CMS Weekly

Archive for September, 2009

Alfresco vs Sharepoint vs Nuxeo
Transcript From Episode CMSW2009-08-10

After an opening caveat that all product comparisons are flawed, Sirius Corp blogger tcallway proceeds to compare open source ECM products Alfresco and Nuxeo with the deeply entrenched Microsoft SharePoint.

SharePoint claims a broad range of functionality including BI, records and document management, web content management and eForms. But it comes with a hefty price tag, and you never stop paying – it’s a lease program with license fees on a host of products – in fact, everything in the Microsoft Stack that is also required to make the package complete.

By comparison, Alfresco is free and runs on Linux, Unix and Mac, in addition to Windows, and supports any LDAP server. Use MySQL or PostgreSQL with Alfresco, and don’t fret purchasing an environment to extend Alfresco – it’s all included. And you don’t need licenses to provide your services to your clients.

However, it’s only the Labs Edition that’s free. The code for the Enterprise version is not available, and this version does have an annual subscription, but is worth it.

The reviewer went on to compare Nuxeo, another open source solution, with Alfresco. He claims both are beautiful, fast and feature-rich, but liked the Nuxeo UI with it’s drag and drop file management better than Alfresco. Nuxeo runs on all mainstream OS’s and is very extensible, and the code is available for its enterprise version. Close, but not close enough. But when the reviewer tried to reach a live person, in the main UK office, or the French office they were forwarded to, the Nuxeo offering came up lacking.

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Alfresco to Double the Number of Enterprise CMS Integrators
Transcript From Episode CMSW2009-08-10

Alfresco announced plans to double the number of SI partners in North and South America to meet increasing demand. Adding 40 new system integrators will help serve the growing market, which includes new American customers Virgin Mobile, FedEx and Sun Microsystems.

Alfresco has chosen not to offer direct consulting or professional services, but rather focus on developing an enterprise-class ECM platform. This is an exciting opportunity for independent alfresco users and developers to move to the next level and become an Alfresco Partner. System Integrators provide expertise consulting, integration and migration services for Alfresco content management solutions. All System Integrators have trained and certified Alfresco consultants on staff. The new SI partners will support new project implementations and assist with migrations away from legacy ECM systems.

Community Edition downloads have now exceeded 1.7 million.

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Alfresco Community Now Available for Ubuntu: Organizations can now try Alfresco Community Edition 3.2.
Transcript From Episode CMSW2009-08-10

Alfresco announced last week that their free Community Edition 3.2 is now available for the Ubuntu Server Edition. An easy to install package can be downloaded from the Ubuntu software repositories apt-get install alfresco-community.

Ubuntu has emerged as the leading Linux platform for Alfresco ECMS. Both systems are known for their ease of use and simple environments. Ubuntu has consistently been the top Linux distribution in Alfresco’s Open Source Barometer survey, and with the delivery of a very easy installation it is expected that many more organizations will explore the use of open source software both to save money and deliver exceptional value. In the prevalent economic conditions very few can afford to overlook the combination of Alfresco and Ubuntu.

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Mediacurrent: The Value of Post-Launch Drupal Services and Support
Transcript From Episode CMSW2009-08-10

You may be one of the estimated 400,000+ people or organizations that have launched a Drupal site since the open-source content management system’s inception. Not to take the wind from your sails, but the work on your Drupal site is not immediately over after you launch – it is really just beginning. In short, a website developed using an open source or proprietary platform, is not a one-time capital expenditure.

The “car” analogy is often used in the Web 2.0 world, but it is germane. When one makes a major purchase like an automobile, the expectation is that a certain amount of ongoing maintenance and support comes with the territory – oil needs to be changed, brakes replaced, tune-ups, etc. Same would go for a Joomla site. Once launched, a website requires alert maintenance to keep it secure and accessible.

As an open-source technology, Drupal, for example, is supported by a passionate community of international developers who quickly find and fix security vulnerabilities, which means you need to be on the ball to install and test frequent patches, as well as migrating to the latest major versions where the ongoing support is provided in a timely manner.

Two questions that Mediacurrent would like you to consider are: one, what does routine Drupal support actually entail; and two, what are the ramifications if I do not properly maintain my site over time? They have a checklist at www.mediacurrent.com. The same questions would come to mind if your site is based on Joomla or any one of the other web content management systems.

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Survey and contest by Acquia Network Services
Transcript From Episode CMSW2009-08-17

The folks at Acquia have some free stuff to give away and you can have a chance to win it, in exchange for 5 minutes of your time spent filling out a survey. So, pop on over to acquia.com and help them with their roadmap planning. The one randomly drawn winner will choose an Amazon Kindle 2, plus $50 in Kindle electronic books, or a pair of Bose QuietComfort Acoustic Noise Canceling Headphones.

