Forrester Report Finds Enterprise Embracing Open Source WCM

Cloud services provider Acquia has commissioned a Forrester report on open source WCM, and while the results are not overwhelming, it does show more enterprise companies are employing open source systems.

Nearly 60 percent of the 160 companies surveyed said they had at least considered open source for their WCM programs. The report also found that executives who make these kind of decisions are also the ones who are least likely to be very satisfied with their choice. 

Open Source Successes

Acquia certainly has a stake in the findings in this report. As a cloud services provider specifically for the open source Drupal ecosystem, Acquia would love to see more large companies adopt the open source ethos. Forrester found several large vendors who have successfully adopted open source CMSs, and there were a few reasons why those companies enjoyed that success.

Company infighting seems to be what is holding enterprises back when it comes to successful WCM implementation.

Company culture and classic marketing versus IT fighting may be the biggest reasons businesses failed to implement a new Web CMS, but let's look more closely at the number two reason: lack of a company wide strategy. This obviously goes hand in hand with number one, but at least Forrester has some recommendations for how to build that strategy. They are, in order:

• Required a solution that allowed for more customization and flexibility.
• Prioritized integration between WCM and other solutions to support digital customer experiences.
• Focused on more than just cost reduction.
• Made specific plans for supporting the open source WCM deployment.
• Understood the myths and reality surrounding open source security concerns.

First, most companies agreed that open source allowed for more flexibility and customization. One survey respondant, a UK educational institution, told Forrester that when using a proprietary system, it took nine to 10 months to add a new feature. With open source, they were able to add functionality within days.

As for combining systems, the all-in-one solutions often offered by vendors does not seem to fit with those companies who had adopted open source. These companies preferred a best of breed approach, and often realized the power of the developer community to assemble system components.

How to Choose an Open Source Web CMS

If you've been skeptical of open source in the past, you have nothing to fear from what Forrester says:

Open source has by and large achieved a higher level of technology maturity over the past several years and have demonstrated some success in large-scale web deployments."

It's not just entertainment, media and traditional education that are finding success with open source, the report reads. Governments, pharma and retail are having success with it as well, a sure sign it should not be excluded when evaluating Web CMSs.

Because open source allows for downloading entire systems for test driving, this is a decided advantage when doing an evaluation. Be sure to try out those prospective systems and contact the developer community for extra insight and validation.

Open source is not perfect, of course, so areas like support and implementation should be explored carefully. There are developers and system experts out there who have built networks on top of open source software. That way, many IT aspects can be outsourced including core platform support, module support, module creation and enhancement, system upgrades, integrations and 24 x 7 x 365 infrastructure and uptime.

Acquia, of course, offers just these kinds of services for the Drupal-based platform. The company has even begun diving into digital marketing with its latest release, called OpenWEM. Tell us in the comments if you've had reservations about open source in the past or if there are some concrete reasons it simply won't work for your purposes.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Acquia Introduces Open Web Experience Management For Drupal

Acquia, a provider of paid cloud services specifically designed to support the Drupal open source web content management platform, is introducing a new concept it calls “Open Web Experience Management” or OpenWEM. It looks like digital marketing has officially come to Drupal.

First, let’s examine exactly what Acquia is trying to accomplish with OpenWEM. The vendor says OpenWEM is a combination of Acquia cloud services, the Drupal platform and the Acquia app marketplace that allows users to “create immersive, digital content and campaigns [and] socialize them across multiple communities and channels,” based on an open standards web architecture.

OpenWEM also allows Drupal modules to integrate with most major marketing automation and social analytics solutions. Acquia says other WEM tools are based on proprietary third-party architectures that make them “slow to adapt to changing business needs and keep pace with the speed of the social web.”

Filling the OpenWEM Toolbox

In addition to offering the OpenWEM architecture, Acquia is also launching beta versions of two new tools supporting it: Drupal Commons 3.0 for Drupal 7 and Media Cloud. Drupal Commons 3.0 is designed to allow the creation of online communities for collaboration and content sharing. Acquia says the latest upgrade features enhanced mobile support, analytical capabilities and user experience improvements.

Meanwhile, Media Cloud is a new media management service designed to support native management and sharing of rich media content within the Drupal environment. Acquia is also partnering with gamification software provider Badgeville to include Badgeville for Drupal as a key supporting component of OpenWEM.

To further ease access to OpenWEM, Acquia is partnering with more than 400 digital agencies and developers and integrating APIs for the top Drupal development tools used most frequently by Acquia customers.

Acquia Opens Up to Developers

Through a combination of open source and free services, Acquia is angling to become the standard means of managing activities on the Drupal platform — the company refers to itself as the “enterprise guide to Drupal."

