Bryan Ruby

The first time I heard the mention of customer experience management was at CMS Expo 2012. In one of the sessions, Robert Rose spent much of his time at the Expo warning the audience that content management systems need to do more than just content management. Rose believed experience management needed to be given a higher priority over web content management. Yesterday, DNN announced with Evoq 8 they are now ready to "move beyond web content management" and enable "marketers to publish, personalize, and measure content anywhere online". The improvements in Evoq 8 are focused on today's marketing needs for better customer engagement. 

This week, Nuxeo announced the availability of Nuxeo Platform Fast Track 7.1 (FT 7.1).  The Nuxeo Platform is the company's flagship product, a "highly customizable and extensible content management platform for building business applications". FT 7.1 follows November's release of Long Term Support (LTS) 6.0 and continues a very aggressive roadmap of continuous improvements for the platform leading up to LTS 8.0 by year's end. 

Among the platform enhancements and improvements are a new service for metadata read and write on binaries, computed image views, extended field constraints, a new reference engine and a streamlined workflow graph editor.

Almost a year ago to this date, Sitecore and Microsoft announced they would collaborate on an offering to bring the best of experience marketing and commerce together. Today, Sitecore announced at the National Retail Federation’s Annual Convention in New York the availability of Sitecore Commerce 8 powered by Microsoft Dynamics. This solution is intended to enable enterprises to bridge the gap between in-store and digital experiences.

Kentico, a provider in Web content and customer experience management,  just released a new version of their content management system, Kentico 8.2. This new version provides several new and improved features with the primary focus on collaboration and ecommerce. Kentico 8.2 also offers improvements that the software developers believe will help businesses launch and manage digital marketing campaigns faster and easier than previous versions.

Welcome to the last article of 2014. This year, CMS Report published over 280 articles related to content management systems, content strategy, business strategy, and information technology. During this time we also declined about an equal amount of articles that weren't quite right for our readers. In each case, I'm grateful for the many authors that submitted their articles for review and publication. 

Somewhere along the way, I admittedly lost sight of TYPO3. It's not that I ever thought TYPO3 wasn't a good content management system but it never seemed like there was ever a lot of exciting things to write about TYPO3. When a CMS has a history that dates all the way back to the late 1990', well it's difficult to shake it off as as anything but a legacy application. So in my slumber I failed to notice that there was a new CMS on the radar, TYPO3 Neos.

I was recently asked by the Argus Leader, a local newspaper in Sioux Falls, to give my two cents on the controversial South Dakota #DontJerkandDrive campaign. Since then the article has been syndicated out to USA Today and other publications. It seems that I caught the attention of a reporter when I labeled the campaign as "brilliant" on Twitter.

When I talk about Drupal, information technology and the weather all in the same breath, I'm known to be very enthusiastic and opinionated in such discussions. I can't help myself. I'm biased toward Drupal as it is one of my favorite content management systems. I'm also a former meteorologist working in information technology for a very large organization that is heavily involved with the weather. Needless to say, a year or two ago when I heard that The Weather Channel started using Drupal to meet the needs of it's customers and meteorologists, it caught my attention.

Over the years, I've talked about building a range of simple websites for personal use to implementing very complicated proprietary and open source enterprise content management systems. What I haven't talked about is the cost of building and maintaining those websites. Honestly, I've been too embarrassed for how little I spend and too stunned by the price tag for what the big companies pay for their websites. Who Is Hosting This? sent us a graphic that we thought represented the typical costs small to medium size businesses can expect when building and hosting their new websites. So good was the infographic that we decided to post it here.

For the first time in 15 years, my family doesn't have a website to call their own. In January 2000, I registered the domain Bryansplace.com. This was the first website I ever built outside of work and it became a sandbox for me to express my interests as well as a way to seek personal growth. From handwritten HTML pages, a detour with Frontpage, and eventually to a number of CMSs, the software and content at Bryansplace evolved as my life evolved.