A few days ago, I read Mary Jo Foley's article titled Microsoft: Our strategy with Silverlight has shifted. According to an interview with the President of the Server and Tools Division at Microsoft, the company will be shifting support for Silverlight away from the PC and Mac desktop and toward the phone market.

So what’s a developer to make of Microsoft’s messaging (or lack thereof) about Silverlight at its premiere developer conference?

I asked Bob Muglia, the Microsoft President in charge of the company’s server and tools business, that very question and got what I consider to be the clearest answer yet about how Microsoft is evolving its Silverlight strategy.

“Silverlight is our development platform for Windows Phone,” he said. Silverlight also has some “sweet spots” in media and line-of-business applications, he said.

But when it comes to touting Silverlight as Microsoft’s vehicle for delivering a cross-platform runtime, “our strategy has shifted,” Muglia told me.

Microsoft plans to be using HTML 5 to replace the functions currently being provided by Silverlight 5.

It is not the point of this post to debate the merits of HTML 5, Silverlight and even Flash. What is my point though, is that Microsoft appears to me to be desperate. Desperate to come up with a strategic plan that will carry them beyond the day of Windows PCs. Microsoft is desperate to become innovative for the sake of innovation that they're really confusing a lot of their developers. If only after a few years of support, Microsoft is shifting focus of it's Silverlight platform...what potential developer in his or her right mind would support another future Microsoft endeavor? Just take a look at the comments to Bob Muglia's blog post discussing this topic and I think you'll see my point.

Why Web Content Management Systems are the way of the future, making traditional web development a thing of the past

The Web is an exciting place. With excitement come innate complexity and an overwhelming abundance of choices when defining how to take your website into the future.  Ask web evangelists of today versus evangelists of say 5 years ago, and they will highlight the importance of device support, marketing tools, analytics and focusing on creating great content that will stand the test of time.

Recently, companies like Google and Apple have prompted questions to the public, such as, “Why are we still building things like we did 30 years ago?” These types of provocative questions are spawning answers in the form of new tools, such as the iPhone 4 and the upcoming wave of Google WebOS notebooks. Ask yourself these questions:

• Would you still create artwork using MS Paint?
• Would you still write articles using Notepad?
• Would you still use Netscape as an Internet Browser?

Then why are you still developing websites in the traditional approach?

Let me start by defining what I mean by “traditional”. Traditional Web Development refers to the act of taking a Web Framework such as HTML, ASP.net, PHP and building a website from the ground, up. This includes everything from setting up Database connections, setting up Database Tables, creating separate files for your Contact Us and Products page, the list goes on. Most web agencies that I consult with have control libraries that make this process less tedious and time consuming but this is not addressing the fundamental issue, being, this is a traditional methodology for building web sites. Weddings should be traditional; your grandmother’s brownie recipe should be traditional. Your web presence should be innovative.

The Trojan installs a keylogger capable to capture keystrokes including username, password and credit card number.

Bitrix, Inc., a technology trendsetter in business communications solutions, alerts customers about the existence of a Trojan program pretending to be the Bitrix security framework. The Trojan is capable of stealing confidential data from infected computers and received the highest threat level from malware experts.

Identified as a part of the “Agent” malware family, the Trojan is presumably spread using mass mailing of spam and malicious links. The malware can be delivered to the target computer in different flavors including pretending to be a Microsoft Silverlight or Bitrix security update. If a user launches the infected file, the Trojan installs itself into the system by creating multiple files and registering itself in the system registry. After installation the malware unobtrusively runs in the background, captures keystrokes and sends out collected data to an external service. This way a malicious person can obtain the user’s confidential information including username, password and credit card number.

The Trojan can be identified by the presence of “Bitrix Security” folder in the application data directory which contains a number of supplementary files and a run-time library under randomly generated names (for example xaukvmm60.dll).

Bitrix recommends that users update their virus scanners and check their computers against this malicious program.

Read more about how to protect your web assets against web-borne malware in a dedicated white paper "10 Ways to Keep Hackers in Check and Ensure Safe Web Resources" by Marcel Nizam, Head of Web Security Development at Bitrix, Inc.

Vancouver, BC -- Intranet Connections has released the newest version of its Intranet 2.0 CMS platform with the aims of reducing administration overhead for intranet managers and simplifying the design of site navigation.  Intranet Connections version 10.5 targets small to medium size businesses wishing to have SharePoint-like functionality, but without the price tag or management overhead.

Carolyn Douglas, CEO of Intranet Connections, “Our focus is on ease-of-use and providing SMB’s with an out-of-the-box intranet that they can implement themselves.  Version 10.5 provides intranet administrators with a simple solution that is easy to install, implement and manage on an ongoing basis, without the need for custom development.”

A key enhancement in the new release is the addition of a revised menu builder that features a drag and drop interface to manage site navigation.  The redesigned interface allows administrators to add a horizontal menu to their site, create drop down menus, add menu headers and relocate menu items from the left main to the site header directly through the site interface.   The new menu builder provides more flexibility to intranet managers wishing to customize their information architecture in a simple manner.

This latest release also builds on the popular tagging feature with the addition of a new content tag management interface.  The robust tag administration area simplifies routine tag management tasks such as creating tag groups, moving tags between groups and finding tags with dynamically filtered search results.  Admins can pre-populate and organize commonly used tags so that end users can easily tag and find relevant content.

