CMF2006

I’ve just come back from CMF2006 which was held in Aarhus in Denmark, 7th – 9th of November. The lineup of speakers was excellent and lots of interesting topics were covered.

On day one I attended two tutorials. The first one was hosted by Tony Byrne, founder and editor of CMS Watch, and was about Portals and CMS which I found very interesting as I work with a few content management and portal solutions, mainly VYRE Unify. It’s quite difficult to fit VYRE within either category because it is a strong CMS solution with a inbuilt portal and fully supports JSR 168 portlets. There are not that many systems that provide both strong cms and protal capabilities. Most portals ship with a lightweight CMS module and few CMS support portlets.

The second tutorial was the Google v2 – The rise of Googzilla hosted by Mr. Stephen E. Arnold, of ArnoldIT. This tutorial gave an interesting insight into Google’s infrastructure and what they are capable of technology wise. Google’s self-replicating, self-healing “nervous system” is geniusly architectured with Google’s own Linux based operating system at the core. Mr. Arnold certainly gave us something to think (worry) about.

During conference day 1 I directed my focus to Taxonomy and Design Manuals and enjoyed both presentations. I also had the chance to get demos of some of the CMS systems widely used in Scandinavia including Sitecore and EpiServer. We also got to see 5 vendors compete in WebIdol namely:

• eZ systems
• FatWire Software
• Sitecore
• Terminalfour
• Tridion

In short eZ systems won the competition and I think it had a big thing to do with the fact that they manged to demo a working Active Directory feature and were a little bit different than the other vendors for that manner. I would have liked to see what sort of records are created in the back end for managing the assets that were uploaded via Active Directory and to see if the Metadata had been extracted as well. I would also have wanted to see if you could have had publishing rules in place that prevented publishing of assets with restricted rights .. but this is really a feature of a DAM system .. and I know of one that could do this.

Fatwire showed some of the in-template editing features of the system which I like but the interface of the backend system was a bit overwhelming with way too many tab buttons in the wrong places. I know for a fact that Fatwire is a powerful system and I would like to get a more detailed demo of it.

Sitecore has a very flashy and well thought out GUI. It seams hat you need to convert to .asp code though as soon as you want to do any complicated stuff. My current employer has recently made a partnership agreement with Sitecore and I’ve now got access to a demo site to play around with. I’ll be able to give you a better review of the system at a later stage.

Terminalfour was the second vendor to do a demonstration and I thought they did the least interesting demo. Maybe I just don’t like seeing so much red but their interface had lots of red in the background. Again to comes to show what frequently happens is that users basically get turned of by something as little (ehh big) as GUI even though it can’t really be justified. I fully admit that I might change my mind if given a more detailed demo of the system. It’s really unfair to judge vendors based on a 6 minute demo but that is what happens in real life all the time.

Tridion gave a demonstration of a basic workflow of editing an article and kicking of a translation task which included messages sent to Outlook. Pretty normal stuff that you’d expect all systems to be able to deliver.

All participants in WebIdol should be given a big credit for putting themselves on the line. They all did a very good job and deserve to be recognized for that.

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