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Quoting IT: Throw caution to the wind with Enterprise 2.0

"The more I learn about Enterprise 2.0, the more inclined I am to encourage companies to throw caution to the wind: buy (or build) some well-designed lightweight tools that take advantage of emergence and game mechanics, find a few leaders willing to lead by example, and go live."

- Andrew McAfee, Enterprise 2.0 the Indian WayAndrewMcAfee.org, April 7, 2011.

10 New Weapons in New Bitrix Site Manager 10.0

Bitrix, Inc., a technology trendsetter in business communications solutions, announces the release of Bitrix Site Manager 10.0, a version that includes 10 new weapons in the web and mobile-development arsenal, significant changes in the licensing policies of the product and a brand new module for senior editions.

Ten new technologies and tools are incorporated into Version 10.0 including:

  1. BitrixMobile: for development of mobile sites and apps with support of iOS, Android and BlackBerry OS on the basis of HTML5
  2. A ready-made mobile internet shop, created with BitrixMobile technology and an application for one-time passwords (OTP)
  3. Web clusters, a complex solution for scalability and reliability of an entire web project (database, search module, etc.), can be applied in high availability (HA) or high performance (HP) configurations
  4. Integration with social networks including Facebook, Twitter and Google
  5. Sticky web-it notes for simplifying collaborative work in web project creation and content management
  6. Instant search with query suggestion
  7. Support of SKU in the e-commerce module
  8. Rating and influence systems in the social networking module
  9. A ready-made InfoPortal for municipalities and media outlets
  10. A "Live session" feature, providing a more convenient experience to the daily user

JFBConnect v3.2 - Adds Multiple Features for Enhanced Integration of Joomla and Facebook

With Facebook recently announcing it surpassed the 500 million user mark, and Joomla powering over 2.5% of all websites, the integration of both is a natural fit for growing your site and brand both easily and organically.

The newest release of JFBConnect, version 3.2, now makes that integration even more powerful! Updated features include a rich wall posting feature on registration and login, full Facebook Open Graph support, automatic comments and like boxes throughout your Joomla site, and additional profile fields during registration.

These enhancements are all in addition to existing features such as one-click registration, customizable profile import into multiple 3rd party extensions, automatic logging in of Facebook users, and all of the Facebook social widgets such as Like, Comments, Fanbox and more.

Rich Wall Posts

With rich wall posts during registration or login, you're sure to get noticed by Facebook users! Simply fill out the message, image, and link to post when any user registers or logs in and JFBConnect takes care of the rest.

Open Graph Support

Interactive Multiligual: Crowdsourcing translations with Tiki

Many times, software internationalization (often abbreviated as i18n) and translation can quickly become a nightmare... if you don't have the right tools. Tiki's interactive translation feature allows contributors to create, edit, and maintain the more than 40 translations of Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware.

In true "dog-fooding" tradition, the Tiki Community began crowd-sourcing this feature in 2010 by establishing a dedicated Tiki instance for translators. Not only can contributors translate via their browser, but Tiki's interactive translation feature allows textual translations within context. The centralized translation server, running the latest Tiki code, ensures that all translators are using the same version. The translation strings are regularly committed to the Tiki SVN repository.

Due to its ease of use, the Tiki Community recently completed two translation sprints, pushing the German and French languages towards 100% completion. With more than 45 active translator accounts, other languages are not far behind.

Quoting IT: Call for Reform in Federal IT Management

"Information technology should enable government to better serve the American people. But despite spending more than $600 billion on information technology over the past decade, the Federal Government has achieved little of the productivity improvements that private industry has realized from IT. Too often, Federal IT projects run over budget, behind schedule, or fail to deliver promised functionality. Many projects use “grand design” approaches that aim to deliver functionality every few years, rather than breaking projects into more manageable chunks and demanding new functionality every few quarters.

