Articles - Page 212

Agentic AI for Agencies in 2026

bmckeiver

This year I chose to sponsor PacktPub's Open Source Awards by publishing and sharing the news of the various steps in the voting and nomination process. In return for the CMS Critic logo being posted on the awards page, I would publish their news releases as the process progressed.
Unfortunately, I have grown to regret offering to act as a sponsor. One of the things that I've noticed this year more so than others is how poorly organized these awards are. They seem to serve more as a marketing tool for PacktPub to drive traffic to their site than to add value to the community. Sure, there are monetary values attached and it's great that these prizes are awarded to worthy projects but there are also serious flaws in how these awards are run.
Take for example the “Best CMS for Ease of Use”  category.
One would expect a CMS that is actually easy to use and has a history of being easy to use to win this, right? Guess who won this year? Drupal.
Drupal is a great project, but if there is one thing it is not known for, it is ease of use. Drupal has to be the absolute last CMS that I would ever name in this category. It's not shooting to be the easiest, but rather the most versatile and that is one of it's strengths, but to give it this award is just plain ridiculous.
I am not attacking Drupal. I am a huge fan, but even the members of the Drupal community have to be honest and admit that this is a bit far fetched. I chose to use it as an example because it's a very good one.
There are tons of open source projects out there that do not have huge communities of people that can vote for them and this is one of the ways these awards fail. They rely on voting from the community.
I'm all for giving the public a chance to vote but let's be realistic here. If you pit the huge community of Drupal, Joomla or WordPress users against another smaller project, who do you think will win in sheer volume of votes? Does this mean it's indeed a good indication of which CMS is best? Not at all.
This isn't just about CMS though. This is about the awards as a whole. Most of the winners are well known projects that have been well established for quite some time: JQuery, Blender, Gimp. All wonderful projects with huge communities. There are a few that won that are lesser known and I'm very glad they got the recognition they deserve such as ImpressPages, for example, but they are the exception to the rule.
I don't want to sound like I'm putting down the winners of these prizes. I think it's great that they are getting cash for their projects and there are plenty of great projects listed. I simply do not think the awards themselves add any real value other than to contribute money and provide Packt with some extra traffic for the 3 or so months they run.
As I mentioned, CMS Critic acted as a sponsor this year and, as expected, Packt kept in touch with me to let me know of the various stages and how they were progressing so I could publish stories keeping the community informed. Then came the time where the winners were announced and I received not a single email to inform me of any winners, no press releases, nothing. In fact, I completely forgot about the awards until I saw a post somewhere else mentioning the winners. Yes, it's partly my responsibility to keep on top of these things but one would also expect that they would be in contact to ensure the proper amount of promotion is given to the winners, and I didn't hear a word.
Perhaps I'm expecting too much, I don't know. What I do know is that I won't be sponsoring next year.
I'm not here to just rant (although I do it well). I'm here to offer suggestions on how I would fix it as well, and here they are:
<ol>
<li>Implement proper judging by a group of known open source advocates and experts in their respective industries.</li>
<li>Maintain voting for a “People's Choice” set of awards for purely recognition purposes with no monetary prize assigned.</li>
<li>Bring in some other sponsors to up the prizes amounts and allow for more competition.</li>
</ol>
What do you think? Do you agree? Disagree? Do you have a better idea? I'd love to hear from you below.

My Take on PacktPub's Open Source Awards

mike-johnston

A new release of the popular open source CMS, Joomla, has been made available. Version 1.7.3 brings with it two significant security fixes and a couple of new improvements. For a full list of the items that have changed in this release, please read the changelog: <a href="http://www.joomla.org/announcements/release-news/5392-joomla-173-released.html">http://www.joomla.org/announcements/release-news/5392-joomla-173-released.html</a>
In addition to the usual bug fixes, some changes to the multilanguage status module. You can read about the improvement to this here: <a href="http://community.joomla.org/blogs/community/1522-languages-173-improvements.html">http://community.joomla.org/blogs/community/1522-languages-173-improvements.html</a>

