On the Move

The growing team’s major focus is on the development of modules and extensions to further expand the Jahia platform

Washington DC - March 5th 2013 - Jahia, provider of Java-based open source next generation CMS solutions, today announced the opening of a new office in Toronto, Canada as a response to increasingly sophisticated demand in the Americas.

Already staffed with senior Jahia team members, the Toronto-based office will be focusing on both serving North America customers and on the development of modules and extensions that will further enrich the Jahia CMS platform.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – February 28, 2012 – Axceler®,the leader in Microsoft SharePoint governance, administration and migration, today enhanced its security expertise with the appointment of veteran sales executive Michael X. Burns as Regional Vice President of Sales for Western North America.  Axceler is announcing the appointment at SPTechCon – the SharePoint Technology Conference being held in San Francisco this week – where Gold Sponsor Axceler is exhibiting (booth # 608) and participating in the speaking program.

Nashua, New Hampshire, USA, April 13, 2011 – Kentico Software, the Web content management system vendor, announced today that it is expanding its US operations by opening a new office in Seattle and has signed on Justin Smith as a Territory Sales Manager for the Western United States.

Wellington technology company SilverStripe has recorded its best company growth in its 10 year history, in contrast to the tough global economic conditions that have adversely affected much of the IT industry. SilverStripe recorded 190% revenue growth between 2007 and 2009, ranking SilverStripe the 37th fastest growing business in New Zealand as calculated by Deloitte for their 2009 New Zealand Fast 50 awards.

The open source project MiaCMS announced that they and the project team behind the Aliro CMS are joining forces to create a best of breed and next generation CMS. For those folks that aren't familiar with MiaCMS, MiaCMS is a fork of Mambo. I was first introduced to MiaCMS while sitting on the judging panel for Packt Publishing's 2008 Most Promising Open Source CMS Award. Admittedly, Aliro is new to me. Aliro is a project that while appreciating the features and history of the Mambo family (including Joomla!) still saw a need to make some dramatic changes to the CMS architecture and modernize the code base.

Like a lot of people, I too wonder what will happen to the MySQL, Java, and hardware once Sun is integrated into Oracle.  I have opinions but those opinions alone aren't worth a hill of NetBeans.  Luckily, people like Gavin Clarke know what they're talking about.  Clarke has written an excellent article at The Register titled,  Sun and Oracle: end of a beautiful dream.

Earlier today, Packt Publishing announced the winners of their 2008 Open Source CMS Most Valued People Award.  The MVP is a new category for Packt's annual Open Source CMS Awards.  In this category, "names were put forward by members of the Content Management System's development team and community and represent the exceptional support, guidance, and sheer amount of time that the MVPs have given up to support the development and growth of the respective CMS". 

Instead of just copying the winners list from Packt's site, I had hoped to do something different here. I started with a goal to look for each of the MVP's personal blog or project site,  I had hoped to find acknowledgments of the award was given by the MVP themselves or by someone else on their behalf.  Evidently I started searching a little too early and I only came across mentions of the awards from three four of the projects: Drupal (Earl Miles), Joomla! (Johan Janssens), and XOOPS (Onakazu). Plus... Plone.

Below are some excerpts from or about these open source MVPs.  If you are aware of more of the award winners recognizing or being recognized for their contributions...I would appreciate a link to the post.  Open source contributors like these MVPs deserve all the recognition we can give them.

Seth Gottlieb, Content Here, recently turned me on to Sacha Chua and her blog.  Sacha is an Enterprise 2.0 consultant and application developer for IBM and she also happens to be a very good blogger.  What makes her blog interesting, besides being well written, is her posts on corporate use of social technologies given from the perspective of her generation, the Millennials (latest hip word for Generation Y).

While some organizations are still debating about introducing Web 2.0 technologies to their employees, this newest generation now entering the workforce is likely to expect that such technologies are already available to them for use in their daily work tasks.  While the use of information technology is often viewed by companies in terms of staying competitive and a requirement for implementing strategic plans, the technologies are also increasingly becoming an essential tool for the human resources department.  If you're expecting to attract and keep bright educated Millennials such as Sacha within your organization, you then need to better understand how people in her work cohort are likely to process the work given.

Jeff Robbins from Lullabot recently interviewed Drupal developer Earl "MerlinofChaos" Miles for an audio podcast. Earl Miles is the lead developer for some of the more popular contributed modules found at Drupal.org. The podcast focuses on his Drupal module work which includes Views, Panels, and Node Queue. Jeff Robbins also managed to ask some non-Drupal questions in the 88 minute recording that I found just as fascinating. Personally, I always enjoy opportunities to get to know more about the developers behind the software I'm using.

I'm hoping that later today the American version of ComputerWorld will carry the Dries Buytaert article I came across on their Australian site.  The article is an interview with Dries and titled, "Drupal: from a drop in the ocean to a big fish in the CMS World".  Yes, it's a catchy title for the interview, but I like sub-heading even more.