When talking about social business, the new and broad beyond-the-tools term for social media, newsletters are often completely ignored as a channel. Several member interviews we’ve conducted recently confirms that email-based newsletters continue to be a highly effective and successful way to engage with the audience. A newsletter may be old-fashioned in the opinion of some, but it does provide a tested and proven way to interact with customers. Yet, apart from e-commerce sites, very few organisations seem to pay much attention to newsletters. Headshift, a London-based everything-social consultancy has this somewhat focused definition of social business: “The rise of the social [ more ]

Optical Image Technology (OIT) and client Panhandle Farmers Mutual Insurance Company of West Virginia has been named one of three national finalists for the 2010 AIIM Carl E. Nelson Best Practices Award in the small company category.  The award recognizes excellence in the field of enterprise content management (ECM) technology, showcasing projects that have achieved a strong return on investment.  The “best practices” designation denotes processes that are quantifiable, adaptable, and repeatable.    One of the first insurers in the region to transition from paper to electronic files and processing, Panhandle implemented OIT’s DocFinity® document and content [ more ]

Drupal's "premier conference" is quickly approaching. This Drupal conference is known as DrupalCon and will be held in San Francisco from April 19-21, 2010. As with previous years, the unofficial theme of the conference is to "learn about all things Drupal". If the conference sessions aren't enough, the schedule is also packed with plenty of development, documentation, and training events that are being held the days prior to and following the conference. Presently over 1500 people have signed up to attend the conference. The price of attending a DrupalCon has always been reasonably priced which is one of the reasons this conference always sees a high turnout rate. If you plan on attending [ more ]

According to the Guardian (see BBC tells news staff to embrace social media).  BBC news journalists have been advised to use social media as a primary source of information by Peter Horrocks, the new director of BBC Global News. He took over last week and said it was important for editorial staff to make better use of social media and become more collaborative in producing stories. They quote him, "This isn't just a kind of fad from someone who's an enthusiast of technology. I'm afraid you're not doing your job if you can't do those things. It's not discretionary." I would agree. Getting material for articles is one of several ways that [ more ]

Delivery has been uppermost in my mind recently. My wife is expecting a second child but this one decided he doesn’t want to head in the right direction. Next week he’ll be “from his mother’s womb untimely ripp’d”. Consequently I’ve been thinking heavily both about caesarean delivery and about a number of projects which now share a common delivery date. If I were project managing this birth, I’d just be cajoling the baby to get into position but quite frankly wouldn’t be offering much value. Is this the same for web projects? Do project managers actually help and how can you get more out of them? According to Douglas Adams’ [ more ]

Integrating Microsoft ASP.NET into RedDot CMSLearn it the right way here Is it easy to integrate .NET into your RedDot CMS project? Yes it is, if you know how and obey some simple rules. This article gives you a best practice on how to include any .NET functionality for your published website within your RedDot CMS templates. If you can avoid using inline code within your RedDot Content Classes then do it Inline code within a content class can’t be versioned as it could be with a version control system when developing standard .NET solutions outside of any CMS. You can’t develop or test properly using inline code within the CMS. Whenever you have to change the .NET part of your [ more ]

Today's management tip "How to Retain Talent in a Recovery" from Harvard Business Online is so simple, yet so very true:In an economic recovery, top talent — fed up with no bonuses and low morale — may want to jump ship as soon as the job market picks up. Here are three things you can do to keep your top talent where they are:Launch efforts to rebuild trust. One of the things that suffers most in a recession is the trust between employees and employers. Show your employees that what was done in survival mode is not the norm going forward.Adjust compensation and benefits. Keep your radar tuned to the job market and any signs that it is heating up. Adjust salaries to make up for lost [ more ]

Tiki has released updates for both current release branches: 3.5 and 4.2. Both updates include bug fixes, feature polishing, and security updates. All Tiki sites are strongly encouraged to update to the latest version to take advantage of security fixes and updates. See the download page at TikiWiki.org to determine which branch (3.x or 4.x) best suits your needs. Coming Soon: Tiki 5 The next major release, Tiki 5, is planned for April 2010 and will include many new features including shopping cart and payment support, improved translation/multilingual support, an advanced rating and scoring system, workspaces, performance improvements, and much more. See the Tiki 5 documentation for [ more ]

All Drupal developers have experienced this nightmare. You have been creating a great project, now it’s time to deploy it. No one wants to deal with it. No one wants to be the responsible of doing it. If you are building a simple site, and there’s only a one time deployment, it’s not a big deal. You just have to follow the largely discussed and know simple rules. The Rules: Use SVN (or CVS) to keep your code updated among the developers Deploy to production by backing up/restoring the database Create scripts to make the deployment process automatic That’s all, the unique problem you could have is maybe that you will have to delete the test content/users and change some settings [ more ]

Here is the eleventh in a new series of posts that provide access to my favorite tweets that contain links to useful information.  Some of these I did to link to things I found useful and others are RTs that I want to save for the same reason. Since Twitter archiving is an oxymoron, I am now going to post my favorite links for the month so they can be easily accessed later. I will repeat this once or twice a month depending on volume. I spot tested the reduced shortened urls and they all should work. I hope this is also useful for you.  Let me know your favorite tweets for the month. Also see the Darwineco favorite tweets. A framework for social learning in enterprise [ more ]