This morning there was an announcement on the Magnolia user mailing list that the first release candidate (RC1) of version 3.5 is now available for download. If you were waiting for version 3.1, don't worry, you didn't miss it. It is the same release. Still, this is a pretty big release. Some of the more notable features is better internationalization support. It used to be that localized sites needed to be managed more or less independently with no real relationships between different translations of the same asset. The new version provides better support for 1:1 localization schemes. Future releases and add-on modules will provide more functionality in this area. The new version has also been re-factored to be easier to customize. For example, many of the configurations have been transformed into beans that can be overridden and extended. There is also better support for filters. Security has also been enhanced with URL level access control (in addition to content level access control).
The Enterprise Edition will be released after the Community Edition is final and stabilized. If you are using Magnolia Community Edition, you might want to download it and give it a try - especially if you have built modules. The Magnolia team has tried to support backward compatibility for 3.0 modules but you never know. Now would be a good time to tell them if there is a problem.
At the cmf2007 conference last week, there were some great sessions and conversations about intranets including James Robertson's presentation of the 2007 Intranet Innovation Awards . There were also many interesting discussions about Facebook inspired by BJ Fogg's insightful keynote on persuasive technology (this guy knows his Facebook - he teaches a college course on it at Stanford). The two topics merged with the provocative assertion: "Facebook will be your next intranet." The idea has been clattering around in my head all week and then I read this news that Serena is starting to use Facebook as their Intranet on Toby Ward's Intranet Blog. I am sure that Toby's article was what got the whole conversation going but I didn't know it at the time. Apparently, the CEO of Serena is a huge Facebook user and has designated Friday as a day when employees should spend an hour exploring and interacting on Facebook.
What fascinates me about this idea is that most Intranets fail as social collaboration tools because they cannot capture the energy and passion that seems to form spontaneously on the web. At least that is my theory. And my theory goes on to assert that people do not invest their personal energy on their corporate intranet because they don't own it. While people do not own Facebook, there is a tacit agreement that a user's Facebook profile belongs to the user. The user can always access it and edit it and he is free to do with it what he wants. A corporate intranet cannot provide this assurance. When the employee leaves the company all the creativity, personality and knowledge invested in the corporate intranet are lost to him. A user has a right to feel like he owns his personality, friendships and ideas.
Because people are not owned by their employers, they interact in a community that transcends corporate boundaries. This is why internal instant message system are never as popular as AIM, YIM, and MSN Messenger. This is also why email crushed those internal messaging systems that companies used to use. You need to communicate (professionally and socially) with people outside of the firewall as much as you do inside the firewall. If your network is entirely contained by your company. Stop reading this blog post immediately and go out and meet some people.
Internal communities of practice fail because the population is not large enough to support them. If you ever took an ecology course, this is similar to Island Biogeography. Just as species cannot survive in small, isolated pockets, neither than communities of interest. You need a population that is big enough to allow healthy turnover and new ideas. If you are interested in a topic, you would do better to join a large open community than to try to start one with the three people in your company that share your interest. It used to be that the physical proximity provided by and office made intra-office communities more viable. Now, with the Internet, location is less of an issue. Being co-workers is an arbitrary requirement to community building that often stands in the way.
So, back to Facebook. The biggest argument against Facebook as the corporate intranet is information security. Much of the information that employees work with needs to stay within the company. Furthermore, there is a fear that allowing employees to be visible makes them vulnerable to being stolen by other companies. If your company is such a bad place to work that the only thing retaining employees is that no one knows about them to hire them away, you have bigger problems than your Intranet. Ideally, employees from other companies would see your employees on Facebook and all the fun they are having and want to come and work for you. Even if they do not come to work for you, they might be inspired to provide feedback or information that will be of some value.
Facebook would be a poor place for people to collaborate on company projects and other strategic stuff. However, how much of this information actually needs to be private? Does a company holiday calendar need to be private? Probably not. An interesting exercise would be to go though your Intranet and identify all the content that could be out in the open or at least minimally protected. While you are at it, you should identify information on your intranet that nobody needs to see. Now I am getting into Bob Boiko's talk "Leading with Information". That deserves another post.
Facebook's "Network" feature supports workplace networks. This allows a user to take their profile (that he owns) and use it within a closed community. The same profile can, at the same time, be used in external communities. When the employee leaves the company, he just leaves the network. All the other aspects of his profile stay with him.
I guess it all depends on what you hope to achieve in your intranet. If you want to provide tools to facilitate specific workplace functions and information, then a closed intranet makes the most sense. If you are trying to create communities and build social and professional connections, you can't beat the Internet.
I just saw an announcement for a new integration between OpenCms and the Java based commerce system KonaKart. The integration is implemented as an installable OpenCms module that connects to KonaKart over a SOAP API. For those of you who are new to KonaKart, it is free to use but is not open source licensed. However, many of the underlying components (such as Struts and Torque) are open source and customers are free to tinker with those. Another interesting aspect of KonaKart is that there is a straight migration plan from the popular PHP commerce system osCommerce. The database structures are identical.
Commerce is not entirely new to OpenCms. I remember seeing shopping functionality on The North Face website (an OpenCms reference site) but it appears to be removed (probably because of a channel conflict with their retail partners). What caught my eye, however, is the amount of momentum OpenCms seems to be having. With two, high impact, big releases (v6 and v7), OpenCms has brought itself back into the limelight after losing mind-share to the new generation of Java based WCM platforms (Magnolia, Jahia, Alfresco). I think adding in-context editing has narrowed the usability gap between OpenCms and the newer products. Other new features like WebDAV have also played a big role. Plus, OpenCms is considerably less expensive (there is no "Enterprise" version to buy. All the revenue comes from support). Support packages from Alkacon are relatively inexpensive and provide enough of a safety net to molify the risk averse CIO.