In addition to its new OpenWEM concept and supporting solutions, back in August, at DrupalCon Munich 2012, Acquia said its Dev Cloud will be permanently free for developing sites. The developer accounts will include all the features of Acquia Cloud: automated developer workflow, separate development, staging and production environments as well as backups, SSH access, Drush integration, Cloud API and Cloud Hooks for continuous integration and more.

Getting In the Digital Marketing Game

Acquia's introduction of OpenWEM, is the real opening of the door for companies to leverage Drupal as a complete customer experience platform. There's the Web CMS, Drupal Commons for Communities, Media Cloud for rich asset management and the ability to integrate digital marketing and social analytics solutions.

This is the kind of end-to-end platform story that many companies are looking for. It's what Sitecore does, Ektron does and a dozen other web content management (aka web experience or customer experience) vendors are doing.

Does the fact that Drupal is open source give them a leg up? These days selling the open source story isn't really a big thing. Some open source solutions can work just as well in an enterprise as proprietary solutions. With a community as large as Drupal's, an enterprise support company like Acquia, and this list of new capabilities, Drupal is well equipped to support the digital marketing needs of an enterprise.  

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Spread a Positive Brand Message Via Social Media Influencers #rdm12

Whether you are operating in a B2C or B2B channel, the odds are your customers no longer look to you as a primary source of information about your products and services. Instead, they look to social media to find “other people” to tell them about your brand. You need to identify and connect with these “other people” to help ensure they are saying the right things.

Everyone Is a Publisher

At a late afternoon session during the Revenue-Driven Marketing Leadership Summit hosted by the Aberdeen Group in Boston, MA, Alan Belniak, Global Director of Social Media Marketing for manufacturing software provider PTC, described how marketers can tap into third-party social media influencers to help spread positive brand messaging and gain credibility with consumers.

“Conglomerates used to produce content,” he said. “Now anyone can publish about anything.” Belniak used the immensely popular online news site Mashable, founded by a 19-year-old in his mother’s basement in Scotland, as an example of how individuals can use the Internet and social media to establish themselves as authorities without any outside support or assistance.

Influencing the Influencers

The job of the modern marketer, according to Belniak, is to elevate their brand’s status with the social influencer community — and to focus on providing thought leadership in that space. While brands ultimately have less control over influencers than they do over media channels such as brand journalism or paid advertising, Belniak said influencers offer more credibility, because they are seen as more independent.

Belniak advised companies to connect their subject matter experts to influencers. “You need to respond to inquiries from the right people,” he said. “The typical PR response is not sufficient. You need to nurture and maintain the relationship.” By creating relationships with influencers, Belniak said companies can then reach out to the influencers’ networks.  “Take influencers along for the ride while you introduce yourself to new characters,” he said.

A Primer on Social Media Influence from Alan Belniak

All Influencers Are Not Created Equal

Whether an influencer is providing positive or negative commentary, Belniak said it is crucial for time- and resource-strapped marketers to focus only as much attention on them as their sphere of influence justifies. "Look at their reach (number of fans/followers), resonance (how often they are reposted/retweeted, etc.) and relevance (how often they are cited as an expert by other media outlets),” said Belniak.

As an example, Belniak told the story of a “wildly negative” blogger who was consistently bashing PTC online and praising their competitors. At the CMO’s request, Belniak and his team investigated the blogger’s influence and discovered that rather than having a “pulpit,” he actually had a fairly small audience. “So we let him go,” said Belniak.

Measuring Social Influence

PTC uses a combination of online influence-measuring tools and manual scoring to determine the importance of influencers' comments on the company. Belniak cautioned that automated sentiment analysis tools are mostly “junk,” but said third-party online influence/measurement services like Traackr and Klout can be highly valuable in helping to determine which influencers are most worth focusing on.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Jahia Wise Preview: Versatile, Streamlined Document and Social Collaboration

At the end of this month Jahia will introduce a new open source solution called Jahia Wise that combines document management and social collaboration. Easy to use, it has all the functionality required to enable workers to integrate all their information sources and populate their websites or intranets with enterprise content.

Jahia already offers a number of solutions for working with data (including documents), but this solution is designed to make it easy for business users to share documents, exchange them, work on them collectively, and ultimately publish them in a controlled and ordered fashion.

Jahia Wise has been doing the rounds of some of the tech shows, particularly in France. Recently, Elie Auvray CEO of Jahia and Anne de Forsan, director of Communications, sat down with CMSWire and gave us a look at the new product.

Jahia Wise: Gallery View
 

Jahia Unity, Jahia Wise

Jahia is keeping some of the functionality under its hat until the product launch, because, Auvray says, some things are unique and well, why give competitors a chance to pre-empt you?

