Deeds

In September's CMS-Connected show, I once again had the privilege of being a guest reviewer for their "CMS In the Spotlight" segment. This time around I reviewed e-Spirit's FirstSpirit CMS. Never heard of it? Honestly, I hadn't either until CMS-Connected Producer Gary Eisenstein assigned me the gig. Come to find out, FirstSpirit CMS helps run a number of international sites from companies like Bosch, KLM, Speedo, Sterling Jewelers, and Nintendo of Europe. While doing my homework, I walked away from the demo impressed with the amount of effort e-Spirit had done to improve usability for authors and editors. 

I had the privileged of reviewing Liferay Portal for CMS-Connected's "In the Spotlight" segment. This is the first time, I've done a show with new co-host Butch Stearns. The end result is what I think is a great question and answer review of Liferay's products followed by Scott Liewehr's analyst perspective of Liferay the company. In the show, I talked about Liferay Portal and Liferay Social Office. I also had a chance to briefly mention Liferay Sync.

Early this morning, I was one of two guests on the eZ Publish Show. The purpose of the episode was to discuss the future of content management system. I was joined by host Ivo Lukač of Netgen, and fellow guest Apoorv Durga from Real Story Group.

On my "to-do list" is a mention of the availability of my In the Spotlight segment online as well as the rest of the May 2013 CMS-Connected show. One of the nice things about participating on this show with hosts Tyler Pyburn and Scott Liewehr is the chance to get to spread my wings to new CMS territory. Specific to this show, I had the opportunity to review Bridgeline Digital's iAPPS Product Suite for the very first time. Once I had a chance to get a demo and do some homework, I found I was quite impressed with this content management platform.

At the 2013 CMS Expo Learning & Business Conference I have the privilege of moderating a panel focused on the Cloud. That's actually a broad topic, but I think it's a topic that is increasingly becoming well understood by the CMS community. Last year, I moderated a similar panel and, in my opinion, we spent way too much time trying to define the Cloud.

The recording video of the March 26th CMS-Connected show is now available online. CMS-Connected is a monthly webcast featuring news, trends and commentary related to the content management industry. In this particular show the focus was on mobile and social eCommerce with much of that discussion including Gabe Sumner from Sitefinity. I also participated as a guest on the show discussing my impressions of MODX  during the "In the Spotlight" segment.

For a second year in a row, I along with CMS Report was invited to cover Liferay's North America Symposium which is being held this year in San Francisco. During this morning's keynote speech by Bryan Cheung, Liferay CEO and founder, I couldn't walk away from the presentation without recognizing the difference a year can make for one company. Something has changed for Liferay and the many partners and associated vendors that are represented here at this conference. Liferay has grown up, people are ready to talk business, and they're once again ready to talk about the importance of open source and community which makes this all happen.

Two years ago I began a process to consider how best to evolve CMSReport.com beyond where it is today. I've known for some time that I needed to take some risks, get out of my comfort zone, and perhaps change how I maintain and run the site. Given the opportunity and in the spirit of taking risks I've decided to no longer run CMS Report on Drupal. That's right, after running this site on Drupal for more than six years on Drupal I've decided to use another content management system.

If you follow me on Google+ or Twitter, you likely already know that I am not a tablet fan. I know the statement is contradictory when coming from a techy person like me. I have a hard time seeing the benefit of a tablet in my day to day life. I already own a great smartphone (the Android-based Droid Razr) and I prefer the ease of a physical keyboard on my computer and notebooks when writing content is crucial. Overall, I'm just not convinced that a tablet will allow me to do anything more than what my current devices already do. Perhaps this is a sign of my age, but I lost my "wow" some time ago for new technology.