CMS Expo in Chicago last week gave me a great opportunity to learn about a variety of content management systems. I spent most of my time at the conference getting out of my comfort zone by visiting with those companies and open source projects that I knew the least about their products and services. Unfortunately, this strategy also prevented me from visiting with my personal favorite CMS, Drupal. By the end of the conference, I felt I needed to treat myself by attending one of the final sessions in the Drupal track, Social Drupal.

What key activities should you integrate? In what scenarios might you be smarter to leave the heavy lifting to an outsourced solution?  What elements are critically important right now when building your social relevance in the market?  Find this out and more at this practical advice session on how you can be using Drupal to capture the Social Media audience which awaits.

My hope for the session was that it would give me good pointers for how to connect my Drupal sites better to the social web. Lullabot's Blake Hall led this information packed session. Blake began the session by pushing his vision that this session should not just be called "Social Drupal" but also "Community Plumbing (without the crack)". The proposed rewriting of the title for this session is a reminder to the audience that Drupal has always been social.

Blake started the session reminding that one needs to take a look at the bigger picture by taking a look as your site's Social Media Strategy. This strategy would include the following elements:

• Authentic Story
• Honest Dialogue
• Engage your audience
• Activate the social media

While the big picture is always nice consider it's the details that help determine whether your site is going to succeed. From this point forward Blake focused on specifics and I feverishly did my best to keep up. Some of the notable remarks from Blake that caught my attention:

• First step is to take a look at your business goals and the resources you have available when building/supporting your site. Blake of course sees Drupal as being able to address both ends of this equation.
• Some of the social modules for Drupal he recommends include Feeds, Flag, Twitter, Dashboard, Fivestar, Messaging, Radioactivity (gotta check this one out!), and Organic Groups.
• Speaking of organic groups, take a look at groups.drupal.org: especially Social Networking Sites group to tap into Drupal community's expertise on social publishing.

I like to keep things simple and prefer to use content management system (CMS) as the term used to describe the information system we use to manage all content. However, I will acknowledge that it is sometimes good to categorize a CMS by purpose. This differentiation of a CMS by purpose has given us subcategories of the CMS which include the enterprise content management system (ECM), the web content management system (WCM), and the social publishing system (social business system). In a press release this week, Alfresco introduced me to social content management, another new marketing term to describe a CMS with the purpose of managing social media.

Alfresco is tying to evolve the social content management system higher than the social publshing system within the information system food chain. If you ask them, a social content management system would do something much more than a social publishing system. I'm not convinced of that, but they do make a good arguement.

Alfresco Enterprise 3.4 is purpose-built for managing content in a social world. Enterprises are increasingly deploying social business systems like Jive, Salesforce.com’s Chatter, Lotus Quickr, Drupal and Liferay, among others, in the hopes of making employees more effective. According to Alfresco, these social business systems are creating volumes of unmanaged content if left un-checked. Using open standards like CMIS & JSR-168, Alfresco Enterprise 3.4 is a content platform with a goal to co-exist with social business systems to help manage and retain the content created by social business systems.

The marketing team over at Alfresco are pure geniuses. In this case Alfresco is using the social business systems as another catch phrase to describe what I know to be social publishing systems. Alfresco on the other hand identifies their product as as a social content management system that co-exist to manage the social content created by all these other systems. A CMS that is needed to clean up after the mess created by all these other social publishing systems.  I'm not sure I buy the argument that there is much difference between a social content management system and a social publishing system. But I will bite that social content management has a much better ring to it than social publishing system or any other term we use to describe the management of social content.

From now on when I describe a CMS for the purpose of managing social content, I'll likely use the term social content management instead of social publishing system. It seems to be a more fitting term for describing the direction the CMS is currently evolving toward. So hats off to Alfresco for pushing this term in their marketing. In a CMS world where ECM and WCM can exist, I see no reason why there can't be a SCM. On face value, there is nothing wrong with this logic. Except, of course, I like to keep things simple and prefer to simply call all these information systems a content management system. However, who am I to argue with progress.

During the past year, I've posted various articles on social publishing systems. Open source content management systems such as Drupal, Movable Type, and WordPress have done a lot in the past year to better incorporate social media features into their web applications. I think the topic of social publishing will continue to be an interesting topic as the CMS continues to evolve in order to stay current with the current social tech trends.

The following is a WordPress.TV video of Andy Peatling, Automattic, talking about the WordPress social networking system BuddyPress at WordCamp Montreal. In the video Peatling gives practical advice for people considering WordPress/BuddyPress as a platform.

BuddyPress 1.0.1 was released yesterday. This point release fixes a number of security issues in the 1.0 version so it is a critical upgrade for everyone currently running BuddyPress. There is also a number of other bug fixes so please review the release history for more information.

BuddyPress 1.0.1 is now available. The easiest way to upgrade is through the plugin browser on your WordPress MU installation, you should see a notification for the latest version. If you would like to upgrade manually you can download the latest then simply overwrite your existing files. Please make sure you backup first.

Embarrassingly, I missed the release of BuddyPress 1.0 which was released a few weeks ago. That's too bad because I've been watching the development of BuddyPress since it's infancy in the development cycle. I had hoped to give BuddyPress more attention when it when the 1.0 version had been released.

BuddyPress will transform an installation of WordPress MU into a social network platform. BuddyPress is actually a suite of WordPress plugins and themes, each adding a distinct new feature. BuddyPress contains all the features you’d expect from WordPress but aims to let members socially interact. I've always wanted to give WordPresss MU a try but I've never had a project that needed the software.  Someday it will happen... 

Last week, Socialtext's Eugene Lee forwarded a link on Twitter with SharePoint as the focus of the article.  The SharePoint article is titled, SharePoint 2007: Gateway Drug to Enterprise Social Tools and the author discusses the frustration enterprises and site developers have with the Microsoft product.  There is some truth in the article as I've heard from many people discussing their concerns about SharePoint lacking quality Enterprise 2.0 features or causing vendor lock for their organization.  However, the article borders slightly on the side of a rant on SharePoint and I've allowed it remain in a tab on my browser for quite awhile while I pondered what I wanted to take from the article.

I think the frustrations the author describes about SharePoint isn't a SharePoint problem.  And the author describes the issue very well without recognizing it's just not SharePoint that drives organizations crazy.

SharePoint does some things rather well, but it is not a great tool (or even passable tool) for broad social interaction inside enterprise related to the focus of Enterprise 2.0. SharePoint works well for organization prescribed groups that live in hierarchies and are focussed on strict processes and defined sign-offs. Most organization have a need for a tool that does what SharePoint does well.

This older, prescribed category of enterprise tool needs is where we have been in the past, but this is not where organizations are moving to and trying to get to with Enterprise 2.0 mindsets and tools. The new approach is toward embracing the shift toward horizontal organizations, open sharing, self-organizing groups around subjects that matter to individuals as well as the organization. These new approaches are filling gaps that have long existed and need resolution.

The problems identified with SharePoint can easily be said about many enterprise applications out there.  Many of the enterprise suites provided to the market traditionally offered turn-key solutions in an effort to deliver a single integrated solution for the customer.  These integrated suites can and do create "vendor lock" but that isn't the sole goal of enterprise products being delivered by such companies as Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle.  The customers asked for efficient and effective enterprise solutions and the big software companies responded by providing the expected tightly controlled software platforms (historically a good thing) along with terms of licensing, predictable pricing, training, and infrastructure support.