One of the comments Macromedia's Senior Product Manager, Craig Barberich, made last week at the Gilbane conference was that he wished the company had started working on its server-based "Web Publishing System" product sooner. Macromedia's desktop-based publishing product, Contribute, has seen some large installations, especially in organizations that know they are going to need 2 or more years to clean up and migrate to a real CMS. We call this the "starter home" approach, but you know what will happen down the road, don't you? Employees are not going to want to leave their familiar Contribute environments. Thus the growing competition among vendors -- including Macromedia, but now also Serena -- to build Contribute front-ends onto their CMS tools...
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Want to know when CMS Watch publishes a new feature article? Consider plopping our free syndication feed onto your Intranet You'll need to transform it from XML (RSS format). For more details on (and tools for) RSS, check out the article Karl Fast wrote in the pages of this site...
The CMSWatch RSS Feed
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The Perl scripting language has fantastic text-manipulation tools, broad support, and now an object-based orientation, so the apparent dearth of Perl-based CM packages has sometimes become a source of jokes in the community. Lines like "last thing a Perl hacker wants to do is build a tool for end-users to manage websites." Well, look closely under the covers at Interwoven and eGrail (i.e. bypass their whitepapers singing about J2EE) and what do you see? Back ends written wholly in Perl. Of course, CMS Watch Report readers know eGrail and Interwoven don't need to use Perl at run-time (where it is slow), just to pregenerate static pages for production webservers to dish up...
Visit eGrail or Interwoven.
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Earlier this month we posted about a government-funded open-source solutions center
in the UK. In Denmark, the government is active too, but in a different way. WebOffice is one of 181 registered
active CMS tools in that small country.
WebOffice stands out from the crowd, as it has been developed by KMD
a publicly-funded systems integrator. Sold by KMD, the system is
used by several municipalities, counties, and other public organizations.
KMD has recently also partnered with local vendor Sitecore, which they tend
to implement on larger projects. Still it seems awkward that Danish tax funds are
going to subsidize a proprietary CMS when there are so many other options, commercial
or open-source, small or large, available.
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Our latest web content management technology research suggests that Big Blue is falling behind its major competitors
in the Web CMS marketplace. To quote:
IBM's Workplace Web Content Management (WWCM) product remains a generation behind, and it is conceivable that IBM may simply elect to acquire a WCM vendor to fill the gap. CMS Watch cautions that IBM WWCM customers may risk the kind of painful upgrade or even replacement of the kind endured by Microsoft Content Management Server (MCMS) licensees when Redmond rewrote that tool under SharePoint.
Read more here.
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Much has been made of IBM's acquisition of boutique CMS vendor, Aptrix. It was a nice pick-up for IBM, but not likely to shake up the CMS marketplace very much. The Aprtrix toolset is all Big Blue: it's built around Lotus and Domino. That's useful for CMS buyers who have already made an investment in those platforms, but not likely to provide a general solution in the marketplace at large. Also, a lot of Lotus Notes shops want to manage their web content in a different, friendlier interface...
Read more about Aptrix
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Today we released the latest update to our Web CMS Report 2008, which evaluates 40 vendors across 2 editions (Global and European). As
always, we saw some incremental changes in certain tools, and bigger shifts in
others.
With this edition, we start to pay closer attention to hosted ("SaaS")
solutions, including coverage of Marqui and OmniUpdate. Our press release highlights
some of the growing energy we see around SaaS-based web content management solutions,
at least in North America...
Well, there's a lot to say about the new XML support in Office 11 (now an early beta) and the implications for CMS. With the exception of the nifty (and badly needed!) XSLT generator in Front Page, much of Office's XML conversion technology appears to mimic toolsets already available from 3rd-parties. The key here, though, is that this is Microsoft giving up the binary ghost. And with XML facilities broadly available at the desktop, no need anymore for unsightly XML editors or supporting separate plug-ins. This could be huge...
Go to Microsoft's XML-and-Office 11 page
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A recent IBM Systems Journal surveyed
open-source Web CMS tool, MMBase (pdf). The history of MMBase is strikingly
similar to other open-source projects: a CMS application gets developed by major media
firm; source opened up for broader support; mostly regional base of supporters
catches on; community struggles to get to the next level. It's
a good story well told, and an important one to understand if you're going to
consider any open-source business tool. Thanks to Martin White for the pointer.
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OSCOM (Open Source CMS association) is organizing another "hackathon" to encourage development and -- dare we hope! -- inter-project cooperation on open-source client tools. Held during late January in Zurich, Switzerland, this hackathon, or "sprint," will focus on various open-source authoring approaches, such as Twingle, Bitflux, and plain old Mozilla...
Sign up to Participate
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