Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware has been awarded a 2010 Bossie award (Best of Open Source Software) by InfoWorld, in the Applications category. InfoWorld’s Best of Open Source Software Awards (aka the Bossies) is chosen annually by Test Center editors and reviewers, and recognize the best open source software for business users.

The editors called Tiki “a powerful, integrated, Web-based application” that can “build and maintain websites, wikis, groupware, CMSes, forums, blogs, and bug trackers, as well as make them multilingual.”

The review continues, citing Tiki’s “fine-grained role-based privilege system” as a differentiating factor against classic wiki models, such as MediaWiki. Read the full article on InfoWorld.a: http://www.infoworld.com/d/open-source/b… .

And don’t forget to nominate Tiki for the Packt 2010 Open Source Awards  (http://info.tikiwiki.org/article105).

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I began to think what a deed I’d done.
I grabbed my hat and I began to run.
I made a god run but I ran too slow;
They overtook me down in Jericho
- IN SEARCH OF LITTLE SADIE

Lordy, has it been a year already? Sure has. The 2010 Gartner Magic Quadrant for WCM is out. You can get the report here courtesy of our friends at SiteCore. As usual it is worth a read, but here is the juicy bit:

I’ve marked the guys that have improved a reasonable amount with a green line, indicating where they’ve moved to since 2009. No-one has really slipped, although a few have vanished. EMC have given up on WCM and are partnering with Fatwire instead. Vignette and Nstein are also now part of the Open Text dot. Expect to see Day replaced by Adobe on here in 2011.

They’ve stuck with the same Big Three (Oracle, Automony/Interwoven and Open Text) in the lead as last time. Two other Big Guys – Microsoft and IBM – are inching closer to the Leader Quadrant. It does seem that to be near the top of the “ability to execute” axis, you need to be a massive company and have technology that is at least ten years old. I ranted about this last year, and the same thoughts apply. I should point out that this dimension is defined as “how well a vendor sells and supports its WCM products and services“, not on the success of implementations or happiness of customers. If you want to get the products with the most marketing dollars behind them, this is the axis for you.

The Open Text logic still confounds me. Here is how I see it. In 2009, Open Text was one of the three leaders, based on what I can only assume was The Product Formerly Known As RedDot. Vignette and Nstein were lingering in the shitty quadrant (VIGN on the border, admittedly). So my only conclusion is that RedDot was the favoured product in the eyes of Gartner. However, my spider senses (and OTEX staff layoffs) tell me RedDot is on its way out and the Vignette WCM product is the Chosen One. So I’d have expected the Gartner folk to move OTEX further into the danger zone, but the uncertainly and product direction have actually given them a boost.

The tussle between the younger upstarts is as close as ever. The Java vendors (FatWire and Day) have gained slightly on the .NET ones (SiteCore, Ektron). The Java/.NET hybrid, SDL, keeps its nose in front. I think we’ll see bigger gaps in 2011.

Last year, I noted that poor EPiServer had got a bit of a raw deal. That’s been fixed. I’ve always felt they should be sitting right next to SiteCore on this thing. And CoreMedia also got a big bonus. Alterian got a little boost, but they’re still in the quadrant of despair.

There are two new vendors on there, Atex and Dynamicweb. I’ve heard of the latter but never seen them. And only heard of Atex when they aquired Polopoly as few years ago. Never seen their product either, so not comments here.

Still no Open Source vendors on here, for the same revenue related reasons as last time. I’m not going over all that again.

Most of these little yellow dots haven’t drifted very far in a year – the report is pretty similar despite the M&A activity that has kept us bloggers busy. So pretty much a repeat of last year. And, like last year, here is hoping Gartner’s lawyers don’t serve me any takedown notices.

The 2010 Open Source Awards was launched yesterday by Packt, inviting people to visit www.PacktPub.com and submit nominations for their favorite Open Source project. Now in its fifth year, the Award has been adapted from the established Open Source CMS Award with the wider aim of encouraging, supporting, recognizing and rewarding all Open Source projects.

WordPress won the 2009 Open Source Content Management System (CMS) Award in what was a very close contest with MODx and SilverStripe. While MODx was the first runner up, SilverStripe, a Most Promising CMS Award winner in 2008, made its way to the second runner up position in its first year in the Open Source CMS Award final.

The 2010 Award will feature a prize fund of $24,000 with several new categories introduced. While the Open Source CMS Award category will continue to recognize the best content management system, Packt is introducing categories for the Most Promising Open Source Project, Open Source E-Commerce Applications, Open Source JavaScript Libraries and Open Source Graphics Software. CMSes that won the Overall CMS Award in previous years will continue to compete against one another in the Hall of Fame CMS category.

