Microsoft

Newly Released DotNetNuke 7.0 Helps Organizations Save Time, Reduce Costs and Develop Advanced Web Applications

DotNetNuke Corp. (DNN), the company behind the most widely adopted Web Content Management Platform for Microsoft .NET, today announced general availability of its highly anticipated DNN 7.0 release.  DNN 7.0 intends to make creating and managing content-rich websites, social intranets and online communities easier than ever, with benefits for enterprises, web content editors, developers and web designers alike.

During the past couple years, I've had the opportunity to get to know DotNetNuke and their open source community much better than I had ever expected. Shaun Walker, a founder and CTO of DotNetNuke Corp., is also a visionary leader and over the past few years I've come to know and respect the man quite a bit.

As we discussed a few weeks ago, the release of Joomla 2.5 on this day was expected.  Surpringly, knowing the release date seemed to make the wait longer. Without a doubt, Joomla.org will be a busy place the next few days. Joomla's marketing people tell me that Joomla! has been downloaded more than 28 million times and powers more than 1.6 million. Those are pretty significant numbers and this new version of Joomla! is expected to help continue the popularity of this open source CMS.

As I discussed in my previous articles, Joomla! for the first time includes multi-database functionality, beginning with Microsoft SQL. If you read the article, you also know that Joomla 2.5 also includes more than a dozen new features. You'll can also check out those features by going to https://www.joomla.org/core-features.html . But before you hop over to another site, you can find some additional details about Joomla 2.5 right now in this exclusive press release that we've acquired from sources secretly embedded in the Joomla! community.

The 1994 Knight-Ridder video I attached at the bottom of this post  is a fantastic reminder that the tablet predates the iPad and Android tablet by many decades. During the "hypermedia" era of the late 1980's, I can recall taking a "tech of the future" class where my professor discussed in similar detail what a tablet might look like in the future. He described a day where students would be sitting under trees reading not from paper books but utilizing exactly what we know today as the digital tablet. 

 Believe it or not though, the origins of the tablet computer date back to the 19th century.

MODX, LLC, the company behind the open source MODX content management platform has released a major update to its flagship MODX Revolution with version 2.1. This release extends MODX’s reach beyond the traditional Open Source server infrastructure and into the Microsoft channel by adding support for Microsoft SQL Server.

Sydney, Australia – 16 February 2011– Elcom, one of Australia’s largest independently owned Web Developers, today announced the latest release of CommunityManager.NET (Version7.3) – its flagship enterprise Web Content Management software.

CommunityManager.NET is utilized by over 500 organizations worldwide, and provides a secure and scalable framework which supports websites, intranets, ecommerce platforms, membership systems, mobile platforms and online training capabilities.

Underpinning this latest version of CommunityManager.NET is a variety of updates and additional new features, designed to increase efficiency and reduce costs through an improved user-experience for clients and end-users. At the core of this latest release is the addition of A/B testing to Elcom’s existing Online Marketing offering.

According to Elcom’s Product Director, Anthony Milner, “This new feature was developed in response to industry trends and by really listening to what our clients wanted”. It allows users to test a baseline control sample webpage and compare it to a variety of single-variable test samples, in order to better evaluate and improve response rates. This ultimately enables the execution of “smarter marketing” through testing, evaluation, better resource allocation and enhanced tracking ability – thereby significantly improving Return on Investment.

New Solution Packages Enable Commercial Edition Customers to Get Up to Speed Faster

DotNetNuke Corp., the company behind the most widely adopted Web Content Management Platform for Microsoft .NET, introduced support for two innovative new products from Microsoft: WebMatrix and Razor. New adopters of DotNetNuke with limited technical experience can take advantage of the WebMatrix development environment to efficiently build their web site. More experienced developers can leverage the deep DotNetNuke integration with Razor to more quickly and easily create powerful extensions for the DotNetNuke platform. Version 5.6 of DotNetNuke also now includes a Configuration Manager feature which simplifies web site administrative tasks. In addition, the new DotNetNuke Solution Packages enable customers to get up to speed faster and take full advantage of the commercial editions of DotNetNuke.

