Thanks to Philipp Krenn for taking on this additional work to his excellent first analysis. Check it out for the additional analysis.

On the release announcement, they are stating that they want to release version that include only security updates and versions that include security + bug fixes. While I can appreciate that they are trying to follow the “try to make everyone happy” model, they are, in my opinion, just adding to the general consensus that Drupal is a complicated and highly technical CMS.

While this may very well be the target market that Drupal is aiming towards, one would think it would be more sensible to attempt to follow suit with the whole customer experience movement that is occurring right now and try to make things as transparent and easy as possible for the end users.  Unfortunately, it seems that the Drupal team is not heading down this path.

In my opinion, Drupal should offer separate release announcements. One for the 6.x series with a countdown as to when this series will stop being supported so that those on the platform, know when it will be grandfathered and will be better able to plan a transition to 7.x.

For those on the 7.x version, I would personally just offer a single version. However, if it’s absolutely necessary to have two types of installs, why not simply offer one version and within the upgrade process have a prompt for the user asking them if they’d like to do a complete upgrade (with security + bug fixes) or a partial just to address security issues and have the system do what’s needed. Single file, single download, no confusion.

For release announcements, I think that Drupal needs to spruce things up a bit and write-up announcements that give more detail and less technical terminology akin to the way that the Joomla! and WordPress teams do their write ups. It’s a fairly easy change to make and is more likely to get picked up by people and get them excited about the new release. If  the customer wants more technical information, link to a more technical document. Otherwise, follow the keep it simple methodology.

I am aware that the Drupal teams have a ton of work and do the best they can with all of the tasks at hand and I don’ t want to come across as someone who doesn’t appreciate their efforts. I do, however, believe that there is always room for improvement and it is my hope that they take this writeup as feedback and not as an attack.

CC:  Please tell us a bit about yourself and your background leading up to working with Percussion.

Vern Imrich

VI:  My formal training and degrees are all in engineering, numerical methods and computer simulations.  But all along I was heavily involved in publications, running engineering magazines and other periodicals.  I became a pro at SGML, desktop publishing systems, and even typesetting languages.  Then, while in graduate school at MIT, SGML suddenly became HTML and the Web exploded onto the scene.  I ditched the numerical simulation code and grad school altogether and went full time to the Web, building sites, doing web applications. When I arrived at Percussion in the mid 90′s, it was a “data to  documents” company looking for a new market to expand in.  I spurred the company’s move to the Web, and by 1999 we had adopted XML  as our new core technology.  We quickly saw the core value proposition for this technology as helping companies publish web sites and web content quickly and cost effectively, and released our first Web Content Management System in the spring of 2000.  There have been many ups and downs as the Web bubble burst, morphed several times over, was reborn with Web 2.0 and into the social media explosion of today.  My experience combining the technical rigor of engineering with the free form creative processes of content publishers and editors has allowed me to guide Percussion to keep pace with the Web market all throughout.

CC: What makes Percussion a strong option for companies to consider in the market?

VI:  What we hear from our customers and prospects is that they choose our software because its highly usable, and because we deliver functionality as a product (rather than a set of complex customizations) which make our product supportable, flexible and upgradeable. This is a fundamentally different way to deliver the CMS than what you are hearing from other vendors in the market that require far more customization services. And we offer everyone a cloud-based evaluation to prove that the demo they just saw is really out of the box functionality. If I may say, it’s really a sad commentary on the state of the CMS market that prospects are often jaded by knowing that the sexy demo’s they see so often are really just “demo-ware.” They know that the vendors show up to their kick-off with nothing more than a bag of parts and a large consulting contract.

We think there is fundamentally a better way to manage your content, drive customer engagement, and manage your content marketing. We believe that simplifying all of that complexity into a highly usable out-of-the-box product that marketers and content owners can actually use to get their job done, CM1 solves a fundamental need and drives a real business outcome. If companies can’t use their web efforts to scale their business, then they are missing out on revenue. Our products breakthrough that wall.

CC: What do you feel was your greatest technical achievement over the last two years?

VI: Without a doubt the CM1 user experience is the key breakthrough that we are most proud about and the one that our customers love us for. “Finally,” they tell us, “something that we can actually use!” Believe it or not, we just had a prospect tell us during a demo that they felt like a caveman staring at fire for the first time! Now not sure we should go THAT far, but it’s definitely been a major breakthrough.

And we really believe that user experience is not about how pretty the interface looks (though we know that ours is pretty sexy looking!). We know that design can be fleeting, you can refresh how your product looks at any time, and many vendors have, but we took the time to completely rearchitect how you use the product based on how users actually want to do work. And by users, we mean the people actually managing the content, not the technical team in charge of the app.