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KnowledgeTree Takes Root in New ECM Markets
Transcript From Episode CMSW2009-08-17

LinuxInsider reports that the world of turnkey electronic content management has few open source players, which helps a company like KnowledgeTree stand out. The ECM software category caters to a wide variety of industries, and each has its own complex set of requirements.

On CMS Weekly we usually talk about content management as web content. For this story, consider the broader application of electronic document management. In this arena, in contrast to the web content management, there are few open source players. One worthy of note is KnowledgeTree.

KnowledgeTree was founded in 2004 by CEO Daniel Chalef in response to a request from a government agency in his home country of South Africa to help set up a system for managing its documents and tracking access. Chalef was already hatching plans to develop an open source product for document management, so he chose to continue with that model, initially developing a community-based free version, and proceeding to a commercial version, available stand-alone or web-based.

KnowledgeTree was designed to be easy to install and use, and includes a Microsoft Office add-on, for accessing and editing documents in the KnowledgeTree repository directly in Office. KnowledgeTree Live includes an integrated Zoho Writer for document editing without additional editing software. In addition to more than 300 commercial subscribers, the community edition has been downloaded 650,000 times. More than 60% of the subscribers are based in the US. The target customer is small to medium sized companies and government agencies.

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Shout out to JoomlaDay CapeTown
Transcript From Episode CMSW2009-08-17

Saturday, 8/15 was the day that enthusiastic Joomla fans in South Africa joined together for JoomlaDay Cape Town. The event was held at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology. If you missed it, JoomlaDay Johannesburg is coming up later in the year.

Joomla project member Ryan Ozimek traveled from the US to give the keynote and call to action in Africa, as well as a preview of Joomla 1.6.

JoomlaJunkie also attended and introduced their new template development framework for Joomla 1.5. The framework is called Morph, and promises to think for the user, one step ahead, knowing what you need. It has a Configurator that is like the dashboard in your car. By controlling every block of content on your website, you can build websites much faster and easier. Other highlights are the framework, providing the structure, themelets, the visual layer, and five powerful FX features.

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Ben’s SEO Blog: Drupal Learns To “Socialize”
Transcript From Episode CMSW2009-08-17

Sun, Aug 30, 2009 12:45 PM
Our friend Ben Finklea at volacci.com blogged this week about a new Drupal module called “Socialize”, developed by Gigya and Acquia. Socialize enhances the social features of a Drupal site, enabling site owners to authenticate users to Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter, as well as mail programs such as Gmail and Yahoo Mail. It allows your Drupal website to push content and user activity out beyond the site and into the social networks, driving interactivity and viral promotion.

As announced in a July 23 press release, other features of Socialize include enabling users to invite friends to the site, or to share site content or a specific event and send status updates, tweets and newsfeed events to their social networks. The Gigya Socialize module has been fully integrated with Drupal’s user action and trigger core modules so Drupal site owners can configure the viral promotion channels to work dynamically.

The module is fully configurable and installs in minutes with no programming. The module is available, free of charge, on Drupal.org. View a webinar of the tool under acquia.com.
http://www.gigya.com/public/Content/About/Press.aspx?m=Press&p=1281

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Introducing GetSimple CMS
Transcript From Episode CMSW2009-08-17

In his CMS Report this week, CMS enthusiast Bryan Ruby reviews a new CMS tool called GetSimple CMS, newly launched by Chris Cagle. This brand spanking new tool is aimed at small businesses, and have a few nice features worthy of note.

These include an “undo” command that works for almost every action, and a revision backup feature. The tool also can generate an XML sitemap, which is used by most search engines for indexing. And it has an integrated help ticket system.

Another factor to note is that GetSimple CMS uses XML files for database storage, instead of the more common SQL database. GetSimple CMS is a PHP application that runs on Unix or Linux OS and Apache servers. Demo and download are available at get-simple.info.

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PHP book for tweaking WordPress to make it better, faster, and secure
Transcript From Episode CMSW2009-08-17

There’s a great new book available for WordPress bloggers who want to make a smarter, better, faster blog. The WordPress 2.7 Cookbook, written by Jean-Baptiste Jung, is now available from Packt. The cookbook is fully tested with WordPress 2.7 and contains 100 recipes for enhancing your WordPress blog, so you can attract more readers and more comments.

The book addresses basic concepts, such as improving the blog’s layout and using themes, and moves to more complex topics such as using widgets and plug-ins, and incorporating ads in their RSS feeds. You’ll also learn how to integrate with sites such as Twitter, FeedBurner, Digg, and Del.icio.us. Or you can learn how to transform a classic theme into a captivating Photoblog or a personal blog into a complete, multi-author online magazine.

WordPress is an open source project and one of the largest self-hosted blogging tools in the world, used on hundreds of thousands of sites and seen by tens of millions of people every day. About 120,000 blogs are created daily. WordPress’ versatility and ease of use have attracted a large, enthusiastic, and helpful community of users and contributors. Order WordPress 2.7 Cookbook today from packtpub.com.

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