CMS Weekly

Archive for September, 2009

Enterprise Sharing – Why groups fail to share effectively
Transcript From Episode CMSW2009-08-17

When asked to make a group decision, instead of sharing vital information known only to themselves, people tend to repeat information that everyone already knows. Most spaces/venues of interaction fail to take advantage of the value of critique and debate. Since disagreement in generally not encouraged, we end up sharing information that we think will not cause conflict or upset others. It takes a degree of self-confidence (and a supportive environment) to ensure contrary voices are heard.

What controversial idea have you shared lately? And, how was it received? Pressure to normalize ideas (and people) is strong and pervasive in groups.

Originally written by George Siemens for elearnspace and first published on August 14th, 2009 in his newsletter eLearning Resources and News.

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Collaboration and Enterprise 2.0 Study from AIIM
Transcript From Episode CMSW2009-08-17

Encouraging news for Enterprise 2.0. It finds that business take up of Enterprise 2.0 has doubled in the last year. An interesting study by AIIM on Enterprise 2.0, or how companies use Web 2.0 technologies such as wikis, blogs, forums and social networks internally, to improve business collaboration and knowledge sharing.

According to the report, over half of organizations now consider Enterprise 2.0 to be “important” or “very important” to their business goals and success. Only 17% admitted that they have no idea what it is, compared to 40% at the start of 2008. However, only 25% of organizations are actually doing anything about it – but that is up from 12% in the previous survey. Knowledge-sharing, collaboration and responsiveness are considered the biggest drivers. Lack of understanding, corporate culture and cost are the biggest impediments.

IT departments are by far the strongest users, with 68% using it, but only 6% of organizations using it throughout the business. 71% of respondents agree that it’s easier to locate “knowledge” on the Web than it is to find it on internal systems, sad and scary, but an improvement from the previous year. Full report at aiim.org.

AIIM is also known as the enterprise content management (ECM) association. For over 60 years, AIIM has been the leading non-profit organization focused on helping users to understand the challenges associated with managing documents, content, records, and business processes. AIIM was founded in 1943 as the National Microfilm Association and later became the Association for Information and Image Management. Carl Frappaolo and Dan Keldsen defined Enterprise 2.0 in a report written for Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) as “a system of web-based technologies that provide rapid and agile collaboration, information sharing, emergence and integration capabilities in the extended enterprise.”

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EE Roadshow: The Future of Content Management Systems
Transcript From Episode CMSW2009-08-17

One thing that seems to be common across the CMS world is “community”, and ExpressionEngine has a devoted community too. After a sold out show in Vancouver in 2008, the EE Road Show moves to Seattle on Oct 2nd, 2009. Some sessions previewed by President Leslie Camacho in his blog are Jason Hudnutt explaining how to deploy ExpressionEngine with Git, Matt Perry telling how he improves EE performance for complex scenarios, and Ryan Ireland’s 10 ways to Improve Your EE Site Development.

There will be more sessions, as well as panel discussions, and of course the most valuable offering of this type of event – meeting the community and sharing ideas. President Camacho himself will present “The Future of Content Management Systems”, specifically about their 2.0 version and generally about the future of CMS and the opportunities it presents for CMS professionals.

Register at eeroadshow.com.

Our European listeners can experience more of the ExpressionEngine community at EECI 2009, the first European ExpressionEngine and CodeIgniter conference, Oct 22-23 in Leiden, Netherlands. Almost 100 companies are scheduled to attend, with interesting names such as Duoh!, Full Cream Milk and Design is Dead.

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#alfresco says #SharePoint “is simultaneously the most interesting and dangerous Microsoft technology”
Transcript From Episode CMSW2009-08-17

While Microsoft’s Windows sales fell for the first time in history this year, its SharePoint sales have gone up, after breaking the $1 billion revenue mark last year. A quote from Matt Asay, an executive at Alfresco who we met at CMS Expo Chicago: “SharePoint is saving Microsoft’s Office business even as it paves the way for a new era of Microsoft lock-in. It is simultaneously the most interesting and dangerous Microsoft technology, and has largely caught its competitors napping.”

Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, has talked about SharePoint as the company’s next big operating system. Currently it is used to create web sites and manage the content, it is used for project and document collaboration by team members, and it includes business intelligence tools too, at a price point that rivals what some niche companies charge for just one piece of the package. While it lacks sophisticated features offered in the point tools, Microsoft is confident that it has the necessary features for most users.

That said, a new release planned for next year promises to be “packed full of more advanced features”, such as tying into the corporate search technology acquired by the purchase of Fast Search and Transfer. Even free open source solutions have a hard time competing when Microsoft offers free basic SharePoint licenses to Windows Server customers.

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Lullabot: Doing It (With Drupal) Again!
Transcript From Episode CMSW2009-08-24

In case you’re not on the Lullabot mailing list, they are getting ready to do it again. They had nearly 300 attendees with a wide variety of Drupal experience and we’re planning for an even larger event this year.

Do It With Drupal 2009 will be held December 9th, 10th, and 11th at the New Orleans Marriot at the edge of French Quarter in New Orleans, Louisiana. Registrations just opened, may be a chance to be among the first 25 registrants, who have been promised some sort of special deal, yet to be identified.

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8 Things You Can Do With an Enterprise Wiki
Transcript From Episode CMSW2009-08-24

Stewart Mader, founder of futurechanges.org and author of Wikipatterns brings us 8 Things You Can Do With an Enterprise Wiki

1. Post a meeting agenda and email the link out once. Attendees can modify the document in place, and if you’re lucky, some agenda items will get resolved before the meeting.

2. Post the meeting minutes and action items. Stewart recommends having the whole team responsible for contributing to the minutes.

3. Manage projects by keeping all relevant documents in one place that can be viewed and modified by all appropriate team members.

4. Compose documents that require the input of more than one person, thus reducing the volume of emails and potential confusion formerly experienced as the file was moved around between participants.

5. Use a wiki for software developers to build the documentation while they build the software.

6. Re-use information when moving to a new project that was similar to the previous one.

7. Post the Employee Handbook. When employees use the comment feature to ask non-confidential questions, the answers are posted on the page so everyone can see the answer, avoiding repeated questions to HR. This should also reduce confusion as to the current version of the handbook if everyone views one common electronic document.

8. In addition to the previous 7 internal-facing uses, you can also use a Wiki for the external facing function of a customer support knowledge base. External users can be encouraged to add content as well, with an internal person moderating the content for quality and accuracy.

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+1: Another Joomla Multi-sites component
Transcript From Episode CMSW2009-08-24

New Joomla Multi-sites, available in the Joomla Extension Directory, component now makes it easier for you to share your Joomla files and folders across totally independent websites.

One of the best benefits is in maintenance, as you only have to update files in one place. You can choose to have one common database, or two databases where one is the master and one is the slave, or you may have as many databases as websites.

Most user feedback seems to be positive, with one negative comment about the fact that the solution was accomplished by a modification of the Joomla core. Positive comments include the fact that the designer was willing to spend many hours to help users when the documentation was not able to, due to the broken English.

It’s also an easy tool to create a privacy policy. Regardless of the flavor of web content management system you employ, Compass Designs is always a worthwhile stop. A while back there was a discussion on Refund Policy, and how important they are. Another follow on discussion surrounded the similar need is a privacy policy. For a handy tool that generates a privacy policy for you, visit the Direct MARketing Association affiliated site, http://www.dmaresponsibility.org/PPG/#form. This tool asks some basic questions about your business and website, and then generates the privacy policy for you automatically.

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Next #Alfresco Tech Talk Live: Rich McKnight on Alfresco/Drupal Integration, 12PM EST Aug 21, 2009.
Transcript From Episode CMSW2009-08-24

For our Alfresco and Drupal aficionados, the topic at last Friday’s a bi-weekly Alfresco Tech Talk was an interesting demo of how to use Alfresco and Drupal together. The guest speaker was Rich McKnight, an Alfresco Senior Consultant. Rich’s 25 year career has included work in a number of different areas including enterprise content management, web site development, telecommunications, and CAD.

In this demo, he showed how to leverage the strengths of both Alfresco and Drupal by taking the content from Alfresco web forms and presenting it as Drupal nodes. This is accomplished by using an Alfresco callback to post the content to Drupal using XMLRPC. Drupal can even keep track of the version history by using the unique identifiers from both systems.

Members of both communities were able to learn about the other system by attending this presentation.

The next session will be Friday Sept 4th. All sessions are recorded. To attend live, or hear past recordings, go to wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Live.

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Alfresco Meetups planned for Oct/Nov’09 US cities: DC, L.A., Atl.
Transcript From Episode CMSW2009-08-24

Alfresco Community Manager Nancy Garrity reports Alfresco Meetups are in the works for Oct and Nov in LA, Atlanta and Washington DC, as well as the European cities of Frankfurt, Madrid, and Milan. To submit a speaker proposal for the US and Europe Meetups, go to bit.ly/vGN7i. Anyone interested in sponsoring these events should email events@alfresco.com. Specific dates for each event are now posted on alfresco.com.

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Corporate Twitter Toolbox: Twitter Tools for the Enterprise
Transcript From Episode CMSW2009-08-24

Mashable has the corporate Twitter Toolbox. From tweeting and responding to customers to tracking the conversation and measuring the effectiveness of Twitter campaigns, there is a bevy of great tools out there for corporate tweeters.

Finding the right Twitter applications is a challenge for social media managers, though, because new apps seem to spring up each day and they often have overlapping feature sets. Sudha Jamthe, Social Platform Strategist for PayPal X Platform advises companies on innovation and building engaging communities, and she says Twitter is a great listening post for companies to monitor conversations related to their brand and engage with customers. She delivers an extensive report on the market leaders in the different categories of tools available to manage a corporate social media campaign.

First, she advises marketers to use the Forrester Profile Calculator to find out where your customers are before you start pouring resources into a strong Twitter presence. The technographic profile shows how many of your customers generate original content through blogs and tweets, and how many mostly just read available content. Radian6 and Techrigy’s SM2 help to further categorize your customers by the specific social media tools that they use and find out where and if they are listening or posting.

Once you have a strategy, tools like Hootsuite and CoTweet help you execute. Companies like Disney, Dell and FOX use Hootsuite, a web-based Twitter client that supports multiple tweeters from one corporate Twitter account. In-depth reporting is available for each tweet and is a very valuable feature for a corporate social media campaign.

CoTweet also offers integrated Bit.ly reporting as well as multi-user and multi-profile support, and is used by Jet Blue, Sun Microsystems, Starbucks, Whole Foods, and even Twitter itself. TweetDeck and Seesmic are the two most popular desktop clients for enterprise use. Both are robust solutions with multi-profile support but not multi-user support, so work well for a solo community manager. iPhone solutions include Twittelator and Tweetie, both supporting multiple profiles.

The final step is tracking the conversations around your brand. Twitter Search is sufficient for many companies that just want to follow the chatter. Twitter Grader tracks and measures the influence of individual tweeters. Twazzup and Twitturly are useful for tracking a hashtag campaign. And another set of tools is no doubt in development right now, so keep your eyes and ears open.

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