Bryan Ruby

I know what most of you are thinking and let me address what is on your mind at this very moment. No, I'm not blinded with nerd goggles.  In fact, I'm currently writing this post from a Windows Vista PC while my wife in the next room is on her MacBook Pro.  Windows and OS X have earned their roles on the computer stage and I would be the last person to dismiss these great operating systems.  However, these days I'm finding that Linux has just as much of a right to this stage when debating the value of operating systems.  

Radiant, a Ruby on Rails based CMS, will soon be released under version 0.7. The new version is currently available as a release candidate. 

The most significant changes between Radiant 0.6.9 and 0.7 will include:

"The usability of a content management system is paramount. If authors and site owners can’t work out how to use the CMS, you’ve got nothing. The CMS can have all the functionality in the world, but usability trumps it all."

 - James Robertson, Practical ways to assess CMS usability, Column Two, November 25, 2008

I'm doing a little morning reading at some of my favorite Internet spots.  A couple of this morning's IT related posts that caught my attention:

Fatwire Content Server 7.5, a Web content management system (WCM), was released this week.  Fatwire's Content Server intends to deliver a compelling web experience by building, deploying, and managing large-scale and interactive web sites.  New features in CS 7.5 include:

• Site Preview: Allows business users to set up time-based versions of their website and preview what their site will look like on different future dates, including side by side preview of date-based versions. With this new tool, business users and marketers can create seasonal and time-based online campaigns with ease.

The developers of Gallery, an online photo-album organizer, have officially announced the start of Gallery 3.  I have to say they have a very aggressive release date for the release of version 3.0.

Ironic how the world can change so quickly.  Yesterday, the CIO of my organization began enforcing the use of anti-virus software on all of our Linux clients and servers.  Today, I read that Apple is telling its Mac users to purchase anti-virus software.  Something nasty is brewing out there.

Apple encourages the widespread use of multiple antivirus utilities so that virus programmers have more than one application to circumvent, thus making the whole virus writing process more difficult.

It has been a long time since I had anything to report about eGroupWare, an enterprise groupware package.  It also doesn't help that I haven't used the software for about a year.  However, eGroupWare 1.6 Final was released last week giving us some new news.

New additions and improvements in eGroupWare 1.6 include:

I caused a little bit of controversy during my review of ImpressCMS as one of the five most promising CMS.

ImpressCMS impressed me so much that I decided to add it to CMS Report's CMS Focus.  ImpressCMS pushed XOOPS off of this list!

Even for The Register, not a very long article but it does ask some important questions.  The article, Welcome to the world of collaboration by stealth, suggests via questions that collaboration is bigger than the IT department.

Because it involves software, probably the IT department's. But is IT equipped for the task? And does it want the responsibility? Collaboration is a human process, in essence, so surely the buck stops somewhere else - even if IT provides a number of enabling tools.