Social Media

Satisfying Your Gen X and Gen Y Intranet Users

With the boom of tech-savvy employees in the workforce, companies are in search of unique engagement tools to keep the Gen X and Gen Y employees interested.  In Dana LaSalvia’s article called “Building an Employee-Enriched Culture with Social Media” she wrote that “organizations should think about integrating companywide marketing messages and upgrading their employee’s recognition programs to be more virtual.” To do this, implement an intranet!

CMS Redefined: Cloud. Mobile. Social.

Back in December I participated in a podcast with Alan Shimel from Network World where I was also joined by Kathleen Reidy, Senior Analyst from The 451 Group and Todd Barr, Chief Marketing Officer for Alfresco. The topic of the podcast was “Open Source CMS” but we also talked about “crystal ball” predictions for the CMS market in general for 2011. In the podcast, I mentioned that from DotNetNuke’s perspective, innovation in the content management market in the coming years will all be centered around 3 major disruptive industry trends…Cloud, Mobile, and Social.

JFBConnect v3.2 - Adds Multiple Features for Enhanced Integration of Joomla and Facebook

With Facebook recently announcing it surpassed the 500 million user mark, and Joomla powering over 2.5% of all websites, the integration of both is a natural fit for growing your site and brand both easily and organically.

The newest release of JFBConnect, version 3.2, now makes that integration even more powerful! Updated features include a rich wall posting feature on registration and login, full Facebook Open Graph support, automatic comments and like boxes throughout your Joomla site, and additional profile fields during registration.

These enhancements are all in addition to existing features such as one-click registration, customizable profile import into multiple 3rd party extensions, automatic logging in of Facebook users, and all of the Facebook social widgets such as Like, Comments, Fanbox and more.

Rich Wall Posts

With rich wall posts during registration or login, you're sure to get noticed by Facebook users! Simply fill out the message, image, and link to post when any user registers or logs in and JFBConnect takes care of the rest.

Open Graph Support

Bitrix Study Demonstrates the End of the Era of Custom-Built Content Management and Social Intranet Solutions

Bitrix, Inc., a technology trendsetter in business communications solutions, introduces a new study of the top five reasons off-the-shelf CMS and social intranet software offer clear advantages over custom-built solutions. The study demonstrates that the functionality and availability of off-the-shelf software makes in-house development obsolete in terms of total cost of ownership, security and associated risks.

How YouTube and the Social Web Saved Winter

My back hurts. As with the rest of the United States, my neck of the woods has received more snow and cold weather than one could possibly want for the winter season. Due to the constant snowfall, I have spent a number of my days clearing my driveway from snow with the help of my 15 year old snow blower. Several days ago, the snow blower's auger died on me leaving me with a useless rusting piece of machinery.

Auger Belts

1. Remove the plastic belt cover on the front of the engine by removing two self-tapping screws. See figure 23.

2. Drain the gasoline from the snow thrower or place a piece of plastic under the gas cap.

Another new term: Social Content Management

I like to keep things simple and prefer to use content management system (CMS) as the term used to describe the information system we use to manage all content. However, I will acknowledge that it is sometimes good to categorize a CMS by purpose. This differentiation of a CMS by purpose has given us subcategories of the CMS which include the enterprise content management system (ECM), the web content management system (WCM), and the social publishing system (social business system). In a press release this week, Alfresco introduced me to social content management, another new marketing term to describe a CMS with the purpose of managing social media.

Alfresco is tying to evolve the social content management system higher than the social publishing system within the information system food chain. If you ask them, a social content management system would do something much more than a social publishing system. I'm not convinced of that, but they do make a good argument.

Alfresco Enterprise 3.4 is purpose-built for managing content in a social world. Enterprises are increasingly deploying social business systems like Jive, Salesforce.com’s Chatter, Lotus Quickr, Drupal and Liferay, among others, in the hopes of making employees more effective. According to Alfresco, these social business systems are creating volumes of unmanaged content if left un-checked. Using open standards like CMIS & JSR-168, Alfresco Enterprise 3.4 is a content platform with a goal to co-exist with social business systems to help manage and retain the content created by social business systems.