These new categories will ensure that the Open Source Awards is the ultimate platform to recognise excellence within the community while supporting projects both new and old. “We believe that the adaption of the Award and the new categories will provide a new level of accessibility, with the Award recognizing a wider range of Open Source projects; both previous winners while at the same time, encouraging new projects” said Julian Copes, organizer of this year’s Awards.

Packt has opened up nominations for people to submit their favorite Open Source projects for each category at www.PacktPub.com/open-source-awards-home . The top five in each category will go through to the final, which begins in the last week of September. For more information on the categories, please visit Packt’s website at www.PacktPub.com/blog/packt’s-2010-open-source-awards-announcement

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All the tired horses in the sun
How’m I supposed to get any ridin’ done? Hmm.
- ALL THE TIRED HORSES

Where there is smoke, there is fire. In this case, it’ll be a shitstorm of a fire that’ll consume everything useful in it’s path. A bit like a Scorched Earth Campaign of Content Management.

Of course I’m talking about the Autonomy/Open Text speculation here (@hakana), here (@ldallasBMOC) and here (@piewords). In truth, the few rumours are, according to the crowds, highly unlikely to have any substance so this whole post is a waste of time. Apart from photos of CEOs in bed with hookers, no-one in Twitterville can produce a single good reason for it that I can swallow. But if this post even slightly reduces the miniscule chance of this joke of a deal materialising, it’s time well spent.

The whole is less than the sum of the parts

Onward. It’s pretty clear there is no way that this deal could make a new sale more likely. The number of different CMS and search products The Firm would have warrants the invention of a new Collective Noun. How about a Gaggle of Products? Or Confusion of Products. Or Mindfuck of Products? Should some poor customer go through a vendor selection exercise and pick Opentonomytext, they’d need to go through another one to pick the product. Ain’t gonna happen.

And the poor existing customers. Following the Open Text/Vignette deal, many poor customers are still wondering whether or when their product will be discontinued. They’re playing Russian Roulette with about 2 bullets in the chamber. If this deal happens, they’ll have about 4 bullets. Some will jump ship, so the whole idea of creating a maintenance revenue cash cow doesn’t make sense either. In simple maths terms: (Autonomy Maintenance 2011) + (Open Text Maintenance 2011) < (Opentonomytext Maintenance 2011).

Spare a thought for the search engineers at Vignette. They OEM’ed Autonomy as their search for years. “Best of Breed”, they all cried. Then arch-rival Interwoven was aquired by Autonomy. “We’re not paying our arch rival cash every time we sell a product”, they  cried. “Autonomy is a piece of shit. Let’s embed the Open Text search engine.” So they did. Hopefully they didn’t delete the code, cause they may be flipping it back pretty soon.

And spare a thought for yours truly. I’ve pushed my MS Paint skills to the limit creating the Super Spliced Open Text Logo. I think the only way I could make a logo for the new beast is on a Möbius strip, and I don’t have any lying around.

Now I’m not saying that the road ahead for either company is paved with gold. But they’ve both got some good products, some great people and a fair bit of cash. If they roll up their sleeves and innovate, they might just be okay. If they keep playing Pass The Parcel with products that develop more slowly than tectonic plates, they’re toast. Wait! Hold on a second! What’s that putrid smell? Oh, look, it’s an an elephant graveyard. And elephants don’t make good software. Especially dead ones.

P.S. Remember, this isn’t actually going to happen. Surely. They’re gonna buy someone else. Answers on a postcard.

The Solution Exchange Platform (beta)
Not perfect – but you can help and make it better!

Open Text introduces a new community platform called “Solution Exchange”

Over the last few months I was part of a not so secret mission. I have been in regular contact over the last 10 months with Danny Baggs who up until recently worked as a Solutions Architect for Open Text and has close ties with the core team located in Oldenburg, Germany. We talked about plugins, the innovation within the community, and how users could participate and share their ideas with each other better. Over the course of these discussions, the “Solution Exchange” project was born! Initially named “SolutionsExchange”, the platform’s primary purpose was to be an extension repository come app store, providing a single point for those in the community to find out about the different plugins and solutions that exist across the web today.
At some point we had to remove the “s” in the middle of the project name due to x-rated obvious, subtle, ..well double meaning reasons..
Starting as a base for plugins and extensions to the just CMS it was soon clear that this platform could provide a whole lot more than an extension repository.

