Service Provider

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:  

Accrisoft. A few months ago, I knew little about Accrisoft or their flagship product, Accrisoft Freedom CMS. In early May, CMS Report met with the company for the first time and it was a great opportunity for me to get to know them better. Accrisoft is a company that anybody who is somebody in the content management business definitely needs to get to know better.

It's not that often I become quickly enthralled with a company and their products. Yet, for the past couple months I can't help but think of the first demo I saw of Accrisoft's CMS. It wasn't just the genius simplicity of their blue/green user interface for users and developers that I'm obsessing about either. It is the fact that Accrisoft convinced me it's not only users that need to rethink how websites are managed, but also the many site owners and developers that incorrectly think they don't need a company like Accrisoft.

Accrisoft is a provider of Software as a Service (SaaS) Web applications and they definitely made a big splash at last Spring's 2011 CMS Expo. During the expo, I was able to meet up with Accrisoft's CEO, Jeff Kline, as well as their chief technology officer, Mark Zeitler. It wasn't just their product, Accrisoft Freedom CMS, that won me over that day but also their enthusiasm and  technical vision of what the future holds for web content management.

If Accrisoft isn't on your radar it is time to put it there. For the last five years I've focused most of my attention on CMSs that individuals and organizations are more likely to manage and host themselves. Quite frankly, a portion of my DNA is old-school IT and I've stubbornly been unyielding to any notion of running a content management system in the cloud. I've always wanted to maintain as much control as I could on the servers that host my CMS. Control of your IT assets is a good thing, isn't it? The talk of the cloud is just slick marketing talk, isn't it? Accrisoft, as well as Acquia, have persuaded me to believe that it makes perfect business and technical sense to utilize SaaS CMS.

Last week, DotNetNuke Corp announced the availability of DotNetNuke Professional Edition 5.1. This edition is the latest release of its web content management and application development framework for business-critical websites and web applications built on Microsoft .NET. The DotNetNuke Professional Edition is built on the same open source core as the free DotNetNuke Community Edition but includes several exclusive features and is fully supported and documented. The annual DotNetNuke Professional Edition subscription costs $1,999 per instance.

New features added to both the community and professional editions of DotNetNuke 5.1 include:

• Added Management Console to simplify access to admin functions
• Auditing for core tables to increase security
• Content Approval and Versioning
• Stop banners displaying and clickthrough count incrementing when indexed by crawlers
• Skin Event Handling
• Google Analytics Support
• Custom XML Sitemap Ranks

Besides the new features and normal bug fixes, DotNetNuke 5.1 also offers additional improvements over DotNetNuke 5.0 including:

There are reasons why I have been mentioning SilverStripe quite a bit here at CMS Report. In case you haven't noticed, the New Zealand based company has been making a lot of effort this year to expand their global reach.  Recently, SilverStripe put Sigurd Magnusson, their Sales and Marketing Director, on a sort of world tour to let everyone know more about the open source SilverStripe CMS. This week the latest news from the company is the launch of their Global Partner Program.

SilverStripe has today significantly expanded its global reach. From today, its corporate headquarters in Wellington, New Zealand, is complemented by partnerships with established companies in 8 locations throughout the US, UK, Europe, and Australia.

The Partner Program gives customers access to professional SilverStripe skills and knowledge across the globe. Today's milestone will allow businesses around the world to get local professional SilverStripe support and services. Additionally, the Partner Program will accelerate market adoption and awareness of SilverStripe globally.

Customers across the world can now visit https://www.silverstripe.com/partners/ to find a local SilverStripe partner who can help implement their SilverStripe solution.

For a couple weeks, I've been aware that SilverStripe was about to announce the launch of their partner program. The goal of the partner program is to help expand support and enthusiasm for the SilverStripe CMS. I was asked to say something nice about the CMS in their press release announcing the partner program.

I have to admit that when someone submits a story and I trust them...I sometimes don't read the whole article before I publish it.  So until I read Dean Barker's Gadgetopia, I didn't realize his company, Blend Interactive, was featured in eZ's SHARE! magazine.  The irony is that if I had read an article posted at my own site by one of eZ System's own people...Dean's post wouldn't have been new news to me.  Sigh, I have been just too busy...

At first I was skeptical that this article was without bias regarding Wordpress.com since it was Matt Mullenweg's own blog that referred me to the story.  I was pleased to discover that the author, Jonathan Bailey, helped erased my skepticism in his well written article, Wordpress.com is Virtually Spam Free.  The first two paragraphs should get you interested in reading more.

I'm convinced that digital identity and universal authentication systems will make it big on the IT radar scope for 2007. While a number of propriety systems have cropped up over the years, the open-source project OpenID has started to make headlines as it tackles the problems and solutions for digital identity.

OpenID is an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity.

The local newspaper for Sioux Falls, SD contains an article about an online service called Feed Rinse. The service "can rinse your feeds by keyword, author, tag, etc, or filter profanity and more." According to the article, the service is making national headlines on their Feed Rinse product. I've never used the service, so I can't really give it thumbs-up or thumbs-down. Some excerpts from the Argus Leader: