Here's a way to get your own little piece of the cloud for free. Microsoft is now offering 5GB of free online storage through Windows Live Skydrive. Are we sensing a little bit of the Christmas giving spirit?

With the holiday officially upon us now -- did someone say Advent Calendar? -- you may be saving all your money to buy an Xbox or a WII. But if you aren't, or you are one of the fortunate few to have tons of money to spend, we have a few conferences that might be tempting.

Our friends at CMS Watch recently announced their take on trends in SaaS Web Content Management for 2009. We've been contemplating about the future of SaaS WCM for quite some time ourselves.

Let?s take a look-see at CMS Watch's predictions for the year to come and some more analysis of hosted Web CMS solutions.

DotNetNuke Corporation, the commercial entity behind the popular free and open source DotNetNuke CMS, has announced a new infusion of Series A Capital. The amount of funds raised is not being disclosed at this time, but the two organizations behind the new cash infusion are August Capital and Sierra Ventures.

The act of initiating a query via search functionality is no longer seen as a magical, mythical process. According to a recent CMS Watch report, The Search and Information Access Report 2009, enterprise search technology is no longer perceived as being a stealth and secretive operation. After having interviewed enterprise search customers from around the world to evaluate 20 solutions in the marketplace, it was evident that because of modern search offerings with the availability of improved administrative tools and APIs, the aura of search technologies has been demystified.

Like using Google Apps? There are a lot of templates to choose from, so you don't need to start from scratch. And if you liked all those templates, then you'll probably love these new ones -- Forms Templates.

The twists, turns and tips you need for staying up-to-date by the water cooler.

Highlights of the Week

* Waste Time on Intranet, Make More Money. Now is the moment to cash in on your company’s Intranet. * Web Content Migration: Disastrous Strategy. There is probably no worse strategy for an Intranet or public Web site than content migration. It is doomed to failure from the very start. * ClearGauge and ZoomRank Deliver Next Gen SEO Analytics. What do you get when you mix a provider that specializes in search engine optimization and a Web-based service that monitors search engine rankings? * (Interview) eZ Publish as SaaS Web CMS. We spoke with eZ’s global partner manager Bertrand Maugain to get more insight into the new eZ Publish SaaS offering and their partner in arms, Mamut ASA. * How To: Running WordPress with SQL Anywhere. SQL Anywhere is a simple, powerful database with some interesting features.

Most Popular Articles

And these are the articles you couldn’t get enough of during the past week -- if page views are anything to go by, anyways. So, what was your fancy? WordPress 2.7, Day CQ5.1 WCM, Google Mobile Apps and Amazon’s CloudFront CDN. * Day Software's New CQ5 Web CMS Has Arrived. To get as close as possible to a real-life experience, we went ahead and installed the software from scratch and played with it for a couple of days. * Google Apps Go Mobile, Starting with iPhone. What does Safari 3 have to do with Office applications on the iPhone? * WordPress 2.7: From Blog Platform to Web CMS. Now on their third beta release, WordPress is promising big things with version 2.7. * Gartner: 2009 Top 10 Strategic Technologies. At the recent Gartner Symposium/ITxpo, Gartner analysts presented their insights into the top 10 technologies and trends to rule the world in 2009. * MySpace Tries Something New With Profile 2.0. The two most significant changes included in this optional upgrade are advanced privacy options and the near complete adherence to W3C HTML standards. * Amazon Launches Cheap CDN for SMB Web Publishers. Amazon’s CloudFront CDN is cheap enough that SMB web publishers are now able to serve their more popular content to their customers quickly and easily.

The Economy is in the Dumps but Content Management is Booming

If you're looking to advance your career, or if your org has got empty seats in need of savvy CMSers, you're in luck. Catch the best fish of the season on our content management job board.

Featured Jobs:

* Director of Developer Community at The Echo Nest * Full Time Writer at TechCrunch * Senior Technical Consultant at Acquia * Director of Technology with Drupal Experience at Imagination

Harsh economic times are safe havens for those in the legal industry. So many desperate acts, so little time to search and discover each one. Such little time is driving up legal costs and stretching companies' resources thin. So much so, that many enterprises choose to simply settle cases in order to avoid the costly and, often, painful process altogether. While many eDiscovery solutions have conveniently popped up in the marketplace in time for financial meltdowns, it's not always easy for companies to decide what to do and how. CMS Watch to the rescue. They have added a new course called The Fundamentals of eDiscovery to their curricula of online courses.

C2C builds email, data and file management solutions. SharePoint can store a massive amount of content which includes emails, data and other documents. Want a way to easily archive and manage that content in MOSS? Try C2C Archive One for SharePoint.

Microblogging is one of the fastest forms of social interaction online today. And sites like Twitter are at the top of the traffic ladder according to Alexa. Now you can get your own. Shout‘Em is releasing its first public beta trial of the system some are calling the “Ning of Twitter”.