The Solution Exchange launched into an early beta in March 2010 and was on horribly slow temporary hardware. It has since been moved to Open Text’s dedicated and managed data center in Waterloo, Canada, which not only shows the support that Open Text are giving this platform but also provides a stable foundation from which the platform can evolve.

Beta and the mix of RedDot & Vignette

The site is still currently in beta, which makes perfect sense whilst it gains momentum and issues are worked through. I also now know that Open Text has re-structured its business somewhat recently with Danny moving into a dedicated Community Manager role for the platform. This is again great news and shows Open Text’s intentions to help support us, the community, better. The site itself is made up of the core Web Site Management products (the RedDot Management and Delivery Server) but is also complimented with technology made available through Open Text’s acquisition of Vignette. The product to be called “Open Text Social Communities” fits well in this setup and provides those handy little tagging, rating, commenting features as well as full blown social applications like the classic blogs, forums, and wikis. The point here being, that these once competing technologies are working collaboratively in this environment instead of continuing to compete under the Open Text umbrella.
And why, yes! I know I sound like Mr. RedDot Marketing Masterchef myself, but it actually looks like not only has Open Text has decided to eat it’s own dog food, no no no, they also seem to have reasoned and actually listened to their customer base.
The RedDot CMS is alive and gaining traction again!

So it’s beta? But what does it do at the moment?
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There is a lot of acquisition talk these days, both anticipated and real.  When you think on it, it isn’t really news.  Acquisitions are a constant in this industry, but there are two of late that indicate how things may be getting ready to change.  People keep asking me my thoughts, so I thought I would jot them down.

Keep in mind that I’m not an analyst or expert and I don’t play one on TV.  I can write a mean Haiku though.

Adobe Buys Day

If you don’t follow the CMS open source world and/or the CMS industry at large, this announcement may leave you scratching your head wondering “So what?”  Day Software has been one of the leading open source companies in the Content Management world.  They are headquartered in Europe and have been working to build a footprint here in the states.

Meanwhile, Adobe is, well, Adobe.  They are critical players in the publishing industry.  They’ve had a really neat little product called LiveCycle for a few years that you could get bundled with Alfresco or integrate into your favorite little ECM platform.

If you want a great collection of viewpoints, head over to CMS Wire.  Irina wrote a great summation of the first day of activity.  Read that before proceeding any further.

I see the fit.  I see the synergy.  I see Adobe picking up a profitable, growing, company that can fit nicely into their portfolio.  I see Day gaining broader access to the U.S. market and some substantial financial backing which will calm potential large customers.

What I don’t see is overwhelming success.

I’m not a fortune teller.  I do know this…Adobe sales people will have no idea how to sell Day.  They sell product.  They try and sell LiveCycle, and they don’t do as well as they should given the quality of the product.  Selling Content Management is even harder.  The EMC core guys have been trying to get a handle on selling Documentum to their high-spending storage customers and haven’t been succeeding.  Adobe at least starts closer, but there is no slam dunk.

Then there is all the cool stuff that will be available to users of Day’s CQ5. I’ll bet right now that there will be a license cost.  I bet they could buy it now.  I’m not saying there won’t be a better integration or that it won’t cost less, but it won’t be a magic panacea.

Meanwhile, there is one important thing to note.  Day is the first of what I call the “2nd Generation” CMS vendors to really get bought by a larger company.  The 2nd gens are maturing and becoming attractive.  I expect that more will start getting bought by people that have been waiting for that maturity so that they can get one that they want, and not whatever is left.  It won’t be quick, but the wheels are going to be turning.

Autonomy to Buy Open Text?

This is a RUMOR that has been gaining traction.  It is an interesting one though for a few reasons, not the least of it would be the reversal of roles for Open Text.  If I was a competitor of either company, there are two things I would want to happen.  I would want to perpetuate the rumor because it cause a lot of FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt).  Second, I would want it to happen.

For years Open Text has been fighting the reputation as the acquirer of all things Content Management.  Recently, Autonomy has been making a few acquisitions that were overlapping in nature as well, though not to the degree of redundancy of Open Text.

If this took place, you would have so many CMS solutions under one company that it would be almost ridiculous.  Vignette, Interwoven, iManage, LiveLink, and eDocs to name just a few.  If they came in and their first demo didn’t click, they could just show a different product until you liked one.

The only reason I can see for this deal is to build an O&M cash cow.  That’s it.  Sad though it would be, I would have to laugh at anyone that tried to make a serious argument that the resulting company was one of the leaders in the industry.

