of September. For more information on the categories, please visit Packt’s website at www.PacktPub.com/blog/packt’s-2010-open-source-awards-announcement

Adobe – Day: Acquisition or Big push for the Content Management Market?

Xenia Von Wedel from SocialRadius recently did a Q&A with CEO Interview Elie Auvray, to get a feeling what the Adobe / Day Software means for the Content Management market in general, and for Jahia in particular and decided to share her interview with our readers. Thanks Xenia!

Xenia Von Wedel: The announced Adobe acquisition of Day Software, a WCM competitor of yours, strikes us as a bit odd. What does WCM have to do with graphics tools?

Elie Auvray

Elie Auvray: First of all, I would like to congratulate the Day team for an outstanding deal. It is also a great recognition of the value provided by next-generation WCMs, so we at Jahia are happy about that as well.
The acquisition makes sense for Adobe, as it allows them to cover the whole value chain from content creation to its management and publication across any channel. Day will be the framework Adobe lacked for their enterprise offerings.

Xenia Von Wedel: They say that “Day customers will be able to leverage more interactive application and document capabilities from Adobe® AIR®, Adobe® Flash®, Flex, Adobe® LiveCycle® and PDF” – can’t they do that with Jahia as well?

Elie Auvray: Yes, a number of our customers already integrated some of Adobe’s flagship products with Jahia. Even through Adobe products aren’t open source, they are very interoperable – if they weren’t nobody would use them.

Xenia Von Wedel: Will the acquisition give Day a competitive advantage over Jahia?

Elie Auvray: No. Once the acquisition by Adobe is approved by authorities, Day will be even more focused on what they call the “Customer Experience Platform”, which is but one facet of Jahia’s offerings. Our mission is to unite and present content, no matter where it comes from and no matter what’s its type. Therefore Jahia will still be the vendor of choice for customers who need to tie all their content together with a sophisticated front-end solution that makes all their information silos work together, smoothly. That is very different from the mission of the now Adobe-controlled “Customer Experience Platform”. Jahia will continue to champion robust open source standards and frameworks, such as the Apache foundation. We hope that Day will continue to contribute to these frameworks, but Adobe, quite frankly, hasn’t been the best promoter of standards in our industry, aside from their own.

Xenia Von Wedel: How do you think the acquisition will influence the content management market in general?

Elie Auvray: For the casual observer, it could seem that this acquisition is simply in line with the consolidation recent trends, starting with EMC-Documentum, then Open Text-Vignette and Autonomy-Interwoven – not to mention a myriad of smaller or more technology-oriented acquisitions.

But the Adobe-Day acquisition is unique in that it polarizes the market even more and, at the same time, it commoditizes so-called ECM solutions: By making Day the backbone of its content value chain (from creation to management and delivery) as opposed to Alfresco – which seemed the logical choice considering Alfresco’s OEM relationship with Adobe – Adobe validates that Content repositories are the new commodities, and that what really matters is the tools and composite applications that are capable of being repository-agnostic.

That is very good news for Jahia, as we’ve hammered that message since our inception. It’s not good news for pure document-centric vendors that built their entire core around more limited content types, such as documents and records.

I remember that John Newton, CTO of Alfresco, said at the 2009 Boston Gilbane Conference that “a WCM can live without a DMS but a DMS cannot live without a WCM”. Adobe’s move affirms the wisdom of that comment.

Xenia Von Wedel: What’s the relationship status between WCM and ECM?

Elie Auvray: User experience platforms like Fatwire, Day, and Jahia communicate with, rather than compete with ECM/DMS. That’s why connectors, REST interfaces, and standard like CMIS are so important.

At the end of the day, what matters is software that unifies those content silos. At Jahia, we started unlocking the frontiers among software classifications with our United Content Hub (link: http://www.jahia.com/jahia/Jahia/Home/features/jahia_enterprise_class_software/Enterprise_Connectors)

We think that Day is a great competitor for these reasons. It’s good to face competition on such an innovative market, as it reinforces Jahia’s vision. As it is, customers shortlist us on a regular basis at the expense of Microsoft and other ECM and portal vendors that fail to deliver comparable value.