Joomla 1.7.3 now available

One of my favorite places to go to discover new content management systems that I haven't heard about before is Vimeo. I can almost always find something new there that's been uploaded and today is no exception.
Here's a look at a slick looking CMS called Apostrophe:
[[apostrophe]]
From their profile:
Apostrophe™ is a content management system designed for maximum flexibility with a minimal learning curve. The interface is ergonomic, all content-editing is performed in-context.  Manage levels of user permission. Organize and integrate photos and videos in the media library. Create complex page hierarchies quickly.
Check it out at <a href="http://apostrophenow.com">http://apostrophenow.com</a>

Introduction to Apostrophe CMS

<a href="http://www.opencms.org/">OpenCms</a> 8 has made the work of a content editor easy as never seen before. Everything you need to create beautiful web pages is within reach on the page itself.
With OpenCms 8 new or existing content can be created or added with the Add Wizard by drag &amp; drop. Content can be edited directly on the page with OpenCms 8's built-in editor. The used template or the appearance of an element can be changed with a mouse click. Lists are generated on the fly and arbitrary JSPs are added as Dynamic Functions.
Favorites lists can be created with OpenCms 8's built in clipboard to short cut workflow.
With OpenCms 8's Sitemap Editor entire website structures could be built from scratch within minutes from a set of predefined, reusable model pages and navigation is built automatically from the website structure.
Version 8.0.3 of Alkacon Software's successful open source website content management system OpenCms 8 is now ready and available for download from alkacon.com.
With the introduction of “Function Pages”, JSP based dynamic pages can be added with simple drag and drop in the sitemap editor. JSP function elements can now have multiple formatters to be used in different containers.
The sitemap editor's improved “Create Page” dialog offers a wider choice of types distinguishing “Container Pages”, “Type Pages” and “Function Pages”. It is now also possible to select the page model when using the sitemap editor's context menu option “Create sub-page”. The available container page models can be accessed for editing directly from the “Create page” dialog in the sitemap editor. Additionally the sitemap editor executes the “Show page” action if the page icon in the sitemap is clicked.
ADE Galleries have been improved with a text search field to directly search for “Galleries” and “Categories”. Uploaded elements are now directly visible in the Galleries and the improved upload process translates filenames to avoid special chars but preserves the title property.
The Image Gallery now allows selecting images directly with double-click and offers a simplified scaling mechanism and an improved link selector.
An element's option bar now displays “Resource is currently locked” icon in ADE when resource is currently edited by another user in a multi-user scenario.
The classic OpenCms workplace now features a sophisticated mechanism to keep the internal link structure intact when a folder is copied.
With version 8.0.3 OpenCms now supports the latest PostgreSQL “stable release” version.
As true open source software, OpenCms is free of licensing costs.

New OpenCms 8.0.3 available from Alkacon

With version 3.4.1, Kajona widens its portfolio for interfaces and functionality. Besides a redesign of the authentication-subsystem, the release “connectivity” introduces a new oracle-driver along with new REST-interfaces.
Portal and Pages
<ul>
<li>The portaleditor is enriched by functions to handle inactive elements directly in the portal. It's now possible to set elements inactive and active in the portal.</li>
<li>Due to internal optimization of the page-generation, pages are now generated way more faster then before and are delivered to the browser even faster.</li>
<li>Up from V3.4.1, Kajona will ship the JavaScript library jQuery along with YUI. In the future, jQuery will replace YUI at least in the portal. YUI was updated to its latest release.</li>
</ul>
New modules and elements
<ul>
<li>The newly added element “directorybrowser” may be used in order to generate a simple directory-listing. It provides way to create a simple, reduced list of downloads without making use of the comprehensive downloads-module.</li>
<li>Exporting and importing pages is now possible by using the new system-tasks “export page” and “import page”. The content of a page is transferred by a single xml-file.</li>
<li>The module “eventmanager”, added to Kajona in 3.4.0 now provides an additional calendar-based view of the events available.</li>
</ul>
Login-Provider
<ul>
<li>The whole user subsystem was redesigned from scratch. It now support the handling of different login providers such as Kajonas' internal login and a LDAP directory. A first implementation of a LDAP connector is available.</li>
<li>REST and XML</li>
<li>A lot of Kajonas' internal methods are now available via a REST-interface. Using this interfaces, a simple experimental Android app was written in order to proof the general functionality.</li>
<li>In order to simplify the development of xml-based methods, the framework supports the developer with a new annotation “@xml”. Methods marked with this annotation are available via the XML interface whereas classical methods remain hidden to the XML interface. WADL-files, the specification of REST-interfaces, may be generated by Kajona on-the-fly.</li>
</ul>
Framework
<ul>
<li>A new driver for oracle-databases was added to the database-layer. Since the driver is still under development, it should be used for test purposes only.</li>
<li>Incoming requests are now handled by a new request-dispatcher and delivered to the matching subsystem. This unifies the the control flow within the framework. Developers should investigate the changes made to the base-class “class_root”. The class is now subject to the same object-lifecyle as common, extending objects and interacts the same way in case of persistence. Furthermore, abstract base-classes are now possible within the model-hierarchies.</li>
</ul>
Outlook
<ul>
<li>According to the current release-schedule, Kajona V3.4.1 is the last release of the 3.4 series; nevertheless the branch will still be supported with security fixes.</li>
<li>Up from now, the team will focus on the version 4.0, restructuring many parts of the system. More details will be published on the kajona-page in the near future.</li>
</ul>
Website: <a href="http://kajona.de">http://kajona.de</a>

