WCM

There are a few simple web content management systems available today. Cushy CMS, Clover and Surreal are three super simple systems that come to mind when we look at PageLime. PageLime is a hosted web content management solution that let's you very easily add content management to your website without making a lot changes. Just give them FTP access to your site, mark up your pages with some CSS classes and you are off to the races. Add Content Management QuicklyYou may have built your website thinking you didn't need — or want — content management. But, like most, you have found that the need to keep updating your content to keep it fresh and relevant is becoming a bit of a pain in the you know what.

BlueModus today unveiled its Content Management System (CMS) solution designed to increase flexibility and scalability of website content control, from simple editing capabilities to enterprise-level solutions. "More than ever, content control and change responsiveness are vital to growing businesses of all sizes," said BlueModus President David Baumgarten. "Our custom-tailored CMS solution takes web content control to new heights. "Our CMS is fully configurable, and brings website control back in-house, with truly limitless possibilities. When we determine what our customers want, we build it – and make it work." BlueModus, which recently designed customized CMS solutions for Cisco and Bayer Pharmaceuticals, provides ongoing training and support services. Catering to the digital and interactive professional, as well as the non-technical user, BlueModus' CMS solution provides businesses and its partners with the ability to develop a tiered support system, ensuring speed of implementation, rapid development, and the ability to evolve.

Open Text said it’s a done deal. The planned acquisition of all of the issued and outstanding shares of Vignette (worth approximately US$ 321 million) has been completed late yesterday following a shareholders’ meeting where the voting and approval took place.While Vignette is busy nostalgizing, Open Text says it’s working on the strategic aspects of what may come next. Let’s not forget that Open Text already has a WCM-centric group called Open Text Web Solutions. Offering an even broader range of (quite similar) products is going to take some brain activity. Then again, this would not be the first quilting exercise for Open Text.

It's been a busy summer for the Plone project. In particular, they put out a call for Plone Improvement Proposals (PLIPs) for Plone 4. They also split the initial vision for Plone 4 into a more do-able Plone 4 for this year and a more far-reaching update for Plone 5 slated for next year. Following the PLIP process, the Plone 4 Framework Team has polished off their list of what's to be included in this release. Even with scaled back plans the Plone 4 team chose to include a record 40 improvement proposals.

I frequently receive questions like this: "We're a major regional hospital, what's the best CMS for us?" Or, "What would you recommend for a mid-sized manufacturing firm?" Or, "What's the right WCM package for a consumer goods company?" Or, "What's getting traction among not-for-profit organizations?" And so on. First, let's dispense with the idea that there is such a thing as a universally "best" or "leading" CMS. Instead, different vendor offerings "fit" better or worse against individual business scenarios. And of course your budget, architecture, and locale matter too.

The initial vision for Web CMS Plone 4 was so complex that it wasn't slated for release until 2010. In order to allow for smaller, more focused releases, Plone Founder Alexander Limi announced at the Plone Symposium at Penn State that the Plone Roadmap has been revised. What was originally Plone 4 has been split into Plone 4 and Plone 5. The New Plone 4Plone 4 is due in late 2009 and its release manager is Eric Steele.  This release will feature:

IBM’s Lotus Web Content Management System is to ship with a second HTML editor following the announcement of a new OEM partnership with Ephox, the web content authoring software developer of EditLive. According to Ephox, the new editor is for non-technical business users who do not know how to manipulate HTML and who are likely to stay that way for the foreseeable future. As it stands Ephox’s EditLive gives users control over the entire authoring process. It contains Word-like editing features ranging from spellcheck as-you-type, to a track changes function. It can be customized and extended, having over 200 APIs. It also allows for integration with a given Content Management System or application platform.

Version 3.3 of the Plone web content management system is on its way, and the Plone Foundation is inviting all and sundry to help test during its short beta cycle. Come one, come all, pound on this baby and make it great. New with 3.3: Features Added, Bugs FixedA number of enhancements and bug fixes are included with this release, such as:

With some interest we read recent commentary by Drupal project founder Dries Buyaert. He was meant to be providing pundrity on the future of open source. Some interesting points include: Most people interact with and/or rely on open source much more than they realizeMozilla Firefox, with a supposed 20% of the browser market, is in a large part responsible for bringing the face of open source to the consumer"web master role that we used to know is dead. Publishing tools and content management systems, like Drupal, replaced them"

It's more than a Web Content Management System. The Affino eBusiness Suite is designed to help you manage every aspect on your online business. It's about publishing, promoting, selling, socializing and it has just been updated to version 5.5. What's new? Let's take a look.

