Enterprise

Although Plone 3.3 is a minor release in the Plone 3 series, it does offer several refinements. Highlights of the 3.3 release include the ability to localize navigation, tabs, sitemaps and searches within folders. According to an announcement by Steve McMahon "this makes it much easier to develop autonomous sub-sites within a Plone site". The new Lineage add-on provides management facilities to exploit the new feature.

Some additional new features and refinements include:

There is a real fear out there. A fear involving companies commercially supporting open source software and neglecting the "free" community version of their software. Fortunately for us, when looking for proof of this fear Alfresco is in the wrong direction to look. Alfresco Community Edition 3.2 brings so many new capabilities and improvements to the table that you can almost see the enterprise content management landscape brighten up.

Perhaps Mozilla is finally seeing the light. There is a story circulating around that Mozilla will be providing better tools to deploy and manage Firefox within the enterprise. According to a PC World article that sources Mike Beltzner, director of Firefox at Mozilla Corp:

Through the program, which will start sometime soon after Firefox 3.5 is released at the end of June, companies can use a Web application provided by Mozilla to specify certain customizations for the browser -- such as bookmarks to certain sites or corporate intranets or portals, he said.

CoreMedia announced today that the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) has launched a sophisticated interactive content portal powered by CoreMedia’s CMS that harnesses the power of social media. The name of AAMC's new site is MedEdPortal.

“AAMC’s desire to create an interactive medical community that facilitates the exchange of educational content is a project that CoreMedia was excited about and well suited to enable,” said René Hermes, VP Marketing of CoreMedia. “The combination of our market leading CMS and extensible social software features made CoreMedia the obvious choice for AAMC.”

AAMC’s MedEdPORTAL is a free online peer-reviewed publication service provided in partnership with the American Dental Education Association (ADEA). MedEdPORTAL was designed to promote educational collaboration by facilitating the open exchange of peer-reviewed teaching resources such as tutorials, virtual patients, simulation cases, lab guides, videos, podcasts, and assessment tools. While MedEdPORTAL's primary audience includes medical professionals, health educators and learners around the globe, it is also freely accessible to the general public.

I finally got a chance to read CMS Wire's article, SharePoint vs Alfresco: A Platform Perspective. Nothing too surprising in the article as it shows that both SharePoint and Alfresco can stand on their own.

While we believe the comparison was fair, we also agree that there's more to SharePoint than immediately meets the eye. By the same token, there's more to Alfresco than just Share, much of which we eluded to in the article.

Last week, Varien and Magento announced an alternative to the community open source Magento ecommerce platform.  That alternative is Magento Enterprise Edition.

Lots of changes from Microsoft is expected to come in the next few years through its Unified Communications push. CMS Wire is the first site I saw that I saw mentioning that the new SharePoint will be called SharePoint 2010.

Finally. Microsoft has come forward with some news about the next version of SharePoint.

First, we have an official name: SharePoint 2010. Not overly innovative, but at least we can all agree on what to call it now.

Jon Marks, a technical analyst from the United Kingdom, posted an interesting article last week on his blog.  In the post, The CMS Word on the Tweet, he discusses the difficulty of finding "his world" on Twitter when seeking conversations centered around content management system.  Jon even uses CMSReport.com's CMS Focus as an example for showing what he observes as a large divide between open source Web content management systems and propriety enterprise software.  A divide that many of us may already recognize but haven't quite put into words like Jon has.

To the Big Wide World (which includes Twitter, and all the sites I’ve mentioned above), CMS means “Free Open Source CMS with Low Cost of Ownership”. The commercial Open Source CMS solutions don’t make the cut either. Four of the five Open Source CMS products reviewed by CMS Watch (Drupal, Joomla!, Plone CMS and TYPO3) live in both worlds. Open CMS doesn’t as my feeling is it is a bit too complex. Alfresco, DotNetNuke and ez Publish made one of the lists above, but don’t really feature in the Tweetosphere.

I inhabit a world populated by analysts, commercial vendors, systems integrators, large agencies and other such creatures. I don’t believe we pay much attention to the other world until a product jumps the gap. And it seems difficult for a product that isn’t Java or Microsoft based to make it in to My World.

Jon asked me via Twitter to let him know what I thought of his article.  I think Jon has done an excellent job of identifying the dichotomy found within CMS.  It does seem that the enterprise often takes an approach to content management that differs greatly from open source projects.  The approaches differ so much that the parties involved often end up defining what is a CMS in two different ways.  The only thing I would like to comment on is that I unfortunately live on a third, yet unidentified, world that the other two worlds don't fully understand.

Long time readers should already know that I'm a big fan of Andrew McAfee.  Andrew McAfee is the Associate Professor at Harvard Business School that is widely credited for coining the phrase “Enterprise 2.0”.  With all the traveling I did in January and February, I haven't had much chance to visit some of my favorite blog sites.  To my surprise, Andrew McAfee recently moved his blog from the business school's CMS over to his own domain and his new site looks great!

Dries Buytaert announced on his blog that a set of Drupal modules are available for integrating Drupal with Alfresco.

Alfresco and Optaros, in conjunction with Acquia, have made available a set of Drupal modules that integrate Drupal with Alfresco using the CMIS APIs. See the CMIS module and the CMIS Alfresco module on drupal.org.