Developing a better CMS
Drew Wilson's been working on his Content Management Tool Firerift — he's even built what might be the world’s first computer animated CMS commercial for it — and in the process has learned some things about developing a better CMS.

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The 5 hidden costs of running a CMS
Paul Boag, author of 'the website owners manual' explains the five hidden costs of content management systems.

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Working with web developers in India: why, whom, and how
Ryan Norbauer has been there, done that and taken copious notes — where the "there" is his consulting firm, the "that" Indian outsourcing and the "notes" are contained in this refreshing article on the realities of using outsourced talent.

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Building and managing virtual teams
Chris Nagele's run Wildbit, creators of hosted Subversion app Beanstalk, for 8 years virtually. He lives in Philadelphia and his team is all over the world. So, he knows a few things about virtual teams and shares them in this article.

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Same DOM errors, different browser interpretations
Have you ever looked at how the different browsers handle the same DOM errors? As this article from Opera JS guru Hallvord R. M. Steen points out, their different interpretations can be surprising.

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More news and articles from WebProNews.com

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Marqui de Sale
A few weeks ago, I questioned whether the SaaS Web CMS vendor Marqui was "going belly up" due to the fact that they had gone into receivership. Contraction within the Web Content Management marketplace has long been predicted by many analysts, but like many, many WCM products, it appears that Marqui will continue to linger. According to the Marqui site, the company has been sold to a group of private investors.

As indicated in the Marqui press release, the investor group also owns a fellow Vancouver-based company called WaterTrax that produces software to monitor water quality. Marqui customers should take some comfort that WaterTrax has experience with SaaS, but it remains to be seen how the new owners will go about creating what they are calling "a multi-brand software-as-a-service." We already know that the WaterTrax and Marqui will be sharing a CEO and CFO, Marqui customers will want to watch carefully how the new owners plan on sharing technical infrastructures. Sharing infrastructure could mean consolidation of technical and support resources.

Customers will want to carefully gauge how this impacts the Marqui service. Will the offering change or will divided attention keep Marqui in a state of dormancy? As always, we'll be watching...

The Emperor's New Box
Google has announced its new Search Appliance, version 5.2. As usual, this has been marked by a slew of presentations -- and of course, a video on YouTube. Probably the main upgrade: a 10 million document limit on one server.

The box, dressed in imperial yellow -- or somewhat more irreverently: the pizza quattro formaggi -- of course goes with the times. Faster (probably multi-core) processors allow for the higher document count. That's not so much Google's achievement, though you shouldn't forget that this is one enterprise search solution that actually comes with the hardware to run on, and the company makes sure it can handle its workload. But what else is new?

Well, according to the presentations and press release, you now get Kerberos, personalization, alerts, and better stats. Kerberos (no, not that Kerberos, but the security protocol) provides "single authentication for Sharepoint, file shares and non-Windows-based content systems, in addition to Windows-based systems". The personalization features mainly seem to be a form of collection-based biasing (i.e., for certain collections you can boost specific results; and it's now possible to do this based on metadata, too). The alerts are supposedly much like the regular Google Alerts we've come to love and hate. And as readers of the Enterprise Search Report will know, the GSA's statistics certainly had room for improvement.

I'll remain skeptical of these features until I've actually seen them, however. And none of the GSA integrators I talked to seemed to have hands-on experience with them as of yet. It took the previous GSA 5 release several months to be revealed as a bit of a disappointment: first meeting with enthusiasm, but slowly becoming a bit of a let-down. We'll have to wait and see what is actually delivered -- and how.

With the GSA, you get a whole lot out of the box. In this case, quite literally: many things touted as features actually rely on you installing them on external servers. That's not necessarily a bad thing, if you're aware of it before you commit (and Google's aggressive marketing doesn't really help a fair comparison). Helpful colleagues frequently remind that I should think outside the box; however, I tend to believe only what I can see with my own eyes, and I would advise you to do the same.

Quick: what do Joomla!, Drupal, and WordPress have in common?
Big Blue recently released its IBM Internet Security Systems X-Force 2008 Mid-Year Trend Statistics report, and it contains more than a few eyebrow-raisers. For example: Web-application-based security vulnerabilities have begun to outnumber reports involving conventional viruses and trojans (of the kind that target the operating system). We're now at the point where 51 percent of newly discovered software vulnerabilities depend in some way on web-page interactions.

Also, there's been a sharp surge in the number of vulnerabilities that involve SQL injection (as opposed to cross-site scripting). Meanwhile, the use of infected image files (.gif or .jpg) as a way to inflict mayhem is on the decline.

What really got my attention, though, is the new Top Ten list of vendors with the most vulnerability disclosures. Normally you would expect Microsoft to be at the top of that list (I would, at least). Instead, it's at Number 3, behind Apple and... Joomla!. Fortunately, Joomla! can be secured, but it's quite possible that many novice Joomla! installers do not.

Numbers 8, 9 and 10 are interesting, as well: Drupal, WordPress, and Linux.