The marketing team over at Alfresco are pure geniuses. In this case Alfresco is using the social business systems as another catch phrase to describe what I know to be social publishing systems. Alfresco on the other hand identifies their product as as a social content management system that co-exist to manage the social content created by all these other systems. A CMS that is needed to clean up after the mess created by all these other social publishing systems.  I'm not sure I buy the argument that there is much difference between a social content management system and a social publishing system. But I will bite that social content management has a much better ring to it than social publishing system or any other term we use to describe the management of social content.

From now on when I describe a CMS for the purpose of managing social content, I'll likely use the term social content management instead of social publishing system. It seems to be a more fitting term for describing the direction the CMS is currently evolving toward. So hats off to Alfresco for pushing this term in their marketing. In a CMS world where ECM and WCM can exist, I see no reason why there can't be a SCM. On face value, there is nothing wrong with this logic. Except, of course, I like to keep things simple and prefer to simply call all these information systems a content management system. However, who am I to argue with progress.

Alfresco Enterprise 3.4 delivers social content management

This week, Alfresco announced the availability of Alfresco Enterprise 3.4 for download. This new release delivers on Alfresco’s vision of providing the open platform for social content management by delivering both a more robust content platform for building any kind of content-rich application, along with a more social user-interface for collaboration and document management.

Bitrix Unveils Multi-Platform Virtual Appliance for Social Collaboration and E-Commerce

Bitrix, Inc., a technology trendsetter in business communications solutions, introduces Bitrix® Virtual Appliance 2.0 – the world’s first dedicated ready-to-use solution designed to run social collaboration and e-commerce applications in the most popular virtual environments including VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V, Parallels Virtuozzo and Amazon EC2. As a result, SMBs can achieve cost savings up to 50% on deployment and management of applications and reach a new level of business continuity and agility.

CMS Report's Top Ten Content Management Stories of 2010

What a great year 2010 was for content management. Open source CMS projects seemed to have grown up this year while proprietary systems appeared to continue in their evolution. While social publishing systems may not have conquered the traditional content management system, the CMS definitely took notice by integrating as many social media features developers could come up with.

Below are the top ten stories of 2010 that were posted here at CMSReport.com. The stories in this list were ranked by the number of views per month since the articles first appeared at CMS Report. 

Top Ten Content Management Stories of 2010

  1. Someone does another Drupal vs Joomla comparison
  2. Open Source versus the Enterprise Solution
  3. Ten Content Migration Tools to SharePoint Platform
  4. Drupal themes go nuclear with Fusion
  5. SilverStripe CMS becomes the first Microsoft Certified open source web app
  6. Denial of Service on an Apache server
  7. Guidelight Business Solutions video of DrupalConSF 2010
  8. Sharepoint 2010 vs WCM Platforms
  9. We Hear You: Our spam filtering needs to be improved
  10. The MODx Revolution 2.0 Interviev

As you can see, stories on Drupal, Joomla!, Sharepoint, SilverStripe, and MODx brought a lot of visitors to the site. Not all the stories listed above would have been one of the ten I would have personally picked, but I'll respect the numbers behind their ranking. I personally, don't like "versus" articles yet readers seemed to flock those articles. Unfortunately quality of writing doesn't appear to always matter as there were some very well written articles we posted in 2010 that didn't make this list.

The year 2011 will undoubtedly bring change and new stories to the world of content management systems. I think the year will also be a year of decision for the direction we take CMSReport.com. I feel as if this site of ours is stuck somewhere between our roots as a niche blog and a potentially popular CMS news site. I'm hoping we make some changes in the new year that all our readers can appreciate and value.

5 ways to use social media for better emergency response

As some of you know, I'm very interested in how government and large organizations are using information systems, collaboration tools, and social media. This past weekend, I had a chance to read some of the trade magazines stacked under my desk and collecting dust. I came across a great article published in Government Computer News that discussed how emergency management is using social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter.

The artice, written by Rutrell Yasin, lists five ways to use social media for better emergency response which include: