This past week I had the pleasure of attending the Day Ignite 2009 Customer Summit in Chicago (10/28 - 10/29) as a Day Partner, care of Earthbound Media Group (my employer and Day Partner).  Topics covered ranged from the upcoming Communiqué (CQ5) 5.3 preview (which I’ll comment on momentarily) to running CQ5 in a Cloud environment to the new Microsoft Sharepoint Connector - and much much more!  At the conclusion of the conference, we were treated to dinner and a show at the Chicago House of Blues - Foreigner! It was pretty neat!

The first thing that I want to share is the David Nuescheler’s Top 10 list of new features in CQ 5.3:

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I have been involved in content migrations for EMG and its clients and a few in my earlier jobs as well. Some of them wanted to migrate from a database driven custom CMS to a ECMS product, Some wanted to migrate from a Database driven CMS to another Database driven CMS tool and some others were not sure of which way to go except for the fact that they wanted to move from their current CMS. Bottomline for all these migration scenarios is the client wants a better Website or Intranet (as the case may be) that gives the client more mileage.

Whatever the case maybe there are some common factors for content migration that will determine the complexity of the entire process.

1. Origin of Content / Content Repositories  - The simplest scenario will be to migrate from a well defined relational database to the new system. But, this is never the case. There are always multiple systems from where the content originates – it could be a combination of one or more of the following : database systems, flat file, legacy systems, another content management system etc. The complexity of the migration process increases with the number of content sources.

2. Content Quality – One of our clients had their navigation system in imagemaps, thankfully, they did not want to migrate the existing navigation system as-is. In another instance, when we were automating a migration from flat files, we found that the HTML files did not follow any template and some of them were missing values for fields that were mandatory on the new system. So, we had to do a partially automated migration.

3. Content Types and Amount of content– Content Type could be text, Documents, Media etc. In a manual migration, Amount of content to be migrated will play a major factor.

4. Upgrade existing system – So far, I have not come across a scenario where the client wanted to do an as-is migration. There has been a substantial upgrade – either by defining additional fields, additional value add by implementing Search Engine Optimization, Information Rearchitecture, content cleanup etc. The complexity of migration will obviously increase with more value adds to the existing system.

5. Users, Roles and Business workflows - Mapping the users, roles and business workflows from the as-is system to the new system is a time consuming process. Sometimes we may have to redefine the mapping if the new system does not support the working of the as-is system.

Method of migration – Based on the above factors, we should be able to figure out if we can do a completely automated migration, completely manual migration or a combination of automated and manual migration.

The entire process will be successful only if we keep the actual “freeze” time (change over from the old system to the new system) within acceptable limits.

Culture is defined as - the art and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively. Technology is changing the recording and dissemination of collective information. There is no better representation of this than the online Enterprise Content Management System. Because of the collaborative nature of these systems it is much easier to update content and keep your message current and valid; but it is also much easier to have conflicting content and incorrect versions of your content.

As a project manager I orchestrate the implementation of Enterprise Content Management Systems for a living. I have managed builds from the ground up and I have managed implementations of third party solutions. Every system out there is unique and each have strengths and weaknesses but there are certain issues that run across all of them. These issues aren’t necessarily flaws in the application but rather, they have to do with the intricacies of deploying information about an organization on a company-wide scale.

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I don’t know about you, but I would LOVE a new 17″ Macbook Pro! So, how do you win a new Macbook Pro? Enter the Day JCR Cup 2008! Simply create a content-centric application and submit it no later than midnight September 30th, 2008. Detailed information (more so than what I’ll cover in this blog) can be found at:

http://dev.day.com/microsling/content/blogs/cup.c.html

JCR/JSR 170/Content Management:

You may be asking yourself, ‘what does JCR stand for?’ JCR stands for the Java Content Repository. Day Software (Day) has been an emerging leader in the field of Web Content Management (WCM) and Enterprise Content Management (ECM) for over a decade now. In an effort to not only promote themselves more amongst the Open Source Community, but also in promoting the concept of Content Management Systems (CMS) (I know, I know, let the acronyms fly!), they created the JSR (Java Specification Request) 170.

The Apache Software Foundation created an open source, fully compatible version of JSR 170 by creating the Jackrabbit project. Day’s commercial implementation of JSR 170 is the Content Repository Extreme (CRX). Day’s flagship WCM, Communique, is a set of API’s built on top of the CRX.

One of the neat things about this contest is that it gives developers a chance to obtain a free, trial version of the CRX. When you sign up for the contest, a trial key is emailed to you. The contest page has links to documentation, quickstart guides, FAQs, mailing lists, and all associated technologies needed to build out a complete CMS.

One final note before I end this blog… I’ve been developing with Day Communique for over 5 years now. I am VERY curious to see what the new version, CQ 5, will look like. I have a sneaky suspicion that all of the technologies involved with this content (JCR, SLING, etc.) are a good indication of what CQ 5 is going to look like…

Until next time…

Todd

There’s been a lot of talk lately on the value of social networking tools, sites, blogs, blah, blah, blah… and it starts me wondering, “How do you build community?” Seriously. So, the social scientist in me takes over and I begin to digg into this deli.icio.us question and see what the rest of the oncomm has to say about it. I’m sure if the information is out there, by now I must have reddit.

This concept of building community sounds great, especially to marketing types who see this as a way to generate traffic “for free” but kind of breaks down when it comes to actually starting to build. Lets consider for a moment the reasons why we might “build community” purely for marketing reasons and then we’ll dive into perhaps the factors that actually drive community which might give us some insight into how community actually gets built.

• TRAFFIC-> Interesting content means interested visitors, right?
• KNOWLEDGE -> Sharing or obtaining. If you write it, they will come.

Now, let’s think about what these factors mean to community.

First, we should probably establish the difference between traffic and community. Amazon.com gets a ton of traffic and plenty of comments and feedback on products. Does it have “community” or “web2.0″ features? Is it a “social networking” site? Hardly. It’s pretty clear that traffic isn’t community. Next let’s consider knowledge sharing and community. For this let me use the example of, well… how about Micro$oft. Like many other software vendors, the redmond elite have used their online presence to produce a great deal of “knowledge” to be shared with the world. This certainly generates a certain amount of “traffic” and “content” but again, hardly creates “community.”

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