This would also create an official place where the Content Management systems of today can go and die their slow death.  It would also officially mark the passing of a significant number of the 1st Generation CMS vendors.  The ECM generation is trying to redefine themselves under pricing pressure from SharePoint, Open Source, and cloud-based solutions.  While more capable, not everyone needs all of those features.  They also cannot master the calculus required to determine the cost, competitive or not.

This also has begun to beg the question, which of the 1st generation vendors is going to evolve enough to become the “godfather” to the 2nd generation, or will they just slowly be wiped from the face of technology over the next decade?

Haiku

I hinted at a Haiku, so here we go….

Collecting money,

Not growing organically.

Oooo, shiny penny.

Dallas, TX – Thursday, July 22, 2010 – MODX, LLC, today released its flagship web content management platform, MODX Revolution 2.0. This release culminates years of effort to completely reinterpreting its award-winning popular Open Source Content Management System (CMS).

MODX Revolution is a customizable content management platform. It is built on a modern, object-oriented core with a fully documented API for developers, sits on top of a robust database Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) layer powered by its sister-project, xPDO (http://xpdo.org/).

“Revolution represents more than three years of work reinventing our classic code base,” said Ryan Thrash, CEO of MODX and the project co-founder. “We looked at what was available in both the Open Source and Commercial worlds and thought we could create something truly special and different. We did, and now we’re sharing an amazing platform for consuming APIs, managing content and creating custom web applications with the world.”

Like previous releases, MODX Revolution 2.0 gives visual designers complete control over the design, content structure and overall usability. Since design is an integral part of user experience and aids in communication, MODX leaves how the site will look, how it’s structured and how it behaves up to the project experts. MODX does not impose any restrictions whatsoever in these areas.

Organizations can harness MODX Revolution’s power, flexibility and extensibility that is synonymous with prior releases, with the performance, stability and security of enterprise-level content management applications. This includes a new caching system to improve page loads, handle more content and even leverage proven external caching mechanisms like Memcached. Further improvements include security hardening with proactive cross-site scripting prevention (XSS) and input sanitization.

MODX Revolution 2.0 boasts an all new Manager interface built using the Revolution API itself and ExtJS from Sencha. It can be customized to offer a tailored experience for site managers and editors. Features like a drag-and-drop content tree, the ability to incorporate files on the filesystem as content and linking to external content in the content structure, means controlling content is encompassing and unrestricted.

MODX Revolution 2.0 further introduces Contexts which offer a way to run multiple websites, different language versions, provide additional organizational structure, or even a custom Manager interface. Contexts bring another layer of flexibility and capability to MODX developers.

“Revolution is our future,” said Thrash. “To borrow from Spinal Tap, it takes everything people love about MODX to eleven. Not only that, but it can be tailored to your exact requirements even changing how it functions while still maintaining an upgrade path for future versions or migration from our classic code base.”

The latest release of MODX Revolution be downloaded for free at http://modxcms.com/download/

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Roberto Galoppini has an interesting case study on selecting an open source project management tool. In it, he describes his SOS Open Source methodology for filtering open source projects by looking at a number of factors organized into three categories: sustainability, industrial strength, and project strategy. The case study doesn’t go into much [...]

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The Tiki Community is proud to announce the release of its first promotional video: How to get help.

In this video, recorded in March 2010, Gary Cunningham-Lee explains how new Tiki Community members can get help with their Tiki sites. Gary is a long-time Tiki contributor and a member of the Tiki Software Community Association.

Watch the complete video at: http://bit.ly/ddczzU .

A series of video clips, released under a Creative Commons license, will be made available for interested parties. Daniel Gauthier, a member of the Tiki Community and the filmmaker of these clips says, “I’ve created these video clips for a very specific purpose: To help developers, technology decision makers and companies like ISPs who normally know about Open Source Development projects understand the richness of the Tiki Community.”

Three to five video clips will be released in the near future, each lasting three to four minutes. These “info-clips” are interviews with members of the Tiki community. In each clip, the audience learns about more about Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware, the Tiki Community and its “Wiki Way” model of software development.

Mr. Gauthier adds, “What a great way to learn about Open Source Development. Tiki Wiki is a dynamic eco-system. It grows so fast and so strong that one day, I believe it will be adopted by many more Fortune 500 companies.”

The videos also showcase the Tiki integration with Kaltura (http://www.kaltura.org/), an open source, community supported online video and rich-media solution. See http://dev.tikiwiki.org/Video for details on the Tiki+Kaltura integration.

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