Symphonious

CMSWire: Vendor Criticism of CMS Watch

In an industry whereby most of the "independent analysts" are heavily dependent on revenues from the very firms they claim to be "independent" of, it's unusual to see truly critical research get published. So it becomes a surprise to both buyers and sellers when they read such criticism. In our reports we widely distribute the compliments and brickbats — if something is truly terrible we will tell you.

The way I see it, criticism is one of the most important things a product company can receive - particularly in an aggregated, general form like an analyst report tends to give you. It lets you identify areas you need to improve in that are actually affecting clients rather than the ones that seem important to you.

The first thing I do when I get a new vendor report is to search through it for any mentions of Ephox (it’s amazing how often we turn up in reports about web content management systems) and see what they didn’t like so we can work out how to fix it. Then I go through and find the general trends in the report etc to establish a wider industry direction and market opportunities etc.

I’ve said this internally to Ephox already but I want to give a big congratulations to the team on getting EditLive! 6.4 out the door. We have a lot of customers who have been waiting quite a long time for the features in that release and only a year or two ago they were thought to be effectively impossible given the Swing Text APIs that EditLive! is built on. It’s a testament to the team that this can be done at all, let alone with such high quality.

Of course, now it’s onward and upward so it’s back to the grindstone for all of you!

We've found a cheap little NetGear router that can roughly load balance and fail-over between our two internet connections to hopefully get a little bit more speed. Of course, the simplest thing to do is to set it up so that from the inside it looks just like the old modem and then on the WAN side set it up to look like a client using that old modem as it's router. Of course, that means that the inside and outside of the router are in the same subnet (192.168.0.0) in this case and the new router's internal IP is also the IP of the WAN router it forwards on to.

If your mind can't handle that, don't worry - neither could the NetGear router's.  Shame though, it was such a simple way to configure things. Now I either have to change all the internal IPs and find anywhere they happen to have been hard coded and update them, or get the ISP that manages the modem to change it's internal IP. We've sent the word to the ISP but it's filtering its way up the chain of suppliers to the real ISP that actually runs things. Oh and of course since last time we called our ISPs been bought out by someone else again.

If only we were big enough that the top level provider considered us worth dealing with…. Sigh.

I'm setting off on a fairly major trip, firstly to Lotusphere in Orlando (20-24 Jan) where I'll be facilitating a BOF session (BOF112) titled "Mashup Web 2.0 with Web Content Management". Sadly it's been scheduled for 7am Thursday, 24 Jan which seems like a rather silly time to expect people to be up, out of bed and ready for intelligent discussion. So if you're around I'd really appreciate you getting out of bed early and coming along to make sure it's not an empty room. Ephox will have a booth on the show room floor and cosponsor a couple of parties as well (details here). I'm really looking forward to actually getting to meet some of our clients and partners - they don't tend to drop by Australia very often and pretty much never come as far north as Brisbane.

From there it's back over to Lake Tahoe for a fancy corporate retreat and a whole lot of major planning which should be fun.

Finally, I'll be spending February in London to help kick our European sales along, so if people are around I'd love to catch up and meet some new people.

Since I'll be doing a fair bit more travel in the future, I've joined up with Dopplr to help keep track of it and succumbed to the horrors of widgets in my sidebar to display my upcoming trips. If you're using Dopplr I'm registered under adrian@symphonious.net (screen name ajsutton) so feel free to follow my trips and let me know if we're passing by. I'm really looking forward to meeting new people now that I'm getting around the world some more so don't be shy.

PS: Apologies to the Planet Ephox subscribers who have now had three posts about Lotusphere in rather quick succession.

For those who both use EditLive! and were very quick to upgrade to Leopard, you might want to grab the latest early access build of EditLive! With old builds on Tiger, our toolbar didn't respond well to the darker background color:

(Click for full size version)

Fortunately, Apple introduced some new rendering styles for buttons with Leopard that we could leverage to get a much nicer, much more OS X look:

(Again with the clicking)

We need to take some time to further tweak the UI on Leopard in a few places (and improving a number of the icons would be good) but this takes care of the biggest problem we had on Leopard. If you're wondering, a new button capsule is started each time a toolbar separator is specified in the config file.