Hell Hath No Fury Like Oracle Scorned -

Not all M&A's are reason to celebrate. Sometimes they happen guns a-blazing. We get the feeling Oracle's attempt to acquire BEA Systems will be just that kind of socially awkward cold war-type thing.
Last Wednesday, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison announced that a future takeover bid for BEA Systems will be less than the US$ 7 billion it was willing to pay last month. He pointed to the stock price and coolly added, "Clearly the $17 price seems too high now."
US$ 17 per share was the valuation of Oracle's initial takeover bid. But Ellison's comment is also an acknowledgment of the downturn in value for a number of tech stocks, which hit Oracle hard, according to the Financial Times. BEA's shares have enjoyed a safe plateau as its shareholders anticipate a fresh bid from Oracle.
Last month Oracle's offer to buy BEA was rejected because it "undervalued the company." But Ellison remains grimly optimistic, adding at its recent SF-based annual financial analyst meeting, "It looks like no one [else] is going to buy BEA. We were the only buyer then."

We went from content silos to content management silos to enterprise silos.
But by necessity, our need to share information is pushing us to collaborate
beyond any arbitrary boundaries. What does this mean for our profession?

By going to content management systems, are we just catching up with today,
or preparing for tomorrow?

Will Content 2.0 catch up to Web 2.0?

Strategy A Consulting Group is bringing the first content management
conference to Vancouver that covers content management from both the Web and
XML structured authoring perspectives.

Registration is now open

Vendor Demos Continued -

Following in the vein of Tony Byrne's 10 Steps to a Successful Vendor Demo and my post on how to sit through one , here is a link to Joel Spolsky's How to Demo Software article. Besides being an entertaining read (as all Joel's posts are), I think this article re-enforces the importance of the performance and other production values to a vendor demo.

Event Explores Web Content Management Technologies and Their Impact on the Way We Work

Recent advances in content management tools – including Semantic Web
technologies—are creating dramatic changes to the way organizations and
their staffers work. Web content management software has made it
possible for organizations to increase workplace efficiency through
collaboration, eliminate unnecessary waste through automation, lower
cost of production through process improvements and workflow routing,
and, perhaps most importantly, make possible the delivery of relevant
content with pinpoint accuracy, increasingly, on demand. When
localization and translation enter the equation, these benefits grow
exponentially.

freelinking.module allows content authors to link to other pieces of content (ie., nodes) in the Drupal site easily, using CamelCase words and freelinking delimiters, currently defined as double-square brackets ( [[ and ]] ).

When enabled, the freelinking filter searches the body of nodes looking for "CamelCase" style words (words that begin with a capital letter and have one or more capitalized words run together) and words or phrases enclosed in double-square brackets [[like this]]. These words become clickable to a node with the words as the title. If no node so titled exists, the link will attempt to create the node and present the user

I am just testing out Free Links.

CM Pros Canada West provides a local forum where professionals engaged in content management can learn and share information about content management to further the body of knowledge in this field.