The relevance of this convergence, from a user perspective, came from Stephen Powers on January 22 of this year in “Web Content Management and Portal: Together at Last?”:

IBM is betting that the WCM and portal markets will converge and cease to be separate markets, with vendors offering combined WCM/portals suites that have one administrative tool set, one presentation management structure, one repository, and so on.

Xenia Von Wedel: Although Day Software is not open source, CTO David Nüscheler has a strong voice in the open source community. What impact will the acquisition have on the CMS community?

Elie Auvray: We really hope that David will continue to contribute to the open source community. Whether he can do it within Adobe remains to be seen, considering Adobe’s track record of strong, but not so open, products. Similar fears surfaced after Oracle acquired Sun, and the recent retirement of some of the standards Sun had shepherded should make us wary of Day’s future involvement with standards.

Xenia Von Wedel: How will the acquisition affect the remaining CMS players?

Elie Auvray: Our industry is maturing and consolidation is a natural and healthy evolution that serves the greater good: innovation. When an industry consolidates, it means yesterday’s innovations becomes today’s commodities, setting the stage for the next wave of disruption!

Xenia Von Wedel: Big companies tend to acquire, rather than innovate – can smaller players still play a vital role?

Elie Auvray: Yes. Smaller players are in the best position to innovate, since they are more nimble and technology-driven. Larger Software companies are tied to the short term imperatives of the stock market, focusing on maintenance revenues as opposed to the next big thing.

Xenia Von Wedel: Day Software and Jahia are competing in the same high-end/Enterprise CMS space – does Jahia still stand a chance considering the massive sales power Adobe brings to Day?

Elie Auvray: Blue chip companies often pick Jahia over much larger software vendors for a simple reason: our software relieves their pains faster and it costs them much less.

That has nothing to do with in-house sales power. What sales power does is to bring more opportunities. Our indirect sales model serves us well in that regard: 60% of our software-related revenue is brought by partners, and some of them have tremendous sales power. Our job is to make the best product that our partners can easily deploy and put in front of more and more customers.

Xenia Von Wedel: Conversely, will the acquisition give Jahia a price or flexibility advantages?

Elie Auvray: There has already been a lot of debate among pundits on the acquisition’s impact on the price of Day’s licenses: the short answer is no one really knows!

Xenia Von Wedel: Day Software and Jahia both say that content is everything – what are Jahia’s differentiators?

Elie Auvray: Yes, Jahia and Day share the same vision around what content really is. What we bring is an added dimension of “whatever the source or type ,” – be it a PDF stored in Alfresco, Documentum, or Sharepoint, a JSR 286 portlet, a mashup, a widget, an RSS feed or an open social gadget — these are all natively managed and supported objects in Jahia.

The market used to be divided – and still is, to a certain extent – among ECM, DMS, Portal, WCM, mashups, and other content silos, due to technical incompatibilities. This causes great confusion among users, integrators, and customers when they have to select the right product for their project.

This divide no longer makes sense, since projects must now use multiple components, or “content composites”, to fulfill customer requirements.

Xenia Von Wedel: Could you tell us more about these “content composites”?

Elie Auvray: Content Composites will make your website, portal, extranet, intranet, Enterprise 2.0, or whatever the name project much more flexible. At the end of the day it’s all about what you want to do with these content-rich applications; but the core features required to deliver such solutions are basically the same. Content composites are small parts of a web site such as: Articles, files, document list, breadcrumb path, tag cloud, collaborative application, document sharing, social interactions through comments, votes, wikis, forums, and blogs: it’s only a question of what, when and how you want to aggregate those content objects within your web solution.

This is consistent with our vision from day one: that all these objects should be integrated into an intuitive and unified web interface, where webmasters, content producers, and even developers can work efficiently without having to worry about the type of content or composite, or where it comes from.

