Responsive Web Design is without a doubt one of the Web's biggest buzzwords for 2012. The Web is changing fast and even though the importance of CMSs addressing mobile devices was well predicted, I suspect even the tech gurus are surprised at the current growth rate of smartphones. If you don't know it by now, there is a lot of pressure on web designers and site builders to ensure that their client's websites are responding to the changing Internet. A website should look good no matter how it is being displayed, whether that site is being viewed on a desktop, cell phone, tablet, or whatever new device the Ghost of Steve Jobs brings us.

Organizations deal with a lot of confidential information every day, information that is typically managed using business applications, like SharePoint. That means that properly implemented and managed security is critical to these applications.

With SharePoint, you can implement effective security, but managing it with the tools you get out of the box isn’t the easiest. Here we look at the challenges you will face managing security and permissions within SharePoint and discuss why you should make it a key element of your Information Architecture plan.

One of the benefits of conferences such as last week's CMS Expo are the opportunities to come across content management systems you know nothing about. Such was the case for me when I was introduced to Wondercode, a content management and e-commerce solution developed by a Norwegian company. My introduction to Wondercode was in a showcase session with Sven-Erik Knoff as the presenter. 

Hundreds of corporate and commercial websites run Wondercode, each with their own unique twist and functionality. This panel will go in depth in showing you just how flexible, customizable and powerful Wondercode is

"Innovation is an art, but it is an art where “managerial” interventions can accelerate or retard the rate of progress. Much of this concerns the sources from which ideas originate, the speed by which ideas move through an organization, the invitations to participate, the attitudes of the key decision-makers and the sources of inspiration that they draw from."

- Bill Fischer, The Virtues of Having Strange People Close By, Forbes.com, May 17, 2012

I finally got my introduction to Telerik Sitefinity! I was not only the moderator for a panel at last week's CMS Expo, but I also had a chance to attend a few of the many sessions being offered during the conference. One of the first sessions I attended was a presentation focused entirely on Telerik's Sitefinity CMS with Pat Harlow as the presenter for this flyover session.

Telerik Sitefinity CMS is a modern online business platform which adapts to any business requirement and works equally well for online marketers, developers and IT managers.  This session will cover different capabilities of the system – Mobile Web, Form builder, and built-in Ecommerce. Pat Harlow will also highlight the Module Builder and Sitefinity Thunder, which makes developers more productive than Santa’s elves. Join this session to see what’s coming up for the next Sitefinity releases!

For busy people, these sessions are productive and valuable by giving attendees a great overview of a vendor's CMS within a one hour time frame. Despite Telerik being a sponsor here at CMS Report, I never before sat down with their sales people to go over Sitefinity's features. Below are some of notes I took during the presentation as well as my "first" impressions of the Sitefinity CMS.

François Hollande won the presidential election in France last week, with the help of an impressive campaign and content management system SilverStripe.

Hollande’s website http://francoishollande.fr was the web-based focal point of the door to door campaign and functioned as the main communication tool throughout the whole election period. In the month before the election, the site had three million unique visitors and ranked 15th most visited information site in France.

dotCMS, an open source, Java-based web content management system, is pleased to announce the release of v2.0.  This latest release continues dotCMS’s pursuit of providing one the most scalable, powerful and easy-to-use web content management platforms in the marketplace today.   No spin or catchy titles, just good, meaningful tools and functionality for both commercial-grade and multi-tenant content driven web applications. 

“dotCMS 2.0 is our response to the on-the-ground, real needs of both business users and developers,” announced Will Ezell, CTO of dotCMS.  “We have exciting plans for the 2 series, which will continue to rapidly improve upon our already robust enterprise content platform”.

Jay Gilmore tweeted me this morning to be sure that I made a note of the latest version of MODX Revolution that was released a couple days ago. MODX Revolution 2.2.2 includes a number of important fixes, some performance improvements, and two new wizards to make it easier to create User and Resource Groups in the CMS.

If you're using MODX Revolution and have not upgraded to 2.2, you will find that it has been one of biggest releases for the MODX folks to date. There were also notable improvements and enhancements included in Revolution 2.2.1.

Some of the highlights in the MODX Revolution 2.2.2 release: