Rastin Mehr Design Studio Inc. is an Internet Technology Solutions company, in West Vancouver, BC, Canada specialized in developing custom Content Management Systems (CMS) and Social Media technology and marketing solutions.

We are Web Application Architects, meaning that if Web Designers design web pages, or Web Developers and Programmers stitch together existing web solutions, we actually develop the meat and potato of the core CMS and Social Media technologies. In addition to that, we also provide hands-on marketing and management strategies that go with our software solutions.

rmd Studio collaborates with a team of highly qualified business associates and has grown a community of more than 200 businesses and technology professionals (Tazzu Networking Ltd. ) in the greater Vancouver area. 

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.

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.

Facebook is one of the largest social networking sites on the internet with more than 60 million registered members. 60% of them login daily and 85% login at least once a week. According to Chris Hughes, spokesman for Facebook, "People spend an average of 19 minutes a day on Facebook."

Facebook is also a framework for developers (that would be us!) who build applications that interact with the core functionalities of this website for marketing and service delivery purposes. A facebook application can either be exclusive to the facebook platform, or instead bridge a free standing website on the internet to the facebook social network.

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.