Joomla! Upgrade – Pros and Cons

More than two years after it's last major version was released, the Web CMS project Joomla! has announced the beta version of its next major release (1.6). For an open source project, that's a lot of time between two versions. There have also been concerns raised about transparency and governance within Open Source Matters (OSM), the not-for-profit that manages the Joomla! project. However, with a Read More

Compliance and the Role of Enterprise Content Management

Alan and I recently wrote this piece (requires free registration) for CFO Connect, a thought-leadership magazine for CFOs and other senior finance professionals operating in India. The idea was to introduce people to Compliance and how an ECM technology platform can help companies meet their compliance needs. To quote from the article, Most businesses assume that compliance costs money and does n Read More

Treating Content Migration Like a Real Project

I was reading the excellent Web Site Migration Handbook by our good friend and colleague David Hobbs -- and a quick Twitter exchange with him got me thinking about the importance of testing and QA in migration. Most organizations do not undertake a migration effort with the rigor and discipline that they normally would for a software project. The result is often a failed migration. You should Read More

Cricket, Lies, and….Content Management

They say nothing unites us Indians more than Cricket. Mash that up with Bollywood, big money, politics, as well as sleaze, and you get the multi-billion dollar Indian Premier League (IPL) -- an irony given that India is a land of Mahatama Gandhi. The last few weeks has seen a drama, albeit not a Bollywood one, unfold. It all started when the IPL chairman cum commissioner Mr. Modi fired the first s Read More

FatWire Community and Gadget Servers

FatWire recently announced two new products -- "Gadget Server" and "Community Server" -- both aimed at website visitors. Community Server provides user-generated content services such as blogs, ratings, reviews, and comments. Gadget Server allows you to serve up lightweight components called Gadgets. Both these applications run on FatWire's Content Server platform that we cover Read More

Myth of the No-Code Solution

I get an uneasy feeling when someone tells me their product is so simple that business users can create new applications without writing any code. This is especially true of products that offer some kind of a gadget and/or mashup functionality. Granted, it's comparatively easier to create Gadgets as compared to more heavyweight components like Web Parts or portlets. But a gadget does not make an a Read More

Complementing Portals with Enterprise Mashups

Enterprise Mashups are becoming popular as a way to create new, dashboard-style applications from existing, often disparate applications and data sources. Many vendors offer some sort of Mashup functionality.  A sampling includes large ones such as Microsoft (Composites in SharePoint 2010), IBM (Mashup Center), small niche vendors such as JackBe (Presto), Kapow and Backbase, and even open sou Read More

So what is your ECM story?

It's been a year now since we launched our ECM Maturity Model under Creative Commons, and it seems to have proven comprehensive as well as extensible for different groups adapting it for their specific environments. In other words, it's been useful -- if something of a hidden gem. Click to enlarge Here at the Real Story Group we have also used it with our customers. As an example, see the Read More

Collaborate and Innovate

ideaken - collaborate to innovate

Congratulations to good friends and ex-colleagues – Munish and Jayesh who have given up their cushy jobs at Wipro to launch ideaken. ideaken uses social media to enable collaborative innovation. To quote:

Collaborative innovation takes place when one starts to leverage unknown or unnamed sources of ideas, solutions & knowledge along with the known and named sources. The basic intention is to increase the chances of problem-to-solution match by increasing the solver base dramatically. Enterprises need to source the diversity of talent, tap into the wisdom of crowds and reach out to the underutilized talent sources. While most of the enterprises understand the power of collaborative innovation, the means to achieve the same on a continual basis and on a wide scale is not available.

They essentially provide a platform to bring together “Seekers” and “Solvers” who can then help each other. Seekers offer challenges such as: “Practical solution to save stranded Whales, Dolphins, and other big fish” or “Domino helper – a device which allows a player to set up dominos faster for a toppling game”. Solvers then select the challenges that interest them and then offer solutions.

ideaken is also available as a software as a service  that organizations can use with their own branding.

Here’s wishing you all the best guys. I’m sure ideaken will do well.

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The return of web-based IDEs

Developers know that Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) go a long way in improving productivity and shortening time to market. Some vendors in the marketplaces we cover ship with their own proprietary IDEs, while many others use a plugin to (or otherwise extend) the popular Eclipse or Visual Studio IDEs. In the event, you typically install an IDE on a developer workstation along with many Read More