Thoughts

I do not know when it exactly happened, but a number of years ago I decided to become a pacifist. I am a pacifist that is in the war of open source versus proprietary. In my opinion, the debate over licensing and software development processes is only mildly interesting as it is the quality of the end product that matters to me most. I walk the fine line of being an advocate for open source and a defender of proprietary software. Admittedly I've confused a lot of people that have chosen to take sides in this war. However, there is always room for reasonable civil discussions of any topic when new data and new perspective is given.

For a second year in a row, I along with CMS Report was invited to cover Liferay's North America Symposium which is being held this year in San Francisco. During this morning's keynote speech by Bryan Cheung, Liferay CEO and founder, I couldn't walk away from the presentation without recognizing the difference a year can make for one company. Something has changed for Liferay and the many partners and associated vendors that are represented here at this conference. Liferay has grown up, people are ready to talk business, and they're once again ready to talk about the importance of open source and community which makes this all happen.

I spent most of the last two weeks camping and hiking in the Grand Teton National Park of northwest Wyoming. If you've never visited this national park then take my word on it that Grand Teton is one of the most beautiful places a person can visit in this world. The mountains in this place peak near 13,800 feet and rise from the valley by almost 7,000 feet. Despite the warm summer much of the United States experienced, ice glaciers can still be accessed through a number of day hikes. For anyone that loves the outdoors, this place has everything in the form of wildlife, scenery, and activities. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending from your perspective), what the Grand Teton doesn't have is good 3G or 4G cell phone coverage.

A few days ago, I received an early copy of a press release announcing the launch of Digital Clarity Group (DCG). DCG is an advisory and analyst company geared toward helping business leaders navigate "digital transformation" in their organizations. To the best of my knowledge, I have never recommend a particular consulting or analyst company on any of my blogs. I'd like to set new precedence and tell you why I think if you're a business leader you should consider hiring analysts from DCG to help you and your company face the upcoming technological challenges that have just started to surface.

Responsive Web Design is without a doubt one of the Web's biggest buzzwords for 2012. The Web is changing fast and even though the importance of CMSs addressing mobile devices was well predicted, I suspect even the tech gurus are surprised at the current growth rate of smartphones. If you don't know it by now, there is a lot of pressure on web designers and site builders to ensure that their client's websites are responding to the changing Internet. A website should look good no matter how it is being displayed, whether that site is being viewed on a desktop, cell phone, tablet, or whatever new device the Ghost of Steve Jobs brings us.

Yesterday, the Argus Leader announced that they will be moving toward a subscription model for their online content. Readers no longer will be able to visit ArgusLeader.com and expect to be able to read all the content for free. I didn't visit the website too often, but I'll miss the freedom to come and go as I please without being an online subscriber.

The 1994 Knight-Ridder video I attached at the bottom of this post  is a fantastic reminder that the tablet predates the iPad and Android tablet by many decades. During the "hypermedia" era of the late 1980's, I can recall taking a "tech of the future" class where my professor discussed in similar detail what a tablet might look like in the future. He described a day where students would be sitting under trees reading not from paper books but utilizing exactly what we know today as the digital tablet. 

 Believe it or not though, the origins of the tablet computer date back to the 19th century.

One of the coolest things about CMS Expo 2011 was the opportunity to see five open source CMS "founders" together in one room. On the conference stage were Dries Buytaert (Drupal), Andrew Eddie (Joomla), Sigurd Magnusson (SilverStripe), Shaun Walker (DotNetNuke), and Per Ploug-Hansen (Umbraco).

Most people in the content management world will acknowledge that seeing these five guys together in the same room is a rare event. What you may not know is that for many of these open source leaders this event was the first time they have ever met one another.

What are the enterprise trends in content management? This past month, I've given a lot of thought on the evolution of content management and social media in large organizations. Perhaps the amount of time I've recently spent on the plane traveling both coasts of the United States gave me too much reflecting time on this subject. Most of us understand the impact Enterprise 2.0 has had on enterprise content management, yet I feel like we're missing pieces to the puzzle. Luckily, there are a lot of smart people out there giving us clues to what the current enterprise trends are with content management.

This week I have been thinking a lot about how poorly we manage data and information. The quality of the data and the lack of needed data has historically been an issue at work. We have focused a lot of our time on data mining but never really recognized that one day there would be too much data and information for our staff to sift through. Recently, our managers proposed two new data sources for the operational staff to review and I decided that it was time to hit the panic button that we're currently giving out more information to our workers than they can handle.

When a business presents too much information to their staff it is a lot like catching deer in your headlights. If the deer is too overwhelmed to run and you don't steer the car out of the way then no good can come to both car and deer. This is where I think we are at work and we're needing to slow things down a bit to give both driver and deer time to think about their next move. For the moment at least, I'm personally at a lost on how best to solve our issues with information overload.