If you looked at OpenCms a couple of years ago and found it less exciting than its newer peers, you may want to take another look.
I am sitting on the plane on the way back from a wonderful time at CMF2007 (pics) in Aarhus. Thanks to Janus, Sara, Flemming (my guardian angel), and the rest of the J. Boye crew for putting together a fantastic conference.
Before taking the trip, I made some changes to my computing toolkit to help me be more productive in the air. For those who don't know me, I am a proponent of server side tools for managing information. I use services like Bloglines for reading blogs, Wikis and Google Notebook/Docs for writing, and del.icio.us for bookmarks. Ideally I should be able to log onto any computer, connect to the Internet, and have everything I need.
The first change that I made was to migrate from my beloved Bloglines to Google Reader. While, I prefer the functionality and behavior of Bloglines to Reader, the addition of Google Gears makes Reader a perfect online/offline tool. I can still access my feeds from any computer but I can take my little slice of the web with me when I am offline. According to feedburner, my immigration appears to be on the tail end of a trend. The Reader wedge of the subscriber pie chart grows in proportion to Blogline's decline.
I also installed the blogging client Ecto, which I am finding preferable to the Blogger web client because it adds little touches that are difficult to reliably support in a cross-browser web client. If it were not for packed airplanes with coach seats that are too small to work in, wasted time in the air would be a perfect place to catch up on writing blogs. From a business class seat, or at least Economy Plus, Ecto would be even better.
And with that, I will dig my laptop out of my chest, power down, and watch the in-flight movie.
If you run a Plone site, you may find yourself envious of PHP WCM systems that are so easy to host on cheap, basic hosting plans. While many of the PHP based WCM products are designed to run on a shared hosting plan, most hosting providers don't even know what Zope is and don't want it on their servers. You may have been burned by the Zettai implosion and have been afraid to trust another Plone specialist. Maintaining a single instance of Zope on a leased server is not hard. You just need to know about packing the database and other administrative functions. The only hurdle is the need for basic server administration skills (monitoring, security, backups, etc.) that many small companies tend not to have... at least not to the level that you need.
Things may be about to change. Jarn (formerly Plone Solutions. They changed their name as part of the transfer of the Plone name to the Plone Foundation.) has published their framework for Plone hosting. From a technical perspective, this may be an even more generous move than changing there name. If hosting providers pick this up and use the technology as a way to expand their offering, Plone may see an adoption trend similar to what Mambo saw when it became installable through Plesk.
A Mambo-like growth spurt is probably too ambitious. Zope tends to need more resources (memory, in particular) than your average PHP based system that can run on a stingy VM or shared host. But still, there may be a noticeable increase in options. On the Plone hosting page, there are 6 providers (including Jarn). It will be interesting to see if this list expands as a result of Jarn's move.
eZ Systems recently announced the alpha release of eZ publish version 4. If you are pleased with with eZ Publish's functionality, but your in-house PHP programmers are turning up their noses for its lack of PHP5 support, this will be some welcome news.
eZ's earlier stance was to move ahead with functional improvements before making the platform PHP5 compatible. However, having addressed some usability concerns with their in context "Web-In" interface, eZ turned their sights towards PHP5 support which several other PHP based WCM platforms (such as Drupal, None, TYPO3, Modx and SilverStripe) already have. Joomla! does not anticipate PHP5 compatibility until release 2.0 (Joomla! just announced a release candidate of version 1.5 so 2.0 may be a ways off).
Part of the process of adopting PHP5 is the migration of eZ Publish onto their PHP framework eZ Components. This will bring the products closer together technically to allow the same development effort to improve them both. All the eZ Publish installs will help test eZ Components. Code in eZ Publish that is redundant with code in the eZ Components framework will not be maintained in future releases.
While the PHP5 move is big, it won't have much impact on most developers. Most basic eZ Publish implementation work is done in their templating language that effectively abstracts PHP code out of the presentation layer. On the plus side, however, early reports indicate that adoption of PHP 5 has improved performance considerabely. Readers may recall my reporting that performance was quite slow without optimization.
The Bricolage list has been quite active recently with announcements of new sites and a good discussion about integrating Bricolage into a dynamic presentation tier. You should definitely check out the recently re-launched SportsNet CA. The home page is very dynamic with lots of multi-media and rapidly changing content like sports scores.
There was also an anouncement of a Bricolage community newsletter called Output Channel. Pretty good for a project that was left for dead by one reviewer.
One of my work alumni lists just sent out a link to this video about an 8 foot multi-touch screen. Wouldn't it be cool if you could use one of these to manage your website?
After all, this is a media company whose magazines, books, products and programs feature ideas about attractive and tasteful lifestyles. Why not a beautiful Web site? "That was a big mistake," Wenda Harris Millard, the company's president of media, said this week during a panel discussion at Advertising Week. "We put beauty before utility." She said the front page, with its video player and jazzy graphics, included only about five links to actual content, "so the things people were looking for couldn't be found."
One of the many Web 2.0 trends is the rise of information over form. Back in the early days of the web, I remember people trying to duplicate a paper experience on the screen. Then, websites became video games challenging users to explore to find what they needed. Now it is all about the information and getting to it as quickly as possible.
And THAT is why the left navigation on my website gets pushed down to the bottom of the page on earlier versions of Internet Explorer. :)
What makes CMF conferences different from other events on the circuit is that there is much more interaction. In most conferences, people pop-in, give their presentations and then jet out. At CMF, you have all the big names and everyone hangs out together at well organized social events. So, if you can't get your question in as the speaker is disconnecting from the projector and packing up his laptop, there are many other opportunities over drinks and food. Hopefully, I will see you there too.