UNC Health Care Site Launces On Plone

There is an article on News Forge about the University of North Carolina School of Medicine re-launching their internal and external websites in Plone. UNC Healthcare had the classic problem of organically grown websites creating a disjointed and confusing experience for their visitors. Operating on a modest budget, UNC Healthcare discovered Plone and was able to achieve a true content management solution at minimal cost. In addition to typical content management benefits of distributed authoring with centralized control, UNC Healthcare developed and deployed a "Find a Doctor" application on the Zope framework.

Federated ECM

I just wrote an article for Cutter IT Journal about the decline of the "one system to manage all" vision of ECM and now I am seeing evidence of this trend wherever I look. The May issue of EContent Magazine reports FileNet's new strategy of Federated Content Management. In the words of Chris McLaughlin, Filenet's director of marketing

ECM isn't about picking one platform and stuffing everything into that one platform . . . it is about choosing a platform you want to build forward from and giv[ing] your organization a range of options on how to move forward with a CM strategy.

FileNet is now emphasizing standards and interoperability that "creates a union of information across multiple content stores." This is a refreshing departure from the one-size-fits-all rhetoric that lead to expensive projects that under-delivered and left customers hopelessly locked into their vendors.

CM Professionals Announces Management Committee and Executive Director

Today CM Professionals officially announced the formation of a Management Committee and appointment of a new Executive Director.

The Management Committee consists of:

• Patricia Kelley, content architect at Allstate Insurance - Director of Marketing
  
• Erik Hartman, president of Netherlands-based Hartman Communicatie BV - Director of Member Relations
  
• Glen Secor, senior consultant and legal analyst with The Gilbane Report - Legal Advisor
  
• Hilary Marsh, president of strategic online consultancy Content Company Inc. - Director of Communications
  

Laura Walker succeeds Bob Doyle as Executive Director of CM Professionals. I personally would like to thank Bob for his tireless energy and drive to get CM Professionals off the ground. The organization would not be the success that it is without his dedication and talents. Bob will continue to play an active role in CM Professionals as Technology Advisor.

Laura Walker will bring new perspectives and skills to the Executive Director role. Her experience as the executive director of OASIS will be critical in helping CM Professionals achieve its potential.

Read the full press release.

Gilbane Enterprise Blog Survey

The Gilbane Report recently posted the results of their Survey on Enterprise blog, wiki, and RSS Use. While the survey sample is not representative of a larger population of companies (the survey was voluntary and Gilbane readers are probably ahead of the curve), the results are interesting.

Of the 58 respondents (mostly from companies under $25MM in annual revenues but 10 from companies of over $1 Billion in annual revenues.):

• Over 35 use Blog or Wiki technology
  
• More of the Blog/Wiki users use them for knowledge management and internal information dissemination, than customer communication.
  
• More than half of the respondents get support for their Blog or Wiki from their internal IT organization.
  

Drupal Documentation Experiment

The Drupal Project has reorganized its documentation into a new set of documentation handbooks. Drupal's documentation is already pretty good thanks to a robust community using and contributing to the software. The documentation team is now using a Zoomerang survey (results) and Web Sort, a web based card sorting tool, to leverage this community to make the documentation more usable.