But that’s all by-the-by. When Jahia Wise is released it will have been in the works for about a year, according to Auvray. The driving principal behind it, he says, is the same principal that drives all Jahia’s other products — notably, unity.

Expanding on the concept of unity, he pointed out that Jahia has, as its driving principal, the delivery of agile open source technologies. This delivery pushes enterprise application convergence as far as it can possibly go by pulling together web, search, document, social and portal technologies.

And Jahia has already managed to achieve this, he says, with some of their other products — like their content management system eXtended Content Management (xCM), their visual experience builder Jahia Studio, their content core platform and a number of other JahiApps (Jahia applications).

When it comes to enterprise collaboration and document exchange, companies expect more and more integration with the information they share online on their intranet or website. Many solutions on the market are cumbersome, complex and costly — especially in terms of integration.

Jahia Wise: Secure Collaboration

Jahia Wise Evolution

Jahia Wise offers an alternative to this complexity, Auvray says. It is the first time that Jahia has produced a product focused entirely on the document, file sharing and social collaboration market. It is a completely new product, based on the same underlying platform as xCM is, but has evolved to ensure that the distribution of content across the enterprise is easy and intuitive. To do that it comes with numerous modules and packages.

While Jahia Wise can work as a complementary product to the core platform, it does have a separate installer, which means that it can also be set up and run independently of the core platform for enterprises that are looking for a distribution platform on its own.

It evolved in this way, Auvray says, because when they went looking at distribution management systems they saw a wide range of products that can manage a wide range of content. However, they also found that once an enterprise started building an intranet based on existing company information, located in different silos, the nightmare of integration began.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

Movable Type Unveils Version 5.2: An Improved Rich Text Editor, Cloud Support Top the Updates

Movable Type, the popular blog software, has released version 5.2, with added support for cloud computing environments.

Movable Type is a popular open source content management and online publishing platform for creating blogs and websites, and it is free for redistribution, use or modification.

Revised Rich Text Editor

First released in 2001, Movable Type was designated as free software under the GNU General Public License in 2007. There are now more than a thousand plugins available for the platform, and it is used by such sites as BarackObama.com, Oracle’s blogs, NBC Universal and BritneySpears.com.

New features in version 5.2 include a revised rich text editor for web pages and blogs, which is designed to be more customizable, browser-friendly and AJAX-friendly.

Version 5.2 can be used under the nginx+PSGI environment, providing support across a range of server environments, including cloud computing virtual servers, CMS servers or content servers. The update also enables collections of blogs to be managed in a multi-blog environment, such as combining data from multiple blogs via the enhanced template language.

A user dashboard now helps to centralize functions commonly used by admins, authors and moderators. There is a new revision history of such CMS objects as blog templates or entries, improved AJAX-based sorting and searching features, and an enhanced list management framework for dealing with large amounts of data.

Authenticated SMTP, Browser Support

With new sitepath restriction, a System Admin can limit the publishing of content to the part of a given file system that is used by the Movable Type server. Email notifications can be sent with authenticated SMTP, and custom fields’ performance has been improved in order to provide faster rebuilds of custom field data.

The update officially supports the Google Chrome browser, starting with the latest version, Internet Explorer 8 and 9, and the latest versions of Safari and Firefox.

Other changes include a mandatory requirement that a system email setting be defined and, if it hasn’t been, the system will prompt for a system email address. A starting day of the week can be set for the calendar by the user, so that each week starts with that day. If none is set, Sunday is used as the default.

Six Apart's acquisition in 2010 left many wondering what would happen to Movable Type where it didn't really seem to fit into the plan, but it has remained an active open source solution with an active community. Japanese subsidiary Six Apart KK has taken over complete responsibility for the web content management system and we are finally seeing more updates as a result.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Umbraco Web CMS 4.9 Focuses on the Editor Experience, Rich Media

The open source content management system Umbraco may have dropped version 5, but the refocus on version 4 has brought some nice improvements and a number of bug fixes.

The free, ASP.Net-based Umbraco is designed for building websites — from small campaign or brochure sites to large media-based sites — and complex Web applications.

Umbraco, which bills itself as a  “priceless CMS at the cost of virtually nothing,” was first released in version 2.0 in 2005, which was also when the first developers conference, called CodeGarden, was held. Unfortunately a turn in the wrong direction resulted in dropping the next major version of the Web CMS to go "back to the basics".

“The early days of Umbraco was the result of a wonderful collaboration between three guys in Copenhagen,” wrote one of those guys, Niels Hartvig, on the Umbraco blog. He added that, “almost eight years later — I’m smiling again” because of the new release.

Focus on the Editor Not the Developer

Umbraco 4.9 features a revised editor, easier integration of third-party videos and images, and a new media library. In addition, the new version includes more than 50 “big” bug fixes, incorporated from submissions by over 20 contributors.

