Content Management Today

Pack your bags and get ready for Momentum 2010 in Lisbon, Portugal! EMC’s most important and exciting events of the year!

Momentum is the ultimate information exchange for the information intelligence community. From October 25-28th at Lisbon’s Congress Center this excellent event is taking place.

This year’s agenda is packed with sessions, keynotes and networking receptions. Ensure you start making plans now to join us in Lisbon for a truly informative, exciting, educational and enjoyable Momentum.

To attend this fantastic and not to be missed event go to:

http://www.momentumeurope.com/conference.asp or

http://uk.emc.com/microsites/email/momentum-2010/agenda-available.htm

These sites will have all the information needed to make this conference the best ever!

Do not miss out on this great EMC event!

I came across this great article on Sharepoint 2010 by Toby Ward

Have a read and hope you get some insight to Sharepoint 2010:

The experts dish on the good and not so good:

Like a dish detergent spun through the rebranding cycle, SharePoint 2010 (news, site) is all new and improved. The enhancements though to the World’s most popular and prevalent web development platform — nee portal platform; nee enterprise content management platform; nee Microsoft’s answer to Lotus Notes / WebSphere — are far more impressive than your standard “new and improved” detergent in a bigger box. SharePoint’s box is bigger, but there is substance to the improvements above and beyond the style.

SharePoint 2010 (SP2010) has not been reconstructed, and is not the best solution for any organization in any scenario — it can be expensive, very expensive, and it contains far more than most organizations will ever use. But, the enhancements are more than cosmetic with impressive additions and upgrades to the feature set — when compared to MOSS 2007.

With all of SP’s features and functions — hundreds of them — what is it really good for? What are its strengths and weaknesses, and what type of organization makes a good fit for SP, or vice versa?
What the SharePoint Experts Say

We’ve taken a birds-eye approach to SP2010 with a look to the expert perspective. I asked three SP experts to weigh in with their thoughts on SP2010’s strengths and weaknesses:

* Shawn Shell, author of the SharePoint Report for CMSWatch, and CEO of Consejo Inc.
* Robert Bogue, CEO of Thor Projects, and a SharePoint MVP
* Andrew Connell, author, trainer, and co-founder of Critical Path Training

Somewhat surprisingly, though not entirely given the breadth of services offered by SP2010, each expert cites different strengths and weaknesses, with very little overlap.

On The Plus Side of SharePoint 2010:

* My Profiles (formerly My Sites) — including more social media and better associations between individuals.
* Office integration — Better integration with MS Office particularly for Access and Excel Services — improving the supportability of those inevitable Access applications.
* Business Intelligence — Impressive upgrades to dashboard reporting and monitoring through Excel services.
* Service Application architecture — Moving away from the Shared Services model and to independent service applications.
* Developer Story — Across the board the story for development with SharePoint is better. Better tooling. Better APIs. Better materials.
* External Connectivity — BDC is now part of SharePoint Foundation as Business Connectivity Services (BCS) with more powerful connectivity and workflow. For example, expense reports can be done in SharePoint and automatically imported into the accounting system; purchase orders can be routed through approvals before automatically being created.
* SharePoint Designer — A full-fledged SharePoint editor that knows and understands SharePoint, not just an HTML editor. Administrators have control of whether SharePoint Designer can be used or not for individual sites, and can control which features are enabled.
* Offline Support via SharePoint Workspace — Previous support for offline work was limited or only available via a 3rd party solution. SharePoint 2010 is now a platform for retrieving data while you’re offline as well as posting new data while offline.
* Trusted code, Cleaner code — Code can be run against SharePoint data in a trusted way, and applications can be built client side. Out-of-the-box sites now generate much cleaner mark-up (well-formed XHTML; table-less markup), are accessible (WCAG 2.0 AA) and are much lighter (refactored markup, compressed JavaScript & CSS files).
* SharePoint Online (hosting) — SharePoint 2010 Web Content Management sites can be deployed to the cloud and avoid up-front licensing, hardware and staffing costs.

