Posted
on Apr 22, 2011 in Case Studies, Industry Trends, Offerings, Technical Tips | 0 comments
I was recently asked [again] about what platform to choose for an open source web CMS. At the highest level, and to avoid considering too many variables that introduce confusion into a decision, my general feeling on this is to go with the technology that best balances the following (in order):
- Community (users, third parties, and developers): size, enthusiasm, and proselytization
- Technology: tech stack and solution architecture
- Leaders: commitment, flexibility, release schedule
I feel the community size and enthusiasm is so important that I decided to chart out the general trends. Although we implement will all of these CMS’s successfully, we have been choosing WordPress over the others for a number of years on most CMS implementations. My own experience is that the WP community has been growing rapidly and gaining enthusiastic momentum. The below results prove it.
Overall, trends show popularity in WordPress far surpassing Joomla and Drupal over the years:
For the past year, we see WordPress in its own league of popularity:
Trends for the three solutions with the word “CMS” attached shows a slightly closer picture overall. I feel this is mainly because WordPress was initially marketed as a blogging platform. Though I’ve been using it as a CMS for quite some time, only more in the past year or two have people really embraced it as a powerful CMS:
However, when you look at the past year, again WordPress far surpasses the others:
Using these products for years, I have many insights and considerations that have yet to be put down in writing, but I hope the above provides you a little idea of one of the main variables we consider when selecting a solution for our customers.
Posted
on Jan 17, 2011 in Business Strategy, Case Studies, Industry Trends, News and Updates, Offerings, Technical Tips | 0 comments
I’ve been wanting to do this for a while, and finally got around to adding Google Charts into an enterprise intranet portal. We had five unique data points to display as key performance indicators (KPIs) for how the organization is performing.
We have delivered a number of whizbang charting and dashboard capabilities and had a lot of fun with them over the years, but this time, we wanted a lightweight capability that generated images (no Flash and no JavaScript) so any old browser on any platform would render this area properly. We also didn’t want to introduce any extra file downloads associated to the various charting libraries we have used in the past.
We decided to use a Google-O-Meter (the gauge at top of the image) and Bar Charts (the lower four bars). There were a number of tricks we employed to get these looking the way we needed (transparent background, proportionally accurate grid lines in the bar charts, a think arrow in the Google-O-Meter, etc.), but the most satisfying aspect was the simple ability to integrate this with custom Liferay Web Content Structures and Web Content Templates.
We are pleased and impressed with how easily and nicely these technologies came together. Give it a shot sometime and if there is a lot of interest, we might get some time to post a detailed white paper on how to go about this.
Posted
on Oct 19, 2010 in Case Studies, News and Updates, Technical Tips | 5 comments
As a follow up to our highly successful White Paper on Salesforce.com Integration with SOA 10g, we have released a new version using SOA 11g:
Salesforce.com Integration with SOA 11g
This is included as part of a resource kit offered by Oracle Corp. After registering for the resource kit, you will see a link to the white paper as seen in the below screenshot:
Enjoy!
Posted
on May 28, 2009 in Case Studies | 0 comments
The Challenge
M&S was engaged by ABC, a publically traded company, for a multi-national Oracle initiative. Upon joining, M&S recognized the need to easily share, collaborate, and centrally publish information.
The Solution
The value of Web/Enterprise 2.0 social software was no longer a secret reserved only for the most cutting-edge — or as some might have labeled them, “bleeding-edge” — organizations.
The Results
Within two weeks of deciding to implement the M&S solution, the application was available to the customer, hosted by M&S Consulting.
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Posted
on May 21, 2009 in Case Studies, Industry Trends, News and Updates, Technical Tips | 16 comments
Oracle Corporation has recently published a white paper written by M&S Consulting, where we take the opportunity to outline an integration approach to Salesforce.com using Oracle BPEL.
A Technical Case Study – Creating an Oracle BPEL adapter to integrate with Salesforce.com – Feb 2009
Below is the introduction to the article, which goes on to detail (with step-by-step screenshots) how to achieve integration with Salesforce.com…
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Posted
on May 5, 2009 in Case Studies | 1 comment
The Challenge
ABC, a publicly traded services and manufacturing organization, has leveraged Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) to manage a variety of back-office functions, including their suppliers. Suppliers have been provided data from EBS manually by internal teams — the data sent has varied in both content and as well as format.
Internal teams spend valuable time generating reports manually for external supplier organizations and suppliers are left with the tedious process of generating their own reports. All the while, both groups may be relying on measures out of line with ABC’s priorities.
The Solution
We took a systematic approach to the issue, addressing:
- EBS/Data
- Discoverer/Reporting Logic
- Portal/UI
The Results
Finally, by setting up proper SSO and hooks from Portal to Discoverer and integrating end-to-end all the way down into the database, users in Portal (regardless of whether they are internal or external users) see only what their user account can see. Additionally, by leveraging the latest Portal 10.1.4 features, we were able to provide ABC with a portal that had a completely customized look-and-feel matching their external website exactly.
Within days, the entire solution was architected, designed, and developed. We were all excited about the quick progress and all of ABC’s expectations were exceeded.
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Posted
on Mar 27, 2009 in Case Studies | 0 comments
The Challenge
ABC, a facilities services company, has employed over 16,000 people in fiscal year 2008. At year end, ABC’s payroll vendor generated an enormous number of W2 documents for distribution to each employee. In addition to physically mailing the individual W2 documents, ABC desired this information be delivered through their employee Portal so the information could be
- quickly accessed,
- accessible 24×7 now and into the future, and
- available in an electronic format.
The Solution
M&S devised a mechanism to generate a single file per employee based on a unique Social Security Number. Once the files were generated, they were loaded into a database inside the customer’s LAN. A web application was built to identify the user logged into the Extranet Portal, request the appropriate W2, and display it to the user securely over SSL.
The Results
Within weeks, the entire solution was designed, developed, and deployed into production, available to over 16,000 employees. Once deployed, employees immediately began logging into the Extranet Portal from around the US to access their electronic W2s quickly and securely.
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Posted
on Jan 19, 2009 in Case Studies, Industry Trends | 0 comments
You lie in wait, looking for your prey, it approaches, and looks around. You spring the trap and
find the spoils of war…the dreaded %20
Ok, maybe not all that exciting, but it brings up an important problem in data conversion and in
application development projects. Namely the importance of input data trapping and input
validation.
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