Kajona V3.4.1 is completed!

Daydream, have recently announced a key upgrade to their FocusOPEN Digital Asset Manager software. The upgrade introduces a host of new and powerful features to the system, including: fine control over permissions for users and user groups, upgraded authentication architecture to allow better integration with third-party authentication providers and the release of their Open Image Studio for the open source version – a powerful add-on that allows end users to manipulate images directly in the system.
<blockquote>
“We believe that this latest upgrade will offer end users far better control over core system functions and many useful asset manipulation features. Our Open Image Studio has always been a popular facility in our enterprise implementations, so we are pleased to roll this out to all FocusOPEN users, regardless of their licence status” said Ralph Windsor, Project Director at Daydream. “The Open Image Studio allows end users to crop, rotate, flip and resize images from within the system – thereby reducing time and saving money on expensive specialist software, such as Adobe Photoshop” he explained.
</blockquote>
Other key features in the 3.4.1 upgrade include:
<ul>
<li>New groups permissions scheme: Allows granular control over users and group permissions.</li>
<li>Authentication plug-in architecture: Allows integration with third-party authentication providers</li>
<li>Open Image Studio: Allows cropping, flipping, rotating and re-sizing of images</li>
<li>New options for multi-user collaboration on lightboxes</li>
<li>Active Directory integration ported from Enterprise version (Commercial Edition only)</li>
<li>Email broadcast facility: Allows batches of messages to be sent to users</li>
<li>Offline zip order processing: Prepares large zip in the background</li>
<li>Enhanced embedded metadata: Allows different mapping rules for each asset type</li>
<li>Physical asset option and physical asset ordering features</li>
<li>Delivery instructions for physical assets</li>
<li>PDF contact sheets for lightbox and order manager</li>
<li>New home page custom ‘tab' control with URLs to searches</li>
<li>Change fields in list view for different asset types</li>
<li>New notify when published simplified workflow feature</li>
<li>Exclude asset types from default searches</li>
<li>Disable or enable shopping cart selection</li>
<li>Enhanced API features</li>
</ul>
The new edition can be downloaded free of charge from the FocusOPEN site. FocusOPEN Digital Asset Manager is an open source system, distributed under both AGPL and Commercial licenses. A range of in-the-cloud service plans, priority support packages and other professional services are also available. For more information on how to licence FocusOPEN Digital Asset Manager and to find out more about our supporting services, visit: <a href="http://www.digitalassetmanager.com">http://www.digitalassetmanager.com</a>

Daydream Announce Major Upgrade To FocusOPEN Digital Asset Manager 3.4.1

The latest version of Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware, Tiki 8.1, is now available for immediate download. This release includes many new features and improved functionality, including more than 3,200 code updates by 43 Tiki Community members.
Some key highlights of Tiki 8 include:
<ul>
<li>Improved internationalization (i18n), including better support for non-English characters in page names and complete translation of German interface items.</li>
<li>Improved (AJAX) interface for comments and support for Akismet spam protection</li>
<li>Integration with WebODF to support Open Document Format (ODF) in Tiki Docs.</li>
<li>Multiple enhancements to site search, such as indexing improvements, caching, and the ability to export search results as an RSS feed</li>
<li>Several new Tiki plugins</li>
<li>Update of the template engine from Smarty 2 to 3</li>
<li>Security fix, first identified by Stefan Schurtz (http://www.infoserve.de/)</li>
</ul>
This is just a small sample of what's included in Tiki 8.1. Refer to <a href="http://doc.tiki.org/Tiki8">http://doc.tiki.org/Tiki8</a> for a full list of what's new.
You can obtain Tiki 8.1 (as well as all other Tiki releases) from http://tiki.org/download. The release of Tiki 8 marks the end-of-life for the Tiki 7.x branch. All Tiki Administrators running 7.x are highly encouraged to upgrade to Tiki 8.1.