The finding that no fewer than four of the top ten vendors with the most reported vulnerabilities are open-source projects is, at first blush, quite striking. But the results should be viewed with caution. In part, the rankings reflect a recent change in IBM's data-gathering methodology (which the report's authors are quick to point out). Another important caveat is that the numbers are not normalized against adoption rates or installed seats or any other usage metrics. They're based on raw numbers.

It's worth remembering, too, that open source projects are extraordinarily open about security vulnerabilities. Hence you would expect a comparatively high rate of reporting for an open-source product. Finding, publishing, and fixing security vulnerabilities is something the open-source community has gotten quite good at, particularly in the Linux world, where every line of code for the entire operating system (including all encryption routines, random-number-generating code, and so on) is available free for the downloading. Security flaws in Linux tend to be found and corrected with astonishing alacrity.

On the other hand, it's striking that three of the Top Ten contenders on IBM's security worry-list have PHP in common. You can read whatever you want to into that, I suppose. I'm not a PHP expert, but I'm enough of a web developer to know that languages don't create security problems; programmers do.

If you have the time and the inclination, download the IBM report. At 85 pages, it' a well-worthwhile lunch-hour read, if you care about web-app security ... as I think we all should.

Free SharePoint Webinar
In collaboration with our partner, KM World, my colleague Tony Byrne will lead a free webinar, How to Evaluate SharePoint for the Enterprise, on the 28th of August at 2 p.m. US ET / 11 a.m. PT. It's a preview of the full-day seminar that Tony will teach in San Jose, CA on September 28th, closing out a packed week of content technology education at the San Jose Convention Center.

The webinar offers a high-level critical view of SharePoint, with candid, independent advice for both business and technology leaders alike.

You can register for the webinar here. See you online!

CMS Watch consulting services
A question we are often asked is "Does CMS Watch provide consulting services?" In fact this question is asked so often, I thought a quick blog entry might be in order.

The answer should be prefaced by our raison d'être: CMS Watch evaluates content-oriented technologies, publishing head-to-head comparative reviews of leading solutions. We see our work primarily as informing and educating buyers of content technology via our reports and this web site. We admit that the constant work of updating reports such as The ECM Suites Report and the eMail Management and Archiving Report leaves us little time for consulting, but some of our customers do desire personal help and advice. In these cases we provide advisory and consulting services, most commonly to help with vendor and product selection. We don't do very large projects, nor do we compete with the big consultancies and integrators out there. Indeed why would we -- they are often our clients too, and many are among our subscribers, who receive analyst time built-in as part of our offering.

The engagements we do take on help keep our feet solidly on the ground. Buyers know they are getting tough, critical and truly independent advice, while at the same time, we remain rooted in the world of real projects and real buying issues. We help our clients distinguish marketing hype and hyperbole from the facts and real-world experience of others - something we work hard to ensure is reflected in our reports. If this kind of consulting is something you feel you could benefit from, just drop us a note. Remember, we consult only for buyers, and never for vendors.

SearchDay: Tips for Making the Most of SES San Jose
Today's search engine marketing news and opinion: Tips for Making the Most of SES San Jose; And the Link Love Award Winner is...You; Online Olympic Traffic Soars; and more.

SearchDay: Search Ad Tools Help Manage Complexity
Today's search engine marketing news and opinion: Search Ad Tools Help Manage Complexity; Real-Time Analytics with Woopra; Yahoo Adds Speed, Smarts, and Languages to Safari Plug-In, Inquisitor; and more.

SearchDay: Content? Content. Content!
Today's search engine marketing news and opinion: Content? Content. Content!; Proper SEO and the Robots.txt File; Dynamic Keyword Insertion: Friend or Foe?; and more.

SearchDay: Oil and Water? SEOs vs. Content Owners
Today's search engine marketing news and opinion: Oil and Water? SEOs vs. Content Owners; Getting Vertical Search Right: A Sneak Preview; Google Warns on AOL Investment Loss; and more.

SearchDay: Link Building with Customers
Today's search engine marketing news and opinion:Link Building with Customers; Avoiding Online Missteps with Generation Y and Millenniums; Google to Update Content Network; and more.

SearchDay: Awesome Ad Groups: Small is Good
Today's search engine marketing news and opinion: Awesome Ad Groups: Small is Good; After the Yahoo Shareholder Meeting; Google Translate Goes Live with Human Translators; and more.

SearchDay: Has Mobile Local Search Finally Arrived?
Today's search engine marketing news and opinion: Has Mobile Local Search Finally Arrived?; Look Out PageRank, There's a New Algorithm in Town; Universal Thoughts on Local Search; and more.

SearchDay: The Future of SEM Education
Today's search engine marketing news and opinion: The Future of SEM Education; Understand Where You Are To Know Where You're Going; Microsoft Adds Image Hotspots to Live Search Design; and more.

SearchDay: What's Wrong With Being Cuil?
Today's search engine marketing news and opinion: What's Wrong With Being Cuil?; Google vs. Yahoo on Paid Links; Marchex Launches Integrated Local Ad Platform; and more.

SearchDay: Press Releases and Search Engine Optimization
Today's search engine marketing news and opinion: Press Releases and Search Engine Optimization; When's an Outage More than Just an Outage?; Google's Sergey Brin on Local Mobile Search; and more.

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