“What can we do to call more attention to the problem of Information Overload?” is a question I still hear regularly.   Last year we came up with an answer:  participate in Information Overload Awareness Day, a new workplace observance that calls attention to the problem of information overload and how it impacts both individuals and [...]

I went back to the Onset Blues Festival for the fifth straight time a few weeks ago It has become an essential part of summer for me. This year I saw the last three acts and they were all great…

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 LavaCon Conference on Digital Media and Content Strategies (September 29–October 2 in San Diego) is sure to be one of this year’s best conferences. Now in its 8th year, LavaCon has expanded from its technical communication and training roots to include topics of interest to all professional communication pros. Whether you are a marketing manager trying to develop a plan to manage a social networking campaign, a technical writer trying to get control of your content creation, management and delivery processes, or an business or project manager trying to understand the rapidly-changing content technology landscape, this event is for you.

This year’s theme — How to develop, manage and publish digital content that enhances the customer experience, reduces production costs and promotes your online brand — has broad appeal and should attract a diverse audience of content professionals seeking insight into how they can solve some of today’s most pressing digital media challenges.

Jack Molisani, executive director, lavacon

“To attract and engage the next generation of tech-savvy customers, we must do more than just write content—we must deliver user-optimized content when the customer wants it, where the customer wants it, and in the format the customer wants it,” says LavaCon Executive Director, Jack Molisani.


“But before we can do that, we first have to discover what our customers need and want, estimate cost and ROI, build a business case for securing the needed resources, recruit and manage the right people, select and implement the right tools, assess and manage stakeholder expectations, create and publish the content, translate the content into multiple languages for multiple platforms—and, of course, bring the project in on-time and on-budget while overcoming office politics and resistance to change along the way,” he adds.

Jolynn Atkins

Day one (September 29) starts off with a three-hour Social Media Marketing Bootcamp taught by Jolynn Atkins, Manager of Consulting Solutions, Escoe Bliss Professional Resources.

Later that day, DK of MediaSnackers presents a two-and-a-half hour workshop entitled, Social Media for Executives, Business Owners and Entrepreneurs, which is immediately followed by a two-hour workshop from Social Media Consultant CJ Lucke and Events Marketer Richie Edquid entitled Foursquare Marketing Workshop for Bars, Restaurants and Retail Stores.

That evening the organizers present a welcome reception and offer a walking tour of the Gaslamp Quarter of San Diego.

Neal Schaffer

Day two kicks off with an opening presentation from Neal Schaffer, author and president of Windmills Marketing, whose opening session, “The State of Social Media in 2010: Why Every Business Needs a Social Media Strategy…NOW!” looks great.

Ann Rockley

Following Schaffer is a must-attend session on Intelligent Content by Ann Rockley, president of The Rockley Group, and author of Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy and DITA 101: Fundamentals of the Darwin Information Typing Architecture for Authors and Managers.

Fourteen more sessions are offered throughout day two on topics including: documentation in agile environments, branding yourself and your projects, media-rich interactive content, collaboration technology, calculating ROI for social media, online branding strategies. A special lunchtime features session by Crosby Noricks of Red Door Interactive entitled You’re Only As Good As Your Last Tweet promises to offer up some twitterific advice for those still struggling to master to popular microblogging service.

Scott Abel

Day three kicks off with yours truly, Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler. My session, Get Ready for Socially-Enabled Everything, will cover the features that make social networks so popular and that help us create better customer experiences. Attendees will discover how socially-enabled eBooks, training materials, mobile phones, product documentation, video games, music, and cable television are changing the way we work, socialize, learn ann interact.

I’m followed by Rahel Bailie of Intentional Design, whose session Creating a Content Strategy will explore the issues, challenges, and tasks involved in creating a content strategy designed to support your business goals.

The remainder of day three is chocked full of 16 presentations covering topics including social media, dynamic content, controlling vocabulary, content reuse, Sharepoint, 3D training and demonstration videos, and minimalism.

Mark Fidelman

I’d be remiss if I didn’t also highlight the luncheon presenter for the day, Mark Fidelman of MindTouch Software whose session Why Content Strategists are the Next Corporate Rock Stars. I’m excited about this presentation as I have called myself a content strategist for 7 years now and I think it’s finally catching on. Mark has great insight into the issues surrounding the importance of content being treated as a business asset worthy of being managed efficiently and effectively, in short, governed by a strategy and implemented by content strategists. Don’t miss this session!

DON’T miss the behind-the-scenes tour of seaworld

The final day of LavaCon includes 20 individual sessions on topics including: effective machine translation, XML authoring and DITA, single-sourcing, mobile content, eLearning, and HTML . A lunchtime presentation from Senior Product Evangelist, RJ Jacquez of Adobe Systems will serve as the closing keynote, although don’t plan on leaving at the end of the day. There’s an off-site event planned that will blow your mind: A behind-the-scenes-tour of Sea World.

