Intranet Journal on CM Professionals

The latest issue of Intranet Journal has a good article on CM Professionals. If you want to learn how to be successful with content management, not just about the tools; I strongly recommend joining.

OpenCMS Version 6.0 Released

The OpenCMS Project recently officially released version 6.0.0 of OpenCMS. Version 6 has been in beta for some time and I have been waiting for the official "gold" release. Some of the new features that 6.0 introduces:

• In-site editing. This is where users with edit permissions are able to edit content directly on the presentation side of the site, rather than just through the management interface. If you have read some of my other mail and blog posts, you may know that I have mixed feelings about this design. On the plus side, it makes the system more intuitive because users are able to edit the site directly. On the negative side, this kind of feature reduces the potential for reuse and more dynamic presentation logic.
  
• New content types. This is a huge improvement over the last version. Version 5.x only had one content type: pages. This leads to unstructured content and poor separation of content and layout reducing the potential to reuse.
  
• Full text search of attachments (MS Word)
  
• Improved permissioning
  

OpenCMS the most mature and polished of the Java based open source CMS. With this release, OpenCMS improves its versatility and increases its potential as an enterprise ready CMS.

Cutter IT Article Available

My Cutter IT Journal article "From Enterprise Content Management to Effective Content Management" is now posted on the Optaros website. I am interested in your comments/reactions. Please send them to sgottlieb at optaros.com.

Technology Selection Pitfalls

Tony Byrne, of CMS Watch fame, just posted an excellent article on 5 common pitfalls encountered in a technology selection. People who have been through a number of these selections (from either the customer or vendor side) will recognize many of these issues.

I absolutely agree with Tony's point about becoming slaves to spreadsheets and the recommendation to consider more qualitative methods to examine the suitability of software (Pitfall #2). I also agree that the vendor that you work with is every bit as important as the feature/function/price of the product (Pitfall #4).

The most powerful technology selection technique you can leverage is talking to other users of the technology. Try to find other organizations that have similar business needs (not feature needs) and learn about their experiences with the technology and the support organization behind it. You will learn more this way than you will from hours of product demos and brochure reading.

Open source is not the only kind of software that has user communities. Commercial software has them too. Some vendors try to get in the way of customers (and prospects) learning from each other. Others encourage it. In fact, for some commercial software, customer forums are the most effective way of getting support. No matter what your software choice, use the community. If you can't/don't, you will suffer alone.