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EntropySoft announces the Interwoven WorkSite connector

Aug 19, 2008 by Bill MorrisoncloseAuthor: Bill Morrison Name: Bill Morrison
Email: writeall@hotmail.com
Site: http://
About: See Authors Posts (3) MyTestBox News

Enterprise content integration (ECI) is admittedly an essential element for website functionality. Now, in the spirit of more is better, EntropySoft  announces the creation of Interwoven WorkSite connector. EntropySoft is focused on the integration of unstructured data and is a pure-player in the ECI global market (Enterprise Content Integration).

Yippee or Yawn?
Depends. Depends on if you are using (or looking to use) EntropySoft’s connector portfolio. This release adds to their already huge line of connectors.

From their press release:

This connector is part of EntropySoft’s connectors portfolio, which consists of more than 25 bidirectional connectors, the biggest offer for connectors on the market.
The plug and play connectors are designed for major applications such as Alfresco, EMC Documentum, FileNET P8, Open Text LiveLink, IBM DB2 Content Manager On Demand, Xerox Docushare, Microsoft Sharepoint, Lotus Quickplace and others.

So this might be just the widget you need. Or it might be one you file away for your next gig. The one thing it does demonstrate is that the folks at Entropy Soft aren’t just chilling out and resting on their butts, eating Doritos. This connector adds to their line of enterprise software and continues the search for the holy grail- Stuff That Works.

Read more about this here.

What EntropySoft does well:

1. Content Connectors: normalize access to content repositories. (software editors)
2. Content Federation: content integration in business apps.
3. Content ETL: for system integrators and organizations who want to easily migrate, archive or publish contents.

The bottom line- you got stuff? Stuff from third parties, variable formats and whatever your boss is currently in love with?
Check out EntropySoft and their products.

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Tags: content connectors, content management, enterprise content integration, entropysoft, interwoven connector

Tikiwiki CMS launches the version 2.0, release candidate 4

Aug 7, 2008 by Mircea GoiacloseAuthor: Mircea Goia Name: Mircea Goia
Email: mtb@mytestbox.com
Site: http://www.mytestbox.com
About: Mircea Goia was born in Romania and imigrated to USA in 2005. He lives in Phoenix, AZ and works as web developer. Aside, he works also on several entrepreneurial Web projects. He shows a keen interest in commercial Web development such as social networks, viral marketing, online video. His artistic hobby is filmmaking with special interest in directing.See Authors Posts (73) MyTestBox News

Two weeks after the release candidate 2 (Tikiwiki version 2.0) a new release candidate has been unleashed: #4Tikiwiki version 2.0 http://tikiwiki.org/ is the new version of this popular content management and wiki software/groupware.
We have reviewed an older version of Tikiwiki here.

This new version is packed with new features and enhancements like:

# Accessibility
# Action log
# Admin improvements
# Ajax & Flash enhancements
# Authentication
# Banners
# Calendar
# Category
# Contacts (in MyTiki)
# Contribution
# Copyright management
# File Galleries
# Free tags
# Forums
# Wiki Auto Save a Draft
# Wiki page permissions
# Wiki Page Staging and Approval
# Universal Wiki edit button
# Wysiwyg in Wiki pages
# and many more!

In short, it has even more features, it’s faster and has a better user interface.
To see all of these new features and improvements, check out their page: http://doc.tikiwiki.org/Tikiwiki+2.0

It had amassed over two years of work and these new improvements seem fantastic. We might review this new version soon.

The official release will be out in August, so stay tuned!

The team (formed by over 300 developers around the world) already started the work for version 3.0, which could be released in April 2009. The main focus of version 3.0 will be enhancing the admin interface, the user interface, the theme system and built-in themes.

Get TikiWiki 2.0RC4 here:
https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=64258&package_id=266122

Help them improve. Report any issues here:
http://dev.tikiwiki.org/Report+a+Bug

And if you discovered any security issues report it to security@tikiwiki.org

About Tikiwiki
Tiki CMS/Groupware (aka TikiWiki) is a powerful open-source Content Management System (CMS) and Groupware that can be used to create all sorts of Sites, Web applications, Portals, Extranets, Intranets. TikiWiki is a multi-purpose package with a lot of native options and sections that you can enable/disable as needed. It is designed to be international, clean and extensible. TikiWiki also works great as a Web-based collaboration tool.

TikiWiki incorporates all the features present in several excellent wiki systems available today, plus a lot of new features and options, allowing your wiki application to be whatever you want it to be – from a simple wiki to a complex site for a whole user community with many intermediate steps. You can use TikiWiki as a forums site, for poll taking, a chat room, and much more!

Read our review of Tikiwiki here! (videos included)

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Tags: cms, content management, groupware, tikiwiki, version, wiki

SMACKDOWN :: Who were the Open Source Content Management System (CMS) market leaders in 2008?

Jul 31, 2008 by Mircea GoiacloseAuthor: Mircea Goia Name: Mircea Goia
Email: mtb@mytestbox.com
Site: http://www.mytestbox.com
About: Mircea Goia was born in Romania and imigrated to USA in 2005. He lives in Phoenix, AZ and works as web developer. Aside, he works also on several entrepreneurial Web projects. He shows a keen interest in commercial Web development such as social networks, viral marketing, online video. His artistic hobby is filmmaking with special interest in directing.See Authors Posts (73) Content Management, MyTestBox News

When it comes to life online, we all use content management systems in one way or another: blogging, building websites, maintaining websites, marketing them, etc.
If we are not web experts, we usually just use software tools to develop websites. We may not even know what it is that powers the websites—what is actually doing the back-end work. Now it’s time to discover Content Management Systems (or CMS systems), and which ones are used most frequently.