This is a real breakthrough in user experience. It puts the power over the content back in the hands of the content owner. It creates flexibility, allows marketers to be more agile in their activity, and gives them the flexibility to take on whatever comes next.

Further the dashboard creates a comprehensive connection between analytics and action. Now teams can go from simply reading and reporting on the analytic data to a much more powerful “Read and Act” in the moment based on what’s working, or what’s trending in the market.

CC: From a technical standpoint, how does Percussion fare for customers with multiple infrastructure types within their corporate landscape?

VI: Our core DNA since we first launched WCM back in 2000 has always been as a decoupled system. Even as we add delivery-tier services like dynamic tagging and categorization, comments, ratings, personalization etc we treat the architecture the same and keep them decoupled. This creates limitless flexibility for our customers with their infrastructure and existing applications. Move to the cloud? No problem. Integrate with a custom built delivery side database? No problem. Integrate CRM or ERP or Marketing Automation connections? Also no problem.

And as important, because we don’t require you to change your current web infrastructure, you don’t have to redesign or re-architect your site to use our product. This is a key driver for many organizations that have heavy investments in their web technologies.

CC: A fair portion of the code utilized for Percussion was derived from Open Source projects; What was the reason for choosing to build off of these projects?

VI: As with any software initiative, we know what we are good at. And where things exist already that can be leveraged to deliver a high quality experience, we would rather start there than build it ourselves. We are constantly looking for ways to expand our use of Open Source because it frees our technical team to focus on what we do best.

CC: How has Percussion given back to the open source community?

VI: We do publish our common code back to the community, but a lot of where we innovate involves pulling together all this great technology in such a way that folks can use it easily and cheaply. In other words, we’re often the “last mile” to the user, so the code we publish tends to be widgets, gadgets and other plug-ins for our WCM offering.  Still, we’re always looking for areas where we can share more.

CC: For customers looking to integrate with multiple third party applications such as Salesforce and ERP solutions, how does Percussion fit in?

VI: As I mentioned earlier, our hallmark has always been our ability to integrate with other applications that our customers use. Some of our most successful customers like Autotrader.com, Weather.com and BabyCenter.com have really complicated applications running their business. They appreciate our ability to easily connect to those systems.

We take a classic widget/gadget approach to integrating applications like SalesForce which allows us to frequently add new integrations either on client demand, or because we know they will be popular. Soon, we will also extend the capability to create new Widgets or Apps to our key development partners and will deploy them in an App-Store type model. This is a really exciting development because you gain true network momentum as more and more people come on line with CM1 and CM1 widgets, gadgets and Apps.

CC: Can you give us a preview of what we can expect from upcoming releases of the software?

VI: We hear from our prospects all the time that they have a very hard time managing their content and driving a true content marketing strategy with their current technologies. However, they can’t always get their senior team to understand why that matters. Some of the near term things being rolled out as part of our advanced content marketing dashboard will draw a much cleaner picture for executives on what kind of value they are getting from their content operations. By exposing data about how content is turning into revenue, or even reducing costs, we change the dynamic from “my job is hard, this will help me do it better” (which sadly is never a winning business case) to a “here is where we are driving value to the business.”

I already mentioned the concept of an App Store. This will be a really exciting development in the coming months as well.

CC: Do you have any parting comments or final thoughts?

VI: You know, I would just say that historically people thought of one-size-fits-all WCM. It was really complex, and it was really hard, and it was really expensive. Smaller companies aspired to afford it, but it was always the domain of the monied class. But we are seeing a widescale revolt against complexity. Users just want something that works, and preferably works now. And smaller companies are realizing they can get full-functioning content systems in an affordable package, they don’t need to suffer in silence any longer.

CC: Thank you for your time Mr. Imrich.

With Liferay Sync, users now have the ability to access documents stored within a Liferay instance from their mobile devices and desktops. Documents can be dragged and dropped into a synchronized folder and then be edited, moved, or deleted. Sync automatically takes care of revision management.

A key benefit for Liferay users is access to documents offline; the documents synchronize when users are back online. A single user can make a change to a document on their desktop, which is then synchronized with the central server and updated for all other users who share that folder.  In these ways, Liferay Portal becomes a central repository for documents, opening up new avenues of collaboration for a distributed group of users.>

“Liferay Sync was designed to combine the benefits of a web application with the user interaction benefits of a desktop or mobile application,” said Edwin Chung, Liferay’s VP of Product Management. “The web allows centralized data and group access, and the desktop provides a rich way to search, access and manipulate documents.  But while Office Web Apps and Google Docs require you to store a copy on the server and edit documents in a browser, Liferay Sync allows users to leverage any desktop or mobile office package, such as MS Office, OpenOffice, iWork, or Photoshop, to edit and save documents locally while either online or offline.”

“The launch of Liferay Sync is an exciting and significant product release for our company,” said Brian Chan, Liferay’s founder and Chief Software Architect. “The ability to combine desktop and mobile interfaces with a web service takes the Liferay experience to new heights of simplicity and enrichment for our end users.”

Starting today with the beta form of Liferay Sync, Liferay Portal CE users can synchronize their documents within one Liferay Site. A coming edition of Liferay Sync for Liferay Portal Enterprise Edition (EE) will allow users to share documents across an unlimited number of Liferay Sites on one installation. Liferay Sync is compatible withWindows, Mac OS, and iOS.

For more about Liferay Sync, visit www.liferay.com/products/liferay-sync.

The SDL Board believes the addition of Alterian’s integrated marketing platform capability will bring strong synergies and enhancements to SDL’s Global Information Management strategy that helps global businesses engage with their customers in the language, the media and at the moment they choose. There is an excellent strategic fit in combining the marketing analytics, campaign management and social media capabilities from the Alterian product suite with that of SDL’s leading global Web Content Management, eCommerce and Structured Content capabilities.

Mark Lancaster, Executive Chairman of SDL commented:

“Understanding what your customers are interested in by analysing what they are looking at, and for how long, is key in developing your web and customer engagement strategy. We already have best-of-breed web content management technology, user guidance content management technology and leading language technology. Adding Alterian’s marketing analytics, social media and campaign management technology will provide customers with a superb integrated solution for managing customer engagement and improving customer experience. We are very pleased to have completed this acquisition and look forward to working with Alterian employees, partners and customers.”

An early pioneer of in-context editing, concrete5 gained popularity due to its ease of use for managing the content of websites. With this in mind, the company has leveraged the Twitter Bootstrap toolkit to offer a completely redesigned, centralized dashboard for backend administrative tasks with the release of concrete5.5.1.

While concrete5 is frequently used by webshops to deliver sites to clients who want to make edits on their own, many people who use concrete5 are DIY websites on budget webhosts where concrete5 is acting as a self-publishing platform. Over two-thirds of the traffic hitting concrete5 servers isn’t coming to its public facing community concrete5.org at all. The company knew it needed to improve the learning experience from within the concrete5 application itself.

“We started just wanting to make it easier to get around the Dashboard and browse our marketplace from within your own site, but we quickly realized we were going to have to touch every part of the interface to do it right,” said concrete5 designer Robert Huston. “Twitter Bootstrap gave us an amazing style guide, and much of the infrastructure we needed right out the box. With some addition icon work and thoughtful application of the rules the Twitter team devised, we were able to accomplish months of work in just weeks.”

“A lot of time has gone into tuning things under the hood with this release,” added Andrew Embler, CTO of concrete5. “Performance on a default install of concrete5 has improved dramatically in this version, and new features like Stacks and Global Block Areas provide best-practice solutions to problems that had been solved organically in the past.”

New installs now include a wizard explaining how people can get started, and a daily news feed laid out like a magazine helping people learn more over time. The browse marketplace functionality has been dramatically improved, and users can now even purchase add-ons and themes without ever leaving their own sites.

About concrete5 
Concrete CMS Inc. is a leading developer of next- generation open source solutions for web sites. The company’s flagship product, concrete5, combines the ease-of-use of a blogging platform with the flexibility and power of a web development platform. To date, hundreds of thousands of advertising and creative agencies and web developers around the world have downloaded concrete5 for free and used the technology to quickly and inexpensively build enterprise-quality web sites that can be updated by end users. concrete CMS is a privately held company based in Portland, Oregon, and manages the concrete5.org project. For more information, please visit http://www.concrete5.org.

This release offers improved stability and performance with over 80 bug fixes, including an obscure but theoretically possible MySQL injection exploit.  The control panel is noticeably faster in most environments, with much snappier rendering of filterable tables.  And an expanded approach to ‘Remember me’ functionality that’s optimized for multiple sites and/or devices results in a nicer frontend user experience.  In addition to improvements to general functionality, both users and developers will find lots of goodies as we continue to develop existing features and set the groundwork for upcoming additions.

File management continues to improve in this release, with a number of nice additions.  The browser has been beefed up to allow sorting and filtering by keywords, greatly improving the ease with which you can find a particular file.  The browser has also been added to the category editor, for use when populating the category image field.  File access via the browser has also been seen increased security checks, limiting access through the browser to the CP.

