Interview with Brad Kain from Quoin about the UNFPA content management project

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Submitted by xeniar on

Jahia, provider of Java based open source CMS solutions, today announced that the United Nations Population Fund  (UNFPA) has selected Jahia CMS and partner Quoin to provide comprehensive support for UNFPA's international websites. The following is an interview with Brad Kain, Quoin co-founder and President.

Background Information: UNFPA is the United Nations Population Fund, an international development agency that promotes the right of every woman, man and child to enjoy a life of health and equal opportunity. UNFPA supports countries in using population data for policies and programs to reduce poverty and to ensure that every pregnancy is wanted, every birth is safe, every young person is free of HIV, and every girl and woman is treated with dignity and respect. The three core areas of their work - reproductive health, gender equality and population and development strategies - are inextricably related. Population dynamics, including growth rates, age structure, fertility and mortality, migration and more, influence every aspect of human, social and economic development. Reproductive health and women's empowerment powerfully affect, and are affected by, population trends. For each core area, UNFPA created large databases.

The Project

Interviewer: Hi Brad. Thanks for taking the time to sit down with us to discuss your latest win of the UNFPA content management project with Jahia CMS.  Tell us about the UNFPA website project.

Brad Kain, Quoin co-founder and President.Brad Kain: UNFPA is a leader in digital media within the UN, offices throughout the world with a global website, 7 regional portals and over 100 country websites.

Interviewer: So what does the integration project look like? How does this fit with Jahia’s mission and what can these sites achieve with assistance from Jahia CMS?

Brad Kain: Quoin recently won a three-year contract with the United Nations Population Fund (www.unfpa.org) to provide Jahia CMS support and site development. We will work with this global mission-driven client to redesign the organization, regional, and country web sites. Our onshore/offshore team is looking forward to providing rapid and effective development support as the UNFPA focuses on the use of social media to engage visitors.

The MODx Revolution 2.0 Interview

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In late July, MODx Revolution 2.0 was released. Before the project's release, I interviewed though email Ryan Thrash, CEO and co-founder of the MODx project, as well as Jay Gilmore. In a joint response, they graciously answered some of my questions about MODx. Below are my questions and their responses from our MODx interview.

CMS Report - The release of 2.0 is a new beginning for MODx...where does MODx go from here?

MODx LogoMODx - MODx Revolution represents a sharp inflection point in our history. We have a lot of very positive announcements to make in the coming weeks, but here’s a high level overview:

  • MODX, LLC, is a new company we’ve formed to stand behind the core products and to continue to foster the ongoing development of the software and the MODx ecosystem in general.
  • We’re hiring both from within the community and bringing in outside expertise to make sure we have a viable and sustainable business. We’re 1000% focused on accelerating MODx adoption, awareness and continuing to rise as one of the top Open Source content management platforms today. 2011 should be an unbelievable year for MODx uptake.
  • We’re looking for qualified developers, consultants and agencies to partner with MODx. They’ll be recognized as MODx experts and Solutions Partners, prominently displayed on our website and outbound marketing efforts, officially launching no later than early 2011. We get a good volume of leads through the website and these will all go to Partners, which is just the tip of the iceberg of benefits from partnering with MODx.
  • Similarly, we’ll be launching commercial support services to meet the demand we’ve seen from businesses in the community. We have great offerings to talk about with regard to this later.
  • We’re relaunching and totally revamping our websit to better focus on and to serve more stakeholders including end users (at our new modx.com URL). We’ll have dedicated community and developer sections to make learning about MODx easier.

What this all means is that there’s now going to be an organization to hold to account for MODx. We’ve done what we think is a good job as stewards since founding the project, and we’ll have dedicated time and resources to do an even better job going forward.

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

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 “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.

Mollom: A solution for comment spam

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Passwords, user accounts, email verification. I have never liked requiring my website's visitors to register before they can leave a comment. There is a large segment of people that like to submit quality comments online, but they don't want to be required to leave their personal information there. So from the beginning, I have always allowed anonymous commenting by unregistered visitors and for the most part, they quality of the comments haven't suffered. However, allowing for anonymous comments also invited my site into a war against comment spam. My latest weapon to do the fighting for me in this war is Mollom.

