Web Content Management (CMS) Market Summary. Meta Group have recently released the METAspectrum summary of the North American Web Content Management (Web CMS) market. The focus is on WCM systems and ECM systems that are purchased expressly to drive Web sites. Out front they find the usual suspects, those being Documentum, Vignette, and Interwoven. Following in the top challenger roles are Microsoft, Stellent, FileNet, and IBM…. [CMSwire]
Month: August 2004
Ektron authoring tools
Ektron Updates XML Authoring Tools. New Hampshire based Ektron, has recently updated their popular eWebEditPro+XML web-based editing component. Of note is an enhanced API, giving developers further abilities to manipulated data and behavior in server-side code. eWebEditPro+XML integrates with Web content management systems and other Web-based applications to enable non-technical users to create “smart” forms and capture and validate data based on specific criteria, all… [CMSwire]
Udell on information routing
Information routing. Everybody processes a ton of email. And nowadays, some of us also process a ton of RSS feeds. In both cases, inbound items fall into three categories…[Jon’s Radio]
StepTwo on large CMS implementations
CMS Myth #2: Big organisations need a big CMS. I’ve seen this time and time again: big corporations making the automatic assumption that because they are large, they must purchase a similarly large and expensive content management system. This is not the case. In many cases, even large organisations… [Column Two]
Big corporations, though, often have larger, more strategic, initiatives that serve as an umbrella under which web content management falls. Many companies are looking to consolidate vendors and reduce the IT footprint. When companies start to consider the larger problem of ECM–not just WCM–the vendor list starts to get shorter, the implementation complexity begins to increase, and the price tag inevitably goes up.
Billy Collins rules
I’m not much for poetry but Billy Collins read Litany on Prairie Home Companion this past Sunday and I thought it was awesome.
Music acquisitions
Stadium Blitzer, The Gourds. Not my favorite Gourds album, but then again, I probably haven’t given it a fair shake yet.
Shinebox, The Gourds. Excellent bluegrass cover of Snoop Dogg’s Gin & Juice. Shockingly enough to my friends at work, I had never actually heard the original. I’ve since corrected that.
Near Truths & Hotel Rooms Live, Todd Snider. If you’ve never seen a Todd Snider show you should. He’s an extremely talented songwriter and pretty hilarious in-person. The CD captures a bit of what that’s like–great songs and funny–sometimes lengthy–stories in-between. A bunch of us recently got together to go see him at Club Dada but that night there was a huge storm. Todd was trapped in Houston. We made the best of it, though. The road manager sold me a copy of his new one, East Nashville Skyline, and we convinced the sound guy to throw it in. I had already listened to my pal Jim’s copy so I already knew the words to greats like The Ballad of the Kingsmen and Iron Mike’s Main Man’s Last Request. I, along with a good chunk of his loyal Dallas following, had planned on singing along with Todd but the weather and the Wright Amendment put an end to that.
White Blood Cells, The White Stripes. I think I like Elephant better, but it is hard to go wrong with the White Stripes. It’s a nice change from my usual alt-country fare.
Documentum-Cocoon integration progress
Got a Reader and a Generator added to my Cocoon-Documentum integration package last week. I also tested out the sendmail transformer that comes with Cocoon. Now, I can grab any file from Documentum from Cocoon using the Reader and then stream it to the browser or email it. If I want to transform an object stored in Documentum, I can use the Generator to snag it and then use it as I normally would in any other pipeline. For both I’m using the same protocol Documentum uses to reference documents through their “virtual link” support which is /<docbase>:<full path to content>.
I haven’t made the Reader or the Generator available yet. I’ll add it to the Transformer package when I get a chance.
What’s left to do is create a protocol. That will allow me to use any Documentum object anywhere in a pipeline rather than just being restricted to Readers and Generators. That means I could store my XSL stylesheets as objects in the Documentum repository instead of on the file system if I wanted/needed to, although that would degrade pipeline performance.
Read a couple of good sailing-related books recently. Both are very quick reads and very interesting. The first is To Harness the Wind,
by Leo Block. It is a history of the development of the sail. It really
covers more than just that. I learned all sorts of useless tidbits like
the origin of the terms starboard and port.
The other was a gem I stumbled onto at Half Price Books called Those Vulgar Tubes: External Sanitary Accommodations Aboard European Ships of the Fifteenth Through Seventeenth Centuries
by Joe J. Simmons, III. If you’ve ever wondered how early seafarers
“took care of business” look no further. Like To Harness the Wind, you
can pick up more from this book than what you might expect from such a
narrowly-focused title.
Making progress on “Stupid Documentum Tricks with Cocoon”. I’ve added
stylesheets so I can see Documentum query results as Microsoft Excel
spreadsheets or PDF. I also just got the mail action working–that
means I can have Cocoon send out these files via email if needed.
Check out the cover story in this month’s Transform magazine. I haven’t read the whole thing yet, but it looks like a fairly comprehensive discussion of collaboration and its relationship to ECM.