Tiki 8.1 Now Available, End-of-Life for Tiki 7.x

Power your CMS on AWS

Manage your websites & apps in the most trusted cloud.

#ffffff

Ektron Windows Azure Edition includes a new cloud-ready version of Ektron eSync enhanced with native support for Windows Azure, bringing its unique bi-directional content replication and differential deployment capabilities to the cloud. eSync automatically deploys only the files that have changed, dramatically increasing speed-to-web instead of replicating an entire web application.
Key benefits of Ektron Azure Edition:
<ul>
<li>Marketing agility – Empower marketing teams to deploy new Ektron sites and marketing campaigns on-the-fly without IT involvement.</li>
<li>Hybrid deployment – Customers can mix and match Windows Azure instances with traditional on-premise Ektron instances, ensuring sensitive content remains local while still benefitting from Windows Azure cloud delivery.</li>
<li>Dynamic elasticity – Scale on-the-fly based on usage patterns. Usage of Windows Azure instances can be scheduled, ensuring your Ektron site is ready to scale when it most needs to.</li>
<li>High availability – Windows Azure provides a highly available platform for large organizations, ensuring maximum uptime for your Ektron site.</li>
</ul>
“In the competitive landscape of website development, speed matters,” said Nicole Denil, Director Americas ISV, Windows Azure Incubation at Microsoft. “Microsoft is excited to see Ektron build on the Windows Azure cloud. The global scalability and reliability of Windows Azure can give Ektron customers great benefit.”

