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NEW YORK, June 12, 2012- Engagement and control are two words driving conversations across the enterprise in 2012 and beyond. As the CIO grapples for technology governance, the CMO struggles to keep up with the chaotic changes in marketing.  Both are challenged with leveraging technology to engage, collaborate, socialize, and measure the more empowered consumer and the ever-more virtual workforce.  To meet this challenge – some clarity is needed. 

Digital Clarity Group (DCG), a new research-driven advisory firm focused on helping leaders navigate the digital transformation, is celebrating its launch today by identifying several seismic trends affecting the enterprise.

Technology industry veteran Scott Liewehr is President and Principal Analyst of DCG and has assembled an extraordinary “all-star team” of experts to focus on working with business leaders on all aspects of digital transformation.  This includes advising technology vendors on how to approach this market, as well as the buyers on how to better navigate the changes. As Scott stated; “Consumers and knowledge workers alike are grabbing control of the reigns and not letting go. The combination of the social web, open standards, the cloud, and ubiquitous mobility to name just a few, represent a field of dreams for empowered audiences to both collaborate and self-satisfy. For organizations, these represent an opportunity to transform, innovate, engage and develop loyal customers and employees like never before.” 

The transformation that DCG addresses is the overlap of where Innovative Change meets the Social Enterprise and Consumer Engagement, and is facilitated with Adaptive Technology.  And as part of the inaugural launch of DCG’s practice, the team has identified several seismic trends impacting leaders across these four themes.  

Today, Matt Mullenweg announced the availability of WordPress 3.4. WordPress includes significant improvements to the blogging application's theme theme customization, custom headers, Twitter embeds, and image captions.

More specifically with regards to theme customization, the new theme customizer allows you to play around with various looks and settings of your current theme and provides the ability to preview those settings without publishing the changes until you're ready to go public. For themes that support the theme customizer, you can  also change colors, backgrounds, and image headers all from within the admin menu.

The folks over at Netgen (Zagreb, Croatia) wanted me to make mention of the upcoming eZ Publish Summer Camp being held in Bol, Croatia from September 5th to 8th this year. Besides being supportive of almost any conference that promotes CMSs, I thought if my Croatian grandmother was still alive today she would be quite pleased I was talking about Croatia. This three day conference promises to address a number of needs for eZ Publish developers while also giving you a chance to also spend some vacation time in boat and wine country.

Long time readers of CMS Report may recall that each summer I plan a number of small vacations intended to reduce my technology usage as much as possible. I have a real need to unplug from my Internet connection, step away from the blogging of content management systems, and leave the computer screen behind. I don't always succeed at this endeavor so this year I'm deploying some new tools to assist me in making this year's Technology Break a success. I now introduce to you, the Jayco CMS.

MindTouch, a company dedicated to creating self-service help experiences, announced today that its social help system now integrates with SalesForce.com Help Desk and support ticketing to dramatically improve support agents’ efficiency and customers’ help experiences. MindTouch believes their social help platform is revolutionizing the user manual and SaaS customer experiences through a web-based environment that includes a knowledge base, help center, ticketing integration, and help button.

Support agents using CRM and web-based support ticketing systems have instant access to MindTouch powered help articles and knowledge base assets, thereby speeding time to resolution for customer issues. For support agents using SalesForce.com, MindTouch enables them to quickly pinpoint customers the most relevant content and to easily publish new content to the MindTouch knowledge base, as well as identify gaps in product documentation assets–all without ever leaving the SalesForce interface.

"On the other hand, the U.S. workforce is now 20-odd years into a decline in expertise in science, technology, engineering and math...If you include statistical analysis in that skill set, the decline potentially sets the stage for a perfect storm in self-service IT, where overconfident but underskilled end users run amok in business systems, draw bad conclusions from randomly mashed-up data or corrupt IT's once-pristine data stores."

-  Tracy Mayor, Self-service IT: Are users up for the task?, ComputerWorld, January 9, 2012

Some of my friends over at DotNetNuke have been talking to me about the latest version of their software. They're excited the new emphasis their favorite CMS is taking by combining traditional Web content management with enterprise social publishing capabilities. In fact, just today DotNetNuke Corp. announced the availability of DotNetNuke (DNN) 6.2, a social CMS that provides organizations the tools they need to easily configure and deploy internal social collaboration solutions and online communities.

I haven't had a chance to demo DNN 6.2,  but I'll walk you through on what I've gleamed so far from the press releases and conversations within the community. I'm hoping to get an opportunity for a demo on the new features down the road but this will have to do for now. Just to get the definitions straightened out, what DNN is calling Social CMS is what I also like to call a Social Publishing Systems. Everyone has a different take on how to use social media, some companies get it while others are still trying to recognize their importance. Taking DNN 6.2 into consideration, it's apparent to me that DotNetNuke gets social.

During the Memorial weekend, I decided to pull the plug on the CMS related news feeds we were streaming into Planet CMS. One of CMS Report's biggest strengths has always been pointing people toward the right direction in their search for content management systems. Knowing that one site couldn't support all the stories that needed to be written about CMSs, we began to rely more heavily on using a news aggregator within our Drupal CMS to provide you the links and excerpts to articles written elsewhere. I did this all with good intentions, but Google apparently disagrees.