There has been a huge transformation this year at WhiteHouse.gov. Blogs, RSS feeds, and connections to social networking sites are being fully utilized at the President's website. Those of us that have worked in information technology positions for the federal government have experienced first hand just how slow bureaucracies can be in taking advantage of newer technologies.
Lots of news this week regarding the open source SilverStripe CMS. It is extremely unusual for CMS Report to post something on SilverStripe as well as something on comment spam twice in one week. Yet, my two favorite companies, Silverstripe Ltd and Mollom, are going to have me do just that because of today's announcement that they've partnered together to help SilverStripe site owners block comment spam on their sites.
I'm a big fan of Elgg, a free and open source social software that allows you to build your own social networks. So it is with great surprise to me that I haven't really covered a lot of news about Elgg here at CMSReport.com. Take a look at a recent post by Dave Tosh for some examples of the latest Elgg powered sites on the Web. If that's not enough for you to judge how well Elgg can run social media sites...than Dave has more examples of Elgg sites to show you.
This month marks a new milestone for CMS Report, the blog, news, and aggregated website turned three years old. When I wrote the first post, I wasn't quite sure where I wanted to take the site, but I knew my enthusiasm for Web content management systems would get me wherever I needed to go. Three years later, CMSReport.com has seen over 1,700 original articles posted at the site. Pleasing to me, not all of these posts were written by me as I have always appreciated the contributions of content by others here at the site.
Work is currently underway to provide an extension so that SilverStripe can run on Microsoft SQL Server 2008. The SilverStripe module allowing for this connection to the SQL Server is currently still being developed, but the alpha version according to Sigurd Magnusson does work.
Like a lot of people, I too wonder what will happen to the MySQL, Java, and hardware once Sun is integrated into Oracle. I have opinions but those opinions alone aren't worth a hill of NetBeans. Luckily, people like Gavin Clarke know what they're talking about. Clarke has written an excellent article at The Register titled, Sun and Oracle: end of a beautiful dream.
Last week, Varien and Magento announced an alternative to the community open source Magento ecommerce platform. That alternative is Magento Enterprise Edition.
Lots of changes from Microsoft is expected to come in the next few years through its Unified Communications push. CMS Wire is the first site I saw that I saw mentioning that the new SharePoint will be called SharePoint 2010.
Finally. Microsoft has come forward with some news about the next version of SharePoint.
One of the more interesting concepts, I think, is the many ideas for how to incorporate microblogging (think Twitter) into your content management system. Drupal Voices via Lullabot interviews Rob Loach and briefly talks to him about his Distributed Micro-Blogging proposal which received a grant from the Knight Foundation. The audio recording is only two mintues long but there is enough there to get you started thinking how microblogging may eventually play a role in the larger world of content mana
I originally thought the article from Silicon.com, "Naked CIO: Open source ain't cheap" was written by a troll. Most IT authors realize that the quickest way to get a rise out of readers is to say something negative about one of two topics, Apple computers or open source. This author decided to write about the latter. Reluctantly, I have to agree with the author that for most enterprises running while open source is no more expensive than proprietary solutions it also certainly is not compellingly cheaper.