Last year I was one of the beta testers for Acquia's Drupal distribution and the Acquia Network.  I was evaluating Acquia's products and services for a potential intranet project at work.  For this particular project, unfortunately, it looks as if Acquia or Drupal wasn't the right solution.  Our regional folks wanted a solution similar to Microsoft's Sharepoint that is more integrated with Microsoft Office and heavily featured in document management.  That's alright though because there are a number of smaller intranet projects at work where Drupal is the perfect solution and a lot of progress is being made in that direction.

Over the weekend, I decided to move CMS Report from Drupal 6 to Acquia Drupal.  In December, I received a message that beta testers would be rolled over into "a Community subscription entitlement that extends through December 31st, 2009".  Placing the Acquia subscription onto CMSReport.com not only will allow the site to receive the benefits of being on Acquia's network, but will also allow me to monitor the evolution of Acquia.  Acquia is still a young company and likely will continue to expand on the products and services it offers.

Mike Elgan has a good article in ComputerWorld, Why products fail.  He makes a point that many usability tests really miss the entire point of what people really want in a product.

When you ask someone what they really want, they won't tell you the truth because they're not aware of the truth.

Both users and product designers alike talk about user interface (UI) consistency, usability and simplicity, and system attributes like performance and stability. What's missing is that these attributes are means to an end. The real issue is always the user's physiological feeling of being in control.

In the article, he later goes on to support his argument. I think he is right, true usability is all about control. Something for all of us to ponder about the next time we participate in a usability exercise for our content management system.

During the past couple years I've had some brief but rewarding content management discussions with Deane Barker from Gadgetopia and Blend Interactive.  Dean has worked with quite a few Web content management systems over the years and appears to be most passionate to using eZ Publish.  Naturally, our discussions almost always involve Dean talking about ez Publish and me talking about Drupal.  Unfortunately, as I am more of a system administrator than a developer, the information I have been able to provide him about Drupal has always been limited.

Well, it looks as if Deane Barker has finally decided to get on the Drupal learning curve and find out more about this great CMS.

I’m working with Drupal for the first time on a hobby project I’m doing with Seth Gottlieb (about which you’ll hear much more later…). Adam Kalsey — Drupal ninja that he is — is advising us on the technical implementation, and he’s been a great help.

Why Drupal? Because I didn’t know it, and figured I needed to. Seth and I, after all, had the discussion about how there are people like to feel smart and people that like to feel stupid. Learning Drupal has made me feel plenty stupid, and that’s exciting. And there’s no better time to feel stupid while learning than on a project you’re doing for yourself.

I'm always excited to see very talented content management people discuss their initial experiences with a CMS.  If Deane writes more about Drupal, I suspect his writings will be very similar to the Drupal writings of Sacha Chua.

Wikipedia Foundation: "With the support of over 125,000 donors from around the world, the Wikimedia Foundation has achieved its goal of raising over $6 million USD to sustain Wikipedia. As of today, the campaign has generated just over $6.2 million USD."

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Packt is pleased to announce a new book on Drupal that acts as a practical guide with instructions for setting up a home page, product catalog, blog, events calendar, etc. using the Drupal CMS platform. Written by prominent Content Management expert Mark Noble, Drupal 6 Site Builder Solutions helps developers build powerful website features for their business.

Drupal is a free Open Source modular framework and Content Management System (CMS). Drupal is extremely scalable, making it ideal for both a simple personal website as well as an industrial strength commercial or institutional web presence. Written in the programming language PHP/MySQL, its power and flexibility combined with its exceptional design means it is one of the most popular choices for creating a CMS website.

phpBB, an open source Web forum application, officially announced the end of support for phpBB 2.0.  Long live "Olympus" (phpBB 3.0).

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Every year, there are some key information technology people that make mostly sound and trustworthy predictions for the coming year.  I'll be updating this page through the week with links to these visions of what we may expect in 2009.  My own thoughts and vision for 2009 and CMS Report will come later in another post (I am not worthy to place my own comments here).

Content Management and Social Publishing Predictions

Dries Buytaert (Drupal Project Lead) - Drupal, Acquia, and Mollom

Ryan Thrash (MODx) - Evolution and Revolution

Open Source

Dave Rosenberg (Co-founder of MuleSource) - Open source as paid software

Assorted Tech Gurus - The Future of Open Source

Technology and Information Technology

Joe Zuccaro - Twitter, Blogging, Open Source CMS (Drupal), Government

Assorted Analysts - Cloud Computing, Windows 7, Collaboration, Patents

If you come across a posting regarding 2009 by an IT leader, please feel free to leave a link in the comment section below.