Highlights:

• Available today is deep integration of the new Razor scripting syntax which Microsoft launched at CodeMash last week. Supported as a core aspect of the DotNetNuke platform, Razor enables developers to quickly and easily create custom extensions for their DotNetNuke web site or web application.
• Through support of WebMatrix, new adopters of DotNetNuke with limited technical experience can now take advantage of the WebMatrix development environment to efficiently build web sites.
• DotNetNuke 5.6.1 features a new Configuration Manager that allows a host user to manage the various configuration files that control the run-time operation of DotNetNuke. Administrators can now select the desired configuration file and load it into a multi-line textbox in a web browser where modifications can be made manually and changes can be saved where they will take effect immediately. Administrators can also upload a Configuration Merge script which can be used to automate many of the more repetitive and complex configuration operations.
  

Yesterday, I received an email from SilverStripe Co-Founder, Sigurd Magnusson. For all the years I have been corresponding with Sigurd, I don't think I've ever seen him as excited as he was this time in breaking the news. SilverStripe, a web development company delivering open source content management systems (CMS) has achieved Certification for Windows Server 2008 R2 for version 2.4.0 of their flagship product, SilverStripe CMS. This is a world first, as the software is the only truly open source web application to achieve certification on the Windows platform.

What is a little different about this story is that it is not only SilverStripe's press relations people making a big deal about this story. Microsoft is making a big deal about the accomplishments of SilverStripe. Andrew Gordan, Microsoft's New Zealand’s Platform Strategy Manager writes:

A large amount of the innovation in the software world is happening on the web and in the cloud, and in addition to that, we are seeing increased awareness and acceptance of open source software on the Microsoft Windows platforms.

Microsoft's Certified for Windows programs are well known for indicating software and hardware products that have been thoroughly tested to work well on Microsoft Windows and as of today, SilverStripe CMS is the first Open Source web application to complete the comprehensive testing necessary to achieve "Certified for Windows Server 2008 R2" status.

In his own blog post, Sigurd mentions that the certification for SilverStripe has been a long but rewarding road. A large proportion of the SilverStirpe's  community and clients use Microsoft servers, databases, and other technology. Over the past three years there an effort has been made for the SilverStripe CMS to work with Microsoft's operating system, web servers, and SQL Server database product.

A few days ago, I read Mary Jo Foley's article titled Microsoft: Our strategy with Silverlight has shifted. According to an interview with the President of the Server and Tools Division at Microsoft, the company will be shifting support for Silverlight away from the PC and Mac desktop and toward the phone market.

So what’s a developer to make of Microsoft’s messaging (or lack thereof) about Silverlight at its premiere developer conference?

I asked Bob Muglia, the Microsoft President in charge of the company’s server and tools business, that very question and got what I consider to be the clearest answer yet about how Microsoft is evolving its Silverlight strategy.

“Silverlight is our development platform for Windows Phone,” he said. Silverlight also has some “sweet spots” in media and line-of-business applications, he said.

But when it comes to touting Silverlight as Microsoft’s vehicle for delivering a cross-platform runtime, “our strategy has shifted,” Muglia told me.

Microsoft plans to be using HTML 5 to replace the functions currently being provided by Silverlight 5.

It is not the point of this post to debate the merits of HTML 5, Silverlight and even Flash. What is my point though, is that Microsoft appears to me to be desperate. Desperate to come up with a strategic plan that will carry them beyond the day of Windows PCs. Microsoft is desperate to become innovative for the sake of innovation that they're really confusing a lot of their developers. If only after a few years of support, Microsoft is shifting focus of it's Silverlight platform...what potential developer in his or her right mind would support another future Microsoft endeavor? Just take a look at the comments to Bob Muglia's blog post discussing this topic and I think you'll see my point.

Below is a consolidated list of content migration tool I have come across, and most of this are primarily for content migration to SharePoint Platform.

(1) MetaLogix

https://www.quest.com/metalogix/

SharePoint Site Migration Manager- For migrating content from SPS 2003 to SharePoint 2007 Platform

Web Content Migration Manager for SharePoint - For migrating content from various below listed platforms to SharePoint 2007: