Web Changes At VARBusiness, CRN And ChannelWeb
The most immediate change is, starting today, we're temporarily taking offline the ability to post to our Talk Back discussion boards, as well as new user registrations for ChannelWeb membership. These will stay offline through the Memorial Day weekend; we expect to be back in business the first week of June.
At that time, we'll debut a powerful, new discussion board system. You'll still be able to participate in threads about any of the articles on our sites, along with open forums on channel business and technology issues. In addition, you'll also be able to better format posts, search the posts, and view your own posting history as well as those of other members.
ChannelWeb registration will still be required for posting, but that'll be upgraded, too. Your ChannelWeb membership will provide you with a "calling card" to the communities on all of the Web sites from our parent company, CMP Media. Those include TechWeb, InformationWeek, Network Computing, EETimes, Dr. Dobb's and DV.com. You may need to answer additional registration questions on those sites, but your ID and password will always be the same.
In one subtle but significant change, ChannelWeb members will login with their e-mail address, rather than their username. (Usernames will still be used to identify members on the discussion boards.)
If we play our cards right, you may not even notice other significant changes, which will also be in place the first week of June. For the past few years, the Channel Group sites have run on a Microsoft IIS Web platform. As part of a CMP Media initiative, we're moving to a J2EE platform powered by ATG Dyanmo and Interwoven TeamSite. When those new sites are live, they'll look and feel as close to the current ones as possible. Our home pages, articles and features should all work the way they always have, and even bookmarked links should smoothly redirect from .asp pages to .jhtml pages.
Personally, I'll miss our Microsoft platform. Despite the occasional "gotcha," I found it to be a flexible system for publishing content and developing apps. In the hands of our site administrators, particularly Bob Colucci and John Hodge, it was also a system with enviable uptime. Going forward, we hope to be able to take advantage of upcoming capabilities, from tighter integration with our magazine production systems to personalization and e-commerce, as we endeavor to enhance your experience on our sites.
What won't change is our commitment to the channel, and bringing the industry's best news, analysis and tools to the solution-provider community. Let me know how you think we're doing.
Joe Caponi is editor of ChannelWeb