Open Source Content Management Panel at Gilbane Boston

Next week, I’ll be moderating a panel on Open Source Content Management at the fifth annual Gilbane Boston Conference - “Where Content Management Meets Social Media.”

It’s Thursday, December 4th, from 3:30-5:00pm. The panelists will be:

• Nate Aune of Jazkarta (Plone / Zope / Python)
• Elie Auvray of Jahia
• Michael Wechner of Wyona (Lenya, Yanel, Yulup)

Here’s the description from the official program:

There are many open source content management solutions available today, reflecting a wide variety of capabilities and costs, and organizations of all types are more willing than ever to consider them in place of, or along side commercial CMSs. This session will look at some of the pros and cons of deploying open source content management systems in terms of licensing, costs, maintenance, and functionality to help you determine if they are an appropriate option for your organization.

In addition to all of that, I also hope we’ll talk about how the adoption landscape is or isn’t changing for open source in the CMS space, innovation and standards compliance in open source CMS, and how open source projects can make user adoption easier or more effective.

What questions would you like to ask this group of speakers? How do you see the landscape changing for open source projects in the content management space?

It’s about time

Why isn’t this a feature of every modern email system?

Forgotten Attachment Detector

(This is a feature on Gmail Labs, which you’ll find under the settings label in Gmail)

The use case is so simple. The user writes “Attached you’ll find” or “in the attached” or something like that - basically anywhere they use the word “attached” - if there is no attachment, ask the user if that’s ok.

The number of times you say “attached” and don’t mean to attach a file is presumably outweighed by the number of times you mean to attach a file but hit send before you attach it.

How can I get this in Apple Mail or (sigh of the reluctant user) Entourage to do this?

Are Flash and Flex Web Technologies?

Throughout this week and part of last, I’ve been working (in between meetings) on getting Alfresco Labs 3.0 set up on my laptop to be able to demo (and experiment with) their new Share application. The challenge has been in getting the flash-based preview of uploaded multi-page PDF documents working (see this thread in the Alfresco forums for some of the details).

The way the feature should work is that the Alfresco Share application takes the PDF a user uploads into the document library, converts it to an SWF using swftools (one frame of the SWF per each page of the PDF), and then uses the YUI framework to “play” the resulting SWF.

The problem is that for me, depending on the version of Flash installed, the preview SWF cannot be displayed. (Short version: Flash 9.0.45-47 works fine, later Flash versions just result in a spinning cursor which never resolves. The problem is Flash 9.0.45 breaks file upload, which works in later Flash versions).

Good Flash

Bad Flash

Just finding this out required a lengthy exercise including full uninstalls of Flash (using Flash uninstaller for Mac OS X, which takes forever since it is a PowerPC binary running on an Intel machine) along with installs of various versions of Flash from the 9.x archive.

It was in this context that I was so happy to see the dialogue Dion Almaer and Brad Neuberg posted at Ajaxian today: How Flash Can Join The Open Web.
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LinkedIn Gets Events

(via Bokardo on Twitter and the LinkedIn Blog)

Building on the momentum of all the (OpenSocial based) applications they added a few weeks back, LinkedIn is now rolling out events. In this video, Christine Wodtke demonstrates how the application leverages your social graph, showing who in your network is attending various events:

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Twitter, for the Enterprise

Laura Fitton of Pistachio Consulting (and @pistachio on twitter) has published a report covering 19 “Enterprise Microsharing” applications, including a number of open source applications:

• Identi.ca (The report refers consistently to Identica, not Laconi.ca - I know Evan’s mentioned simplifying things by renaming the Laconi.ca software to match the site name, but for now the software still lives at the Laconi.ca url)
• Jisko
• OpenMicroBlogger
• Yonkly (which doesn’t mention open source on the site, but does exist as a GPL v2 project at codeplex. Site runs ads for a SaaS version.)

As well as Prologue, which does not get grouped in with the other open source options though it is available under GPL v2. (It gets a separate group as it isn’t purely a microsharing application btu a theme for Wordpress.)

It’s a good overview, though I would have liked to have seen more coverage of the difference that the OpenMicroblogging protocol (which is supported not just by OpenMicroBlogger but also by Laconi.ca) will make, in terms of real interoperability across networks. But I guess that would be less relevant to the Enterprise scenario, since the whole purpose of the enterprise scenario is to have a closed network.

(See also my post from earlier this summer listing open source microblogging options, as well as this recent post suggesting Twitter themselves could get on the open microblogging bus.)