• Multi-database support
• Upgraded search functionality with support for auto-completion and stemming
• Update notification and single click updates for Joomla! as well as any extensions

These features represent another step in Joomla's long, incomplete journey to try to become more amenable to enterprises. But before you get all excited and start thinking of using Joomla! for, say, your enterprise intranet, keep these points in mind:

1. While Joomla! announced added support for databases other than MySQL, in reality, it only adds support for Microsoft SQL Server. In fact, Microsoft's influence is quite visible (and is probably good for the project), and the new version also supports Microsoft Windows Azure. Support for others databases (Oracle, et.al.) remains in the works. As with all issues related to Joomla!, how soon extension developers update their code to take advantage of new platform capabilities will actually dictate how much you can adopt those capabilities. Many extension developers will update their code but many will not, so you will need to make sure the extension you want to use supports the database you want to use.
    
2. As for the search engine, it's really a core extension. So all you need to do is activate this (it's disabled by default). However, you will again need to make sure extensions are updated to take advantage of new search functionalities. Even if they are, there will be some issues in terms of managing the current search module's existing index alongside the new index.
    
3. And finally, for single click notifications to work, you will again need to ensure the extensions are updated to incorporate that.

So, overall, the new features are indeed useful, especially in an enterprise context. But a lot depends on extensions you plan to use and so make sure you plan well in advance. Consult the Web CMS Report for more details on potential gotchas here.

Finally, if you are upgrading your existing Joomla! installation or plan to deploy it for a new initiative, this would be the time to push extension developers to update their code.

This is our sixth year in a row doing this humbling exercise. If you'd like to see how we've done previously, you can view past predictions here: 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, and 2007.

Here's our 2012 technology predictions:

1. Big data meets web marketing
Digital marketing systems -- from analytics, to adaptive personalization, to social media monitoring platforms -- generate huge amounts of data. The ability to extract and leverage meaningful nuggets from these vast stores of information represents a persistent but increasingly important challenge for marketing specialists. 2012 will see specialist (typically SaaS...see below) vendors pull away from the pack of integrated WCM suites and other adjacent technologies that implement e-marketing functionality as a simple, add-on service.



2. Enterprise search marketplace opens up...again
The major vendors in this space are undergoing substantial transformation: FAST is getting sucked into the SharePoint vortex; Autonomy is facing an unclear future under HP; and Endeca remains fitful and distracted. Look for upstart vendors to fill the void as they did earlier this decade when the market was more open. In particular, look for specific applications based on the open source platform, Lucene.



3. Social services get called on the carpet in SharePoint
SharePoint has seen stratospheric, often viral growth in enterprises around the world. Licensees are beginning to discover, however, that its lack of contemporary social networking services and polished collaboration applications are limiting its effectiveness and driving business units to self-provision other tools. 2012 will see the rise of a variety of SharePoint-specific, supplementary offerings, from new and existing vendors alike.



4. CRM and CMS on a collision course
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Content Management Systems (CMS) have long been central pieces in the digital marketing toolkit; however the lines between these two systems will continue to blur in 2012. More and more, marketers want to set content and interaction experiences based on customer interaction, so CMS vendors continue to add CRM features, while CRM systems add more web publishing features. In the long run, we think integration is more promising than convergence; in the meantime, expect some messy collisions.

5. Death of the intranet as we know it
Intranet managers still have a key role to play in enterprise collaboration and information management, but employee expectations and the role of the intranet have changed dramatically over the past few years. Savvy companies will focus on the broader employee experience in a mobile, "digital workplace." 2012 will see a significant reallocation of resources from corporate communications to more business-oriented functionality.

6. BPM springs back to life
Process still matters, and workflow applications continue to dominate enterprise document and records management efforts. 2012 will see a renewed interest in good, old-fashioned BPM, as enterprises seek to orchestrate activities across organizational boundaries, including partner and supplier systems.

7. Rich media goes mainstream in the enterprise
Video is no longer an emerging technology for the enterprise. New social initiatives in particular will bring more media into internal systems. To be sure, a gulf remains in production quality (between professional and amateur), and employees will continue to look for increasingly sophisticated capabilities as both media producers and consumers. In 2012, enterprises will respond with specific, rich-media initiatives.