File ‘credit’ and ‘location’ metadata can now be added through the file modal, and file fields can display all data associated with a given file through frontend tags.  It’s now easy to show any of your image options with native tags.  The ability to watermark an image without requiring resizing has also been added.

Improvements designed to make updating and/or moving ExpressionEngine sites were also a focus of this release.  File upload paths can now be overridden via a hidden configuration variable, making updates after a move or syncing a developer site and a production site easier.  A third_party_path configuration variable was also added, allowing you to keep your third party add-ons folder outside of the system folder.

A number of smaller feature requests were also addressed in this release, including the addition of an ‘active’ status indicator to the Channel Categories tag; the ability of the Channel Categories and Category Archive tags to accept multiple channels in the channel parameter; the addition of a url_title parameter to the Channel Next and Previous tags; the expansion of improved control over pagination output to search pagination; the ability to choose a specific channel from the main control panel dropdown menu when editing and a lot more.  Check the Changelog for a full list of what’s new!

Developers will also find a number of significant additions in this release.  Two new constants, URL_THEMES_THIRD and PATH_THEMES_THIRD, have been added with the goal of allowing users to fully customize the location of third party folders. These two constants point to the URL and the path of the themes/third_party/ directory. We’d like you to start using these right away and have your add-ons using them by our next major release because we’ll be introducing two new config variables that allow users to override these settings.  In conjunction with the new third_party_path config variable, users will then be able to keep third_party folders completely out of the system/ and themes/ directory, making upgrading easier.

It’s also not too soon to start paying attention to our new Developer Log.  This feature records deprecated functions that are called during normal operation of a site.  This allows ExpressionEngine to send a warning that functions or behaviors currently in use on a site will be removed at some point in the future, thus giving third party developers time to future proof their code.

A new File field library should also be of particular interest to third party developers.  The library makes it easy for developers to use the native browser for their own needs.  For a look at the library in action, just take a peek at how it was used to enable file browsing for the Category Image field in the control panel.

EE’s Pagination library has also seen significant improvement, reducing the amount of code needed to implement pagination parsing and providing a method for handling pagination_links as a tag pair.  All developers are encouraged to make use of the library for parsing of pagination tags.  Hooks also received their share of love in this release, with new hooks available when deleting members, modifying template data, defining template types, and pulling in rows for the content edit page.

Before I dig into the software itself, it’s relevant to point out that anyone can test out the software by simply visiting their website at http://www.ademero.com/ and downloading a trial version. Ademero works on any Windows machine but, once installed, can be access from browsers on any platform.

Let’s dive into the interface shall we?

First, I’m going to show you the interface as seen by the average non-administrative user.

When you first connect to the system through your web browser, you’ll be prompted to log in. Once you’ve done that, you’ll be taken to the dashboard where you are treated to a quick overview of all of your queue’s and messages from within the system.

 

Conclusion

Content Central is a complex piece of software that is both easy to use and feature filled. The fact that it functioned without issue in every browser I tried (Safari, Chrome, Firefox and IE) was a testament to the amount of work that the team at Ademero have put into it.

The layout of the system makes it incredibly user friendly and provides an interface that is both pleasing to use and fast while maintaining a high degree of functionality. The help system that Content Central provides is quite simply, perfectly implemented and provides just enough assistance to not be overwhelming while still giving you just what you need.

I highly recommend Content Central and would strongly advise you try it out if you are in the market for document management software.

Along with new features such as advanced search and automatic notification of Joomla core and extension updates, the Joomla CMS for the first time includes multi-database support with the addition of Microsoft SQL Server. Previous versions of Joomla were compatible exclusively with MySQL databases.

“Multi-database support is a huge step forward for Joomla, which is already powering more than 1.6 million websites worldwide. It ensures companies and organization, both large and small, will save even more money and time by adopting Joomla,” said Ryan Ozimek, president of Open Source Matters, a non-profit created to provide organization, legal and financial support to the Joomla project. “No longer will Joomla developers be tied down to a particular database or have to spend more money and time integrating other software to get Joomla to communicate with their database. This enhances Joomla’s scalability immensely.”

Other key features in Joomla 2.5 includes:

• Automatic notification when a Joomla or extension update is available. When logged into the control panel, site administrators will instantly have access to new notification buttons that allows them to see and act on the latest updates. In addition to updates for the Joomla CMS, a second button offers third party extension notification updates.
• A better natural language search engine to the Joomla core. Complete with auto-completion and stemming (for example if you type “running” in a search field you also see run), it is faster and more versatile than the standard search.

