Intranet

Nashua, New Hampshire, USA, December 15, 2010 – Kentico Software, the Web content management system vendor, announced the general availability of Kentico CMS 5.5 R2. This new version of their flagship enterprise CMS provides enhanced Intranet support, Document and Project Management,  integration with Microsoft Office through WebDAV protocol, Workgroups,  Sharepoint 2010 Connector and Windows Azure support.

“We have always developed Kentico CMS as a scalable enterprise platform for corporate websites, intranet solutions, e-shops and integration with social networks. Our main focus for Kentico CMS 5.5 R2 was to extend our intranet offering mixed with key Enterprise 2.0 functionality” says Petr Palas, CEO of Kentico Software. “Keeping our intranet solution in step with our CMS offering ensures customers can grow their website needs with their business; leveraging the consistent easy to use Kentico environment that includes multi-site management, and an industry leading ROI.” he adds.

Key features that round out the Kentico CMS 5.5 R2 intranet offering include Document and Project Management, Workgroups and WebDAV support. Project Management provides the users with ability to manage, assign and monitor projects and tasks. The new Document Management helps users to manage documents and their permissions directly from a website without access to the administration UI. With the added support of WebDAV, users can now directly edit documents without the need to save them manually to a temporary location and then re-upload them.

“With our partners and customer focus, we drove our development based on an extensive set of client scenarios. We validated our features with our partners and key customers like Shaw Industries Group Inc. to refine our key scenarios. Kentico CMS 5.5 R2 delivers a complete intranet solution with a ready to use Intranet Starter site and flexible Document Management. Kentico CMS 5.5 R2 cuts down the time and cost of any intranet portal development. This combination of features and functionality guarantees that the Kentico CMS Intranet helps our partners and customers successfully meet their business goals.” says Michael Neuwirth, Product Manager at Kentico software.

Kentico CMS 5.5 R2 extends support for SharePoint 2010 and includes Windows Azure support for single CMS installations.

More information about the Windows Azure support is available at: http://devnet.kentico.com/Blogs/Michal-Neuwirth/December-2010/Kentico-CMS-5-5-R2-has-been-released.aspx

Kentico CMS 5.5 R2 for ASP.NET can be downloaded as a free 30-day trial at http://www.kentico.com/Download.aspx.

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.

Mike Stefanello wrote to us earlier this month to talk about OfficeMedium. OfficeMedium is a web-based service that provides intranet and collaboration software for businesses and work groups. In a very competitive market, OfficeMedium appears set to try and win customers over by providing enriched business tools at a low reasonable price. OfficeMedium is pricing their services at a monthly rate of $8 per user plus $1 per Gigabyte used.

OfficeMedium utilizes the open source Drupal CMS. A case study for how Drupal was used to build OfficeMedium can be found at Drupal.org. Below is a copy of Mike's email talking about OfficeMedium.

We offer a brand-new web application that we believe your readers will be interested to hear about.

OfficeMedium: Web-based Intranet and Collaboration Software

OfficeMedium is a recently launched startup that offers on-demand, web-based intranet and collaboration software for businesses and work groups. The private and secure networks offer a wide array of features meant to centralize and streamline important information and data, unlike other applications which seem to focus on single, often over-detailed and confusing, offerings, such as project management, contact relationships, or "enterprise twitters".

Within a sleek, extremely simple and easy-to-use interface, OfficeMedium offers:

• Task and Event Management
• Personal and Group Calendars
• File Sharing, Storage, and Organization
• Contact and Company Information Management
• Automated Organization and Archiving
• Client Integration
• Social and Communication Features (such as private messaging, status updates, micromessaging, user profiles, shared blogging, poll creation, activity feeds, and more)

Away from this blog, I've been putting a lot of energy into how best to work with social software in larger organizations (Enterprise 2.0) behind the firewall.  My professional attention has been shifting away from using Web content management systems, social publishing systems, and other collaboration tools on the Internet.  I really think the next big advancements and challenges for web technologies will not be on the World Wide Web,
but the less explored intranet ran by medium and larger size organizations.

In one form or another, I've been involved on both sides of the firewall in my organization. Ten years ago it was a huge challenge for
organizations and businesses to figure out how best to utilize the Internet to meet their business needs. As challenging as I saw the Internet for my own organization, I'm convinced there are greater challenges on the intranet side of the house.  For the most part, we all can see what the others are doing with their Internet Web servers, but few of us get to see what other organizations do with Enterprise 2.0 behind their own firewalls.

It has been awhile since I've considered using KnowledgeTree on the office intranet. I eventually decided that I needed to focus more on our content management system (we are now using Drupal) and consider implementing a document management system (DMS) at a later date. A recent Linux.com article on KnowledgeTree reminded me about the DMS that I almost forgot about.

These days, effective document management means accessibility from anywhere on the planet, electronic storage, reliable backup, and instant document modification updates. KnowledgeTree offers all that and more. It's available in several editions, including an open source community version (which we reviewed last year) that businesses can tailor to their individual needs.

You can install KnowledgeTree in-house on your company's server or use it as an online, hosted service. With it, you can create, edit, and store documents from Linux, Mac, and Windows computer. KnowledgeTreeLive, the hosted version, can be accessed from any computer with an Internet connection and a supported browser -- Firefox, Safari, or Internet Explorer.

I always promised myself that I would take a second look at KnowledgeTree sometime down the road. Unfortunately, at least for for KnowledgeTree, the regional office I'm under has started a move toward Microsoft's SharePoint. As I've written in the past, SharePoint is confusing system to describe and even Microsoft has a tough time explaining their product to potential customers. I initially thought SharePoint would be more of a CMS, Portal, and wiki but each time I've looked at SharePoint I'm realizing that it's greater strength may be in document management.