There’s Still Room For Improvement

* Web content management — Much improved with the addition of social media, metadata controls and the ribbon interface for the editor, but far from best-in-class.
* Search — Too many search experiences between Foundation, standard SharePoint and FAST (and FAST is quite complicated to setup).
* Increased complexity — 2010 may cause organizations headaches; many firms felt 2007 was pretty complicated to maintain and 2010 is a good bit more complex (it’s new found flexibility around service applications has created some of the complexity).
* Security — Generally acceptable for many, but SharePoint Designer access “still isn’t as controllable as large enterprises might want.” Some of the scenarios that SharePoint supports including running in the Sandbox and long running workflows make it difficult to hold on to the original user’s identity.
* Uneven administration — No single administrative panel for an entire farm (security configuration remains a good example); fine-grain controls (e.g. quotas are applied to site collections, not sites).
* Coded workflow — Converting declarative workflow to coded workflow. Declarative workflows, created by SharePoint Designer, are not easy to convert into a coded workflow.
* Bulk pages — Lacking features to manage bulk pages (e.g. publishing multiple pages at a single time, such as a magazine).
* Reusable content — Lacking features to reuse content for entire pages or sets of pages. SharePoint 2010 includes a feature called Reusable Content, but this is scoped only at snippets of content rather than entire pages.
* E-commerce — If you’re looking to buy and sell online, there are better available options.
* Size — There’s so much you can learn about SharePoint and so many features that you can spend your entire time working with SharePoint and never end up working with a particular feature or set of features.

For business users such as communications and marketing professionals, SP2010 is a powerful, if not overwhelming solution. Business users can take solace in knowing that the enterprise content management (ECM) and web content management (WCM) features are much improved. The ECM and WCM features are not considered best-in-class, but SP2010 provides most of what many require.

“WCM was good for 2002, but remains weak compared with far less expensive and more capable solutions (though it is compelling if combined with the rest of what SharePoint brings to the table),” says Shell who also adds that the improvements to taxonomy management (metadata) and social media are particularly notable.

“SharePoint isn’t perfect,” says Bogue. “But on the whole I think the features meet most people’s needs (particularly the editor which supports direct copy from Word; previously a thorn in everyone’s side).”

“From my perspective SharePoint is great value but things of great value are almost never best of breed. Best of breed demands a premium, and that’s just not SharePoint’s space in the market.”
For Developers & Administrators

For techies, there are a lot of enhancements to make the .NET pro smile: particularly improvements to SharePoint Designer, Visual Studio, SharePoint Foundation and Business Connectivity Services.

“SharePoint at its core is very extensible – when developers or site owners want to change specific functionally, tools like Visual Studio 2010 and SharePoint Designer 2010 make it very easy to accomplish these tasks,” says Connell, who advocates patience in working with SP2010. “Folks working with SharePoint have to learn enough about the platform to understand what’s available to them while getting detailed knowledge on the things they need. It’s like the old saying: “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.”

SP2010 certainly isn’t perfect, nor is it “everything to everyone”; it needs only a business case that can afford the sticker price.

“I think that professionals – of anything – tend to see things from the lens of perfection,” adds Bogue. “Developers want to write perfect code with 100% code coverage with tests, etc. However, the trick for me isn’t seeing the world perfect, the trick is to see the world as practically as possible.”
A Viable Option for the Right Organization

Overall, the experts give SharePoint 2010 a thumbs-up. It’s not for everyone nor every organization, but it’s a very powerful platform that gives Oracle and other .NET vendors a run for their money.

Adds Bogue: “I’m not minimizing the fact that SharePoint has its issues – even in 2010. My perspective is simply that it’s “good enough” for what most customers need. The real issues for deployment have nothing to do with the technology and everything to do with the politics and the people. The technology’s the easy part.”

Here are some ECM Events to look out for!

IKS Early-adopters Workshop
Event Details
Starts: Jun 22, 2010
Ends: Jun 23, 2010
Location: Salzburg, Austria
Event Description
This event launches the IKS Early-adopters programme. It will held on 22-23 June 2010 in Salzburg, Austria. The goal is to bring together the first group of CMS vendors who will evaluate the IKS Stack by integrating IKS components of their choice into their CMS technology platform.

Magnolia Conference 2010
Event Details
Starts: Sep 16, 2010
Ends: Sep 17, 2010
Location: Basel, Switzerland
Event Description
Magnolia Conference will take place September 16-17 in Basel, Switzerland. The first day will consist of keynotes and sessions with business and technical topics in regard to Magnolia CMS. The day after will be Community Day, an Unconference-style event run by the attendees.