We called this “web content integration”: combining WCM, DMS, and portal features in a unified web platform that communicates seamlessly with complementary third party software. Our next version, Jahia 6.5, will deliver the latest evolution of this concept in the most powerful Composite Content Platform in the market today.

Xenia Von Wedel: How do you envision the future?

Elie Auvray: Information (collective knowledge) is the most important asset companies have, after their people. As a matter of fact, Adobe products are key in our industry. But the real value is content. Not the file type, the tools or the technology.

Information –wherever it comes from- needs to be controlled and accessible not only from anywhere, but also smartly leveraged across different sites and applications. Ubiquitous digital content must be freed from technological limitations. This is the challenge confronting next-generation WCMs like Day and Jahia.

About Elie Auvray- President of the Board & Chief Executive Officer

Elie Auvray co-founded Jahia Solutions Group, starting french operations in 2002 and is acting as President of the Board and CEO. In 1996, Elie founded Voice, a software vendor, pioneering the easy-to-use web application development with Vivendi Group as their first customer. In 1999, Voice merged with the company of the former President EMEA of Cisco in order to create a global software provider, Reef Internetware.

Working closely with the CEO, Elie was the General Manager for Reef France, the first country in term of sales (overachieving sales objectives 7 quarters in a row), and built the first US sales team in San Francisco. Consequently, Elie lead the Europe Presales organization, developing and supporting the company’s Partners network. Reef successfully raised 85 million euros in 2001 from international venture capitalist (Goldman Sachs, 3i, Viventures). Reef Internetware IP was acquired by Mediasurface in 2002. Elie has a Master of Business & Tax Law, a Master of Contract Law and is a graduate from the Business Law Institute (IDA) of Paris.

Ektron Reports 37% 1H Revenue Gains, Begins Q3 2010 With 45% Growth

Ektron Inc. announced a 37 percent gain in revenue for the first half of 2010 over the first half of 2009. Q3 2010 sales increased 45 percent compared to a record sales month in July 2009. 2010 momentum is fueled by accelerated customer acquisition and significant installed-base investments by companies such as Microsoft, Mitsubishi Motors of Europe and The Home Depot. Adoption among Fortune 500 and top-name brands of Ektron’s Marketing Optimization Suite (eMOS) and the recently announced eIntranet also are contributing to the growth.

“Demand for Ektron’s latest solutions, from new and existing customers, combined with our ability to deliver upon mission-critical business initiatives continues to drive a healthy gross margin,” said Bill Rogers, founder and CEO of Ektron. “With competitive technical analysis and boardroom influence favoring Ektron in customers’ due diligence, our momentum and accelerated growth is expected to continue.”

Recent Customer Acquisition and Product Update
June 2010 marked the launch of eIntranet 2.0, a ‘total solution’ for intranets that integrates elements of Ektron’s core technology and gives businesses a powerful and trusted intranet solution. Fortune 500 companies and top-name brands including Brookstone, Realogy and Time Warner Cable are turning to eIntranet to raise the daily value of their intranets. eIntranet combines social software and web content management in one enterprise application. Activity streams, a gallery of widgets, mobile engagement and in-context analytic tools ensure that eIntranet is easy to deploy, use and extend – on-premise, hosted or in the cloud.

July 2010 global customer acquisition highlights and further investments by Ektron’s installed base include Teradyne, The United Nations and Valassis. Additionally, the national governing body of golf, The United States Golf Association (USGA), is extending the use of Ektron across their entire enterprise.

“The USGA is expanding our business processes rapidly on the web. We are doing so with the further investment and enhancement of the Ektron solution,” stated Alex Withers, Managing Director of Digital Media at The United States Golf Association. “Ektron’s ability to meet our demands and provide us with state-of-the-art enterprise technology, both publicly and internally, allows us more quickly and efficiently to achieve our business goals.”

The USGA uses Ektron’s Marketing Optimization Suite to stay on top of the ever-changing digital trends. By leveraging analytics and site visitor activity-specific data, The USGA is able to drive conversions and increase brand loyalty.