8. Big data blows into the cloud
More and more information management systems are generating or leveraging "big data." Yet, many enterprises don't have the resources, capacity, or expertise to properly store and mine this data. Fortunately, "big data" characteristics (such as unpredictable data inflow rates and the need for elastic processing capacity) make it a natural fit for the cloud. As a result, data-rich applications -- such as social media monitoring -- will increasingly go to market with SaaS-only delivery models.

9. Pervasive mobile-only apps
2011's mantra could have been "mobile first." 2012 will see "mobile first and last," as enterprises develop mobile-only interfaces to certain internal applications without focusing any effort on traditional, web-based (desktop/laptop) UIs. Many of these mobile apps will consist of specialized mashups among existing systems. A key driver here is the inexorable rise of tablets. We'll also see interesting examples where enterprises will tweak business processes to leverage tablets (e.g., in-store tablet catalogs).

10. New job titles emerge
Major technical and operational changes are driving new roles -- often informal, hybrid roles -- within the enterprise. 2012 will see the formalization of some of these roles into broadly recognized job titles. Samples include:

• Marketing Technologist - to master the increasingly complex services around e-marketing at scale
• Social Media Monitor - to interpret, understand, learn from, and respond to the fire hose of relevant activity on public social networks
• Enterprise Community Facilitator - to support localized community managers and foster productive cross-silo interaction
• Enterprise Media Producer - to produce or edit high volumes of video for internal and external consumption
• Director or VP of Digital Assets / Digital Media Manager - formal DAM roles emerge to establish ownership -- not just of assets, but of the systems and metadata -- of DAM and MAM

11. Security fears rise: phones, tablets, portable drives, the cloud -- where is our content?
Nearly everyone is a mobile worker. The proliferation of smartphones and tablets means that employees are walking around with disk drives containing company information. A lost or stolen phone or tablet containing sensitive information will likely cause a backlash in enterprise security departments. We've already heard of some highly regulated enterprises banning enterprise access from employee phones. For many employees, 2012 will bring even more rules and regulations around how they can use their mobile devices and renewed enterprise interest in digital rights management applications.

12. Lines blur between commercial and open source technologies
In the WCM and portal marketplaces, major open source projects are "commercializing" fairly rapidly, while many (though certainly not all) commercial vendors are adopting more open development and support models. This means that in 2012, customers will see increasingly less distinction between commercial vendors and "commercial open source" suppliers. The bigger gulf -- though it remains largely one of licensing -- is emerging between commercially-oriented open source projects and community-oriented projects across the WCM and portal landscapes.

Here is RSG's Alan Pelz-Sharpe to shed some more light on our predictions:

• CrownPeak
• e-Spirit
• HP/Autonomy (Interwoven)
• IBM Web Content Manager
• Limelight Networks (formerly Clickability)
• OmniUpdate
• Plone
• TerminalFour
• TYPO3

What can you glean from this collection of updates? The marketplace remains vibrant, with big players and small, commercial and open source, on-premise and SaaS offerings -- all trying to innovate, albeit with varying degrees of success...

As always, our WCM evaluation stream subscribers can download the updated chapters and comparison charts immediately. If you've never seen our reviews before, you download a free sample here.

Nuxeo claims that VCS provides better clustering, tagging, join queries, and performance improvements over it's predecessor. Performance is probably the big driver in the move away from Jackrabbit.

Repository replacements are not trivial. Just ask Alfresco web content management licensees, who recently saw their WCM repository replaced with Alfresco's DM repository. Whatever good reasons for the move, changing an ECM repository is like getting a new brain; it's going to be hard to ensure that all your memories remain intact. We were joking today in the RSG India office: could you imagine the plight of an EMC Documentum or an IBM FileNet customer with millions of documents, if the vendor decided to change their repository?

Stay tuned to our ECM Evaluation Research for a deeper dive into Nuxeo 5.4.

Our Web CMS evaluation research will outline the impacts of all this in more detail, but the biggest news for now is that version 1.7 represents the first to formally segregate a base layer -- the former "framework" now known as Joomla! Platform -- from the higher-level Content Management System (CMS) layer.

This separation of "framework" and "CMS" has become almost universal in the open source world, but the transition is fraught with complexity for licensees.  On the plus side, you have the freedom to develop custom applications off the Joomla! Platform, leveraging core services like security, database handling, logging, without having to use or getting tied down by the restriction of CMS layer.

On the down side, it means two different (albeit related) environments for the all-important Joomla! add-ons -- called "extensions" -- to address.  This could complicate compatibility going forward.

