Version 8.0.2 of Alkacon Software's successful open source website content management system OpenCms 8 is now ready and available for download from alkacon.com.

OpenCms 8 contains a greatly improved user interface for content managers and numerous other enhancements. The "Advanced Direct Edit" mode allows content managers to create page content by drag & drop. The new sitemap editor allows creating new pages and rearranging the navigation tree by drag & drop.

Over the past few years, I've heard a lot of good things about Liferay and their flagship product, Liferay Portal. The portal is an open source enterprise solution for portals, publishing, content, and collaboration. However, I must confess, beyond the demo and some positive word-of-mouth comments, I haven't had much chance to explore their products, services, and community behind the product. My lack of knowledge about Liferay is all going to change next month, because CMS Report will be at this year's Liferay West Coast Symposium in Anaheim, California.

Customer Relationship Management is a company-wide business strategy designed to reduce costs and increase profitability by solidifying customer satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy. It's a strategy used to learn more about customers' needs and behaviours in order to develop stronger relationships with them. After all, good customer relationships are at the heart of business success. There are many technological components to CRM, but thinking about it as computer software with a large database populated with customer-related information. Its primary purpose is to organize, track, and automate key aspects of an organization's sales activities.

This leads to higher customer loyalty and retention, more efficient sales and marketing efforts, lower expenses, more effective call center operations, additional opportunities to cross-sell and up-sell, CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management and while CRM does refer to a program to manage customer information the better CRM software does much more than that.  CRM Software not only allows the organizing of customer information, but CRM software also provides the means to track sales leads from the time they are obtained until the sales are closed.

This month, Packt Publishing began accepting nominations for its 2011 Open Source Awards. Breaking tradition, I've declined the invitation this year to be a member of the judging panel of this award (I've been a judge for the past four years). Regardless of my lack of participation as a judge, I still think this a great award and merits mention here on my blog.

Customers’ order data, pending payments, leads in the pipeline; it all boils down to the extensive data you hold. Needless to say, that your data is as good as you being able to retrieve it and use it effectively. If your data, processes and applications are disparate it creates a chaos in the company. You need to bring order out of confusion for smooth functioning of your company to handle customer queries more effectively. Integration solutions can certainly help you delight your customers’ mainly in three ways:  

As I have done each and every year in the summer, I will be taking my annual break from technology. Through the month of August, I'll be decreasing my postings and management of this site in hopes of using the time to broaden my perspective. I need to spend some time recharging my batteries and my enthusiasm for content management systems as well as information technology in general.

London, UK, 28th July 2011. Open Source Digital Asset Management vendor, Daydream have announced a major upgrade to their FocusOPEN Digital Asset Manager software. This latest edition provides a wealth of new features including: customisable metadata, new preview plug-in architecture and a dedicated JavaScript scripting engine.