Mollom LogoI was first introduced to Mollom in the Fall of 2007 as a beta tester. Prior to Mollom, I had been using a number of techniques, modules, and services with limited success in blocking unwanted spam. While some of these filtering methods did help me filter out unwanted content, I was still spending quite a bit of my time moderating the comments for potential spam. Worse, in long absences from the site I had to disable anonymous commenting for fear that I would come back to a site riddled with ads for the latest popular pharmaceutical drugs or some girl that wanted to be seen for a price. That's when Mollom entered the picture and helped stop most of the spam from entering my site.

In the two years since I've used Mollom, the service probably has blocked more than 100,000 pieces of spam from being posted at my site. Since, the current statistics provided by Mollom only date back to early 2008, the official number of spam blocked stands at around 77,000. In other words, I receive an average of 120 comments a day that require no moderation on my part.

Discovering Mixergy with Magento

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Not sure if I'm early or late to the party, but I just discovered Mixergy.com. Mixergy is a place where 20ish Andrew Warner wants to help ambitious people who love business as much as he does to learn from a mix of experienced mentors. Somebody on the Internet wanting to help you make money, imagine that.

However Mixergy has something that many sites don't have...fantastic interviews of some very influential Web people. Some of the videos that caught my attention included interviews of Seth Godin, Guy Kawasaki, and most recently, Roy Rubin of Magento. I recommend checking Mixergy.com out.

Linus Torvalds on Linux

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Linux Magazine: "Linus Torvalds has led the development of the Linux operating system since its inception nearly 20 years ago. In that time Torvalds has had the opportunity not only to witness the positive cultural and economic changes brought about by Linux but has also been a direct participant in making those changes a reality. And though many things have changed greatly since 1991, one thing remains constant: Linus is still at the helm.

The biggest independent record label in the world use eZ Publish

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EMI Music is the biggest independent record label in the world. EMI Music represents 1,000 artists from all musical genres in 50 countries. One of its focuses is to develop and promote digital services via the Web, mobile channels, and TV throughout the world, providing fans with a rich, complete musical experience.

We have interviewed them and asked about their approach to eZ Publish, new media and content management.

How has the internet transformed EMI's approach?

In order to address evolving consumer needs, EMI Music France has intensified its marketing strategy and promotional activities on the internet. It is a fast and highly competitive industry where responsiveness is crucial for developing and sustaining market share. It is essential that we have dynamic content and an engaging Web presence.

What sort of content management solutions have you implemented? What have been the challenges and difficulties?

EMI Music France has implemented a content management platform that has allowed us to standardize our site development and maintenance process – including artist, record label and event websites. A major technical challenge was to integrate dynamic, interactive Flash elements with other content. We also needed a Web 2.0 capable content management platform that could handle RSS importing and exporting across multiple sites, manage widgets, handle multiple video formats, and so on. The overall goal of the platform is to be able to quickly deploy and easily manage quality sites that can evolve over time.

In which projects have you used eZ Publish?

Blend Interactive featured in eZ Publish magazine

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I have to admit that when someone submits a story and I trust them...I sometimes don't read the whole article before I publish it.  So until I read Dean Barker's Gadgetopia, I didn't realize his company, Blend Interactive, was featured in eZ's SHARE! magazine.  The irony is that if I had read an article posted at my own site by one of eZ System's own people...Dean's post wouldn't have been new news to me.  Sigh, I have been just too busy...

You may not have heard of Blend Interactive, but they do sport a decent portfolio of sites they have developed and designed.  Probably the most likely well known work from the company is the home site for the instant messaging client, Pidgin.  The SHARE! magazine features Blend Interactive, in part, because it is one of the most enthusiastic users of the eZ Publish CMS in the United States.  eZ Publish's roots is in Norway and the software is more popular in Europe.  But, as the eZ article implies, there is a push to generate more users in the United States.

ComputerWorld.au: Interview with Dries Buytaert, Drupal Project Leader

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I'm hoping that later today the American version of ComputerWorld will carry the Dries Buytaert article I came across on their Australian site.  The article is an interview with Dries and titled, "Drupal: from a drop in the ocean to a big fish in the CMS World".  Yes, it's a catchy title for the interview, but I like sub-heading even more.

Drupal’s founder, Dries Buytaert tells all about the Drupal project: its history, where it is today and where it is going.

Perhaps if this is a "tell all" interview...Dries is finally hitting celebrity status and we'll soon be finding articles about him at TMZ.com instead of ComputerWorld?  :-)

Actually, the interview is quite good and I like the fact that beyond Drupal 6, Dries is pretty conservative about predicting Drupal's future.  It's best to keep us all guessing.