Michael Silverman has a great article on The Content Wrangler regarding content management. The full title of the article is "Making The Business Case for Web Content Management: First, Admit You Have A Problem". The article is a one-stop place for explaining content management, why a business or organization should implement a content management system (CMS), and tips for choosing and implementing a CMS.
"Tech is so illogical and arbitrary, it needs folks like you and me to explain it to everybody else."
--Stephen Manes, "Full Disclosure: If You're Not a Geek, You'd Better Know One", PC World Magazine, September 2007
A few months ago I mentioned that I was hosting my site using a "budget shared hosting plan through my reseller site which is comparable to the hosting plans offered by GoDaddy". In that same article, I also mentioned that although I prefer to run my sites on a Virtual Private/Dedicated Server (VPS/VDS), I wanted to try experimenting with the cheap shared hosting plans despite the plans not offering full MySQL functions such as CREATE TEMPORARY TABLE. For the most part, my sites have been running fine on the shared hosting plans but I wanted better control (oh how I miss Linux command line via secure shell). So, I began searching for a better reseller hosting plan. Unfortunately, my search for the perfect reseller host plan still continues.
I thought my hosting requirements were pretty simple. I wanted a reseller hosting plan that provided CPanel, PHP5, MySQL5, secure shell, and a license to a client billing system such as ClientExec. Oh and I wanted to be sure the hosting plans provided were Drupal friendly. While I host more than just Drupal sites I've found that if the server is configured properly to run Drupal then it can run almost any other PHP-based CMS out there. All in all I wanted a shared hosting plan where I spent less time managing the server, yet had the controls I needed via a Linux shell. Simple enough right? In fact I thought I found a great reseller plan through ResellerZoom (RZ). However, after spending most of my weekend hours trying to work it all out, I've come to the conclusion I'm still looking for something that works better.
"IT today is supporting more business processes than backend processes. Today, IT has earned a stake at the table, has gone away from the bits and bytes, and is, more than ever, a partner to the business."
-Frank Modruson, CIO of Accenture Ltd., "What's Next for IT?", The Wall Street Journal, July 30, 2007.
Now that Summer 2007 is finally here, it is time to step back for a couple weeks and spend less time in front of the computer. As I mentioned earlier, I'm going to use some of this time to publish online a professional report I did on IT user support. This report was submitted a couple years ago as a requirement for a Master of Science in Administrative Studies with an Information Systems track. You'll get bits and pieces of it in the following weeks and once I'm done, I'll regroup them similar to the research paper I posted earlier this year.
The biggest reward I get from working on IT projects is the opportunity to take new ideas and new strategies and piece them together into something that has never been done before. Even when I'm not the one originating the new idea, I like helping other innovative people bring their ideas to the table. I have ideas, dreams, and aspirations to help take my workplace to the next level of where it should be via innovative use of what I know best, information technology. How could innovation and all these wonderful ideas I have in my head not be anything but a good thing for my organization? A recent article in the Wall Street Journal answers just that question by saying that there are negatives for an organi
Recently, I read some good posts regarding content management systems (CMS) on a few blogs I visit almost daily. The posts have had me thinking and reflecting in general about CMS. However, I won't talk too much about them so you get a chance to go on and read the articles yourself. The first post comes from OpenSourceCommunity.org and the second post from Gadgetopia.
Collaboration. Everyone wants to do it better. Collaboration. Everyone wants to find that perfect online tool which can support needed communication necessary for good collaboration . Collaboration. Every company in the business wants to provide you their tool to help you make collaboration work for you.
Perhaps ReviewBasics might be just the communication tool you're looking for to meet your collaboration requirements. Tim Shih, SharpStyle Labs, has been wanting me to take a look at their collaboration feedback tool, ReviewBasics. Mr. Shih writes:
"In the digital world, I think we have the inverse effect, where something that is shared can become more valuable than something that is closely held, as long as it is both shared and contributed to by everybody who is sharing in it."
- Mark Shuttleworth, Founder of Ubuntu Linux; Excerpt from "The Grill: Mark Shuttleworth", Computerworld, June 11, 2007