Enterprise

Life can be intense. Every day, employee dramas enter the workplace unsolicited. Some of the greatest workplace concerns we face as HR professionals, employees, and caring colleagues are making sure:

• Health needs are met and costs are covered as anticipated.
• Everyone is treated fairly by managers and co-workers, able to work without discrimination or harassment.
• No one makes (or must endure) threats in the workplace, idle or real.

Intentional wrongdoing, inadvertent employee mishandling, shoddy record keeping, or a manager or worker with a hidden agenda can devastate company finances, reputation, and employee morale. Noncompliance penalties, unemployment insurance, time-consuming training programs, lower productivity, and other HR costs can pull strongly on the bottom line as a result. So what can you do to:

… help staff members comply with corporate policies?

… improve confidence, trust, and satisfaction with your HR department and company?

… discourage workers from wrongdoing and prevent acts of poor judgment?

… protect your organization and its workers from engaging in and getting away with---or experiencing---harassment, unjust treatment, false accusations of such activity, or other harm?

… guard your organization against false accusations?

The answer lies in timely, complete, accurate documentation…along with the ability to organize, associate, and handle information appropriately, consistently, and quickly when you need it. The challenge: gathering it from diverse places including your HR software, document repositories, payroll systems, email, voice messages, and more, and maximizing its use everywhere it has value.

Let me start by clarifying a few things:

1) I work for a CMS vendor, for an enterprise CMS.

2) I am also a big fan of open source.

Yet, I am attempting to write this article with all bias aside; with all generalizations thrown out the window. Without feeling like I am trying to justify this article, I think it is also worth mentioning that the CMS vendor that I work for produces a product that I would avidly use even if I didn’t work for them.

Every vendor, whether they are enterprise or open source do research on their competition. Although the internal information that these vendors have are usually pretty good, there is not a lot of thorough comparisons readily available on the net. When I look on the web, all I see are generalizations. I want to get rid of this, drop biased opinions and give you the hard, honest truth. Sure, I can only talk from my experience, and I have not used every CMS under the sun, but I have had the pleasure (and sometimes pain) of using a diverse range; enough, I would say to be able to stoke the fires. To back this up if someone asked me:

• What is the best photo editing software? I would give an honest answer of Photoshop. But Paint.net is free and so is Gimp, I hear you say. Although expensive, it is the best tool for the job.
• What is the best Media Player? I would say VLC! But Microsoft had dedicated teams to build Windows Media Player, I hear you say! Doesn’t matter, VLC is free and the best tool for the job.
• What is the best Developer Environment? I would say Visual Studio? But I don’t use .net, I hear you say! Great, because you should choose the best tool for YOUR job…..the whole point I am trying to get across with this article.
• What is the best FTP Client? I would say FileZilla!
• What is the best browser? There is no ONE tool for the job.

I think it is important to first define what the two systems are in order to be able to thoroughly compare the two options.

• Open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. The public is allows to copy, modify and redistribute the source code without paying royalties or fees. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology.
• Proprietary software is computer software licensed under exclusive legal right of its owner. The purchaser, or licensee, is given the right to use the software under certain conditions, but restricted from other uses, such as modification, further distribution, or reverse engineering.

From a high level perspective you could argue that both have advantages and disadvantages. It is only when you analyze the functionality of the two systems when the decision on what way to go is made that much easier.

Packt Publishing announced that Pimcore has won the Most Promising Open Source Project Award category in the 2010 Open Source Awards. The Most Promising Open Source Project Award  is a revamped category for the Award this year, featuring Open Source projects, whose first release date is less than two years from 9 August, 2010.

“Winning this Award is a huge boost”, said Dietmar Rietsch, the founding member of Pimcore. “It’s not simply about the money either, it’s the recognition of a year of hard work and dedication from the team and Pimcore’s community.”