Ektron Announces Ektron Windows Azure Edition

With SharePoint quickly emerging as the primary Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system for thousands of organizations, HiSoftware Inc. today announced the launch of the first content-aware compliance and security solutions optimized specifically for Microsoft SharePoint® 2010. With a new release of HiSoftware Compliance Sheriff® for SharePoint, now HiSoftware Compliance Sheriff SP, and the debut of HiSoftware Security Sheriff™ SP, HiSoftware is making SharePoint safe for even the most sensitive enterprise data, from Personally Identifiable Information (PII) to Protected Health Information (PHI) to pre-release financials, strategic product information, HR data and more.
The SharePoint Confidence Gap
SharePoint has proven to be one of the market’s fastest-growing ECM systems: AIIM noted in its 2011 “State of the ECM Industry” report that 70 percent of the largest global organizations surveyed are using SharePoint today. AIIM further reported that in those organizations already standardized on SharePoint, more than half consider it to be their primary ECM system.
Yet gaps in SharePoint adoption and business-readiness remain, particularly when it comes to data compliance and the management of private or otherwise sensitive content. In fact, only 20 percent of the respondents to AIIM’s 2011 survey indicated they had sufficient confidence in SharePoint security to store sensitive information. And more than 60 percent of organizations have yet to bring SharePoint in line with their existing compliance policies.
<blockquote>
“Security and compliance are emerging as key stumbling blocks for enterprises who want to take full advantage of the content management and collaboration features within SharePoint 2010,” said HiSoftware CEO Kurt Mueffelmann. “As SharePoint grows, the type and composition of data organizations want to store and share expands as well, with big implications for information governance and user adoption. By building on the strength of our content-aware rules engine and allowing organizations to take advantage of new functionality for both policy and user-based classification, as well as encryption, we’re removing those barriers.”
</blockquote>
Compliance and Security Solutions Designed for Business
Fully integrated both with and within SharePoint 2010, HiSoftware’s content-aware compliance and security solutions complement the platform’s powerful content publishing and collaboration features by continuously auditing data and documents for compliance requirements such as privacy, information security, accessibility, site quality and brand integrity. Leveraging the hundreds of checkpoints built-in to the company’s proprietary rules engine — including pre-defined checkpoint groups for Section 508/WCAG 1.0 and 2.0, HIPAA, FISMA, MA 201CMR 17 and other regulatory mandates — HiSoftware’s solutions continuously scan all SharePoint content (documents, libraries, lists and sites) as it moves in and out of the environment to identify specific policy violations and classify items via the addition of SharePoint metadata values.
Once classified by the rules engine, these values can then be utilized by Security Sheriff SP to encrypt and/or apply permissions that restrict access to the item, regardless of the permissions applied to the larger SharePoint site, library or list in which the item physically resides. Security Sheriff also tracks the document’s full chain of custody and, when deployed with the HiSoftware Connector for Microsoft Outlook®, can prevent it from leaving SharePoint via email to an unauthorized user. Classification can also aid in e-discovery, search and retrieval, and provide a persistent form of identification for sensitive content as the SharePoint environment grows and evolves.
“HiSoftware is leading the market with the only content-aware compliance and security solutions specifically designed for SharePoint,” added Mueffelmann. “And as the only vendor enabling both policy and user-based classification with encryption at the file level, we cannot only protect organizations from a damaging data breach, but also help control the proliferation of SharePoint sites, lists and libraries – one of the biggest headaches for SharePoint administrators and policy officers.”
General Availability
HiSoftware Compliance Sheriff SP and HiSoftware Security Sheriff SP will be generally available on December 16, 2011. Company representatives will be showcasing the new product at the KMWorld SharePoint Symposium (Booth #20), taking place this week in Washington, DC. To learn more about the new products or to schedule a demo, please contact the HiSoftware solutions team at http://www.hisoftware.com/solutions/related-links/information-request.aspx or 1.888.272.2484.
About HiSoftware HiSoftware is a leading provider of content-aware compliance and security solutions for the monitoring and enforcement of risk management and privacy guidelines across digital environments. The company’s solutions provide a data governance platform for content management and collaboration processes that support corporate and brand integrity, site quality, accessibility and confidentiality for public websites and portals, as well as intranets and SharePoint sites. HiSoftware’s more than 750 customers include some of the largest US and international government agencies, as well as educational institutions and Global 2000 companies. For more information, visit <a href="http://www.hisoftware.com">http://www.hisoftware.com</a>.

HiSoftware Security Sheriff SP Brings First-of-its-Kind Content-Aware Security Capabilities to Microsoft SharePoint

There is a new release candidate for XOOPS 2.5.4 on the mirrors. In addition to updating its internal libraries to their latest versions: phpMailer (5.1), TinyMCE (3.4.6), jQuery (1.6.4), and jQueryUI (1.8.16), the major focus of this release is on converting all Core modules (PM, Profile, Protector) to a new ModuleAdmin GUI, so all of them have a consistent “look &amp; feel”.
The new Module GUI will be the official GUI for all modules supported by XOOPS, and will drive:
<ul>
<li>Increased productivity</li>
<li>Decreased training and support costs</li>
<li>Reduced development time and costs</li>
<li>Reduced maintenance costs</li>
<li>Increased customer satisfaction</li>
</ul>
As their next course of action, the XOOPS Project will be working on a “Basic Module Pack”, which will contain the most popular XOOPS modules in one user-friendly package, all with the new Module GUI.
Here are some screenshots from this new RC:
For more info on XOOPS, visit their webpage @ <a href="http://www.xoops.org">http://www.xoops.org</a>