JustSystems knows how to help their user base. They have just set up a new Community for their XMetal enterprise content management solution. Called the XMetal Community Forums, it's a community where partners, customers and their own internal services team can go to get all their questions answered.

StoredIQ Inc., a leading provider of information management and eDiscovery technologies, announced that it's going beyond their basic eDiscovery solutions to include data stored on backup tapes and other legacy archived media. The aptly named, StoredIQ Solution for Legacy Archived Media, is built to leverage their eDiscovery solution for the enterprise by addressing and capturing data from all sources, both on- and off-line.

When David Girouard, vice president and General Manager of Google enterprise, said the Google Search Appliance has “had a vision to make search inside of business as simple and effective as searching on Google.com” he wasn’t lying. And with the recent slew of upgrades to GSA, we think it’s safe to say the line between that vision and reality has blurred considerably.

Kentico, the ASP.Net-based Web CMS out of Europe is expanding. Providing a strong CMS that offers structured content management, Kentico is thriving in this global economic situation plaguing much more than just the U.S. and Europe.

The DOW is in a free fall, your retirement plan is worthless and your dog has up and decided to fend for himself. Times are bleak and that means it's time to break out the one true no-nonsense money making machine. That's right, now is the moment to cash in on your company's intranet.

SQL Anywhere is a simple, powerful database with some interesting features. It has a small footprint, is self-managed and fully functional, and it provides many of the features of an enterprise database but can run on commodity hardware with a minimal amount of administration. In addition, SQL Anywhere offers high performance, bi-directional synchronization that allows you to easily integrate your database application with your existing enterprise data center -- and this last point could just be key for your corporate blogging infrastructure. In this technical article we show you how to modify a WordPress install such that it runs against a SQL Anywhere database.

The W3C Web Applications Working Group is currently developing standard APIs for client-side Web Application development and is soliciting comments. In June 2008, the WebAPI Working Group and Web Applications Working Group merged to form the new Web Applications ("WebApps") Working Group. Chartered to maximize team and member resources, the working group works to develop the active deliverables from both groups, as well as add selected new deliverables relevant to market needs.

TERMINALFOUR just finished up their t44u Global User Conference last week and it sounds like it was a good one. They not only demonstrated the latest version of their Web CMS -- Site Manager 6.2, they also announced the creation of a Partner and User Extranet powered by that new version.

Companies create competitive advantage with technology by building on current practice in ways that others in their industries have yet to discover or implement. Structured content can support a wide range of business activities, from more common and well understood classic examples of structured content to emerging applications that help organizations become leaders in their fields. The rewards those leaders realize can be significant, in terms of revenues, operational costs, or other business measures, as well as in terms of new skills, knowledge, and expertise that create true, lasting competitive advantage.

eZ Systems is on the cusp of launching a Software-as-a-Service offering for its media-oriented Web CMS, eZ Publish. We covered the original news here, and as promised, we spoke with eZ’s global partner manager Bertrand Maugain to get more insight into the new eZ Publish SaaS offering and their partner in arms, Mamut ASA.

Open source platforms have been cropping up more and more over the years. From web and enterprise CMS’s to video games. And now video platforms have been added to the list of open source solutions. YouTube was able to start a video sharing platform that had never existed before, Kaltura takes it to the next level.

The Swedish WCM vendor EPiServer is finally making it to our side of the pond. Exclusively, our contacts at EPiServer told us the company is actively pursuing an ASAP office opening in the U.S. Watch out, competition! It is all going to be done the “EPi way.” Which means starting up in new markets in a “lean way,” until there is enough business to go full throttle. Function-wise, the .NET-focused EPi is planning to start in the U.S. with, of course, sales. So, if you think you can sell Web CMS, the vendor is looking for a Sales Manager. The current EPi CEO used to be a CEO for Pointsec in the U.S., before moving to Sweden. So, he may explore some sales prospects of his own. Hurry up! Geographically, EPiServer is looking either at the appl-y New York City or the windy Chicago. I, personally, prefer Manhattan views (looking out of the window). Chicago, however, may be a good central EPicenter point in the middle of the country. In addition to the Sales Manager, there’s also an opening for a Technical Sales Engineer with Product Support team to follow. The direction it grows (or not) from here is hard to predict at this point. Hopefully, with a new partner recently signed on in South Dakota, things for EPiServer will take off in a jiffy. We recently gave you an overview of the latest version of EPiServer’s Web CMS software, when they released the second installment of CMS 5.0 R2. And, of course, we plan to give you even more insight into EPi very soon.

Relatively quiet with the news lately, TerminalFour has just made a big announcement related to their Web Content Management System. A new partnership with Exalead, provider of Enterprise Search solutions, will see TerminalFour's Web CMS include the enterprise search capabilities of Exalead's Cloudview solution.

Here's an interesting conference happening on December 11, 2008 in Mountain View, California. Google, Microsoft and Mozilla are joining forces to bring you a conference all about creating Add-ons for the browser.

There is probably no worse strategy for an intranet or public website than content migration. It is doomed to failure from the very start.