List of Fake Content Management Stories from April Fools Day 2011

For the blogger, the most difficult day of the year has to be April Fools' Day. This is the day where jokes are played and stories are made  up. Computer geeks and CMS junkies easily get into the spirit of this celebrated day by pulling all kinds of online pranks. One of my fondest April Fools memories is from 2007 when the official Japanese and Russian Drupal sites migrated for a day from the Drupal CMS over to Joomla!. Good times, good times. The folks over at ocProducts have gotten into the 2011 April Fools spirit by announcing ocPortal 7 with HTML6.

I need your help! Please help me keep track of all the CMS related April Fools' stories that you find online.  Please feel free to add to my list by of content management pranks via a comment below or through Twitter. If you prefer to tweet the story instead I suggest we start using the Twitter hashtag: #aprilfoolscms.

List of Fake Content Management Stories on April Fools Day 2011

  1. ocPortal - ocProducts announces ocPortal 7 with HTML6
  2. Drupal - Announcing CertifiedToSUCK.com
  3. TYPO3 - New paradigm for TYPO3 4.6 development
  4. Drupal - Announcing the Drupal Retail Store
  5. Joomla - Joomla Templates from YOOtheme
  6. Real Story Group  - No more content management
  7. Sharpened.net - The End of the Keyboard and Mouse
  8. IBM developerWorks - Scrum Alliance 2.0
  9. CMS Made Simple - Intuit Announces Acquisition of CMS Made Simple
  10. Enano - Enano merges with Joomla!
  11. EpiServer - EPiFAX 1.0 Released
  12. Plone - Plone Announces New Release Naming Scheme Effective April 1

dotCMS Releases 1.9.2

Miami, Florida (March 29, 2011) —  dotCMS has made 1.9.2 available to the community and general marketplace.  This is the second major release of new features and improvements since dotCMS rolled out the 1.9 series back in July of 2010 and features a number of improvements geared toward performance, scalability and ease of use.

“1.9.2 represents a leap forward for dotCMS.  We and our global network of partners have established a solid pace in rolling out features and community plugins,” commented Will Ezell, CTO of dotCMS. “We are seeing the 1.9 series take a strong hold in the marketplace and the changes in 1.9.2 speaks to dotCMS’ continued focus on the meeting the needs of both the enterprise and of their end user.”

1.9.2 has also been benchmarked on both cloud and physical servers and shown to scale extremely well horizontally and vertically – serving over 4,600 transactions a second across a variety of page types.  The complete performance report can be found here.

New Features Include:

  • Online Image Editor allows content contributors to edit images without needing additional software.  Users can resize, crop, rotate, "save as" different image types and adjust hue, saturation, brightness and coloration of images stored in dotCMS.
  • New Image Renditions and Clipboard allows content editors to use edited versions (renditions) of source images without having to store multiple versions of the same image.  An Image clipboard allows users to create the rendition they want to use, add it to their clipboard, and paste it into their content for re-use.
  • Inline Editing allows content editors frictionless editing of site content, inline, without needing to return to the admin portal.

Your Intranet: The Recipe for Success

Building your intranet is like using a recipe. You want to make the final product enjoyable, and to do so, you need to ensure that all of the ingredients are well balanced.

I recently made a delicious dinner for some friends and was later asked how I did it. I slyly said “a little this and that”, but really, it is a tried and true recipe from my step mom, a chef. Over the years I have perfected the dish to make it “my own”, but I still have to peak back at my food stained recipe book to ensure that I am on the right track. With an intranet, similar to cooking a nice meal, users do not see the creative process until it’s perfected and delivered.  Like a good meal, and as the site develops, the users will crave more. 

Intranet design is similar to cooking in that it allows for revisions along the way. An intranet site starts with design applications that provide functionality to the site. You need to build up these applications with text, borders, pictures, in order to make the site operational and appealing to the user’s eyes. Along the way, you can add or remove icons, text boxes and documents to enhance the page. It’s a never ending process of exciting changes that increasingly make the intranet more accessible for the users.