Starting Monday July 16, Packt Publishing will be accepting nominations for their 2007 Open Source Content Management System Award.  Last year, I had fun watching closely as the top five open source CMS were nominated and I even made some predictions for which projects would be declared the winners.  This year, I'm also honored to announce that I have been selected as a judge for the Overall Winner category!

That's right, while I have my favorites when it comes to CMS, it looks as if I've proven myself to be non-bias and open-minded enough to be on the jury.   Ironically, I'm not the only one from Sioux Falls, South Dakota that will be on the judging panel.  Deane Barker, Gadgetopia and Blend Interactive, has also been selected as a judge for the social networking category.  Evidently, the long winter months in this part of the country has given us too much time to talk and discuss various topics such as technology, content management systems, and innovation.  Then again, it's also possible Sioux Falls is a lot more forward-thinking then people typically give credit to the city.  Either way, neither Deane or myself know anyone from Fargo.

If you recall, this is the award that last year, Joomla was declared by the judges as the winner, with Drupal in second place, followed by Plone in third place.   Different this year then in 2006 is that the CMS projects may be nominated by various categories and more prize money is being offered.

John Newton, Alfresco co-founder, is a man I have never met.  Regardless of this important fact, I feel like I have gotten to know a small part of him through his blog.  While Newton's blog may focus on Alfresco, his posts offers a wide range of insights on subjects such as commercial open source, content management,  enterprise software,  business processes, and information technology.  So if you have any idea of who I am through my own writings  it should be no surprise to you that I enjoy giving thought to some of

Good news for osCommerce fans, osCommerce Online Merchant v2.2 Release Candidate 1 was released early this month.  If you're not an osCommerce user you're probably wondering what all the fuss is about a release candidate for the open source shopping cart.  Consider this, osCommerce 2.2 first went public with Milestone 1 in early 2003 which means that the version 2.2 will be around for almost five years before it is considered "completed".  In other words, an update of any kind to osCommerce is significant to it's developers and users alike.

This osCommerce release candidate also introduces a new name for the software titled "osCommerce Online Merchant".  According to osCommerce, the new name helps strengthen their presence and marketing efforts for upcoming releases.

Michael Kaply is starting a new series on the use of Mozilla's Firefox as enterprise software.  In Part 1 he discusses the obstacles for Firefox to to be adopted in the enterprise.

As Firefox gains marketshare, there comes a point where increasing that marketshare depends on the adoption of Firefox in large enterprises. This article investigates what type of issues arise when supporting Firefox in a large enterprise, and what can be done to solve those issues.

The primary areas I will address are:

To be honest, I've had problems getting excited in the past about XOOPS as a CMS or as an open source community.  There just didn't seem to be a whole lot of buzz about this CMS and I was seriously thinking about dropping it from my personal "top 30 list" found to the left under "CMS Focus". 

The biggest reward I get from working on IT projects is the opportunity to take new ideas and new strategies and piece them together into something that has never been done before.  Even when I'm not the one originating the new idea, I like helping other innovative people bring their ideas to the table.  I have ideas, dreams, and aspirations to help take my workplace to the next level of where it should be via innovative use of what I know best, information technology.  How could innovation and all these wonderful ideas I have in my head not be anything but a good thing for my organization?  A recent article in the Wall Street Journal answers just that question by saying that there are negatives for an organi

I came across a well written summary of content management applications (especially open source CMS) via a Security Blog over at GLORIAD. The CMS article is a near perfect overview on the state of CMS in 2007. This article is a "must read" in my opinion and it's really too bad I didn't write it first. Can you tell I'm envious?

At the end of the article the author concludes:

I must confess, I really don't fully understand how the Internet ranking systems actually work.  Ranking systems such as Google's PageRank and Alexa's Traffic Rankings seem to use a mystery of statistical analysis, algorithms, and a sprinkle of voodoo calculus to come up with the numbers they do.  Although most people lack the understanding to how these numbers are derived it is still fun to watch those rankings change from day to day.  For example, since the Fall of 2006 I've seen the rankings for CMSReport.com change from 830,790 to around a steady 90,000.