"People say that failure is important because it teaches you. I think that you can learn more from success. You learn what works as opposed to what doesn’t work. As no success is perfect, you still learn from the effort and improve from there.

That ability to learn is how you become a successful CMS professional."

- Laurence Hart, The Content Management Expert Paradox, Word of Pie, March 26, 2012.

Every year, I find it an honor when I'm asked by open source projects to announce that they have entered been accepted as mentoring organizations into Google's Summer of Code program. I'm a big advocate of college education and I also understand the importance of a summer job to keeping those college bills under control. Open source projects and the Google Summer of Code provides this opportinuty for upcoming software developers. The Summer of Code is a "global program sponsored by Google that offers post-secondary student developers ages 18 and older stipends to write code for various open source software projects".

As an online marketer, I used to work in different environments, but since joining Foliovision, I spend virtually all my time on our clients’ content management systems. Some days ago, I logged into a completely different CMS after a long time. It didn’t look bad at first glance, but spending just a few minutes working with this interface was enough to see the striking difference between this CMS and our own; this one was really medieval! I am a marketer, certainly not a hard-boiled developer, and for the first time, I’ve summarized my thoughts about what makes a good CMS. These are the pillars of success but also the risks involved.

I. Low initial costs

Want to take control of the unstructured information that overwhelms your office? Looking to automate business processes and improve management of your corporate intellectual property? Are you unsure of how to choose the right Workflow and BPM provider? If your organization would like to gain substantial improvements in business processes, while reducing paper costs, here are seven tips to help you select the solution that will help you achieve your goals and get a quick return-on-investment (ROI).

1. Proven ROI

Michael Assad, the CEO and a co-founder of Agility, must have been one busy man with a video camera during this year's SXSW. Michael was able to interview a number of leaders in the Web publishing industry including people working for such groups as Time Inc., Hearst, BBC, the New York Times, and Al Jazeera.

My two favorite interviews includes Michael's interview with Perry Solomon from Time Inc and his interview with Bill Adair from PolitiFact. One of my long standing criticisms of traditional media has been their lack of enthusiasm in embracing digital media. As a blogger, I tend to think that perhaps they "just don't get it" but such an argument would not be honest nor truthful. There are major players in the publishing industry that have known for decades that digital publishing needed to be a part of their business model. That iPad you're using wouldn't have been possible without the amount of brain storming provided years prior by these publishers.

Given one reason or another though, publishers until recently have been slow to deliver their content in the multiple formats and the mediums we prefer. As skilled as the publishing industry may be for delivering digital content their achilles heel has been unwillingness to take necessary risks. That's why this is great video footage from Michael as they show the print industry is now ready to fullly evolve and allow the digital publishing business take to be fully integrated with traditional print. At least that's what I take away from these videos.

I haven't done one these for awhile...a Moodle release announcement. Last year, we took Moodle off our Top 30 CMS Focus list so it isn't on my radar too often. But like so many great content applications out there, just because it isn't on our list doesn't mean you shouldn't still consider them for your CMS.  

I've mentioned on this blog a few times that CMSReport.com was never really meant to be a business or publication. It just happened. Six years ago, I started this journey I'm on with just my fascination for information systems and the little knowledge I had obtained on my own about content management systems. I was hungry to learn more and I started this site simply as a place to store my personal notes, bookmarks, and possibly share ideas with a few others. As many of you know, a lot has happened since the early years and I've been at crossroads for how to take CMS Report to the next level.

Oslo, Norway - Webnodes AS, a company developing a .NET based semantic content management system, today announced the release of version 3.8 of their CMS, with semantic e-commerce, MVC support and several new mobile features.

"This release is a very important release for us. It demonstrates our commitment on a number of  levels, not only regarding semantic web technologies, but also more pure CMS improvements", said Ole Gulbrandsen, CTO of Webnodes. “In our continued effort to maintain and improve developer efficiency, we have added support for ASP.NET MVC templates. To continue to be on the forefront of the mobile web we have added a range of new mobile features.”