Day Software is having an outstanding year so far. It landed squarely in the Visionaries quadrant of Gartner's 2008 Enterprise Content Management Magic quadrant report just a month ago, and its year-to-date revenue as reported at the end of last quarter was up nearly 10% from 2007. But probably the most exciting accomplishment is the release of newest version of its flagship Web content management system, Communiqué (CQ) 5.1.It's been some three years since Day last upgraded Communiqué, and while CQ5 was released over the summer to a select group of customers, Day used the feedback to prepare for what ultimately became CQ5.1. It's clear that the three years of preparation plus a few months of polishing the product have paid off, because CQ5.1 is impressive.

CQ5.1 comes out of the gate with an ambitious set of functionality looking to provide Web content management, digital asset management and social collaboration in one integrated product package. While the social collaboration features -- blogs, forums, and shared calendaring -- are available but still in beta, the rest of the product seems fully realized.

In terms of new functionality, CQ5.1 focuses both on the essentials that you expect from any advanced content management system, as well some terrific nice-to-haves that streamline the content creation process and set the product apart from the pack. It features improved WYSIWYG content creation and page design, as well as simplified tagging to make sure that the content is easy to find. Editors and content creators also will be pleased to hear that the creation of editorial processes now features an easy to use drag-and-drop editor that allows a process flows to be created quickly and easily.

For an in-depth overview of CQ5.1, check out Irina Guseva's detailed piece on CMSWire.com. She also features a review of the release on her personal blog as well as a run-through of the installation experience. Together these pieces offer a hands-on uderstanding of the ups and downs of CQ5.1.

Day Software has been an interesting company to watch, both in terms of its technology (it's been instrumental in the development of the JSR-170 content repository standards) as well as in the ease-of-use of its products. I'd expect that CQ5.1 will garner them even more attention than before.