The Social Planning and Research Council of British Columbia (SPARC BC) is a none-for-profit organization which has been operating since 1966. They work together with communities on issues such as Accessibility, Community Development Education, Income Security, and Community Social Planning. To many, SPARC BC is known as the organization that issues special permits to those who can park their vehicles at the designated parking areas for the disabled drivers.

SPARC BC's website is powered by Joomla! content Management System (CMS) and it follows the W3C Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) which means it is also accessible to the visually impaired users. Joomla! is one of the finest Open Source CMS solutions in the world as well as being a great Web Application Development framework.

A Content Management System (CMS) is used for managing the content of a website. In the past, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, companies had to hire a web design company to build all the website pages one by one, but today a CMS application is used to manage, search, organize, and publish the content of a website using a secure online dashboard which is available only to the website administrators.

A simple CMS can be used for building a small website. The same content management can be further customized for developing the following types of websites:

• Corporate website
  
• Online Catalog (eCatalog)
  
• Online Portfolio (ePortfolio)
  
• Online Retail Store (eCommerce)
  
• Real Estate application (eRealtor)

A Social Network Management System (SMS) is a more evolved version of a Content Management System (CMS) where registered users are able to communicate with each other, become mutual friends (or contacts), and all together participate in generating content.

The context and quality of User Generated Content (UGC) is often influenced by active collaboration of the online community members in organically formed groups and their passive observation of each other's online activities.

OpenSocial is an open standard service developed first by Google and released on Nov. 1st 2007. This technology is used for developing applications that interact with core functionalities of a group of participating social networking sites such as  Bebo, Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, NetModular, mixi, MySpace, Ning, Orkut, Six Apart; as well as business-oriented networking companies LinkedIn, Tianji, Salesforce.com, Viadeo, Oracle, and Plaxo.

Intranets are specialized forms of Content Management driven websites where all or part of the content is only available to a designated group of people such as a company's employees or partners. An Intranet is often mentioned as the company's internal website. It is quite possible that a company's public website contains an Intranet within itself.

An article about the Vancouver Joomla Day by Bruce Byfield on Linux.com website contains information about community building techniques and how businesses could adopt methods practiced by the Open Source projects to help grow and nurture a Community. This article describes how unconferences and the use of Social Media such as (Twitter , Facebook , and Flickr ) are replacing the old school ways of organizing conferences.

I would like to thank Mr. Bruce Byfield for the interview he conducted with me and two other consultants: Steve Bougerolle and Vivien Anayian.

Steve, Vivien, and I have one thing in common: we primarily offer open source solutions to our clients. This article is titled "FOSS [Free Open Source Software] consulting offers special advantages and challenges" and tackles interesting issues about choosing the right FOSS, business advantage, and the challenges involved in educating corporate clients about this concept.

Article is published on IT Manager's Journal.