itsMeta

It boggles my mind – it’s 2007 and yet to my knowledge, there is no out of the box Content Management System (CMS) that simply plugs & plays into an enterprise infrastructure. They all required quite a bit of customization – common estimates are that you will spend two to three times the cost of the software. Given that enterprise CMS systems run in the hundred of thousands of dollars, this is no cheap customization exercise.

In recent discussions I’ve had with various CMS implementation veterans, one common theme kept emerging – an enterprise is better off rolling their own. What’s out there is too generic, trying to solve every business model’s content management needs with the same solution. This lowest common denominator approach assumes that a publisher has the same CMS needs as a financial institution – this is simply not true. That generification & the resulting underlying complexity leads to the customization necessary that results in the two to three times the expense.

So, what’s an IT professional to do? The word on the street is to roll your own. Analyze the business problem and build the simplest solution you can think of. Remember, a CMS’ core requirements is to 1 – allow users to input content; 2 - deploy it to a number of target environments.

It's a question I've been meaning to answer on this blog for some time now, but never really had it down to one or two or three sentences... until now...

DORK – A socially awkward, wardrobe challenged individual. That’s saying it nicely; notes from other sites “A stupid, inept, or foolish person”. That’s just mean.

NERD – Has deep intelligence in certain topics yet suffers from social awkwardness and could use some help with their wardrobe (although the tight high-water pants are in now)

GEEK – Has a breadth of knowledge over a diverse set of seemingly random topics and has the ability to go deep and gain an expert’s understanding on any particular topic. Also has a stylin wardrobe (most of the time)

Have thoughts, opinions or ideas about what a Dork, Nerd, or Geek is? Do share, post them here…

I was eager to try out Apple's Safari on my PC primarily cause I can't stand IE; Firefox has a really beautiful memory leak; and Safari is touted as being 50% faster than those other browsers. I couldn't wait...

Note that it's still in BETA...

My first impression, it made my browsing experience feel like a browsing on a mac. Except for he fact that none of the common shortcut keys worked. Alt + < or > combo for back/forward did not register; the back and forward buttons on my mouse, just made a sad clicking sound; and the space and Shift + Space to go up/down, didn't work. All minor issues, unless you prefer keyboard shortcuts as opposed to using a mouse.

The speed, definitely a noticeable difference.. 50% faster? Possibly.

Then i went to GMail. That's when it wasn't 50% faster anymore. It felt as if everyone was using GMail at the same time. Massive lag. I authored and sent a message. Only half of it went though. Apparently, the text box cut the message in half. must have interpreted some special character in a weird way. Then, the application seemed to haver gotten into some sort of AJAX loop that caused GMail to lock out my account for suspicious activity. Grrr... I was back in a few hours, but I wasn't happy. Makes me wonder if this was released a tad too early. But to be fair, I'm not sure if this is an issue with GMail not supporting Safari on PC or Safari on PC not supporting GMail.

Some speculation... it's understandable that Apple wants to release Safari on PC now, especially after making the statement "want to build applications on the iPhone? Just write them to work on Safari". I think this made Safari an integral key for iPhone developers on a PC.

So I'm now back to Firefox with closing and restarting every few hours until the next release...

A few months back, I wrote a little snippet about rolling your own CMS. Although still my preferred method of tackling the IT Industry wide CMS problem, you sometimes need a solution up & running with the quickness. So if rolling your own is not an option and you need something profession, cheap and in a demonstrate-able state ASAP, consider Alfresco.

Although it's billed as an Open Source Enterprise Content Management System, it does have Web Content Management Capabilities through a Web Content Management Module. (This may sound like an afterthought, but it's not; it's actually quite robust and is built on a very powerful enterprise scale infrastructure).

Alfresco is an open source J2EE application built on Spring, Hibernate, Lucene, JSF, and all your other Java best of breeds technologies. Best of all, it's founded & built by some of the people behind Documentum and Interwoven (among others). They've brought together their lessons learned and best practices in both the Web & Enterprise Content Management spaces and built Alfresco in an open source manner. It's really a beautiful thing. Their business model is the RedHat model - provide a kick ass product and make your money off support.

Have questions? Post a comment.