Major Rev Under Way For Open-Source ...

Computerworld - ... Web site content management application, says the lead developer, David Wheeler, who also happens to be president of Kineticode Inc., a San Francisco start-up. Bricolage, as the open-source app is called, "is going through a major rewrite and being rearchitected," he says. The reason? Increased modularity and to give a jolt to performance. There will also be improved integration with XML and a centralized database, which is now the open-source Postgres. But support will be added for MySQL, which is also open-source. You might think only small-time users bother with Bricolage, especially since Wheeler's customers routinely ask for and then fund the development and changes that everyone else then benefits from. Where's the competitive advantage? Well, he claims, effective management of Web site content shouldn't be considered a core competency for IT pros, so they shouldn't care. The most important competitive advantage, Wheeler says, "is not paying six-figure licensing fees to Vignette." That notion has appealed to RAND Corp., Entertainment Tonight and Portugal Telecom SGPS SA. Even the Dean for America presidential campaign voted for Bricolage. But Wheeler is unsure exactly when Version 2.0 will finally hit the streets. That's probably because he's putting the finishing touches on the 1.8 upgrade to be released by the end of this month. It will include the ability to centrally manage multiple sites while maintaining individual workflows and document types for each site. And you thought you were busy.
• If you've been paying attention to trends in antispam, antivirus and content-filtering technologies, you've probably noticed that discrete products are increasingly being delivered as packages that allow corporate policies to be applied from a single management console. Matt Dirks, NetIQ Corp.'s vice president for management security products, notes that point products for secure messaging are becoming less interesting to IT managers. In the coming year, you can expect to see some changes in that regard for the San Jose-based company's VigilEnt, MailMarshall and other products. Although Dirks declined to say when or how the changes will occur, he did say a rebranding effort will commence in 2004. Expect to see MailMarshall and others to be thrown in the slammer and replaced by the more vanilla "NetIQ antispam" and the like.
• Eric Hahn, chairman of Proofpoint Inc. in Cupertino, Calif., believes NetIQ has some catching up to do, since his company's Proofpoint Protection Server already is a uniformly named antispam, antivirus and content filtering rolled into a single policy-based application. But Hahn is less interested in bashing the competition than in knocking recent antispam efforts by politicians and Microsoft.