Kshipra Singh of Packt Publishing sent me an e-mail the other day. Packt Publishing focuses on the publication of computer and information technology books intended to be read by developers, administrators, and newbies. Mr. Singh wanted to let me know that they just recently published a new book for the Alfresco CMS. The book is titled, Alfresco Enterprise Content Management Implementation, and is written by Munwar Sharrif.

Packt Publishing has offered me "a sample chapter from this book, to be published" here at CMS Report . To make things easy we decided just to offer the link onsite to the sample chapter stored directly on Packt Publishing's servers. You can download the the sample chapter in PDF format. The sample chapter being provided is Chapter 5, "Implementing Document Management".

Given that I only have the sample chapter on Alfresco to read, I hesitate to offer any type of review for the book. I will say, however, that just in the opening pages of the sample chapther the author had my attention on his reasons for using Alfresco as well as writing the book.

Unlike most other open-source CMSes, which offered only web content management, Alfresco provided a wide range of solutions to Enterprise customers with an impressive roadmap. And most importantly, it is created using completely open standards. This excited us a lot, and we started implementing Alfresco in many enterprises...I have trained many users, administrators, and developers in Alfresco and many other systems. This book distils the hands-on approach of my training courses into a concise, practical book. The book focuses on business needs rather than technical syntax.

The author also make a brief mention that there are currently around 1700 content management systems out there on the market.  No wonder I have been feeling a little behind keeping up on today's content management systems!  Either way, if you have read or are reading the book...I'd be glad to hear your thoughts on either Alfresco or the book.  Feel free to leave your comments here on this page.  

"Why have IT report to accounting?  You show me a company where the CIO reports to the CFO, and I'll show you a company lagging in its industry in the use of technology."

- Benjamin Salzmann, Acuity CEO, Quoted in "CIO to CEO: If You Want to Move Up", ComputerWorld, December 18, 2006

This fork of Joomla to improve accessibility interested me

Accessible (a8e) Joomla! is a Joomla! fork that conforms to accessibility guidelines and web standards. A8e Joomla! will follow regular Joomla! releases. The project should implode when regular Joomla! finally conforms to the standards.

Accessibility of Internet sites is very huge within the federal government and addressed by Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, 1998.

I almost missed this one. Plone 2.5.2 was released a few days ago. Plone is a CMS written in Python (something I know a lot about) that is built on the Zope application server (something I know very little about). The Plone 2.5.2 release is a bug fixer for the following:

• LiveSearch
• Unicode handling
• External Editor
• IE7 rendering

The original announcement from Plone.org can be read here.

CMS Made Simple 1.0.3 was released to fix a number of bugs and security issues. Some of the changes in 1.0.3 as reported in the ChangeLog since CMS Made Simple 1.0.2 was released include:

SeaMonkey, the Internet suite package formerly known as Mozilla Suite, was just released under version 1.1.  SeaMonkey is like the old friend that you don't call anymore because  you're too "busy" spending time with your new friends, Firefox and Thunderbird.  Yet you still wish that old friend the best of luck and perhaps it's time for a reunion of sorts.

You can check out the online readme file for the new features and fixes in SeaMonkey 1.1.  However, the best summary likely comes from SeaMonkey's Project News page.

Are you tired of all the Drupal and WordPress posts we've been doing lately here at CMS Report? Not my fault...I only report the CMS news! The fact is that among the open source CMS that I post about...both Drupal and WordPress have been churning out a lot since the New Year started. The release of Wordpress 2.0.7 is just a good example as any.

On Drupal's sixth birthday Dries Buytaert announced that Drupal 5.0 has been released. The 5.0 version of the content management system is considered a very significant release by its open source community. Consider this, it's been almost half a decade since Drupal 4.0 was released.

After 8 months of development we are ready to release Drupal 5.0 to the world. Today is also Drupal's 6th birthday, so the timing could not be more perfect. Drupal 4.0 was released in 2002 and finally we feel confident to increase the major version number from 4 to 5.