Overall, I’d say LavaCon is one of the best conference values around this year. It’s an intimate event that should attract content professionals from a variety of industry sectors. Whether you’re interested in content marketing, content management, social networking, mobile content, technical communication, or digital publishing, this is one event you don’t want to miss.

This past weekend, I returned from a two week camping vacation in the mountains of Colorado. During those two weeks of little Internet connection…a lot of good content management stories came my way via email but were not posted here at CMS Report. I’ve decided to go through my mailbag this week and post some of the better stories that were missed in my absence.

A couple weeks ago, Stefane Fermigier sent us an email regarding the release of Nuxeo EP and DM 5.3.2, an ECM Platform and Document Management application. Stefane writes:

I’m very happy to announce that we have released Nuxeo EP and DM 5.3.2 today.

The release notes are here:

http://blogs.nuxeo.com/dev/2010/07/nuxeo-dm-532-is-available.html

Many thanks to everyone who has contributed to this release, which I believe is the strongest we’ve done so far, and also the one that took the less effort to create thanks to the build and QA process we’ve put in place in the last year.

We have other new releases coming up in the following days: Nuxeo DAM 1.1 and Nuxeo CMF, and the next release of Nuxeo DM will be Nuxeo DM 5.4, scheduled around October this year.

Remember also that we have the Nuxeo World conference in November: http://www.nuxeo.com/about/events/nuxeoworld2010

Meanwhile, I hope you will enjoy using Nuxeo DM 5.3.2. We’ve upgraded our intranet to use this version (over 5.3.1) in the final days of testing the new release, and I can tell you it is noticeably snappier and overall more pleasant to use than the 5.3.1.

You can find additional details of this new version of Nuxeo on Stefane’s blog. I’ve also embedded a video on what’s new in Nuxeo DM 5.3 below.

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Nashua, New Hampshire, USA – Kentico Software (http://www.kentico.com), the Web content management system vendor, announced that its first annual customer conference – the Kentico Connection – will be held this year at the Andel’s Hotel in Prague, Czech Republic on October 18-20.

“The purpose of the Kentico Connection 2010 conference is to get the whole Kentico community together and enjoy three days of learning, sharing experience and getting answers to your questions,” notes Petr Palas, Kentico CEO and founder.  “Anybody who is already using Kentico or plans to use it in the future is welcome to attend the conference. This three-day event will provide valuable content and an opportunity to talk to the Kentico development team.“

The conference highlights include detailed technical sessions on the Kentico technology platform, an “Ask the Experts” panel discussion where you can meet the Kentico development team, a sneak peak into Kentico CMS 6.0 and what Kentico is planning for upcoming year, and a sharing of your experience with fellow colleagues and partners. All sessions are organized into two tracks – the Business Track, focused on content editors, marketers and anybody who wants to get high-level information about Kentico CMS, and the Technology Track, focused on web developers, web designers and project managers who want to create great websites.

The Kentico Connection 2010 venue will be in Andel’s Hotel in Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic and one of the most beautiful cities in the world. In 1992, the historical core of the city was listed in the UNESCO Register.

The early bird price is $650 and expires on August 31, 2010.  Attendees can register at the Kentico Connection 2010 website (http://connection.kentico.com/) and follow ongoing news about the event on (http://twitter.com/kenticocms).

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Adobe has gotten into the content management business, with its announcement earlier today of its intent to acquire Day software for $240 million. Day –with its WCM, DAM, and collaboration offerings — has had a good deal of buzz over the last year or so. Why? Mostly due to a renewed marketing push, demo-friendly products, and occasional uncertainty around competitors due to acquisitions (Interwoven, Vignette) . Day was one of the few remaining independent WCM vendors with enterprise credentials and was ripe for the picking, particularly given the strength of its WCM product. Adobe, of course, brings its document, creative authoring, and rich Internet application development tools to the table.

With the Day deal and last year’s Omniture acquisition, Adobe continues to assemble components of the online customer engagement ecosystem that we wrote about earlier this year. What’s interesting is which vendors are approaching this ecosystem — from the standpoint of ECM (IBM, Oracle/Stellent, Open Text/Vignette), marketing software (Alterian/MediaSurface), enterprise search (Autonomy/Interwoven), and now creativity software/interactive Web applications (Adobe).

So, what does this deal mean for content and collaboration pros?

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I have written about
CubeTree several times. The most recent was Cubetree engages its user community in product development. I also met a number of their executives at the last
year’s Enterprise 2.0 conference so I was interested to learn that they have
recently been acquired by SuccessFactors,
another firm I have covered (see SuccessFactors: Bringing Web 2.0 to Talent Management). SuccessFactors is one of the
world’s most widely deployed cloud-based business solutions. It is used by more
than 8 million people within over 3,000 companies.

Recently, I spoke with Carlin Wiegner, the CubeTree
CEO, about the impact of this acquisition and how CubeTree will fit within
SuccessFactors.  First, he said
that this move is opening a many more doors for them given the large installed
base, new use cases in areas such as learning, and a larger sales force that
SuccessFactors offers.  There is
also great synergy between the two offerings. SuccessFactors has recently
broadened their offering with the BizX performance management system that
offers more robust support for knowledge workers.

