CM Pros

This year’s Gilbane SF started with a day of pre-conference workshops. In one of them — Managing the Web: The Fundamentals of Web Operations Management — Lisa Welchman, founding partner of WelchmanPierpoint, discussed the challenges faced by today’s web teams.

"Web managers tend to have the world wide web on their shoulders," said Welchman, emphasizing the enormity of complexities that go into web operations management. If web operations management is not done right, one of the outcomes is poor web experience, resulting in lost revenue. But there are ways to make your web operations efficient and successful.

We talked about the big changes coming for MODx (news, site) earlier this year and now we are seeing those changes come to fruition. Beta 1 of the new MODx Revolution 2.0 is ready to download and test and there are some major changes in this open source web content management system.

Memopal is an Italian company with a smart way for you to share files, images and video stored on your desktop rapidly using your smartphone.

The start of summer seems an odd choice to start doling out awards (isn’t that usually January/February?) but it hasn’t stopped asp.netPRO from counting the votes in its 2009 Readers’ Choice awards. It was the winner of the Best CMS that made us stop and pay attention.

One of the most striking trends underway in the DAM space right now (indications of which were abundantly present in the exhibitor booths at this year's Henry Stewart DAM Symposium in New York) is the rush toward Adobe Flex-based client interfaces. The obligatory charcoal-and-pewter look and feel is everywhere, it seems.

Of course, the significance of Adobe Flex isn't the color scheme but the underlying technology. We've written about some of the technical issues with Flex before. The significance to buyers right now (as my colleague Theresa Regli made clear in her Monday morning presentation at the Henry Stewart show) is merely that the rush to a new technology -- however sound (or problematic) that technology might be -- entails risk, and early adopters of the new Flex-based DAM systems will need to have the patience and willingness to deal with the unexpected quirks and annoyances that inevitably surface whenever Version 1.0 of something goes into production. And like it or not, the first-generation Flex UIs are tantamount to Version 1.0 software. There will be kinks to work out.

If you're considering a DAM system from a vendor that has recently gone (or will be going soon) to a Flex-based client (i.e., Widen, The FeedRoom, EMC Documentum, MediaBeacon, Ancept), you should understand that it's more important now than ever before that you do your own hands-on usability testing before assuming that everything is going to magically work out fine. If customization of the client app is something you need to do, get the vendor to show your developers what's involved in doing customization work. Chances are, your developers will have a serious Flex learning curve to climb before becoming productive. And that's if the vendor even makes it possible to customize the client software at all. (Some vendors don't have SDKs yet.)  It's one thing to customize a DHTML interface; something else again to do surgery on a Flash UI.

If you're shopping for a DAM product, be ready for some very pretty-looking new interfaces. But also remember, you can't live on eye-candy alone. Slick does not mean more business-useful.

On the “Future of Publishing” panel this morning at Media Bistro Circus in New York, Dan Costa asked the panel what advice they’d give to young graduates looking to come to New York and enter the field of journalism.

Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate

It reminded me of the scene in The Graduate where Dustin Hoffman’s uncle corners him and tells him “I got one word for you: plastics.” Except that now the new word would be something more like “audience” or maybe “brand.”

(Eileen Gittins of Blurb got the biggest laugh of the day with her answer - “marry well.” Ouch. I thought the days of “pre-wed” degrees were over - though to be fair she said that applied equally to male and female grads).

Anil Dash provided a bit of insight that “only the old folks are worried about this - young grads will get crappy jobs that pay poorly as young grads have always done.” True enough , but I’d argue the whole question is wrong.

It’s based on a premise that no longer holds - that you wait until after graduation to start “real life,” and that your employer (or set of employers) has a substantial and significant role in defining your career path. It assumes that your career is about what job you get, and how you manage it, rather than what kind of audiences you build and how you create opportunity based on those audiences.

It’s also based on the idea that college grads are 22-year-olds with no experience. I don’t have statistics at hand, but it seems to me that even when I was teaching college writing courses 10 years ago, college students were incredibly diverse in age and experience: I learned as much from many of my students as they (I hope) learned from me. Why assume the ‘graduate’ is looking to us, rather than ‘we’ (large media company folks with decades experience) looking to ‘them’ for guidance?

The digital natives are going to create the future of publishing, not necessarily the digital immigrants who currently run media companies.

Why, for that matter, assume that the college degree is the primary path to career at all? I’m a big proponent of formal degrees (and have a student loan bill which rivals my mortgage from gathering my own) but there’s no reason to assume that this is the only (or even primary) way to make a career in 2009.

For those who are the proverbial 22-year-old impending college grad looking to ‘get started,’ why wait for graduation?

Blog! You’ve got greater information technology producing and publishing power at your fingertips, at nominal cost, than most major media companies had just 2 decades ago. Build a consistent brand for yourself as a producer of quality content - that brand (represented in something like a blog, or a site which tracks your work over time) will be stronger than any resume or set of job titles.

Build your network of influencers - connect with people working on what you’re passionate about, and the “career” stuff will work itself out.

Check out the folks at CoPress and what they’re doing in bringing open source platforms and thinking to college publications. Get involved in an open source, open culture, open content, or other organization that is focused on creating community value first and company value second.

Earlier this year in an interview, George Grippo, VP Media Asset Management at North Plains, indicated that many Digital Asset Management (DAM) vendors are struggling to cope with the special requirements of video asset management.

