I've been getting many questions from our Support and Services organizations, as well as from some customers, whether it is recommended to upgrade the CQ 5.3 instance to CRX 2.1. I'd like to share my view on this here and provide some information to help decide on this subject.

As with any upgrade, you have to carefully weigh the expected benefit versus inherent risk any upgrade has. And of course, the closer given environment to "production" usage, the more cautious you should be with upgrade planning.

More details follow, but I would basically recommend considering the upgrade if:

• on development machines, you use CRXDE or CRXDE Lite, and especially if you use SVN Integration
• on other machines, some of the enhancements or bugfixes done in CRX 2.1 (after 2.0) are relevant to your deployments (see subsections titled "CRX 2.1" in the release notes section on Changes in CRX 2.1)

CRX 2.1 Highlights for CQ 5.3 Users. CQ 5.3 has already CRX 2.0 - internally released version of CRX 2 repository - embedded in the product, so it benefits from the many enhancements and fixes in the 2.0 release. The most important changes introduced in CRX 2.1 after the 2.0 release are as follows:

Development environments: CRX IDEs

• CRXDE 1.0 has been released. However, you don't need to upgrade to CRX 2.1 to benefit from it - you can also just install the updated support package.
• CRXDE Lite has a few usability enhancements
• Both environments have improved and extended integration with CQ5/CRX
  • Subversion integration has been extended (import and export) and improved (checkin, better best-effort conflict resolution)
  • Project wizard added (this is mostly for CRX, in CQ5 there is a more powerful Site Importer)

Important repository enhancements

• Online backup has now option to backup to a directory (without creating a zip), and to specify delay value for "slower" backup, which puts less overhead on the live system
• Added configurable sizes for internal repository caches (enhancement #28288 in Release Notes), allowing for advanced performance fine-tuning
• Stability and scalability fixes and enhancements
• The included open-source libraries have been updated and the changes since CRX 2.0 (CQ 5.3) release included

See Release Notes for details of changes. The Changes section has been broken down into changes up to CRX 2.0 (labeled "CRX 2.0") and those up to CRX 2.1 (labeled "CRX 2.1") to help CQ 5.3 customers understand the value of upgrading repository to CRX 2.1 easier.

Other enhancements - the new GUI for CRX Package Manager and added compatibility with Package Share do not directly concern CQ 5.3 users (whether they decided to upgrade to CRX 2.1 or not). CQ 5.3 users should continue using the CQ 5.3 Package Manager (also enabled for Package Share). Both products offer a different GUI for the same basic functionalities and package format.

Can I re-tweet on a blog? Hmm, let's try:

RT @jaykerger www.phoenix.edu is officially live on CQ5! Congrats to the team!

Congratulations, guys!

One of the many totally cool features in CQ5.2 SocialCollab is that you can optionally run it in "Fully Social Mode". In this mode a number of social tweaks are performed in the underlying content infrastructure. For example:

• In Fully Social Mode workflow tasks come to your inbox as "invitations"
• all paragraphs are restricted to a maximum of 140 characters
• there is an additional field "relationship status" in your user profile page

Not conviced, yet? Have a look at the screencast.

Update: check this post's publication date before you click ...

About a week ago we started the CMS Vendor Meme. It's time for a little roundup on how the meme got around:

The amount of responses that were published since last week completely blew me away. So far, the vendors that have responded are (in chronological order):

Magnolia, Alfresco, Jahia, Escenic, GX, CoreMedia, Infopark, dotCMS, Midgard, Vignette, Nuxeo, OpenText, EPiServer, Sitecore, Interwoven, Alterian, Hippo, Ektron, Knowledge Tree, and ez Systems

Also, the meme received quite some attention from CMS users and analysts: on Twitter look for hash tags #cmsmeme and #realitycheck. In the blogosphere Irina Guseva picked it up first, Jon Marks brilliantly commented on the meme as it evolved (here, here and here), Julian Wraith kept an eye on the scores (also correcting the scores of the vendors that did not add up correctly) and commented on individual responses, Bertrand Delacretaz suggested the ID and Juerg Stuker blogged about it in German. Make sure you also check out the discussions: in some of the blog post's comments Kas Thomas, the author of the original list, showed up. And, finally, if you are the type of person that enjoys extensive stats: Cedric Huesler has collected all sorts of data about the answers and compiled this spreadheet.

This has been a thoroughly enjoyable excercise so far, but I believe that there is real value in it as well. As Kas Thomas wrote: the responses reveal the vendor's DNA.

Oh, almost forgot. 9c56d0fcf93175d70e1c9b9d188167cf

Update: added Ektron to the list - thanks Kas for the hint. (30/03/09).

Update: synched the list with Jon's and added Knowledge Tree and ez Systems (07/04/09).

Today's Link Of The Day is Joerg Hoh's excellent Communique blog "Things on a content management system - Tips and tricks for Day Communique".

In his latest post Joerg publishes a little Perl script to help determine average response times (and provide a visual indicator of the system's performance status).

Although the blog started only recently there is already a good number of performance-related posts. All of them are worth the read since they clearly reflect Joerg's first hand experiences in tuning CQ (so do his hands-on sys mgmt topics like: how to lock out the users).

@davidnuescheler you might want to check out Joerg's take on your 5 rules for performance tuning.