Information Technology

Responsive Web Design is without a doubt one of the Web's biggest buzzwords for 2012. The Web is changing fast and even though the importance of CMSs addressing mobile devices was well predicted, I suspect even the tech gurus are surprised at the current growth rate of smartphones. If you don't know it by now, there is a lot of pressure on web designers and site builders to ensure that their client's websites are responding to the changing Internet. A website should look good no matter how it is being displayed, whether that site is being viewed on a desktop, cell phone, tablet, or whatever new device the Ghost of Steve Jobs brings us.

I've mentioned on this blog a few times that CMSReport.com was never really meant to be a business or publication. It just happened. Six years ago, I started this journey I'm on with just my fascination for information systems and the little knowledge I had obtained on my own about content management systems. I was hungry to learn more and I started this site simply as a place to store my personal notes, bookmarks, and possibly share ideas with a few others. As many of you know, a lot has happened since the early years and I've been at crossroads for how to take CMS Report to the next level.

With a smile on his face, Scott Liewehr sent me a tweet the other day letting me know that he briefly plugged my name while co-hosting CMS-Connected. CMS-Connected is a 60-minute monthly news show, streamed live on the TPN Network with a focus on the web content management industry and includes CMS related news and commentary from leading CMS expert analysts and participating guests. It's a very good video production and well worth your viewing time if you have any interest in content management.

Last weekend, digital agency water&stone, released their 2011 Open Source CMS Market Share Report. I consider this report one of the few non-bias and detailed surveys that come across my desk each year. The report isn't perfect, but the report does help give a good snapshot on the state of who's who in the world of open source content management systems.

You are most definitely going to want to take a look at the details in the report. The findings in this year’s report were based on a survey of more than 2,500 CMS users and additional research into a wide variety of measures of market share and brand strength. I'm still combing through the survey and taking note of the interesting individual nuggets of information that can be found in the results of the survey.

Not surprisingly, the report confirms the ranking position of open source's three most dominate Web content management systems in the market. The press release itself summarizes the results this way:

PHP-based systems WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal continue to dominate the web content management space. But, while the Big Three remain unchanged from last year, the Report concludes that WordPress retains a clear lead in the face of decreasing competition from Joomla!.

The decreasing competition from Joomla! can be seen most noticeably in the decrease of installations reported by the survey respondents in 2011 compared to 2010. The survey does note that this dramatic drop is likely due to the Joomla! community aggressively promoting the survey last year. This year, the promotion efforts were not coordinated and less influential. I only point this out because this is an example of where the report isn't "perfect" via inconsistencies in the yearly survey sample introducing  a margin of error in the trend comparisons. 

A couple weeks ago, Liferay's marketing and communication folks sent me an email mentioning that Liferay was included as a "Leader" in Gartner's 2011 Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portals. After my usual procrastination I finally got around to reading the report and what follows in this blog post are some impressions that jumped at me while reading the report. I'm not convinced the randomness of these personal thoughts make up a blog post (at least a well-written blog post) but I'm going for it since my public note taking often turns out better than a well polished article.

There are a lot of stories this week of the old-guard tech companies moving toward software and social media as the solution to their problems. We're well aware of HP discussing their desire to get out of the PC market (which I think is a mistake) and even Cisco is looking at collaboration software as a forward moving solution.

Customers’ order data, pending payments, leads in the pipeline; it all boils down to the extensive data you hold. Needless to say, that your data is as good as you being able to retrieve it and use it effectively. If your data, processes and applications are disparate it creates a chaos in the company. You need to bring order out of confusion for smooth functioning of your company to handle customer queries more effectively. Integration solutions can certainly help you delight your customers’ mainly in three ways:  

"Today, we are beginning to see the emergence of online knowledge marketplaces where you can sell your personal knowledge. You can see its roots in the crowd sourced Q & A trend that spawned sites like Quora, Aardvark, Stockoverflow and others. And sure, you can go to Google or Ask.com and get your questions answered for free."

-Jennifer Hicks, The Rise of the Knowledge Market, Forbes, June 27, 2011.

In February of this year, Phase2 Technology acquired control of the popular Drupal-based Open Atrium system from its creator, Development Seed. Open Atrium is a team collaboration solution built on the Drupal CMS. Open Atrium is often used in team situations, including intranets and project management environments. The system comes with a blog, a wiki, a calendar, a to do list, a shoutbox, and a dashboard to manage it all.

We tracked down the Phase2 Technology team to ask them about their plans for  Open Atrium. CEO Jeff Walpole and Product Manager Karen Borchert were kind enough to take the time to answer our questions.

Q. What are Phase2's plans for Open Atrium?

Phase2 is very excited to be involved with Open Atrium, but we did not want to move too quickly to change something so many people use and love without first serving the community and providing maintenance to its underlying module stack. Earlier this year, we released support packages around Atrium that allow more users the ability to implement and use Atrium with the help of our team's services. In the months since taking over Atrium, we've been delving more deeply into the involved and vibrant Atrium community to try to understand best what users are looking for in this product. We've talked to users about everything from technical needs to theming to documentation to community involvement. We've built some training around Atrium that we've conducted with some clients, and we're currently preparing a stable 1.0 release (it is officially still in "Beta" status). One thing that is certain is that we are looking to this community to be part of that road map and part of the growth of the product. We want to start by giving the community a more public place to see and find contributed Features that they might use for their own Atrium instances. And then we want to see more community involvement in building and improving Atrium in the future.

Peter Barron is an Intranet Connections Fan; he provides significant feedback on our blog, Linkedin and Facebook pages and speaks candidly about our software as it applies to his organization.  Over the past ten years, Peter has managed the Rio Rancho Public Schools intranet, which is internally called “Rionet”. With over 20 school district departments that use the rionet, Peter targets applications and widgets that make the intranet process fast and easy for thousands of users.