Key features and functionality of Ektron’s Marketing Optimization Suite include:

• In-context analytics – Pre-built integration with Google Analytics, Ominiture SiteCatalyst and WebTrends.
• Content targeting – Allows marketers to personalize content by matching site visitor attributes to content. Ektron supports targeting using attributes such as demographic, day-part, behavioral, location/GeoIP, traffic source and Facebook Connect.
• Multivariate testing – Uncovers the best combination of content, layout and messaging to convert website visitors.
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – Optimizes content for organic search.
• PageBuilder – Technical and non-technical teams are able to build out entire pages on the templates created by developers, dragging and dropping Widgets into the drop zones to create the visitor experience on the web page while maintaining the look and feel.
• eCommerce – Streamlines campaigns, coupons and price adjustments in virtually every currency.
• Heat maps – Show how much of the web page is being seen and where visitors are abandoning the site.

About Ektron
Ektron Inc. has innovated web technology since 1998. By integrating web content management (WCM), marketing optimization and social software, Ektron’s software and solutions improve operational efficiency, drive revenue growth and build customer loyalty. Ektron empowers marketers to create, publish and optimize web content that engages, converts and retains customers. Developers benefit from Ektron’s extensibility and commitment to the Microsoft .NET framework. Headquartered in Nashua, New Hampshire, with offices in Australia, Canada, Singapore and the United Kingdom, Ektron has more than 8,000 customers worldwide including Carnegie Hall, Home Depot, Kodak, Microsoft, NASDAQ, Texas Children’s Hospital and the University of Notre Dame. For more information, please visit www.ektron.com.

Packt launch fifth annual Open Source Awards

Now in its fifth year, the Award has been adapted from the established Open Source CMS Award with the wider aim of encouraging, supporting, recognizing and rewarding all Open Source projects.

WordPress won the 2009 Open Source Content Management System (CMS) Award in what was a very close contest with MODx and SilverStripe. While MODx was the first runner up, SilverStripe, a Most Promising CMS Award winner in 2008, made its way to the second runner up position in its first year in the Open Source CMS Award final.

The 2010 Award will feature a prize fund of $24,000 with several new categories introduced. While the Open Source CMS Award category will continue to recognize the best content management system, Packt is introducing categories for the Most Promising Open Source Project, Open Source E-Commerce Applications, Open Source JavaScript Libraries and Open Source Graphics Software.  CMSes that won the Overall CMS Award in previous years will continue to compete against one another in the Hall of Fame CMS category.

These new categories will ensure that the Open Source Awards is the ultimate platform to recognise excellence within the community while supporting projects both new and old. “We believe that the adaption of the Award and the new categories will provide a new level of accessibility, with the Award recognizing a wider range of Open Source projects; both previous winners while at the same time, encouraging new projects” said Julian Copes, organizer of this year’s Awards.

Packt has opened up nominations for people to submit their favorite Open Source projects for each category at www.PacktPub.com/open-source-awards-home . The top five in each category will go through to the final, which begins in the last week of September.

For more information on the categories, please visit Packt’s website.

Gostai Urbi is now open source

Gostai, the editor of innovative software for robotics & AI, is pleased to announce that its core Urbi technology is opening its code base to the open source community.

Urbi is an advanced robotics operating system, already available for a large number of robots like Aldebaran® Nao, Segway® RMP or Lego® Mindstorm, among 15 other different robots. One of its main innovations lies in a new orchestration script language called urbiscript, which natively integrates parallelism and event-based programming. Next to Urbi, Gostai also offers the Gostai Studio graphical programming tools, and compatibility with various simulators, making the Urbi framework one of the most advanced and complete solution for robot and complex system programming available today.

The source code is covered by an Affero GNU GPL v3 license and is available for immediate download and use from Gostai’s website. This initiative will allow developers worldwide to participate in the growth of the industry's most innovative robotic software solution.