The application now supports HTML5 uploads to the media section, and there’s a new folder content overview that can be filtered and from which common actions can be applied to media items.

The Media button in the Rich Text Editor now supports the oEmbed standard in its embedder, and the code editor for templates, scripting and XSLT templates has been upgraded. Creating and inspecting relation types can now be conducted from the backoffice.

Umbraco 4.9

Umbraco Gets Its Focus Back With a Little Help

Hartvig said, “September 2012 feels like October 2004 on steroids.”

He also noted that, in the past quarter, the number of improvements submitted by external contributors for the Umbraco core is higher “than any other quarters combined.”

Umbraco said that, for this Microsoft platform, it is in the top five most popular server applications and among the ten most popular open source tools. Umbraco HQ is the privately-owned commercial entity that provides support, a bug-fixing warranty and productivity-enhancing add-ons for the open-source product.

Umbraco HQ said the application is used by over 110,000 active websites, including the Davis Cup, Heinz, Peugeot, Hersheys and Microsoft’s Official ASP.NET website. HQ is based in Odense, Denmark, and maintains offices in Bellingham, Washington and Southport, Australia.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Badgeville Releases Its Gamification Platform for Drupal

Drupal, get ready for some fun. Badgeville announced the launch of its gamification and behavior management platform for the open-source content, social and commerce management system.

The integration is designed to simplify the ability to apply what Badgeville calls “engagement mechanics” to websites built and managed with Drupal. It will be offered by Drupal-service provider Acquia to its customers.

Engaging for Rewards

Gamification rewards desired behaviors such as starting discussion forums, commenting and writing and replying to blog posts in order to increase customer loyalty, satisfaction and retention. There are also “anti-gaming mechanics,” which set limits on how many times a behavior can be rewarded.

Badgeville CEO Kris Duggan said in a statement that this is the first integration between an “industry-leading gamification and behavior platform and Drupal.” He added that Badgeville uses Drupal, along with customized functionalities, to manage its own Badgeville Community.

Other current customers who use Badgeville with Drupal include iVillage, Paypay’s X.commerce and PropertyInvesting.com. The company said that its customers typically see increases in user behavior tied to business objectives of between 20 and 200 percent.

Badgeville said that its platform has led to significant increases in customer loyalty and engagement. It cited the example of Mother Nature Network, a site focused on environmental and sustainability news, that uses the Badgeville platform to reward such behaviors as Green Blog posts, reader comments and uploading videos.

Points, Levels, Missions

The gamification platform’s rewards include points, achievements, levels, tracks and missions. Its social gaming techniques include contests, leaderboards and notifications.

For instance, a user is notified that someone has written a review on the site about a new line of sneakers. That user reads the review, writes a comment, and then writes his or her own review. Badgeville’s gamification components can award the user with a Marathon achievement level, which the platform allows to be used for special privileges or discounts.

Based in Menlo Park, California and founded in 2010, Badgeville provides gamification and social engagement solutions to influence and analyze user behavior. 

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Developer Friendly FusionLeaf Open Source CMS Goes Live

FusionLeaf, the brainchild of developer Joseph Spurrier, is now open to the public, and the open source CMS can build fully featured websites complete with analytics, rich text editing and all the tools we expect from a modern Web CMS.

If you're not a tech geek, the system can be used like a lever to create your site, but developers especially can most properly wield the new release, according to Spurrier.

Twitter-Based Architecture

FusionLeaf is based on a toolkit called Bootstrap, and it's the same base used by Twitter, among other websites. 

FusionLeaf is built for speed and currently operates in either Windows or Linux based environments.  

This makes any website built with FusionLeaf a natural for viewing on varied screen sizes like mobile devices. Additionally, the system supports search engine optimization and tools like a sitemap generator, menu builder and a theme selector.

Flexibility Rules

This is one reason FusionLeaf is geared to developers. It's very configureable. There's an internal code editor that can change database code or text code in files, and there's a help section with code snippets and reference samples.

Furthermore, FusionLeaf includes security features like protection from SQL injection attacks and disaster recovery in the form of single click backup and restore. As an open source system, FusionLeaf is free to download, and it comes as a CMS portion and a Stack install. The Stack helps turn your Windows machine into a web server and gets the CMS portion up and running. It won't even take up that much hard drive space (40MB).

The Basic toolkit can be upgraded to the advanced Web toolkit as familiarity is gained with FusionLeaf.

Along with the above mentioned tools, FusionLeaf allows admins to see logged in users and the authority to give or withdraw access with one click. While FusionLeaf at first glance appears to be a one man project, perhaps with the right user base, the PHP compatible system could really take off. Any developes out there willing to give it a spin?

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com