Full-screenX Change Conference
Event Details
Starts: Sep 20, 2010
Ends: Sep 22, 2010
Location: Monterey
Event Description
X Change is the premier conference for Web analytics professionals, brought to you by Web Analytics Demystified and Semphonic. The X Change Conference is built around intimate conversations led by Enterprise analytics managers and senior practitioners. Last year’s discussion-leaders included web analytics managers from Adobe, AOL, Barclays, Best Buy, Charles Schwab, Hewlett Packard, Intuit, Microsoft, Nokia, Salesforce, The New York Times, Turner Broadcasting and many other top brands.

The X Change conference is an event that in many ways is hard to put your finger on. It’s a conference, but it’s not like any conference you’ve ever been to:

Social Media World Forum Europe:
Event Details
Starts: Mar 29, 2011
Ends: Mar 30, 2011
Location: London
Event Description
Social Media World Forum is now firmly established as Europe’s leading social media event. A two day event featuring

SharePoint 2010: Using Taxonomy & Metadata to Improve Navigation & Browsing by Jeff Carr

Metadata represents the foundation for a large range of functionality across sites in SharePoint. The goal of metadata lies not in the tagging of content itself, but rather in the potential it offers for the improvement of findability via navigation.

Metadata Navigation
A new feature offered in SharePoint 2010 is Metadata Navigation, which provides users with navigational elements constructed from tags that have been applied by publishers to content. The purpose is to filter or refine the result set based on taxonomy that has been bound to Managed Metadata columns.

Two forms of functionality are provided:

1. Navigation Hierarchies
These provide an expandable and collapsible hierarchy based on taxonomic values bound to a specific chosen field. You can expand a term set and select terms to filter the current view of the library.

Applying a filter by selecting a term displays only those documents that have been tagged with that term. If a selected term has associated children, by default they are included as part of the filter.

Navigation Hierarchies

A further selection on the filter icon located beside the original term offers the option to apply the filter on the parent term only.

Filters are also offered as part of the header fields displayed in a view of a document library. Managed Metadata fields that are bound to a hierarchical term set may be browsed, with selected terms applied as filters.

The user interface is slightly different than that provided by the Navigation Hierarchies, but the functionality is equivalent (including the caveat).

Although presented as a form of guided navigation, this approach lacks true faceted functionality for the user experience. Proper faceted navigation displays a listing of only those term sets and terms that have been applied to content stored within the document library itself.

Presenting the user with the entire taxonomic hierarchy means that the potential exists for navigation down a multitude of paths that have a high probability of displaying no documents.

2. Key Filters
These provide the ability to filter the current view of a document library based on taxonomic values bound to a specific field. The difference between Key Filters and Navigation Hierarchies is that with Key Filters, users enter keywords into a text field and managed terms from the taxonomy are returned through auto-suggest functionality.

Alternatively, selecting the tags icon displays a popup window containing a browsable list of terms from which to select.

ECM Careers has some great new jobs on the job board to check out!

Inside Sales- Software Information Management based in Berkshire,Middlesex

Leading Information Management vendor with solutions covering Web Content Management, Document Management, Enterprise Search are urgently seeking an Inside Sales person to join their successful team in the Berkshire office.

As Inside Sales you will be responsible for:
- Working with an assigned Business Development Manager in assigned territories
- Lead Generation for your external BDM
- Delivery of marketing programmes
- Closing smaller sales opportunities
- Partner management

As Inside Sales you will have:
- Software based Inside Sales experience
- Ideally experience in selling Content Management, Document Management, Knowledge Management, enterprise search, SharePoint or portal software
- Experience of closing deals
- Excellent written and spoken English
- Fluency in a second European language preferred but NOT essential

Apply NOW on ECM Careers!

NetSuite Implementation Consultant in Stoke on Trent

Due to a number of new clients they are urgently looking for an experienced NetSuite Implementation consultant to join their offices in Stoke on Trent.

Responsbilities

- Daily delivery of NetSuite including customization, support escalation, and Q&A
- Document business processes, business mapping, business requirements and meeting notes
- Attend internal meetings including knowledge transfers, mentoring, and Q&A

Skills Required:

- Must have strong experience implementing NetSuite
- 2 - 5 years experience in systems applications consulting, either internally via an IT organization or externally with a consulting firm or software provider
- Customer relationship acumen and experienced consulting skills
- Solid experience in Change Management and Business Process Mapping
- Customer relationship acumen and experienced consulting skills
- Experience with software in an SaaS environment including any experience with Accounting

Go to ECM Careers now and apply!