I don’t know about you, but I would LOVE a new 17″ Macbook Pro! So, how do you win a new Macbook Pro? Enter the Day JCR Cup 2008! Simply create a content-centric application and submit it no later than midnight September 30th, 2008. Detailed information (more so than what I’ll cover in this blog) can be found at:

http://dev.day.com/microsling/content/blogs/cup.c.html

JCR/JSR 170/Content Management:

You may be asking yourself, ‘what does JCR stand for?’ JCR stands for the Java Content Repository. Day Software (Day) has been an emerging leader in the field of Web Content Management (WCM) and Enterprise Content Management (ECM) for over a decade now. In an effort to not only promote themselves more amongst the Open Source Community, but also in promoting the concept of Content Management Systems (CMS) (I know, I know, let the acronyms fly!), they created the JSR (Java Specification Request) 170.

The Apache Software Foundation created an open source, fully compatible version of JSR 170 by creating the Jackrabbit project. Day’s commercial implementation of JSR 170 is the Content Repository Extreme (CRX). Day’s flagship WCM, Communique, is a set of API’s built on top of the CRX.

One of the neat things about this contest is that it gives developers a chance to obtain a free, trial version of the CRX. When you sign up for the contest, a trial key is emailed to you. The contest page has links to documentation, quickstart guides, FAQs, mailing lists, and all associated technologies needed to build out a complete CMS.

One final note before I end this blog… I’ve been developing with Day Communique for over 5 years now. I am VERY curious to see what the new version, CQ 5, will look like. I have a sneaky suspicion that all of the technologies involved with this content (JCR, SLING, etc.) are a good indication of what CQ 5 is going to look like…

Until next time…

Todd

So last week while at a partner conference for ECM leader Interwoven up in San Francisco, I was able to pop over to the Web 2.0 conference right across the street, where EMG happened to be exhibiting for the first time.   After spending just 20 minutes talking with my colleagues in the booth as well as a few attendees here and there, I began to notice something very peculiar.   Never in my life has there been a greater diversity of industry, age, culture, interest or human specimens under one roof then at this conference.   It was an anthropologists dream.   Now, regardless what you may feel about the term “2.o” in general, you have to admit that never has such a buzz phrase fostered such indulgence and interests since I can remember… OK, don’t judge on that one.    I guess the fascinating part for me was just how individuals, companies and the conference hosts themselves had spun the 2.0 genre to include so many things.   From major media providers to small technology start ups to interactive agencies to the biggest names on the Internet - everyone has found a way to exploit, nay I say, capitalize, on the phrase itself.   But has it worked.   Let’s ask the eighty-year old woman slowly shuffling down the walk way about just why she is here shall we - oh wait, where did she go.  Never-mind, I was bombarded, humbled and entertained by the gamut of other conversations I engaged in.   From the genius start-up entrepreneur looking to change the way the web fosters communication as we know it to the stoic academic that was just looking for some great debate to the individual from the SF Parks & Recreation department and his dramatic testimony on the future of the parks and social networking.   Everyone had an opinion.     Well good for them, because regardless of how you feel, there has been a noticeable shift in those that are standing behind the school of thought that demonstrates the web as a true business unit and aren’t going to settle for anything but more accountability, more engagement and more advancement around this extremely young medium.   So I say, hats off to all you(us) weirdos, evangelists and experimenters on the edge of digital sanity.  You are the beacon for my faith and the direction you will take us.

There’s been a lot of talk lately on the value of social networking tools, sites, blogs, blah, blah, blah… and it starts me wondering, “How do you build community?” Seriously. So, the social scientist in me takes over and I begin to digg into this deli.icio.us question and see what the rest of the oncomm has to say about it. I’m sure if the information is out there, by now I must have reddit.

This concept of building community sounds great, especially to marketing types who see this as a way to generate traffic “for free” but kind of breaks down when it comes to actually starting to build. Lets consider for a moment the reasons why we might “build community” purely for marketing reasons and then we’ll dive into perhaps the factors that actually drive community which might give us some insight into how community actually gets built.

• TRAFFIC-> Interesting content means interested visitors, right?
• KNOWLEDGE -> Sharing or obtaining. If you write it, they will come.

Now, let’s think about what these factors mean to community.

First, we should probably establish the difference between traffic and community. Amazon.com gets a ton of traffic and plenty of comments and feedback on products. Does it have “community” or “web2.0″ features? Is it a “social networking” site? Hardly. It’s pretty clear that traffic isn’t community. Next let’s consider knowledge sharing and community. For this let me use the example of, well… how about Micro$oft. Like many other software vendors, the redmond elite have used their online presence to produce a great deal of “knowledge” to be shared with the world. This certainly generates a certain amount of “traffic” and “content” but again, hardly creates “community.”

Read the rest of this entry »

So, today I managed to reach the pinnacle of Smartphone Geekiness. I successfully VPN’d to my office network and SSH’d to our Solaris server via my Samsung BlackJack.

Wow.

One might question the “Why” of this effort, but for those of you who already understand the absolute necessity of this fantastic feat, here is an overview of what I did to make it work.

1) Download ZaTelnet from www.zatelnet.com. Installation was pretty simple and is accomplished the same way any other smartphone app would be so I won’t get into that here.

2) Configure VPN connection. This is the kind of tricky part since the nomenclature behind networks here is kind of ambiguous. In the SamSung, the VPN connections are under Settings - More… - VPN. First create a new connection via PPTP or IPsec with same settings as you would any of your other computers (i.p. address, etc.). The trick is that you are connecting FROM “The Internet” and to “Work.”

3) Next open ZaTelnet and create a new session using the dns or IP of the machine you want to connect to along with all of the usual authentication details. I chose SSH2, default port 22, and the rest of the font, etc. details I left as defaults. For Network choose “Work Exclusive” which I believe means you want to connect to “Work” (duh) but that you won’t be sharing the connection with like… another computer or something that may be using the SmartPhone as a dialup connection.

4) Connect! It took some fiddling to get to these settings, but now that I’m there I can manage my Un*x servers remotely without lugging a laptop with me wherever I go. If I get a random call asking for a config change in the middle of the night… guess what… I’m enabled baby! WOOHOO!

Stay tooned for more random geekiness blogs from the Technology Solutions Group at EMG.

Jeremy Anderson
Enterprise Solutions Architect