Also included among the other features of v10.5 are an upgrade of the HTML editor to improve accuracy when composing complex document layouts or pasting from Word, an extranet friendly security model to simplify user-rights administration on intranet/extranet implementations and a new Multiple File Upload tool for improved ease-of-use, stability and performance.

For a long time I’ve been really interested in performance aspects of content management systems and smarter blogging systems. This is the reason for my decision to test some of the popular systems on a workbench and to get some technical information about these systems.

The test was quite simple. I installed the packages on my sandbox server and added a function (cip-bench()) to the installation. Then I ran the index page with the default template and configuration. The data I got from the test was limited on the raw index page after the installation. I picked up 5 aspects for the test:

• The first one was the memory usage of the system
• The execution time
• Executed database queries
• How many database tables exist
• And the last parameter shows how many files are required.

It is interesting to see how different some CMS solve their tasks. I was surprised of some results for example 399 database queries of contenido.

To sum up this test I was impressed by chyrp. It’s delivered with an elegant backend and I think it has got a lot of potential to become more popular and famous. The memory usage of wordpress seems to be improved in contrast to previous versions.

Blog

CMS

Brett Profitt just announced the release of Elgg 1.7.4 via the Elgg blogs. While the majority of changes in this release are bugfixes, there are two notable changes in Elgg 1.7.4 related to Twitter and user validation.

Brett writes about the new features:

More than a dozen members of the Tiki Community met in New York City October 3-6 for the last major code sprint before Tiki 6. Many others participated virtually through Tiki's integration with BigBlueButton.

Although much of the event was focused on preparations for the Tiki 6 release, additional work was completed, including:

• Continued integration with Kaltura video-editing platform
• Work on the Tiki TV project for collaborative editing
• Public presentation of Tiki at the Casa Frela Gallery to the local NYC community and online Workshop on Tiki Workspaces
• Planning for Tiki 7
• Discussion on the future of trackers, spreadsheets and accounting

Tiki Community members also took the opportunity to meet with BigBlueButton and Kaltura team members during the Open Video Conference and participate in the OVC hack labs. Special thanks to the Kaltura Team!

TikiFest particpants at OVC (left to right): Assaf Chaprak (Kaltura), luciash d' being (Tiki), Jonny Bradley (Tiki), Nelson Ko (Tiki), Étienne Lachance (Tiki), Robert Plummer (Tiki), Denis Zgonjanin (BigBlueButton), Kimberly Fink (Tiki), Unidentified (Kaltura), Lindon Barnfield (Tiki), Philippe Cloutier (Tiki), Zohar Babin (Kaltura), Marc Laporte (Tiki), Jason Levitt (Kaltura). Photo provided by luciash d' being."

The participants also made time for socializing and camaraderie, including the celebration of Tiki's 8th birthday. Complete details of the event, including pictures, are available at https://tiki.org/TikiFestNewYork6.

Alfresco announced the release of Alfresco Community 3.4. Alfresco 3.4 broadens the reach of the company’s open source and open standards-based content management platform with new tools and services for Spring developers, Web Quick Start for easy web site deployment and content integration with enterprise portals.

“The demand for collaboration and social sharing around enterprise content is rising – and content that was once meant just for the intranet is now being re-purposed for the public web, external portals or even to destination sites across the web,” said John Newton, Alfresco CTO. “Through our implementation of CMIS as a core standard and new features in Alfresco 3.4, our content services platform can now manage and deliver enterprise content to any internal or external application in a way that traditional, monolithic ECM products can’t enable without significant time and expense.”

Key product capabilities for the Alfresco Community 3.4 release include:

• Collaborative Web Authoring – Alfresco Web Quick Start is a set of out-of-the-box templates for building content-rich websites on top of Alfresco Share. Quick Start combines the power of Alfresco Share for web team collaboration, with powerful content authoring and publishing services like in-context web editing.
• Office-to-Web Framework – Using Microsoft’s Office SharePoint Protocol and CIFS (shared folders), along with a new API integration with Google Docs, users can now author documents in their native office suite, collaborate in Alfresco or Google Docs, transform and re-purpose if required, and then publish straight to the web – even with sophisticated approval workflows. This feature will be available in a follow-on release Alfresco Community 3.4.b in approximately four weeks.
• Web Content Services for Spring – Built using the popular Spring and Spring Surf frameworks, Alfresco now offers key content management services that can be accessed via OpenCMIS and integrated into any web application. A combination of standard development tools and lightweight scripting gives Spring and Surf developers many options for building content-rich apps.
• Integration with Enterprise Portals and Social Software – The new DocLib portlets allow seamless integration with enterprise portals like Liferay, Quickr and Confluence. Using Single Sign On (SSO), the portlets provide access to both content and project repositories from within any JSR168 compliant portal.
• Distributed Content Replication – Native support for content replication allows organizations to run federated content repositories. Key documents can now be replicated to remote offices, enabling greater sharing of information, quicker access, reduced wide area network traffic and removes the dependency on a single system.

Alfresco has seen major adoption of its open source and open standards content management platform with more than two million downloads of Alfresco Community. Alfresco Community is a free-to-download, free-to-use version developed on an open source stack that runs on Windows, Linux or Mac. Alfresco Enterprise is certified against a larger range of technology stacks (both open source and proprietary), goes through a more extensive QA process and is provided with full commercial technical support.