Jean-Christophe Baillie, Gostai’s Founder and CEO, announced at the ICRA’10 conference in Alaska: “Going open source with a GNU GPL compatible license is the best way to make sure that Urbi will always be available freely for everyone to use, check and share, while maintaining a dual licensing model providing support and advanced features for commercial partners. Coming from an academic research lab, Gostai has always believed in the open-source model and sharing of innovation. It has been a long time since we worked to prepare Urbi for that move, and now it's ready!”

Tiki 5.1 Now Available

The Tiki Community Software Association is proud to announce the 5.1 release of Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware. This latest release includes many fixes, tweaks, and updates, including several new and improved features:

• * Improved compatibility for Microsoft Windows and IIS
• * Fixed the Since Last Visit module
• * Better support for UTF-8
• Review the Tiki 5.1 Release Notes (http://tikiwiki.org/ReleaseNotes5.1) and change log for complete information.

More than a dozen members of the Tiki Community have contributed over 140 updates to this release. All Tiki admins are encouraged to upgrade their sites to this latest release. See http://info.tikiwiki.org/Download for information on how to download this release.

Tiki 6 on the Horizon

Meanwhile, Tiki developers are hard at work on Tiki 6: the next generation of Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware. The Tiki Community made great strides forward during the recent TikiFest in Barcelona. Early adopters can obtain the pre-release Tiki 6 from http://info.tikiwiki.org/Download for testing or to explore the new features in Tiki 6.

For details on Tiki 6, planned for release in October 2010, see http://doc.tikiwiki.org/Tiki6. Tiki 6 will succeed Tiki 3 as the Long Term Support (LTS) version.

About Tiki

Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware is a full-featured, web-based, multilingual (35+ languages), tightly integrated, all-in-one Wiki+CMS+Groupware, Free Source Software (GNU/LGPL), using PHP, MySQL, Zend Framework, jQuery and Smarty. Actively developed by a very large international community, Tiki can be used to create all kinds of Web applications, sites, portals, knowledge bases, intranets, and extranets. Tiki is managed by the Tiki Software Community Association. For more information, visit http://tikiwiki.org.

Book on English teaching using Moodle

Packt is pleased to announce a new book that is aimed at helping Moodlers achieve outstanding results by using the ready-to-use recipes for reading comprehension, writing and composition from the book Moodle: The English teachers Cookbook. Written in a cookbook style by Silvina P. Hillar, this book is a guide that will help users improve their skills in Moodle and enhance their way of teaching in virtual classrooms.

Moodle is a free web application that educators can use to create effective online learning sites. It is designed to help educators create online courses with a focus on interaction and collaborative construction of content. Its open source license and modular design allows any developer to create additional modules and features.

The book starts off by teaching users to connect simple activities using Moodle that will improve student’s writing in different ways. Furthermore they will be able to match images, texts and import different pictures to their Moodle course. Embedding social networks such as Twitter and Facebook to create stories and design interactive activities will also be learnt from the book.

Educators will be taught to improve students' writing, using Venn diagrams, mind maps, and tree diagrams, changing the scenery, and discussion clocks. This will also help them develop a writing atmosphere for students to be creative while keeping in mind the Multiple Intelligence Theory.

With clear step-by-step instructions, this book is ideal for English teachers who want to discover practical, humorous, and engaging activities to insert in their Moodle course. This book is out now and available from Packt. For more information, please visit: www.packtpub.com/moodle-1-9-the-english-teachers-cookbook/book

Jahia's Garcin: Open Source Software is the better option for Cloud Computing

“The cloud might be a deal breaker for many software companies, either from a licensing standpoint or because their software is not extensible.”

We sat down with Emmanuel Garcin, Vice President & General Manager of Jahia Inc., in Washington, DC to discuss the open source CMS Cloud offering.

Hi Emmanuel, thanks for taking the time to talk to us. In a recent release Jahiastated it has experienced a growing acceptance for hosted web content management, even among conservative industries like banking and finance, for both corporate websites and Intranet projects. Why is not everyone using the cloud?

