This is a fantastic article found on ZDNet UK not only about open source content management systems but the issues that traditional publishers are now facing in either competing or adopting with today's Web CMS. The article is written by Mike Barrett and is titled, "CMS evolution, publishing revolution?". The author writes:
I'm currently in the process of moving CMS Report and some other sites I manage to a new VPS. The original reason for the change was to move my sites off of a legacy version of Linux (Fedora Core 2). However, I'm also making the server change because of too much bleeding edge experimentation by yours truly that has brought my server's stability into question. Believe it or not, a reboot of the server doesn't fix everything!
CMS Watch has a very good article on their site titled, "Question CMS Consolidation". The article serves as a reminder for IT and managers that, although technically feasible, an organization may not want to put everyone on the same content management system (CMS). Why would an organization want to to consolidate their systems in the first place? For those at top of the organization there may be some obvious reasons to unify the organization onto a single CMS.
Many organizations are looking at a portfolio of dozens of content management systems running somewhere on their network. From sheer tidiness alone, it’d be nice to have a shorter list. And such tidiness can have real benefits: better negotiating leverage with vendors, reduced overhead to manage contracts, reductions in the number of servers and hence in datacenter space (with attendant power and operational costs), and so on. Finally, increased demands for compliance and control are placing a premium on simplifying information management.
In my own organization, we have had both Internet and intranet servers since the mid 1990's supporting operations and administrators. While we moved our Internet web servers onto a CMS a few years ago, it is only the past few months that many of our offices and departments have shifted their intranet from static pages to much more dynamic system. As many of our field offices migrate their servers to utilizing newer Web 2.0 and collaboration applications, IT and management have a strong desire to consolidate those applications and servers.
Mozilla's flagship e-mail client, Thunderbird, is now available under version 2.0. I've been running the Thunderbird 2.0 nightly development versions for almost six months without any problems. I expect Thunderbird users will have little problem with upgrading from version 1.5 to version 2.0. Straight from the release notes I've listed at the bottom of this post are the new features users will find in Thunderbird 2. None of the new features are earth shattering for e-mail clients but I do find comfort that Mozilla can always teach its software new tricks.
One of the new features that is listed for Thunderbird 2 is the use of Nullsoft Scriptable Install System as the new Windows installer. The message reads that the new installer "resolves many long-standing issues". For anyone that might know, I'd be curious as to exactly what the long-standing issues were? Were the issues merely technical or were there some political open source issues involved with the decision? Just curious as I haven't had the time to dig through some of the developer blogs/notes for the advantages of using the Nullsoft installer.
This is another typical tech doomsday articles, but well worth the read. The article, Is the Internet Ready to Break?, was published in Baseline:
Reports of the Internet's death are greatly exaggerated. But the growth of video and broadband access will require new investment, technology and thinking to keep it healthy.
The fact is that if no one considered IT worst case scenarios we most likely wouldn't be able to prevent them or at least be prepared for the events. We have a couple words for that. It's called contingency planning.
Michael Kaply has been writing a series of articles on how to deploy Firefox 2 within the Enterprise. I wrote last year that one of the difficulties of deploying Firefox and Thunderbird in the enterprise was the lack of tools Mozilla provided for deploying the software. I'm happy to say that Kaply's articles do a fairly good job on providing some solutions for those organizations that need to manage a large network of clients. Kaply's original intent is to cover the following topics regarding deployment of Firefox 2 within the enterprise:
All I can do is shake my head in the direction education has taken in the United States. I've written about this topic in the past, a little here and on another blog of mine. In one of those blog posts, I wrote the following.
American society as a whole seems to have less value for education, especially in the sciences and math, than when I was growing up. Maybe I’m more sensitive to these numbers since I am a scientist at heart…but isn’t anyone else disturbed by this trend? While I feel there should have been something done to help reverse this downward spiral sooner, I’m glad at least that it is finally getting some some well deserved attention by the Bush administration.
College students in the United States are not showing up in those university programs that are focused on physical science, computer science, math, and engineering. There are a number of politicians, parents, and students that will blame the public school education system for the current state of education in the United States. I have some serious doubts whether fingers should really be pointed in the direction of the teachers or even school system. I think in many ways, those fingers should be pointed right back to the parents and their children. Perhaps life in America is so good that by the time the student becomes a young adult, life hasn't prepared them to face the challenges and disappointments they need to do well in the sciences.
A recent eWeek article reported that a United States "policy think tank" found that in the past decade, information technology boosted the U.S. economy by $2 trillion dollars.
From CMS Report's very beginning, I had every intention to talk about not only those content management systems (CMS) that are open source, but also those CMS that are considered propriety systems. I personally don't have a problem seeing companies making profit for the products they develop and promote. Yet, if you look at the majority of posts I have written in the past year you'll find that about 95% of the articles center around open source CMS and not propriety systems. Part of the reason I don't talk much about propriety CMS is that I just don't have the same access to them as I do with open source software. However, a tiny article in one of the IT trade ma
I can only hope that Dell is serious this time around about putting Linux on the desktop. From ComputerWorld:
After collecting some 1,800 new product and service ideas from IT users and customers using an online "suggestion box," Dell Inc. has announced that it's taking the user suggestions seriously and will soon debut and sell a new line of certified, user-ready Linux-loaded desktop and laptop computers.