We told you at the beginning of April of the upcoming release of Andrew Connell’s book on SharePoint. Well we finally found it available at almost all book retailers.

Called Professional SharePoint 2007 Web Content Management Development: Building Publishing Sites with Office SharePoint Server 2007, the 456 page book published by John Wiley and Sons is the only book known to cover the Web Content Management aspects of SharePoint in detail.

Andrew is a big proponent of SharePoint’s ability to create highly engaging web content management sites and this book is his attempt to sell us all on it’s potential.

Chapters in the book cover everything from master pages and page layouts, to content types, navigation, accessibility, workflow, content deployment and a lot more.

Oddly enough, the book comes at a time when we hear more about SharePoint’s collaboration capabilities than its content management. It seems like lately we don’t talk too much about what SharePoint can do from a web content management standpoint. Now that’s either because we’ve finally all settled on the fact that it isn’t quite there yet, or we are just way too caught up in this whole social computing discussion where Microsoft seems determined that SharePoint is a leader.

In either case, this is a book I would personally like to read, especially considering it’s coming from someone who has dedicated his career to learning and understanding how SharePoint works from a web content management perspective.

If a book isn’t enough for you, Andrew is set to teach some WCM courses — both online and in person over the next couple of months on SharePoint and Web Content Management.

Well known for its QuickBooks accounting software, Intuit has introduced functionality that will make its software even better for your business by offering Intuit Document Management System for QuickBooks.

Oracle is stepping up their game through the acquisition of two new software companies that will enhance their enterprise content management offering in very specific industries. Some say it may finally put them in front of the pack of big boys like IBM and EMC. But how will this new offering stack up against rival Interwoven?

The gang over at Vignette has been doing some celebrating this week picking up two different industry awards for two of their products proving they may actually know a little something about saving an organization a lot of money and delivering outstanding web experiences in this Web 2.0 world.

Content management ain’t easy, but as our saying goes — it matters. Fortunately, companies like FatWire Software are making it easier to manage and access content across the messy, complex environments we often have to deal with. They have recently announced the availability of their FatWire Content Integration Platform as well as the beta release of the EMC Documentum connector to enable customers to more effectively manage content across complex environments.

J. Boye has just produced a new research report on the ever popular Microsoft SharePoint. This report, Best Practices for Using SharePoint for Public Websites - A Business Person’s Guide, outlines some of the thought processes organizations have gone through when selecting SharePoint for their public facing websites, some project recommendations and dispels some of the often heard arguments for a SharePoint-based solution.

It’s a day for SharePoint based news announcements. This time the news comes from Clearview Software who is releasing the latest version of their SharePoint-based ECM Suite. V4.1 provides a number of enhancements and new features designed to support the growing needs of enterprises around the globe.

As a provider of enterprise automated media production and delivery solutions, Equilibrium should be very familiar with integrating their MediaRich Media Server with portals and content management systems. Their latest version of MediaRich — version 3.8.6 — has added some new features that will help many companies provide richer Web 2.0 experiences.

Concluding a partnership that has lasted over 15 years, XyEnterprise, provider of XML-based content management systems has announced that it has brought XSystems into the fold permanently through acquisition. The acquisition will result in the creation of a new business unit focusing on editorial tools development, standards expertise and consulting services and a new set of tools for the Contenta product suite.

Ovidius GmbH, one of the leading suppliers of XML-based Content Management Systems on the European Market, recently acquired EasyBrowse EP-Service GmbH. An established developer of solutions for electronic publishing, which aims to meet the special needs of publishing houses and the publishing industry, EasyBrowse is poised to expand Ovidius’ portfolio as supplier of end-to-end solutions for creating, managing and publishing technical documentation.

The panelists present were Yogesh Gupta, President and CEO of FatWire; Erik Aeyelts Averink, of SDL Tridion; Bjarne Hansen, President, Sitecore USA; David Graham, CIO, Vignette and Jim Howard, CEO of CrownPeak. The first round of the panel consisted of each panelist discussing what they thought were the most pressing issues when picking a potential Web CMS provider.

The 4th annual Gilbane Conference kicked off in San Francisco yesterday. The three day conference devoted to all things content management started things off with a special keynote session devoted to search headed up by Google’s VP of Engineering, Udi Manber followed by a discussion with Dan Farber of CNET and Denis Brown of the SAG group, moderated by Frank Gilbane, CEO of the Gilbane Group.

Adobe Systems seems primed to take the Enterprise Content Management business by storm. Their Adobe LiveCycle ES (Enterprise Suite) has just been updated with the content management capabilities of enterprise content management provider Alfresco, helping them deliver to their customers an integrated solution that encompasses data capture, document output, content services and more.

According to Alfresco, this new technology partnership represents a shared vision “for a new class of applications that utilize flexible, open source and Web 2.0 standards that deliver rich and engaging enterprise experiences”.

It’s well known that Microsoft relies heavily on partners to help develop extensions or integrations to their software. That doesn’t mean however, that they sit back and wait for the cool tools to come to them. Such is the case with social networking. At the Enterprise 2.0 conference last week they demoed a social networking solution they had been testing internally called TownSquare.

NewsGator Technologies was one of the nine companies who announced product integrations with Microsoft SharePoint at the Enterprise 2.0 conference last week. For these guys though it wasn’t “breaking” news, as they have been talking about the latest version of Social Sites for a few months now.

EMC Corporation has picked up another award, this one coming from India. Their famed EMC Documentum Enterprise Content Management platform took home the Great Indian Developer Award at the Great Indian Developer Summit 2008.

Open Text Corporation has announced a number of enhancements to its range of Enterprise 2.0 solutions. Among these enhancements is a new offering that lets customers manage compliance rules for social computing capabilities like blogs, wikis and forums on websites, as well as a set of Web 2.0 collaboration tools that kick employee interaction up a notch.

Not all vendors out there believe that you should be able to move back and forth between Lotus Notes and SharePoint. AvePoint, provider of SharePoint infrastructure and administration management solutions, continually brings to market migration tools to move content from another product to SharePoint. Their latest migration tool is the DocAve Lotus Notes Migrator.

Early bird registration is going on from now until July 1st for the 4th international jboye08 conference, a meeting of global gurus in Aarhus, Denmark. The conference brings together IT practitioners from all over the world in order to share and learn in an open environment. It is described as intense, with discussions, demos and interaction from the attendees.