Global Moxie announced the release of Big Medium 2, a web content management system aimed at web designers. Big Medium 2 has version control, workflow, search engine, content syndication, granular editing privileges, Unicode support, but also lots of grace notes for content sites: Pullquotes, image galleries, podcasts, scheduled publication, visitor comments, a WYSIWYG CSS style editor and “other goodies”. Big Medium 2 is geared for designers who want a CMS that enables flexible designs but remains easy to set up without programming skills, just basic to intermediate HTML/CSS know-how. Once the designer configures the templates, he or she can hand the site over to content editors; no technical know-how is required to add or edit pages. Enter your text, images, podcasts and document downloads into Big Medium’s editor, and the software automagically adds the necessary links and pages to your site. Big Medium’s server requirements allow you to install it in nearly any hosting environment. Big Medium is a Perl application and runs on Unix-based or Windows servers with Perl 5.6.1 or higher. Big Medium is $185 per server installation (each install can manage an unlimited number of sites and user accounts, no extra fees). It’s free to try for 30 days, and it’s also a free upgrade for all current Big Medium customers. http://www.bigmedium.com/, http://globalmoxie.com/about
Author: Frank Gilbane (Page 52 of 71)
The theme for the opening keynote panel: Content Technologies – What’s Current & What’s Coming? at our Boston conference this week is: change – and what it means for content and information management strategies.
Of course there is constant and rapid change in technology, but we are now entering an era of multiple tectonic shifts that will challenge IT and business strategists more than ever. And the changes are not all technological, even if largely caused or influenced by technology. For example, the computer-literate generation entering the workplace, consumer technology changing expectations in the workplace, and a sometimes desperate need to adjust or completely change business models.
Other fundamental changes affecting enterprise information management strategies include the speeding freight trains of mobile computing, cloud computing, enterprise software consolidation, and global e-commerce markets.
We’ll also take a look at some specific technologies and ideas that are often over-hyped or not well-understood. Many of these have an important role to play in enterprise information strategies, and the panel’s goal will be to help you think through what your expectations of them should be. Examples include technologies that go ‘beyond search’, social software networks, user-generated content, tagging, enterprise blogs and wikis, and e-books.
This is a lot to cover in an interactive 90 minutes, but our panel will certainly get you thinking, and provide some perspective for your discussions with other attendees, speakers, and exhibitors. Joining me on the panel are:
- Andrew P. McAfee, Associate Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School
- David Mendels, Senior Vice President, Enterprise & Developer Solutions Business Unit, Adobe
- Andy MacMillan, Vice President, ECM Product Management, Oracle
- David Boloker, CTO Emerging Internet Technology, Distinguished Engineer, IBM Software Group
If you are a speaker, exhibitor, or maybe just an attendee who wants to show off their Web 2.0 savvyness at Gilbane Boston in a couple of weeks, you can find some choice buzz-phrases to toss around here. A couple of my favorites:
“disintermediate A-list synergies”
“capture viral tagclouds”
“incentivize data-driven weblogs”.
The scary thing is, you can easily imagine how to explain what these might mean, possibly even with a straight face.
It’s that time of year again. Not only for our Boston conference, and the co-located Content Management Professionals Association (CM Pros) Summit, but for CM Pros members to nominate candidates for soon-to-be-open board seats. It is also a great time to join CM Pros, or at least to come to the Summit and find out what they are all about. The association is also looking for a new Executive Director. Here is the announcement from CM Pros:
Call for nominations
CM Pros is pleased to announce the call for nominations for election of the expanded board will be made at the Fall Summit on November 26, 2007. Nominations open on the day of the Summit and close on December 21, 2007. More information about the time line is available on the website.
The board is seeking enthusiastic candidates to run for four seats, bringing the board to 7 members. To qualify as a candidate, you must be a member ‘in good standing’ of CM Pros. This is an opportunity for anyone who is passionate about content management in its many forms to contribute to the continued growth of the organization.
In the words of one of the departing board members:
Ever wonder what it would be like to have weekly discussions with really smart people, about issues that you’re passionate about? What if those discussions helped shape the future of your professional organization? What if you could contribute your voice, your ideas, your creativity to those discussions and really make a difference? With the Board expanding to 7 members, there are opportunities for you to contribute and make a difference. It’s been a great adventure so far, and we’ve made tremendous progress, with more ideas and projects in the pipeline. We need good people to volunteer their time and talent to advance the profession and grow the organization. Think about it. Do it!