Note that last year Joomla! adopted release timelines based on a strict schedule, rather than it's-ready-when-it's-done, feature-based releases. Version 1.6 was the first release as part of this plan, now followed by version 1.7.  Perhaps more importantly the community now makes a distinction between long-term and short-term releases. These will happen on different time cycles and thus will affect the core platform versus the CMS differently.

Given the large base of extensions (just about 8000), I think the community will be challenged to keep everything in sync.  Even today, a sizable proportion of the Joomla! community still remains on version 1.5, since a significant percentage of Joomla! extensions are not supported for version 1.6.  You the customer will need to pay even greater attention to compatibility going forward.

I talk to enough customers and vendors to know what organizations pay, and when vendors are willing to give out discounts, and what an average customer agrees to pay for any Web CMS in the market. Depending on which tier you look at, your budget can start at US$5K, $20K, $50K, $100K, or $250k – license cost only.

It is still a common misconception that open source is free. I've long been an advocate and educator for organizations, trying to get them to understand that licensing is only the initial investment. The bulk of the expenses will come during the implementation.

So, if you ask me who is cheaper when you're considering Adobe CQ5 vs. Drupal, or Ektron vs. OpenText, or some other nonsense combination, my answer to you: your priorities are wrong. First, look at how the WCMS fits what you're trying to accomplish. Second, look at how your business objectives are met with various options. (Our WCMS evaluations can help you here.) Third, look at how much your initial investment will be. I can go on.

It's simple, really. You're not just buying technology, or just a Web CMS product – you're buying a relationship. Whether you're loaded or not, it's not just about money.

In order to be able to index SharePoint and other sources, the Search Appliance (GSA) uses Google's "Enterprise connector framework." This formerly required an external server to run on. Only in version 6.2 of the GSA (released by the end of 2009) was this actually deployed on the yellow boxes themselves, making indexing SharePoint a point-and-click UI affair.

But the nice thing about the Framework is that Google actually open sourced it (under an Apache license). This means it's easy to adapt it to other repositories (if you have the developer acumen to do so, and a server to run it on). More interestingly, perhaps, is that this also means it's not too hard to use Google's Framework to feed SharePoint content to Solr, instead. And this is exactly what Lucid Imagination has done in their latest 1.7 release of the LucidWorks distribution. Using the connector, it's now as easy to index SharePoint with Solr as it is with a Google Appliance.

However, if you're looking for a discount search engine for SharePoint, LucidWorks Enterprise isn't necessarily it. It's not "free" as in "free beer": you'll need a $64K annual subscription with Lucid to run it in a production environment. If money matters, do the math.

More importantly, don't forget that while a cost comparison is difficult enough, it's only one variable in the mix. And with various search solutions mix-and-matching their components, this becomes comparing Grapples to Orangelos. The good news is there are plenty of options; but then there's plenty of homework, too...

During most of the past decade, the trend has been to separate these efforts and to employ different CMS technologies for these two environments. However, we've recently seen an uptick in subscriber inquiries revisiting this issue. The extraordinary propagation of SharePoint within intranet environments, combined with the growing adoption of lighter-weight WCM tools for public websites (including SaaS and open source) is prompting some enterprises to consider consolidating on a single vendor.

Last week we published an advisory briefing that lays out the pros and (mostly) cons of such consolidation, to help you make the best decision.

I won't revisit a broader language debate here. The difference between VB.NET and C# boils down to syntactic sugar: while syntactically they are very different languages, Microsoft made sure that both are compatible with the .NET Framework development platform. As a result, just like in case with the majority of other .NET CMS vendors – Ektron, EPiServer, Umbraco, etc. – VB.NET can still be used as the implementation code, regardless of the core product language of choice. Therefore, VB.NET should still be supported going forward in the DotNetNuke API.

So far, things look pretty peachy, but let’s move on to the shaky bits. A software core re-write is a very significant change for any platform. The TCL-to-Java conversion caused years of pain for (then) Vignette that scarred the company indelibly.

If you're using DNN, the good news is that the weight of this huge task doesn't fall on your shoulders -- at least not immediately. Most of the work of converting the core to C# was done by a DNN enthusiast developer in China, Ben Zhong. Instead of forking (too much overhead), DNN Corporation decided to accept Zhong's codebase as the basis for a complete conversion. The new codebase currently remains in QA, with a planned release as DotNetNuke 6.0 in Q2 2011.