I came across an interesting study about who are the leaders in open source content management systems market in the year of 2008.
The study was just released to the public and it was conducted by Ric Sheves from Water & Stone web development company (cool name, by the way). The company specializes in open source content management systems, particularly Drupal, Joomla!, Mambo, osCommerce and WordPress. Ric lives in Bali, Indonesia (talking about working from cool places).

At 50 pages, there is a significant amount of data in this study that should be of use to developers or to anyone who is looking to commit to a web publishing system. You don’t want to bet on a dead horse, do you?

But first let’s see WHAT is a content management system.

According to Wikipedia a content management system is:

…a computer software used to create, edit, manage, and publish content in a consistently organized fashion. CMSs are frequently used for storing, controlling, versioning, and publishing industry-specific documentation such as news articles, operators’ manuals, technical manuals, sales guides, and marketing brochures. The content managed may include computer files, image media, audio files, video files,electronic documents, and Web content.A web content management system is a CMS designed to simplify the publication of Web content to Web sites, in particular allowing content creators to submit content without requiring technical knowledge of HTML or the uploading of files.

Because the theme of this site is web software (software which runs on a web server and in a browser – not desktop software) we will concentrate on web content management systems. And because we do like free things (who doesn’t?) we will present this study which took in consideration only the open source web content management systems (and only the publication-oriented CMSs, not e-commerce like osCommerce and not enterprise portals like LifeRay). Commercial or hosted products are excluded too.

Below are more details about this study.

—————————————————————————————————————

This whole exercise began by brainstorming through various methods of assessing popularity and adoption rates. While there are a number of indicators, there is no standardized metric to gauge market share in this particular segment — there is simply no way to get an accurate fix on how many systems are actually in use on the web right now.

For this survey the research results were broken down into two broad categories:
• Rate of Adoption
• Brand Strength

In each of the areas, they used a multi-faceted approach, assessing a wide variety of measures to identify broad trends and patterns from which we can draw conclusions with some
degree of confidence. Among the many metrics they sampled are a number of non-traditional indicators, such as Twitter Prominence and Social Bookmarking statistics.

Rate of Adoption
The team began their examination of the open source CMS market by attempting to measure the relative rates of adoption of the systems in the sample set. For reasons discussed below, direct evidence alone is not sufficient to allow them to draw firm conclusions.

As a result, they were forced to look at a variety of metrics in hopes of building a more complete picture of the current state of the market:

Downloads

Installations

Third Party Support

- Developers

- Publishers

All these three metrics are explained in details in the study.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: b2evolution, cms, content management, drupal, elgg, joomla, mambo, market share, mediawiki, modx, phpnuke, pligg, plone, study, survey, tikiwiki, typo3, wordpress

A rising star: Elgg, the content management system and social network creator

Jul 30, 2008 by Mircea GoiacloseAuthor: Mircea Goia Name: Mircea Goia
Email: mtb@mytestbox.com
Site: http://www.mytestbox.com
About: Mircea Goia was born in Romania and imigrated to USA in 2005. He lives in Phoenix, AZ and works as web developer. Aside, he works also on several entrepreneurial Web projects. He shows a keen interest in commercial Web development such as social networks, viral marketing, online video. His artistic hobby is filmmaking with special interest in directing.See Authors Posts (73) MyTestBox News

Elgg, the content management system and social network creator, reached the version 1.0 Beta, finally (after spending some time in the versions 0.x…).

Soon the team will announce the stable release (at least for now because I am sure that, even after the release, bugs will be found by the rest of the users – like always it happens in software development).

It seems Elgg became a rising star among open source content management software systems according to this report: http://www.waterandstone.com/downloads/2008OpenSourceCMSMarketSurvey.pdf

The Elgg project has shown increasing mindshare and brand strength since inception. Recently
publishing activity and awards can only boost name recognition. The evidence shows in the social bookmarking metrics, where Elgg finished near the top of the list. Yet despite those positive signs, engagement in the blogosphere is sadly lacking — a troubling statistics given that
this system is focused on Web 2.0 social interactivity. Elgg also faces challenges in terms of developer support, though this is perhaps not yet a source of concern given the relative youth of the project.

According to that report Wordpress, Joomla! and Drupal are the most used open source content management systems today (phpNuke and Mambo are the things of the past, it seems – you are a king one day and a peasant the next day if you don’t keep up with the demands. And that happened to phpNuke and Mambo – Mambo seems again has internal troubles among the team members. A new project called miaCMS spawned from Mambo.).

So, congratulations Elgg! And work harder to become a king! I wish you success!

Now, some updates from Elgg…
Elgg had one of the most powerful features from the day it was built: the access control. Whatever you create in Elgg (a blog post, an uploaded file, an element of your profile, etc.) can be restricted to as many or few people you want (very granular control).
Which is maybe one of the reasons Elgg, at the begining, started to be used as a social network creator in schools where the privacy is a big thing.

Now, in the latest version 1.0, they’ve refined that even more: creating collections of friends is easier even before. If you are not satisfied with Elgg’s individual-based access model you can swap it with something else: a roles-based access, for example.

More details about the access control and version 1.0 update on their official blog.

You probably are eager to test the new version, right? Well, hold your horses! The version 1.0 will be released to the public sometime this summer.

In the meantime you can still get older versions of Elgg CMS: 0.2 to 0.9.

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Tags: cms, content management, elgg, open-source, php, social network