“Pimcore is an exciting content management system framework which has great long-term prospects. The project is growing at a fast rate and has good support from its community.” Added Marc Delisle, system administrator and one of the judges for the 2010 Most Promising Open Source Project category. “Pimcore is an easy to use new solution and a high sense of professionalism can be found in everything from the project website to the documentation.”

While Pimcore occupied the top spot in the 2010 Most Promising Open Source Project category, TomatoCMS came in at the first runners up position, while the second runners up position was secured by social networking software package BuddyPress.

With this announcement, the 2010 Open Source Awards has five more categories left, including the Open Source Graphics Software category, for which results will be announced from November 16th through to November 19th.

For detailed results on each category and more information about the Award, please visit Packt's Open Source Awards site.

Vancouver, BC -- Intranet Connections has released the newest version of its Intranet 2.0 CMS platform with the aims of reducing administration overhead for intranet managers and simplifying the design of site navigation.  Intranet Connections version 10.5 targets small to medium size businesses wishing to have SharePoint-like functionality, but without the price tag or management overhead.

Carolyn Douglas, CEO of Intranet Connections, “Our focus is on ease-of-use and providing SMB’s with an out-of-the-box intranet that they can implement themselves.  Version 10.5 provides intranet administrators with a simple solution that is easy to install, implement and manage on an ongoing basis, without the need for custom development.”

A key enhancement in the new release is the addition of a revised menu builder that features a drag and drop interface to manage site navigation.  The redesigned interface allows administrators to add a horizontal menu to their site, create drop down menus, add menu headers and relocate menu items from the left main to the site header directly through the site interface.   The new menu builder provides more flexibility to intranet managers wishing to customize their information architecture in a simple manner.

This latest release also builds on the popular tagging feature with the addition of a new content tag management interface.  The robust tag administration area simplifies routine tag management tasks such as creating tag groups, moving tags between groups and finding tags with dynamically filtered search results.  Admins can pre-populate and organize commonly used tags so that end users can easily tag and find relevant content.

Also included among the other features of v10.5 are an upgrade of the HTML editor to improve accuracy when composing complex document layouts or pasting from Word, an extranet friendly security model to simplify user-rights administration on intranet/extranet implementations and a new Multiple File Upload tool for improved ease-of-use, stability and performance.

Alfresco announced the release of Alfresco Community 3.4. Alfresco 3.4 broadens the reach of the company’s open source and open standards-based content management platform with new tools and services for Spring developers, Web Quick Start for easy web site deployment and content integration with enterprise portals.

“The demand for collaboration and social sharing around enterprise content is rising – and content that was once meant just for the intranet is now being re-purposed for the public web, external portals or even to destination sites across the web,” said John Newton, Alfresco CTO. “Through our implementation of CMIS as a core standard and new features in Alfresco 3.4, our content services platform can now manage and deliver enterprise content to any internal or external application in a way that traditional, monolithic ECM products can’t enable without significant time and expense.”

Key product capabilities for the Alfresco Community 3.4 release include:

• Collaborative Web Authoring – Alfresco Web Quick Start is a set of out-of-the-box templates for building content-rich websites on top of Alfresco Share. Quick Start combines the power of Alfresco Share for web team collaboration, with powerful content authoring and publishing services like in-context web editing.
• Office-to-Web Framework – Using Microsoft’s Office SharePoint Protocol and CIFS (shared folders), along with a new API integration with Google Docs, users can now author documents in their native office suite, collaborate in Alfresco or Google Docs, transform and re-purpose if required, and then publish straight to the web – even with sophisticated approval workflows. This feature will be available in a follow-on release Alfresco Community 3.4.b in approximately four weeks.
• Web Content Services for Spring – Built using the popular Spring and Spring Surf frameworks, Alfresco now offers key content management services that can be accessed via OpenCMIS and integrated into any web application. A combination of standard development tools and lightweight scripting gives Spring and Surf developers many options for building content-rich apps.
• Integration with Enterprise Portals and Social Software – The new DocLib portlets allow seamless integration with enterprise portals like Liferay, Quickr and Confluence. Using Single Sign On (SSO), the portlets provide access to both content and project repositories from within any JSR168 compliant portal.
• Distributed Content Replication – Native support for content replication allows organizations to run federated content repositories. Key documents can now be replicated to remote offices, enabling greater sharing of information, quicker access, reduced wide area network traffic and removes the dependency on a single system.