The not-so-good news here for DNN-based sites is that your VB developers -- and it's still not uncommon to see developers use VB -- will have to start putting their old tricks to rest and learn some new ones. More importantly, DotNetNuke is notorious for cutting corners around testing new releases. You should tread the muddy upgrade waters cautiously.

This move further manifests DotNetNuke's aspirations to be taken more seriously for enterprise-scale .NET WCM deployments (a déjà vu moment), but wholesale rewrites are tricky and can bring longlasting consequences.  So for customers there's still a long, winding road ahead.

Earlier last month, ECM vendor Nuxeo proposed to contribute its Content Repository to the Eclipse Foundation. This after they dropped support for Java Content Repository (JCR), a repository spec that didn't really take off spectacularly, but was arguably more successful than most other standard related initiatives in this space. Nuxeo's contribution, named Eclipse Enterprise Content Repository Project (ECR), is CMIS enabled (incidentally, you can also access JCR via CMIS), and provides an opportunity for Nuxeo to compete with Alfresco on the CMIS bandwagon.

This was followed by Hippo's Rave Proposal to Apache. Rave is a "web and social mashup engine" that aims to integrate many of Apache's existing projects such as OpenSocial, Shindig, and Wookie.

Both these proposals appear very attractive on the surface.

Nuxeo's contribution hopes to evolve into a reference repository implementation that makes it easier for others to focus on developing content-centric applications without worrying too much about the underlying repository. In doing so, it assumes that the underlying repository no longer provides any differentiation, and therefore essentially can be abstracted away.  I've seen enough ECM and WCM implementations to argue this is not always the case.

Rave on the other hand wants to become a lightweight portal type container, but without the legacy of heavier-weight technologies such as Java Portlets. To achieve this, the project aims to integrate many other existing initiatives, and build functionality not yet present in those projects. In doing so, it risks itself turning into something that is as heavy as the current breed of Portal technologies that it wants to replace in the first place.

These are very early days for both these proposals. Nuxeo has just expressed its intention to contribute while Rave is in incubator stage. It will be a while before these reach a stage of maturity where they can be of much use to you the customer.  Even if they provide technologically superior alternatives to other existing options, there are other reasons, often non-technical, that define the success of such initiatives. A lot depends on how other vendors -- mostly bigger ones -- support them. Unfortunately, we don't have a good history of vendors collaborating on such initiatives.

So for now, they are probably more useful to respective vendors, since such announcements tend generate goodwill and visibility without spending a lot or marketing dollars. But for you the end users -- as I explain in "What happens when a standard dies?" -- you should carry out similar due diligence even when a new standard (or technology) emerges.

• Alterian: Perking up a bit after a long period of distractions
• CoreMedia: New UI warrants very careful testing
• CrownPeak: Partly cloudy with a chance of rain
• e-Spirit: Slow but steady improvements
• Joomla!: May lose some simplicity amid enterprisey enhancements
• OpenCms: More slow-but-steady
• Percussion: Low-priced alternative may distract
• Telerik: Staying wide and shallow
• TerminalFour: Making the arduous trans-Atlantic trek

Version 19.5 of the Web Content Management report evaluates 44 Web CMS products and platforms, reviews their weaknesses and strengths, identifies their suitability for different use cases, and isolates vendor tendencies that can influence your long-term success.

Subscribers to the WCM evaluation research stream can download these updates immediately.

As a result, Antenna can now offer mobile apps as well as web apps and can serve different use cases. It also gets access to new markets: Antenna is primarily USA based company while Volantis is headquartered in UK and has offices in Europe and Asia.

Although the offerings are complimentary and might not require any major rationalization, the back-end infrastructure of two underlying platforms will still need to get integrated such that applications can use same resources (such as a content repository). An example of this could be a native mobile app created using Antenna's platform that employs Volantis' device database to fine tune display logic.

If you are a potential customer, the benefit is obviously that now you have one company that can cater to both native apps and web apps. On the other hand, it could be riskier as compared to betting on two different companies.

IBM licenses parts of Volantis technology for its own Mobile Portal offerings including the Mobile Accelerator which is targeted to customers of WebSphere Portal. Even though Volantis open sourced their Mobility Server a while back, not all parts of their offering are open sourced. So if you are considering IBM's mobile offerings, add this consideration to your checklist of items to be clarified. Make sure you understand their roadmap and resulting implications.