Clickability,  the on demand Web Content Management (WCM) vendor today announced the immediate availability of Clickability Corporate Solutions. Created to meet the urgent needs of global organizations for a reliable, affordable and easy-to-use Web business platform, Clickability Corporate Solutions bring the advantages of a constantly evolving multi-tenant platform and a mature Software as a Service (SaaS) WCM solution to companies eager to fully engage and serve their customers online.

In its biannual report released Feb. 2, 2009, IBM's X-Force research group pointed out significant security threat trends as we enter 2009, and paid particular attention to vulnerabilities found in PHP web content management systems such as Joomla!, Drupal, TYPO3 and WordPress.

Open Text™ recently announced availability of the latest release of Open Text Web Solutions. Available to customers now, this new release offers a number of additional enhancements to what is already a core strength of Open Text Web Solutions: Helping customers translate, manage and synchronize multiple websites worldwide. Web Solutions is an integral component of the Open Text ECM Suite, the industry's most comprehensive suite of content services used by tens of thousands of organizations worldwide.

Vivvo is an Web Content Management System based on the popular LAMP stack of technologies. Built by Serbian software house, Spoonlabs, the product is designed to deliver and manage interactive publishing websites.This PHP-based Web CMS features a modern AJAX-ified user interface, a clean and easy to use backoffice set of tools, and the ability to create your front-end website without having to write a line of code. Come along as we take a closer look under the covers.

I've heard too many people say Digital Asset Management (DAM) is "kind of like Web Content Management" (WCM) or "just like document management, but for pictures." While there may be similarities between DAM and WCM or DM, DAM is often mis-perceived, or over-simplified, and most of the information out there about DAM is infused with vendor-specific marketing and sales-talk, rather than concrete hard facts about what DAM software does and doesn't do.

Are you in the loop on this? The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.0 (WCAG 2.0) has been approved by the W3C. With it, comes discussion among W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative about what’s new with these guidelines as well as the resources that will be available for web developers and designers. After months of collecting thousands of individual comments from hundreds of sources around the world during the development of WCAG 2.0., the final guidelines have been published.

CrownPeak, a player in the Web content management field, announced significant growth in the third quarter of 2008. The company reports that the company’s record growth was fueled by positive expansion of the overall Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) industry. In addition to the record quarter-over-quarter growth, CrownPeak has announced new high-profile clients that are utilizing CrownPeak CMS for their Website deployment and extranet solutions. To compliment new projects from new customers, CrownPeak has also seen growth from being able to add new projects from existing clients as well.

The technology marketplace has seen consistent growth in the acceptance of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) models, and Web Content Management is certainly no exception. Yet, the major SaaS-based Web CMS vendors that we evaluate - Clickability, CrownPeak, and OmniUpdate - are all relatively small players, and they have had to evolve to meet changing customer demands. In particular, our recent research for the latest edition of The Web CMS Report 2009 uncovered several inter-related trends in the SaaS Web Content Management space:

“The Web content management market is mature and expanding,” says Gartner’s latest MarketScope for Web Content Management (MacComascaigh, Gilbert, Bell, Shegda, Andrews). “Vendor consolidation has fallen (slowed)… functions such as workflow, ease of use and multi-site management are no longer differentiating factors; they are the norm.”   Findings:   Open source solutions (OSS, represents only 3% of the total WCM market) are increasingly stable, robust and growing in market shareWeb 2.0 phenomenon is driving WCM innovation

Nstein Technologies has released WCM 4.0, a robust digital publishing solution for newspapers, magazines and online content providers. The new version is designed to increase editorial productivity by providing intuitive tools for the creation and management of complex sites and microsites.The solution offers a new, role-based interface for editorial teams and includes: multisite/multichannel content management; out-of-the-box conversion and importation of content from popular XML formats; role-based, configurable editorial dashboards that mirror physical workflows; automatic search/association of assets; on-the-fly content association; real-time semantically generated tags and metadata; faceted search--advanced XML site search, topic clustering, most rated and most viewed stories; and a search engine optimization toolkit--keyword density, "friendly" URLs and optimized HTML structure.