Emmanuel Garcin: Some companies still have financial incentives to own their datacenter It really depends on the financial structure of the firm. Some prefer hardware that you can depreciate, in order to maximize tax deductions [CAPEX versus OPEX]. Most of our Cloud clients prefer to expense [OPEX] their web initiative spendings.

When discussing the cloud option with new or existing clients, what kind of concerns do you hear the most?

Emmanuel Garcin: Different types of customers have different reasons for looking at our cloud offerings. SMBs with low IT resources don’t want to spend on infrastructure. Large enterprises with datacenters still want the flexibility of the cloud, for example, to reach a new region. Thanks to Amazon, we have computing power all over the world. Companies also may want to get faster to market and bypass the  internal IT/datacenter processes which can be heavy and time consuming.

However, both types of customers hesitate to trust others to administer and secure their systems because they want to be able to monitor and back up the cloud themselves. Their concern is always the same:  What do we do when it’s down? Salesforce.com had the same hesitation in the early adoption phase. In our experience, Jahias’s automatic monitoring, security and backup option is often the selling argument.

What is the most convincing argument for using a cloud-based content management system?

Emmanuel Garcin: Number one is scalability. Not all software can leverage the cloud – you need scalable software that can leverage hardware elasticity. Jahia is fully scalable on demand, allowing the user to add throughput to the Jahia architecture at any time.

In addition to its scalability, Jahia is 100% accessible anywhere, anytime through the internet. However, some solutions in the market are only partially accessible through the browser and thus cannot provide all the benefit one could get from the cloud.

How do your clients calculate the ROI of using Jahia in the cloud?

Emmanuel Garcin:  There are two parts to the calculation: the Jahia standalone ROI, as described on our website, http://www.jahia.com/jahia/Jahia/Home/solutions/Benefits/TCO, plus the additional leverage of Amazon’s ROI, explained at http://aws.amazon.com/economics/.

What do these emerging cloud-based offerings look like?

First it is important to define cloud-based offerings in two categories: hardware (Amazon EC2, EMC, for instance), and Enterprise software offerings on the cloud (SAP in the cloud, or Jahia in the cloud).

From an IT infrastructure standpoint, hardware cloud offerings get richer and richer every day, converging towards extremely granular on-demand computing resources and virtually unlimited scaling capabilities. This is mainly due to the recent innovation in virtualization (that cloud vendors leverage) and greater standardization of interoperability protocols within middleware components.

From an Enterprise software perspective, it is obviously a different ball game. Additional flexibility for hardware means capacity-based software licensing scheme have to adapt. This is why Enterprise software companies, while making their product "cloud-ready", shy away from fully embracing cloud computing within their business model. SAP's Leo Apotheker states: "There are certain things that you cannot run in the cloud because the cloud would collapse. It's simple," he said. "Don't believe that any utility company is going to run its billing for 50 million consumers in the cloud. I believe, and John [Wookey] is there to help us, what we can do is to combine the two worlds."

In a nutshell, software companies can't avoid adapting to the cloud, but it still represents a niche and poorly analyzed market for them.

What is the greatest challenge for the cloud adoption?

The biggest challenge is not the client’s decision to cloud or not to cloud -- it’s for the software provider to adapt its business model to the cloud. 

Matching the pricing of Amazon can be a challenge for software providers. For example, when a large city organizes a U2 concert, their website needs only a couple of months of high processing power, to handle ticketing for instance, while the rest of the year remains low.

The cloud might be a deal breaker for many software companies, either because their software is not extensible or from a licensing standpoint. Open Source companies are by default better prepared for the cloud because they don’t rely on licensing income.

We address the challenge with expandable software and a flexible infrastructure which provide a perfectly nimble solution for our Enterprise customers of any size. And here is no extra investment from our side as our software is free our model is transparent, and our support and services are always available at affordable rates.

To follow Emmanuel, please go to http://twitter.com/emmanuelgarcin.