April 2011

Quoting IT: Throw caution to the wind with Enterprise 2.0

"The more I learn about Enterprise 2.0, the more inclined I am to encourage companies to throw caution to the wind: buy (or build) some well-designed lightweight tools that take advantage of emergence and game mechanics, find a few leaders willing to lead by example, and go live."

- Andrew McAfee, Enterprise 2.0 the Indian WayAndrewMcAfee.org, April 7, 2011.

10 New Weapons in New Bitrix Site Manager 10.0

Bitrix, Inc., a technology trendsetter in business communications solutions, announces the release of Bitrix Site Manager 10.0, a version that includes 10 new weapons in the web and mobile-development arsenal, significant changes in the licensing policies of the product and a brand new module for senior editions.

Ten new technologies and tools are incorporated into Version 10.0 including:

  1. BitrixMobile: for development of mobile sites and apps with support of iOS, Android and BlackBerry OS on the basis of HTML5
  2. A ready-made mobile internet shop, created with BitrixMobile technology and an application for one-time passwords (OTP)
  3. Web clusters, a complex solution for scalability and reliability of an entire web project (database, search module, etc.), can be applied in high availability (HA) or high performance (HP) configurations
  4. Integration with social networks including Facebook, Twitter and Google
  5. Sticky web-it notes for simplifying collaborative work in web project creation and content management
  6. Instant search with query suggestion
  7. Support of SKU in the e-commerce module
  8. Rating and influence systems in the social networking module
  9. A ready-made InfoPortal for municipalities and media outlets
  10. A "Live session" feature, providing a more convenient experience to the daily user

JFBConnect v3.2 - Adds Multiple Features for Enhanced Integration of Joomla and Facebook

With Facebook recently announcing it surpassed the 500 million user mark, and Joomla powering over 2.5% of all websites, the integration of both is a natural fit for growing your site and brand both easily and organically.

The newest release of JFBConnect, version 3.2, now makes that integration even more powerful! Updated features include a rich wall posting feature on registration and login, full Facebook Open Graph support, automatic comments and like boxes throughout your Joomla site, and additional profile fields during registration.

These enhancements are all in addition to existing features such as one-click registration, customizable profile import into multiple 3rd party extensions, automatic logging in of Facebook users, and all of the Facebook social widgets such as Like, Comments, Fanbox and more.

Rich Wall Posts

With rich wall posts during registration or login, you're sure to get noticed by Facebook users! Simply fill out the message, image, and link to post when any user registers or logs in and JFBConnect takes care of the rest.

Open Graph Support

Interactive Multiligual: Crowdsourcing translations with Tiki

Many times, software internationalization (often abbreviated as i18n) and translation can quickly become a nightmare... if you don't have the right tools. Tiki's interactive translation feature allows contributors to create, edit, and maintain the more than 40 translations of Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware.

In true "dog-fooding" tradition, the Tiki Community began crowd-sourcing this feature in 2010 by establishing a dedicated Tiki instance for translators. Not only can contributors translate via their browser, but Tiki's interactive translation feature allows textual translations within context. The centralized translation server, running the latest Tiki code, ensures that all translators are using the same version. The translation strings are regularly committed to the Tiki SVN repository.

Due to its ease of use, the Tiki Community recently completed two translation sprints, pushing the German and French languages towards 100% completion. With more than 45 active translator accounts, other languages are not far behind.

Quoting IT: Call for Reform in Federal IT Management

"Information technology should enable government to better serve the American people. But despite spending more than $600 billion on information technology over the past decade, the Federal Government has achieved little of the productivity improvements that private industry has realized from IT. Too often, Federal IT projects run over budget, behind schedule, or fail to deliver promised functionality. Many projects use “grand design” approaches that aim to deliver functionality every few years, rather than breaking projects into more manageable chunks and demanding new functionality every few quarters.