“We literally received thousands of pieces of input at ideas.joomla.org into what functionality should be added to Joomla 2.5, and overwhelmingly enhanced notifications and more elegant search topped the list,” said Mark Dexter of the Joomla Production Leadership Team. “In fact, the automatic notification for core and extension updates received the most votes for a feature that people wanted in 2.5. But we didn’t stop with just those two. Joomla 2.5 is a major overhaul with more than 24 new features that we have highlighted at joom.la/25features.”

Joomla 2.5 adheres to Joomla’s newly-adopted six-month release cycle that began with the previous Joomla CMS release of Joomla 1.7 in July, 2011. Downloading the latest version of Joomla is the best way to ensure organizational and personal security needs are being met since it will have the most recent updates to protect against the latest security threats.

Joomla 2.5 is truly a collaborative community-driven software project developed with the feedback gathered from more than 2.5 million Joomla forum posts, 540,000 Joomla forum members and data from more than 8,800 Joomla extensions. To download Joomla 2.5, go to http://www.joomla.org/download.html.

The new features available with Semaphore 3.3 include:

• multi-lingual information management capability that enables users to switch between languages, allowing documents to be classified and labeled in different languages using the same authority model
• a ‘semantic visualization’ tool for contextual navigation, which enables users to navigate the structure of information, rather than the information itself, boosting the enterprise search user experience and improving information discovery
• an ‘ontology review’ tool that allows clients to feedback on the terminology being used by an organization to label its information assets
• a ‘publisher’ function that ensures that all aspects of an organization’s many information navigation and classification systems are synchronized

At its core, Smartlogic’s Semaphore Content Intelligence Platform enables enterprises to turn unstructured content into actionable information by enhancing the capabilities of existing information management systems such as SharePoint and OpenText. As a Content Intelligence Platform, Semaphore assists organizations in identifying, classifying, extracting, analyzing and utilizing hard-to-find information assets such as research papers, plans, proposals, presentations, meeting notes, strategy documents, reports, memos, web copy and emails.

Jeremy Bentley, Smartlogic’s chief executive, commented: “This newest version of Semaphore enables us to provide the most complete Content Intelligence solution available out of the box. At a time when most organizations are struggling with information overload, information governance issues, the limits of existing information management systems, and an increasing need to monetize and repurpose information, what clients are asking for is a Content Intelligence solution they can easily implement alongside their existing information management systems without the need for a costly ‘Rip and Replace’ program.

“At Smartlogic, we have been doing this since the first release of Semaphore in 2006 and have listened to our customers as we have fine-tuned it. With Semaphore 3.3, we’ve further innovated our solution and added many new features, making it more straightforward to implement and operate than ever – and giving the market what they’ve asked for.”

The launch of the newest version of Semaphore comes just two months after the application received the 2011 European Frost & Sullivan Technology Innovation Award. Charanya Balasubramanian, research analyst at Frost & Sullivan, said of Semaphore: “This technological innovation endows existing enterprise systems with capabilities to find, organize, process, monetize, control and govern unstructured content in an efficient manner. Encompassing four modules, Semaphore radically changes the search, navigation and content intelligence capabilities.”

The release of Semaphore 3.3 also follows the recent acquisition of one of Smartlogic’s chief competitors, Seattle-based SchemaLogic – giving it clear market leadership. Smartlogic, which was founded in 2006, has more than 300 customers worldwide and offices in San Jose and London.

Take a look at this graph for instance:

As you can see, certain systems perform better than others and what I found especially interesting is that contrary to what you might hear on the ‘net, Joomla actually shows quite well from a security standpoint.

As part of the interpretation of this analysis, the author came to this conclusion:

• WordPress only had a single serious vulnerability (in case I interpreted that correctly) — impressive.
• Drupal did also well, only the percentage is a little higher due to the low number of overall issues.
• In contrast to the first two, TYPO3 appeared to not do well at all. It has by far most serious vulnerabilities both in absolute numbers and the percentage. However, I would attribute part of the difference compared to the other projects to TYPO3′s stricter rating of vulnerabilities. One should probably add a CVSS comparison to Drupal to get a more balanced result.
• Joomla, while having the most vulnerabilities overall, did very well with serious ones (meaning it had few of those).
• SilverStripe seems to be floating somewhere between the other projects, neither being exceptionally good or bad.

“We’ve seen the need for cloud-based Web Content Management solutions firsthand in the EMEA market,” says Mark Andrews, CEO of TBSCG. “EndPlay is one of the most visionary companies in this space, and we look forward to hosting and implementing the EndPlay platform for our clients requesting a SaaS solution.”