I know what most of you are thinking and let me address what is on your mind at this very moment. No, I'm not blinded with nerd goggles. In fact, I'm currently writing this post from a Windows Vista PC while my wife in the next room is on her MacBook Pro. Windows and OS X have earned their roles on the computer stage and I would be the last person to dismiss these great operating systems. However, these days I'm finding that Linux has just as much of a right to this stage when debating the value of operating systems.
Ironic how the world can change so quickly. Yesterday, the CIO of my organization began enforcing the use of anti-virus software on all of our Linux clients and servers. Today, I read that Apple is telling its Mac users to purchase anti-virus software. Something nasty is brewing out there.
Apple encourages the widespread use of multiple antivirus utilities so that virus programmers have more than one application to circumvent, thus making the whole virus writing process more difficult.
Even for The Register, not a very long article but it does ask some important questions. The article, Welcome to the world of collaboration by stealth, suggests via questions that collaboration is bigger than the IT department.
Because it involves software, probably the IT department's. But is IT equipped for the task? And does it want the responsibility? Collaboration is a human process, in essence, so surely the buck stops somewhere else - even if IT provides a number of enabling tools.
Today's Wall Street Journal has a great article regarding an employee swap between Procter & Gamble and Google, A New Odd Couple: Google, P&G Swap Workers to Spur Innovation. The motivation behind the swap was to spur innovation between the two companies.
Google would like to have a bigger slice of P&G's $8.7 billion annual advertisement budget and better understand the needs of traditional consumer-market companies. Meanwhile P&G still spends most of it's advertisement dollars in traditional media with as little as 2% of its ad budget online does need some help in making the leap online.
What impressed me most in the story was just how much companies such as Google and P&G are in two different worlds.
This year, I was given the privilege of sitting on the judging panel for Packt Publishing's 2008 Most Promising Open Source CMS Award. Judges on the panel were required to select their top three CMS based on a number of factors including performance, usability, accessibility, ease of configuration and customization, scalability and security. These top three CMS were to originate from the five finalists in the most promising category which included: CMS Made Simple, ImpressCMS, MemHT Portal, MiaCMS, and SilverStripe.
As I promised earlier, I'm posting online my notes and comments on how I ranked all five finalists in the most promising category. For better or for worse, Packt Publishing also gives their judges a lot of flexibility in how they rank a CMS. While I wouldn't consider this a complete analysis of the CMS, it should provide enough information on the impression each CMS left me when reviewed. While the methodology for determining the best CMS may be subjective, I do try to design my ranking of the CMS to be fair and non-biased.
The order in which I ranked the top "most promising" CMS were:
SilverStripe (my highest ranked)
ImpressCMS
CMS Made Simple
MiaCMS
MemHT Portal (my lowest ranked)
In order to come with the above rank, I chose to use factors such as performance, usability, accessibility, ease of configuration, ease of customization, scalability, the the amount of support/documentation offered through the project's site/infrastructure. I did not use security as a factor in my ranking. Since the CMS must be less than two years old to qualify in the most promising category, it seemed unfair to rank these CMS by security since by definition they're not fully matured projects.
Earlier today, I officially canceled my reseller account for Dakota Hosting. I started the account at the same time I started to build websites as a side business. I finally decided to stop pushing the hosting business not because I was losing money, but because it wasn't personally rewarding. I learned a lot about the business and decided Web hosting just isn't in my blood. I will build a Website now and then for a friend or acquaintance, but to be honest my IT job during the day keeps me plenty busy. I'd rather find some new challenges using my free-time for doing good instead of the sole goal to make money.
Gizmodo published their first impressions of the Windows 7 operating system currently being developed by Microsoft. Microsoft allowed developers and reviewers get a sneak peek of this Vista replacement during this week's Professional Developers Conference. Gizmodo and other tech blogs have indicated Windows 7, although still incomplete, looks to be a better version of Windows than Vista. Improvements in boot-up time, work-flow, performance, and user interface all take center stage with this new version of Windows.