To nominate yourself or someone else who you believe would make a great candidate, contact the Elections Oversight Committee at elections@cmprofessionals.org before November 26th or just use the website after nominations open.
Search for a new Executive Director
In addition to board elections, there is another exciting opportunity-the next CM Pros’ Executive Director. The current ED, Scott Abel, will not be continuing in this role. As the organization matures, the board will refocus the tasks and responsibilities of the Executive Director to running a non-profit volunteer association and bringing stability to the organization as it grows. The board is seeking candidates who will initially work part time and can grow into a ‘Chief Administrative Officer’.
A search committee for the ED position has been formed, and a job description is being defined. The job posting will be available no later than November 12th. If you are interested in the position or know someone you’d like to recommend, please contact the search committee lead, Joan Lasselle, at secretary@cmprofessionals.org.
The board, on behalf of themselves and all CM Pros members, wants to thank Scott for his considerable contributions to CM Pros’ success in 2007.
CM Pros Board of Directors
email: board@cmprofessionals.org
web: http://www.cmprofessionals.org
It is always a challenge choosing speakers for our conferences. We receive many more speaking proposals than we can possibly deal with, even when we ignore those that are no more than low value sales presentations. After years of reading speaker evaluations, we also know a lot of really great speakers, and it is difficult to balance bringing proven speakers back with bringing in fresh speakers with great proposals. Anyway, we have made all the tough decisions for this month’s Boston conference, and have published the speaker list on our Events blog so you can see the illustrious group all at once. We are very grateful to our speakers who help make our conferences a unique value for our attendees. Check them out.
It seems hard to believe that we’ve been too busy to blog about our annual upcoming conference in Boston. Fortunately it has a life of its own and doesn’t depend on our blogging activity. This year’s event is our largest yet, and we’ll be blogging more regularly about it to help make sure you don’t miss some of the nuggets.
Today, I just want to note that (one of the reasons we’ve been so busy is) because have a number of research projects and studies underway, and the results of some of these will be discussed at the conference, as well as on some of our track-specific blogs. For example, Geoff blogged yesterday about the research we are doing on collaboration, social computing, and “Web 2.0” technology use in the enterprise. Geoff will be leading a panel on this and other research at the conference. Stay tuned both here and on our topic area blogs for more info on this and other research.
I spent two days last week at the Office 2.0 conference organized by Ismael Ghalimi. The first thing to say about it is that it is truly amazing what Ismael can put together in 6 weeks. As someone who has organized 60-70 conferences, my amazement and respect for what Ismael accomplished, while not unique, is probably more pronounced than others’.
What is “Office 2.0”? As far as I could tell the consensus in the opening panel “The Future of Work” (and in other sessions) was that it referred to any office-in-the-cloud tools, including but not limited to replications of Microsoft Office.
I would say “Office 2.0” is differentiated from “Web 2.0” by having mainly a business focus, and is differentiated from “Enterprise 2.0”, at least in terms of this event, by being more about the technology than the effects of its deployment on enterprise practices. There was some gentle push and pull between Microsoft and Google on the relative importance IT/workflow/regulations versus end-user/real-time-collaboration. When pushed on what they would be adding to future work environments, both Microsoft and SAP stressed the importance of business social networks.
Though not a business social network, in spite of a growing number of professionals using it that way, Facebook was discussed throughout the event. There was much hand-wringing and disagreement over whether people would combine their personal and professional activities, contacts, and information for the world to see. I find it hard to fathom, but it is clear that there are a number of people who are happy and eager to do this. However, just as we’ve said about enterprise blogging, it is important to separate the technology from the way it is used, and there is a big difference between using a tool with social computing-like functionality inside a firewall, and the way people use Facebook. I don’t think there is any doubt that social-computing technology has a large and important role to play in enterprises. Note however that the Facebook generation does not necessarily agree!
Ismael gave an in-depth presentation on his exclusive use of “Office 2.0” tools for organizing and producing the conference. This was a fascinating case study. I have to say that after hearing about Ismael’s experience I don’t think we are quite ready to try this at home, mainly because of the integration issues. We will look at some of the individual tools though. In fact, as Ismael warns, integration is in general the main gotcha for enterprise use of Office 2.0 technology, both between the new tools and between Office 2.0 tools and existing enterprise applications. Ismael describes the event and its organization as an experiment, given what was learned, it was surely a successful experiment.
(See some the the announcements from Office 2.0 at:
Google has added Sun’s StarOffice to its free Google Pack. This has been expected and is of course targeting Microsoft’s Office suite. Richard MacManus reported it Sunday, and Dan Farber says most of what I would say about it.
