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osCommerce Online Merchant v3.0 Alpha 5

osCommerce LogoosCommerce announced that their osCommerce Online Merchant v3.0 Alpha 5 will be made available on March 11th.  They've also retooled the schedule for additional releases of this well known shopping cart.

osCommerce Online Merchant v3.0 Alpha 5 was scheduled for release by the end of February and has been postponed to ensure the quality of the release. It will now be released on Wednesday the 11th of March. This release also brings in a new roadmap and release strategy for the v3.x series.

First U.S. Federal CIO: Vivek Kundra

The United States federal government finally appoints the country's first Chief Information Officer.  For a bureaucracy that is having a difficult time handling a President that wants a computer in the Oval Office and a Blackberry in his hand, I'd say the new CIO has his work cut out for him.

The U.S. government's first CIO, Vivek Kundra, introduced himself today as someone who will act aggressively to change the federal government's use of IT by adopting consumer technology and ensuring that government data is open and accessible.

Testing the water with Acquia Search for Drupal

Acquia used the first day of DrupalCon DC as well as their corporate site to announce the availability of their new service via a public beta program, Acquia Search. Acquia Search is "based on the powerful Lucene and Solr technologies from the Apache project" and "creates a rich index of your site content".  While Apache Lucene and Apache Solr are "free" and open source, the implementation and maintenance of these products can be rather daunting.  Acquia wishes to solve this complexity problem by offering Solr search as a service in their Acquia Network.

Acquia Search Status on Acquia NetworkBefore the beta was available to the public, CMSReport.com was invited by Jacob Singh to join the private beta program to test and review Acquia Search. I have only been using Acquia Search for a week so I still have some learning to do in order to take full advantage of the advanced configuration options in Apache Solr.  Although I'm new to Apache Solr,  I have to say that from a website owner's perspective the implementation of Apache Search was extremely easy.  After I signed up for the service on the network, implementing Acquia Search within the Acquia Drupal CMS was just a matter of activating the appropriate modules and waiting for my content to be indexed by the server.  Acquia Search works straight "out of the box" and I couldn't have asked for anything simpler.