On a side note: having acquired Volantis and its well regarded technology for delivering web sites to mobile handsets, perhaps some day Antenna will actually start eating its own dog food. The screenshot shows how its site appears on a Nokia E71 smartphone. 

Regardless of whether Android tablets can compete with iPad, the fact remains that Android has taken operating system out of the equation now. And this has serious implications for site publishers targeting mobile devices.

In earlier days, one of the features that differentiated one mobile phone from another was its operating system. Companies like Nokia and Apple invested huge amount of dollars developing Symbian and iOS. But what Android has done is that it has allowed lesser-known or even unknown vendors to compete with the Nokias and Apples of the world. 

It has also opened up a huge potential for companies to target a big mobile population that can now afford a "smart phone" without shelling out a bomb. In several countries in Asia and Europe, mobile phones are expensive because they are not subsidized by wireless service contracts.  But with less expensive phones now having the ability to access the web -- and mobile penetration far exceeding PC penetration -- the universe has suddenly expanded.

With opportunities come challenges, especially if your organization is one of those who want to target this population. Unlike iOS where Apple controls the hardware, Android does not have that benefit. Android devices range from small 2" form factors to large 10" form factors. They also vary hugely in capabilities: some run on a 500 MHz processor while others run on more powerful dual core, 1 GHz processors.

You could of course create "apps" for your applications. But that obviously is not a scalable proposition.  For one, you don't want to be creating an "app" for everything, and secondly, it is not trivial to create apps for all different operating systems and deal with the intricacies of  different "app stores."  You will probably need to achieve a balance between an "app" for some scenarios and a web application for remaining scenarios. In any case, if you are not sure, its best to take an incremental approach.

Start with getting your basics right such as by maintaining a strict separation between your content and presentation (and therefore beware of rich text editors). Focus more on standards-based output that can support basic re-purposing with minimal effort. You can then decide whether it make sense to create a native "app" or invest more in a web application to achieve more fine targeting.

1. It doesn't employ the very latest version of .NET
2. Long update cycles means it can fall behind functionally

Neither challenge is prohibitive, but both are potentially problematic.  In the past Redmond and its partners have showcased some interesting alternatives (as well as add-ons) to SharePoint via "CodePlex."  And now we're seeing the next generation of this trend.

Several new products -- all running on .NET 4 -- were announced last week.  Among them is the first release of Orchard, an ASP.Net, MVC-based content management system for building websites and blogs.  Orchard is really an evolution of Oxite, an open source blogging engine released a couple of years back. Orchard is also open source (based on the new BSD license) and shares both code and developers with Oxite.

Orchard is managed via the independent Outercurve Foundation (formerly CodePlex Foundation), and will likely progress with community contributions, but you can easily see Redmond's influence. In fact, Microsoft has so far sponsored the project and provided developers working on it for close to a year. However, do remember that Microsoft is not going to provide any formal support for it. Like other community-driven projects, you will pretty much  depend on others in the community. In fact, the Orchard project page actually recommends you to go with SharePoint if you prefer a formally-supported option.

The good thing for you the customer though is that you are in the market for .NET-based, open source alternatives, you now have another option beyond Umbraco and DotNetNuke (DNN) -- the latter of which we evaluate closely in our Web CMS Report.

Like many others in this category, such as Joomla! and Drupal, Orchard will be able to run in a shared hosting environment -- allowing it to target simpler or agency-driven website scenarios. Orchard claims they will partner with the likes of DNN. It's not clear yet how that will happen, but you might be able to reuse elsewhere .NET components that are part of the Orchard project.

For Microsoft, it gives them a play in an important SMB segment that might find Sharepoint too expensive for web publishing. For you the customer, however, don't assume that Orchard is as well tested or scalable as SharePoint.  It's an alternative, but not a well-proven one.  

In a wide-ranging discussion, we talked about the challenges facing US federal managers in selecting the right technologies for their agencies. John keeps things moving, and our conversation flowed from web content management, to social computing, to open source, to (inevitably) topics like Cloud and SharePoint.

If you work in the federal technology space, I hope you find it useful.

We've recently updated the Drupal review in our Web CMS Report to a preview of version 7. Major updates like these are always difficult to review -- because there are no actual production instances yet to glean real world experiences, as we customarily do. That makes us cautious to predict anything about how it will fare in real life scenarios. And you should be equally cautious if you're considering implementing it in a production environment.

There's a lot to like about what the Drupal community did in version 7. The software's interface (which, like DotNetNuke, is meshed into the visitor-facing website) has been overhauled and dragged into the current decade. Drupal finally has native content modeling (this formerly required an optional module, CCK) so you can have different content types. And perhaps most importantly for the high-traffic customers Drupal has been attracting the past few years, some of the Pressflow distribution's features for better scalability have been ported to Drupal Core. (Though, paradoxically, a simple Drupal install will probably be slower than version 6.) These make Drupal a much more serious contender for the high stakes game than before.

Of course, that's all relative to the previous version. Version 7 is one giant leap for Drupal, but one small step for mankind. It doesn't fundamentally change how it stacks up against most of the platform systems we cover. Drupal still lacks a lot of the infrastructure that's considered a commodity in other platform systems.

Yes, with the plethora of free add-in modules available Drupal can be made to do a lot of things. But at this crossroads between version 6 and 7 the problem with that is quite obvious, too. A lot of version 7 modules are still in pre-release alpha or beta. And it suddenly becomes painfully clear that quite a few modules have been orphaned: their developers have abandoned them in version 6. Modules require due diligence; because you will, always, need modules. (Without a module, Drupal Core doesn't even have a rich text editor.)

There are global release parties this Friday. And as usual, there will be quite a few headaches after that. If you don't have a Drupal tattoo, you'll likely want to be a spectator for a few months before jumping into the melee. So if you're thinking of betting on Drupal, check the odds in our research now -- and then check them again in six months' time.

This also means there is no easy answer. You'll have to do your homework to figure it out. Inevitably, any system will have its advantages and drawbacks. It's up to you to figure out which product has advantages that are a good match for your scenario, while you could still live with (and plan for) the drawbacks.

So which is better, Drupal or WordPress? I've seen quite a few blog posts covering that in the past year. But there's only one truthful answer: ...it depends. Drupal has strengths in community-oriented sites and placeless content. WordPress has an edge in editor usability. I could go on for another 33 pages to describe other differentiators in detail. (In fact, I have.)

But really, to ask whether Drupal or WordPress is better is asking the wrong question. First of all, if you only compare those two, you'll surely want to broaden your horizons a bit. In the grander scheme of things, Drupal and WordPress are actually very similar systems. There's a lot more out there. Preference for one over the other will come down to specifics. Secondly, those should be your specifics; nobody can answer the question for you. You'll have to think for yourself.

That's why I can't offer a generic answer to the question. Which is the best, Drupal or WordPress? Quite possiby neither. We'll gladly provide you with independent information to help you choose; and assist you in reaching a conclusion. But answering the question, ultimately, is up to you.

Think about it. If someone has spent the last ten years mastering a particular product, and one product only, are they likely to be critical of it? Their expertise is their livelihood, and that livelihood is closely tied to the success of a particular system. Also, it may be the only tool in that category they really know.  The effect gets worse when they have gone through extensive training to become fully certifiable. (Pun intended.) And the more proprietary a system is, the stronger the seasoned veteran will proclaim that way to be the best way.  Not all product experts are this way, but many follow the pattern.

I'm not going to name examples because this isn't specific to any specific vendor or project. If you browse through the comments on blog posts here I'm sure you can find several, often contradictory, examples of what I mean. Sometimes commenters will be honest in stating their ties to the product's success. But quite often they'll simply deride anything that in their mind seems to attack their beloved system. Pretending that unlike everything else, which "of course" has major flaws, their system is without a fault. Unsurprisingly, these aren't particularly useful voices to listen to.

By contrast, we have nothing to gain by promoting one system over another. We don't work for vendors in any way (we don't speak at their events, we don't write whitepapers for them, we don't get a commission when a particular system wins the selection procedure). That means we can afford to be very critical (though we spend a lot of effort to make sure the criticism is well founded). If you want to get the cheerleading, "this is the most awesome thing since sliced bread" story, you can easily get that from the vendors -- and increasingly their consulting partners. For us, there's little point in putting out a weather alert for a nice summer's day. Our point will often be to warn of the cloud on the horizon and to bring an umbrella just in case.

Some observers don't seem to get that at all. As the proverb has it, "to the crooked eye, all things are crooked." If one commenter angrily shouts that obviously we're against system X and totally on the take of Y, and a week later another reader accuses us of always being pro-X and not taking Y seriously, that doesn't really reflect on us. It reflects on the communities making those allegations. (Which is why we don't usually remove those comments.)

My colleague Tony Byrne has been praised for being "an equal opportunity critic." I like that; it's our job to stand by the content technology buyer, and to warn them of pitfalls. Not because we're pessimists, but because forewarned is forearmed. When our readers use that knowledge to navigate the minefields towards success, it makes it all worthwhile. And I feel privileged to work for a company that values integrity over easy money -- even if that means being criticized for being a critic.

While these enhancements appear rather minor on the surface, there are some important "under the hood" changes that can have a significant impact on you, especially if you are an existing customer. In our recent advisory, we analyze these enhancements as well as the impact of these underlying changes for existing and prospective Alfresco customers.

Here's the table of contents for the advisory paper, "First Take on Alfresco's Latest Web CMS"

• Key Takeaways
• Introduction
• What's New in 3.4
• Analysis
• Conclusion

Research subscribers are also welcome to make private inquiries about Alfresco and any of its competitors.

These two new products (don't get influenced by their high version numbers) both employ the GateIn framework under the covers, and are functionally and architecturally similar. However, there are some very important differences between the two offerings.

We examine these similarities and differences in our latest advisory briefing, "JBoss and eXo Portal Platforms: Similar, Yet Different." 

Here's the table of contents for the 5-page advisory paper:

• Key Takeaways
• Introduction
• Basic Similarities
• Key Differences
• How to Proceed
• Conclusion

Our Portals and Content Integration Research subscribers can download the briefing paper, as well as comment or ask questions directly on the page, after logging in.

This switch has not received as much attention as it deserves. If you are using classic search collections, you can keep using them but you will certainly need to consider migrating them to the newer search collection even if you don't want to take advantage of the new features. This is because IBM has deprecated the classic search collections. IBM will also not be supporting the existing Search and Index APIs (SIAPI admin APIs) as well as the Web Services admin APIs. This is because Lucene has its own new REST-based API. So if you have your own applications, you will need to change them or create new ones that use the new REST API.

So let's get this straight. The new version brings:

• A completely new index -- which means re-building your entire index, with potentially unexpected results, and
• A completely new API -- which means any application development or advanced customization needs to be re-done

Sounds to me more like a replacement than an upgrade.  Though you still get legacy support.

On the plus side, the new version also makes it optional to use WebSphere Application Server and you can chose to use Jetty instead of WebSphere if you prefer a more lightweight application server  -- and many do.

There are many other important technical implications as well as potential benefits that we'll cover in the Search and Information Access Research. In the meantime, it's certainly a big news for Lucene. IBM has been a regular contributor to Lucene and this move shows their endorsement of Lucene's maturity.  One of IBM's other search offerings, OmniFind Yahoo Edition (OYE), was already built on top of Lucene, though it remains to be seen if IBM takes some steps to rationalize the two offerings. 

Since then, developments have been comparatively slow. It seems DNN Corporation has taken the Alfresco route: focusing on support packages while building various commercial add-ons to the community edition.

Earlier this week, DNN Corporation announced an "Enterprise Edition." This new edition gives you a staging platform to make content and code changes, which you can then push into production. That's standard-issue for higher-end systems, but can still get tricky, and we always encourage customers to test such synchronization services very carefully.

To be sure, DNN's popularity proves there's a place for omnibus CMS products, especially when you need something easy to deploy. Joomla! is another great example, from the PHP world. We call these "simple products:" if you select the right modules and well-tested skins, you can apply a wide range of canned web applications to a single site.

From there, they will both start falling off.  Neither DNN nor Joomla! natively provides effective multi-site management.  Think twice about employing them as serious application development platforms, and if you're looking for technical elegance, I recommend casting your gaze elsewhere.

So it comes down to scenarios and fit. In our Web CMS technology evaluations, we cite DNN as potentially a good fit for two of twelve scenarios, and a plausible fit for three more. DNN's new staging feature is unlikely to change that. Then again, you don't want to invest a system that tries to be all things to all customers.

First, to illustrate: about a year ago, I read Jon Mark's blog post: "when most Twitter users say CMS, they mean WordPress, Drupal or Joomla!. [...] So I panicked a bit. I know WordPress. We very occasionally see Drupal in a vendor selection, and never see Joomla! at all. I've never been involved in an implementation with either. [...] So, are we really that out of touch?"

I'm sure there are many out there that would immediately have thought Jon really was out of touch. Because WordPress, Drupal and Joomla account for millions of implementations. To the general public, if they even know what a CMS is, those three have almost become synonymous with the term. To the point that even a serious newspaper like the Guardian would suggest WordPress as the ideal CMS for the Birmingham City Council, lamenting WP never got a fair chance: "Why wasn't it good enough for Birmingham? It seems that there's a prevailing mindset in some parts of local and central government that thinks that if you (actually, taxpayers) aren't paying through the nose, then you're not getting value for money."

Stop right there.

Yes, millions are using these systems and are perfectly happy with them. (In fact, I've commented a few times how, for instance, WordPress is one of the few systems that casual editors actually like to use.) That's why they rate very well in the "simpler" scenarios we describe in our Web Content Management evaluation research. And most of those millions of implementations fall in one of those categories. On the other hand, there are, for instance, no multinationals running all of their online efforts on simple open source PHP systems. Not because they're against open source, or because they think PHP isn't good enough, or because they're eager to "pay through the nose." But because these systems don't really work in their scenarios. (As a side note, I'm not even generalizing all open source PHP systems here -- some, like Typo3 for instance, are quite complex; and a .NET open source system like DotNetNuke is quite straightforward.)

Saying you could do "anything" with any given CMS is true to an extent. But it's like saying that the bicycle that's so healthy for your daily commute, would also be great for a ride to the South Pole. Sure, you certainly could, but the real question is: would you really want to? And if all you know is bicycles, wouldn't planning a trip to the pole be a great occasion to find out what other transportation would be available?

So what does make a project more "complex" than those "simple" scenarios? Well, we could talk about that for a long time (in fact -- it's what we do on this blog most of the time). But to give just a few examples of what would go beyond a "simple" scenario; some of the things that quickly add up complexity:

• Scale of the CMS deployment: Having hundreds or thousands of contributors, and tens or hundreds of thousands, or sometimes, millions of content items. If a CMS tends to display users or content items simply as lists (newest on top, or alphabetically) you can imagine this becomes rather unmanageable at this scale. You really need a lot more sophisticated controls to deal with it, such as efficient search. It gets quite hard to find out who's doing what, where, and when in your system without repository services, audit trails, integration with directories -- and so on.
• Scale of the published websites: Running a simple PHP CMS on a hosted LAMP server is quick and easy. However, you may find that what works for thousands of visitors doesn't at all scale to millions. Many of the simpler systems we cover are actually much harder to run when you try to use them for high traffic (because they aren't really prepared for it, so you'll have to customize, adapt and use a toolbox of tricks) than complex systems which come with out-of-the-box functionality for massive scaling.
• Content re-use: When you want to use the same content in multiple places in a website, and/or in multiple sites or channels. Especially when this involves placeless content, deployed based on different criteria (automatically and manually). It will quickly build up the complexity of both the core system, but also the interfaces in order to keep it all manageable and intelligible for users.
• Globalization: Just take a look at an airline website. There's not a shocking amount of content, but usually it'll have to be available in at least dozens of languages, in multiple websites targeted at various countries. This means content needs to be translated, but also adapted to nuances of local requirements. Managing this effectively is quite hard, and complexity tends to increase exponentially for each locale added.
• Workflow: In many cases complex workflow is overrated, and straightforward "save - review - publish" would be more than enough. But there are scenarios that won't do at all. If, for instance, content has to be checked by legal, or translated into multiple languages, preferably (to save time) in parallel, you need to be able to design complex branching workflows to deal with this.

Of course, there's a lot more, and if this interests you, I'd suggest you have a look at the introductory chapters of our Web Content Management research. But suffice it to say, when I say "this system is great for simple scenarios, but don't think it'd be just as great for complex scenarios" -- I really do mean complex scenarios. (But that doesn't mean I hate bicycles.)

In the end, what it boils down to is using the right system for the right job. Use something simple and cheap for a simple problem. But don't forget that sometimes, complex problems demand complex solutions. It would be ridiculous to buy a train to get groceries; just as ridiculous as getting a bicycle to haul tons of bricks.