XOOPS 2.5.4 Release Candidate available

<a href="http://www.webnodes.com">Webnodes</a> AS, a company developing a .NET based semantic content management system, today announced the release of version 3.7 of their CMS.
This new release improves the system in a number of key areas:
The world’s first CMS with fully integrated dynamic Schema.org support With this release, Webnodes is the world’s first CMS with fully integrated and dynamic Schema.org support. This means that all content classes and properties in Webnodes can be mapped to corresponding types and properties in Schema.org dynamically.
Webnodes uses the dynamic mapping to add small pieces of Microdata to the html of webpages. All the major search engines will immediately understand the meaning of the content, and can improve their search results in a number of ways. Tests have shown a 30% increase in organic search-engine traffic to websites using Microdata or similar technologies.
Load balancing Another important feature in this new version is that Webnodes CMS now fully supports load-balancing, in a number of different configurations.
Load balancing makes it possible to distribute the traffic between different servers, making it possible to use Webnodes on sites with extreme traffic. In addition to supporting regular load balancing where separate instances of the CMS are running on different servers, many of the performance critical parts of Webnodes has been componentized, so you can split the performance critical components of a single instance on multiple servers as well.
E-commerce improvements The e-commerce module in Webnodes has a number of new features in this release:
– Totally redesigned discount system with a range of different discounts built-in, and with support for adding custom discount types. – Support for coupon codes. – Support for product bundles. – Support for customizable product packs (“build a computer”).
<blockquote>
“This release is one of our most important releases ever”, said Ole Gulbrandsen, CTO of Webnodes. “We strongly believe in the future of Schema.org, and with this release, we’re enabling our customers to tap into the benefits offered by the semantic web.”
</blockquote>

Webnodes CMS adds Schema.org support

Serendipity (or sometimes called s9y) has a new release available with version 1.6. For those unfamiliar with Serendipity, it is a very powerful blog platform / content management system that offers tons of functionality. If you haven't had a chance to try it out, I'd strongly recommend you take a look at it as it's quite impressive.
Version 1.6 brings with it a host of new features and changes such as:
<ul>
<li>Bundle jQuery by default to enable plugin and template authors to easier provide extended functionality to the frontend</li>
<li>Support for templates, so that they can also use config-groups like plugins already have (added to bulletproof template)</li>
<li>Templates can now enable core-provided options like a global navigation setup</li>
<li>Fixed a bug in the automatic media database synchronization that did not properly add new files with the same basename but different file extensions</li>
<li>Added a .htaccess parameter to prevent IE9 CSS-trouble</li>
<li>API changes: Added “shortcuts” to commonly used constructs (language loading, hack protection)</li>
<li>Several minor feature additions in plugins (Karma, Akismet, Mailer) and the core (comment subscriptions, multiple comment moderation)</li>
<li>Fulltextsearch improvements with “*” expansion</li>
<li>Added a “hidden” option for specific author groups, so that their members are not revealed on usual author listings by plugins etc.</li>
<li>Fixes a backend XSS issue in the karma plugin and media database filtering, thanks to Stefan Schurtz!</li>
</ul>
The current release can be easily installed on any previous Serendipity installation. Just unpack, upload and visit your admin panel to perform possible database upgrades. Upon first login with an old password, Serendipity will store your old password in the new format – please be sure to make a backup of your Database prior to upgrading.
You can download or learn more about Serendipity from their website, 	<a href="http://www.s9y.org/">http://www.s9y.org/</a>

Serendipity 1.6 offers full text search improvements and more

<a href="http://OmniUpdate.com">OmniUpdate</a> has released version 9.12 of its OU Campus™ CMS. This release of OU Campus includes a new Site Check feature and support for XSLT 3.0, XPath 3.0, and XQuery 3.0.
Site Check allows authorized administrators to check all website links, both internal and external to the site, with ease. Users can choose to check links for all site pages or only selected pages.  They also have the option to follow link redirects and set timeout rules to ensure that links are in an optimal state. Additionally, users can view reports of broken links by page or by link.
OU Campus has been updated to Saxon 9.3, which includes partial support for the XSLT 3.0, XPath 3.0, and XQuery 3.0 Working Drafts (formerly known as 2.1). The move to XSLT 3.0 provides web developers with a full-fledged functional programming language, making it easier to build powerful, robust, and user-friendly templates. New instructions such as iterate and evaluate give developers the power and flexibility to easily deploy dynamically generated code. Developers can use try/catch blocks to create templates with user-friendly error handling.
OmniUpdate has been extremely aggressive in adding new product functionality this past year. Lance Merker, President and CEO of OmniUpdate, stated, “Our clients require a CMS that gives them the power to push their websites even further. We are proud to provide cutting-edge solutions and technologies, such as XSLT 3.0, to our customers.”

OmniUpdate Releases Version 9.12 of Its Web Content Management System

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Call Tracking + AI that Turns Calls into Leads

Explore a wide range of informative articles, insights, and industry updates. Stay informed and ahead of the curve with our diverse collection of news and posts covering the latest trends and developments in the industry. Page - 212

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Call Tracking + AI that Turns Calls into Leads