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By now, many of us are excited to see the finalists for this year's Packt Publishing Open Source CMS (Content Management System) Award competition, the annual contest in which dozens of companies compete to be highlighted as the year's finest Content Management System.

Entering its fourth year, this competition has grown nearly five-fold and is widely regarded as the most prestigious award available in the CMS industry. But as successful as the competition has become, it sadly suffers from inherent issues which prevent it from truly presenting today's gamut of CMS choices in a valuable way.

Mike Stefanello wrote to us earlier this month to talk about OfficeMedium. OfficeMedium is a web-based service that provides intranet and collaboration software for businesses and work groups. In a very competitive market, OfficeMedium appears set to try and win customers over by providing enriched business tools at a low reasonable price. OfficeMedium is pricing their services at a monthly rate of $8 per user plus $1 per Gigabyte used.

OfficeMedium utilizes the open source Drupal CMS. A case study for how Drupal was used to build OfficeMedium can be found at Drupal.org. Below is a copy of Mike's email talking about OfficeMedium.

We offer a brand-new web application that we believe your readers will be interested to hear about.

OfficeMedium: Web-based Intranet and Collaboration Software

OfficeMedium is a recently launched startup that offers on-demand, web-based intranet and collaboration software for businesses and work groups. The private and secure networks offer a wide array of features meant to centralize and streamline important information and data, unlike other applications which seem to focus on single, often over-detailed and confusing, offerings, such as project management, contact relationships, or "enterprise twitters".

Within a sleek, extremely simple and easy-to-use interface, OfficeMedium offers:

• Task and Event Management
• Personal and Group Calendars
• File Sharing, Storage, and Organization
• Contact and Company Information Management
• Automated Organization and Archiving
• Client Integration
• Social and Communication Features (such as private messaging, status updates, micromessaging, user profiles, shared blogging, poll creation, activity feeds, and more)

My inbox is just full of emails from companies and people requesting that I take a look at their CMS. To be honest, it's a little overwhelming to have so many requests because although time is my enemy I really do want to respond to everyone. For now though, I'm currently focused on reviewing this year's finalists in Packt's Best Open Source CMS. In other words, I have a long waiting list of CMS to review.

However, there are a few of these emails that I don't want to just sit on my computer and go nowhere. One of those emails include a sales pitch for the Kentico CMS. Kentico is a CMS that hasn't quite made it on my CMS Focus list but possibly should be.

It is Day 2 for the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2009 and like many of you, I'm not at the conference. That's alright though because there are plenty of smart people at the conference more than willing to talk about what they are seeing there. It's a good idea to follow some of these people around and let them be our eyes and ears.

Probably one of the most vocal SharePoint evangelists I've come across is Michael Gannotti. I've been following him on Twitter for some time. He's recently posted his take on SharePoint 2010 on the SharePoint Expert Blog. 

SharePoint 2010 is absolutely the biggest most important release of SharePoint to date and in the opinion of this techie the single most important product release since Windows 95! Think I have drank a little too much of the Kool-Aid? Well consider how this rev of SharePoint addresses connecting and empowering people, cutting costs through a unified infrastructure, as well as providing a platform that facilitates a rapid response to business needs. Need more convincing after reading this post? Then be sure to check out "What makes Microsoft SharePoint tick?" by Mary Jo Foley. After that if you are still wondering what all the fuss is about why not check out these three videos by the SharePoint team that provide an overview of SharePoint 2010, as well as focuses for the IT Pro and Developer. Once you are sufficiently salivating then be sure to pre-register for the SharePoint 2010 beta here!!

Mike has a lot more to say about SharePoint 2010 and I encourage you read the rest of his post.  SharePoint 2010 sound like an exciting package and finally taking Web content management a little more seriously. However, I suppose I'll personally have to wait as my organization is only now deploying SharePoint 2007. I have to wonder, if companies are slow in upgrading their Windows operating systems...are they any faster in upgrading their SharePoint platform?

CMS Wire's Barb Mosher reported about a forum posting by a Google Employee explaining why PageRank has been dropped from the Google Webmaster Tools. Barb writes:

Do you constantly watch the Google toolbar in your browser to see if your Google PageRank has changed? Do you worry constantly about why your rank is less than that of a competitor? Well, there may not be any reason to worry any longer.

Google has dropped PageRank data from Webmaster Tools.

Google has for some time discussed that PageRank is a very small factor among many factors that they look at for placing a particular indexed page on a search results page. Dropping PageRank from the Webmaster Tools appears to be just one more step in moving PageRank away from everyone's attention.

We've been telling people for a long time that they shouldn't focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it's the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true. We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it. :-)

I have observed that indeed PageRank doesn't matter for placement on Google's search pages. I've seen CMSReport.com's front page ranked from as low as "3" to as high as "7" over the years. Although the page rank has varied over time, the placement of my web pages on the search pages have stayed about the same. Relevancy of the page to the search terms being used seems to have a much greater impact on how well your site ranks with the search engine. Additional details on why Google doesn't see PageRank as a good measurement for a site can be found on one of their Webmaster FAQ.

First Open Source Software to Obtain U.S. Department of Defense 5015.02 Records Management Certification

A new version of Radiant, a Ruby on Rails content management systems, is coming soon. Radiant 0.9.0 has just been released as a release candidate.

In this release the interface for the CMS has been updated to make Radiant more stylish and compact. Apart from the stylistic changes, there are a few other significant changes to the user interface worth mentioning:

I do my best to keep my two IT world's separated. One of those worlds of course is my obsession with content management systems which includes this blog and numerous discussions with almost anyone interested in CMS. The second world is my IT position as a federal employee for a small government field office. In order to avoid conflicts of interest, rarely do I allow those two worlds to cross one another. You'll find very little mention on this blog of my work for the federal government. At the same time, very few people in my agency are even aware of my CMS side hobby.

Earlier this week, Lullabot's Jeff Robbins posted an article about his company giving Drupal on-site training to employees within the Department of Commerce. In his post Jeff discusses the interest those employees have in Drupal as well as mentioning that the door continues to widen for Drupal in the federal government.

We had a great week of on-site training at the Department of Commerce in Washington, DC last week. They've already launched recovery.commerce.gov in Drupal and they're currently in the process of rebuilding Commerce.gov as a Drupal site. We spent the week with their team making sure that they understood not only how to build and present a Drupal site, but also the benefits of the Drupal community. They're a smart bunch and it's always fun to watch the synapses sparking as people realize all of the ways that they can snap together Drupal's pieces to create interesting web functionality.

There seems to be quite a buzz around Drupal in the government and as the Commerce team walked around the building with Drupal books under their arms, they got lots of comments from people in other bureaus, saying, "Oh! Drupal! We're thinking about using Drupal." Word is starting to get around about Drupal as a great platform for government websites.

Jeff Robbins is correct in saying that until recently, there was a lot of hesitation to using open source CMS such as Drupal for government portals and content delivery. I know earlier this decade my agency's Webmaster had considered using Drupal before deciding to build the agency's own CMS in-house. During this time period Drupal 4.5 was available but while my interest in information systems was growing, I had never really looked into Drupal (Mambo was in the open source CMS headlines back then) . However, just the possibility of my agency considering the use of Drupal during that time helped motivate me to learn more about Drupal.