The addition of Cubetree can take this BizX support
to the next level with its many collaboration features. Individuals can quickly
create rich profiles and begin engaging with others in their organization to
get work done, find co-workers who can help, and share insights as they happen. Teams
can make use of workspaces that
enable groups to immediately gather around a project, collaborate, share
documents and perform work tasks. Ciubetree also
provides executive dashboards that offer insights into
how a company is executing on a day-to-day basis. 

CubeTree will remain a
separate brand as SucessFactors wanted CubeTree’s capabilities to both extend
its own offerings and as an independent, but well aligned, offering.  For example, the SuccessFactor employee
profile will now have CubeTree’s related communication and collaboration
activities embedded within it. 
Other aspects of CubeTree will findtheir way into the appropriate
SuccessFactors offerings. The CubeTree micro-blogging feature will be embedded
within SuccessFactors but also remain a separate free offering. 

Below is a sample screen
from the micro-blogging feature. In this case you see a status update "in
progress" where an employee is letting his co-workers know that he has
wrapped up his current project and where he will be if they need him for the
rest of the day. The CubeTree micro-blogging
capability also integrates with Twitter. Below we see the same employee sending a notice
about the release notes post to a customer who had a question about new
features in this weeks release. By adding a custom hash tag (#cubetree) to his
Twitter update it is posted to his CubeTree feed. He then adds a comment back
that he is pushing it live on the blog.

CubeTree provides
micro-blogging as a free feature and the other capabilities comes in a
commercial package. I think this is a smart move as micro-blogging is the
perfect way to introduce your offerings within an enterprise. It is easy to
install and does not require integration with business process to obtain
initial benefits. It can then be spread virally throughout an enterprise to
quickly demonstrate value.

I also asked Carlin about
what new features that CubeTree has introduced since our last conversation.
They do frequent releases for continuous improvement but one of the main areas
they have focused on is more robust email integration. CubeTree can work with
any email client as it is not a plug in. Instead it sends messages that appear
to the email client like any other message. This allows users to stay within
email for many CubeTree activities. You can also have very robust email alert
settings that can be easily turned on and off. Below you can see some of the
robust email settings.

To complement the email
integration there is also very robust mobile capabilities. Below you can see a
message on a mobile device. The user is replying to an instant
notification and posting it back to CubeTree

I like this combination
as SuccessFactors and CubeTree nicely complement each other without bring
redundancies to sort out.  Carlin
said they sorted through several possible mergers. I do not know the other
possibilities but I think they made a good choice. 

As I  have done each and every year,  I will be taking my annual break from technology. From now through August, I’ll be posting and managing the site a little less. I won’t be abandoning CMS Report, but you will be seeing me a little less.

During the summer months, I like to slow down my technology usage for a few weeks. I don’t think as human beings we were meant to be immersed in the huge quantity of today’s digital information. From the moment we are awake to the moment we go to bed, our bodies are being loaded with information. The email, cell phone, and the Internet seem to have a never ending presence in the lives of us IT folks. I don’t have much control with removing technology from my work day, but I do have options in my personal life. It’s time for me to unplug and officially begin Technology Break 2010.

My slogan for Tech Break 2010 is Run, run as fast as you can! Why the sense of this urgency in this year’s slogan?  Well, last year’s slogan of Blog less, Relax more didn’t do me much good in 2009 as I failed miserably to stay away from the tech. This year, it’s going to be even more difficult as today’s smartphones pretty much means we now wear a computer tied to our hip. I have a feeling the result of this exercise is that I will end up spending less time with technology, but it will be near impossible to take a complete break from the geek life I’ve lived with for so long.

As always, I appreciate help in any articles submitted to CMSReport.com.  If you want to really help out, create an account today and start contributing your own CMS stories. I’ll be checking email now and then for submitted posts so we make sure you’re not waiting too long to see your story published. Have a good rest of the summer!

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I recently
wrote that collaborative applications market remains strong. Here is more good
news as Businessweek reports that IDC predicts that global tech
spending is set to rise by 3.8 percent, to $1.5 trillion this year after
falling by 4.2 percent in 2009. In addition, Gartner predicts a surge in
worldwide personal computer shipments—which are on track to rise 22 percent
this year.

In my last post on collaborative
applications I mentioned the potential success of best of breed players. The
Businessweek report suggests that large players, Microsoft, Dell, Oracle, Adobe
Systems and others have all reported strong earnings. Microsoft has sold 150
million copies of Windows 7 since its debut in October, making it the
fastest-selling operating system in the company's history. Despite this Apple
recently pulled ahead of it in market capitalization, at least for the moment.

In another survey by
KPMG, tech executives indicate excitement over the newer, high-growth areas
such as mobile computing, cloud-based software, and applications that can
smartly analyze reams of data. Part of the growth is coming from newer markets.
Sixty percent of tech executives surveyed by KPMG said they expect China to
contribute more than any other country to their revenue growth over the next
year.

Let the good news keeping rolling in.