Alfresco has seen major adoption of its open source and open standards content management platform with more than two million downloads of Alfresco Community. Alfresco Community is a free-to-download, free-to-use version developed on an open source stack that runs on Windows, Linux or Mac. Alfresco Enterprise is certified against a larger range of technology stacks (both open source and proprietary), goes through a more extensive QA process and is provided with full commercial technical support.

This past weekend, I returned from a two week camping vacation in the mountains of Colorado. During those two weeks of little Internet connection...a lot of good content management stories came my way via email but were not posted here at CMS Report. I've decided to go through my mailbag this week and post some of the better stories that were missed in my absence.

A couple weeks ago, Stefane Fermigier sent us an email regarding the release of Nuxeo EP and DM 5.3.2, an ECM Platform and Document Management application. Stefane writes:

I'm very happy to announce that we have released Nuxeo EP and DM 5.3.2 today.

The release notes are here:

[Broken Link]

Many thanks to everyone who has contributed to this release, which I believe is the strongest we've done so far, and also the one that took the less effort to create thanks to the build and QA process we've put in place in the last year.

We have other new releases coming up in the following days: Nuxeo DAM 1.1 and Nuxeo CMF, and the next release of Nuxeo DM will be Nuxeo DM 5.4, scheduled around October this year.

Remember also that we have the Nuxeo World conference in November.
Meanwhile, I hope you will enjoy using Nuxeo DM 5.3.2. We've upgraded our intranet to use this version (over 5.3.1) in the final days of testing the new release, and I can tell you it is noticeably snappier and overall more pleasant to use than the 5.3.1.

What are the enterprise trends in content management? This past month, I've given a lot of thought on the evolution of content management and social media in large organizations. Perhaps the amount of time I've recently spent on the plane traveling both coasts of the United States gave me too much reflecting time on this subject. Most of us understand the impact Enterprise 2.0 has had on enterprise content management, yet I feel like we're missing pieces to the puzzle. Luckily, there are a lot of smart people out there giving us clues to what the current enterprise trends are with content management.

Nuxeo announced the release of a new version of their Nuxeo Enterprise Platform as well as their Nuxeo Document Management application. Nuxeo version 5.3.1 brings improvements and bug fixes to the software.

Some of the major improvements in this new version of Nuxeo includes:

Below is a consolidated list of content migration tool I have come across, and most of this are primarily for content migration to SharePoint Platform.

(1) MetaLogix

https://www.quest.com/metalogix/

SharePoint Site Migration Manager- For migrating content from SPS 2003 to SharePoint 2007 Platform

Web Content Migration Manager for SharePoint - For migrating content from various below listed platforms to SharePoint 2007:

Who really defines what is a CMS?

You do.

I'm more convinced than ever that CMS experts aren't really in the driver's seat when defining the content management system. Experts in the field of content management are more or less observant passengers that are there to help you not get lost and to point out the significant landmarks on the way. This journey takes you to places while you the customer remain in the driver seat with all the privileges and responsibilities of being the driver.

Over the past few years I've realized that my work preference is to keep things as simple as possible. Sometimes when defining information systems keeping things simple works while other times the system is new and remains too complicated to define. Thanks to my reply in a productive rant against CMS by Laurence Hart I'm not only understanding my aversion to being called a CMS expert but also my philosophy and role in defining what is a CMS. This personal philosophy is developing...

Scott Abel convinced me a few years ago on my own blog that the definition of a CMS is never static and always changing. We’re chasing our own tail when we get nit picky in our definitions of a CMS. Somewhere in all the marketing that has been done for terms such as CMS, ECM, and WCM…we have forgotten the difference between information system and information technology.