While he didn’t explicitly say in the interview that North Plains (news, site), a rich media and DAM solution vendor, was working on a solution to do just this, this week’s release of their latest version of Telescope Video Manager shows that they were.

Available as an on-site or SaaS solution, the Telescope Video Manager provides a relatively inexpensive solution that even novices can use in the creation, editing and distribution of short and long form video across multiple platforms like YouTube and other social networks.

Not all products are built with loads of venture capital in the coffers. Many are grown slowly and painstakingly over a number of years. A labor of love? Maybe. Some unseen driving force pushing them? Most likely.

During the work for our recent Umbraco CMS Review we stumbled upon the story of how this product came to be. It struck us as notable and inspirational, so we thought we’d share it more broadly.

In this article we bring you the history of the Umbraco Web CMS, from a .NET toolkit used as part of founder Niels Hartvig’s consulting business to being one of the most popular .NET open source web content management systems in the market.

When you are doing well in the market, it’s possible that you could just sit back and enjoy the fruits of your labor. But while you are sitting there drinking your strawberry daiquiri, the market is likely to be shifting and changes may be required.

Sitecore (news, site) understands this well. According to their VP of Product Marketing, Darren Guarnaccia, web content management has become a commodity, plateauing on functionality and UI. For customers, it has become frustrating trying to decide which Web CMS is the right one, when they all seem the same. So what do you do?

Sitecore’s answer is to provide a solution to solve a specific problem. In this case, it’s an Online Marketing Suite (OMS).

1. Intranet 2.0 Survey Toby Ward and the Prescient Digital team is conducting an...
2. New Report: Drupal for Publishers Florence, MA (April 21, 2009) — Content Here is pleased...
3. Blogs, Wiki’s, etc. A couple of months ago a WCMS sales guy said...

1. Intranet 2.0 Survey Toby Ward and the Prescient Digital team is conducting an...
2. New Report: Drupal for Publishers Florence, MA (April 21, 2009) — Content Here is pleased...
3. Social Media Traffic Patterns Louis Gray has written a post about a trend that...

Alex Manchester has written about intranets on mobile devices. To quote:

I’m still of the opinion that we’ll see many more mobile-friendly intranets in the future. In fact, I also think we’re not too far away from a situation where the majority of employees are given mobile devices as a matter of practice when they start.

The idea of pushing the intranet, its related tools and internal/corporate communications to a device that can manage computing and browsing, but also documents via e-ink (Kindle style), has huge potential. But it seems we’re not there yet.

Shawn Medero has written an article on paper prototyping. To quote:

As interfaces become ever more complex and development schedules seem to get shorter and shorter, you may find it useful to give up your user-interface modeling software for awhile in favor of something simpler. All you need is paper, pens, scissors, and your imagination.

Statistically, Flock (news, site) is like the little browser that could, but didn’t. Translate that into numbers and you get 7.5 million people that have downloaded the browser, but only 1.1 million that actively use it.

So, why does Flock keep Flopping? Well, we’re not really sure. Dubbed the social Web browser, Mozilla-powered Flock is made up of all the things we typically love: integrated social networking, micro-blogging, chat, etc. Will the newly released 2.5 version be enough to finally take flight? Let’s take a look at the fresh features:

It’s been a busy few months for Autonomy Interwoven (news, site).Last week, it unveiled a new solution that provides analytics for social media.

This week, it’s turn for MediaBin — their Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution — to get a once-over, which comes in the form of meaning-based Virage MediaBin 7, a solution that automatically retrieves, analyzes and processes audio, video and graphic content.

Atlassian (news, site) says they don’t implement features just for the sake of it. That all enhancements to their solutions are based on customer feedback and needs. With the latest release of their enterprise wiki, Confluence, we see that some of these needs are universal across the Enterprise 2.0 market today. All show just how far the wiki has come in only a few short years.

CMSWire spoke with Bill Arconati, Product Marketing Manager, and Laura Khalil of Altassian to get the scoop on the new features and an update on the Atlassian Stimulus Package.

ThoughtFarmer has changed the name of their intranet solution to better define the market it supports. Now called Social Intranet Software, the latest version out offers a host of new features that will get your employees collaborating and sharing their knowledge.

It has often been said that you can prove anything with statistics. If that is in fact the case, then the results of a new survey will prove what many people know already — companies are still throwing money at web content management systems.

What is striking about this survey however, is that many companies this year are spending, or plan to spend, their CMS budgets on implementation rather than licensing.

The CMS Survey Report 2009, published by UK-based Econsultancy in association with Australia-based Squiz.net (news, site) also shows that companies are doing this because they don’t believe they are getting a high-enough ROI from their existing CMS.

The title of visionary isn’t one that is handed out as readily as it once was. Move over Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford. Make room for Mimosa (news, site).

The email and file archiving solution provider has been named a Visionary Vendor by Gartner, Inc. in its “Magic Quadrant for E-Mail Active Archiving.” But it didn’t happen over night. Mimosa spent the better part of the last year adding new features to its Mimosa NearPoint platform to support eDiscovery, search and compliance.

In an age when computers can crunch numbers and do analysis on a vast scale, the deep flaws in our intuition and gut instinct are becoming more and more apparent.