Announced on Vignette’s Facebook fan page and by Jules, here’s yet another CMS vendor meme. They call it the Enterprise Web Content Management (WCM) Vendor Meme. And this is exactly where I have a problem with it (OK, several):
- I know the lines are blurry between ECM vs. WCM (vs. micro CMS). Some call themselves “enterprise-ready” WCM. What is enterprise WCM? Enterprise CMS or Web CMS? Decisions, decisions…
- Why can’t you put up a corporate blog using your latest VCA release instead of using Facebook, where I have to become a fan to leave a comment or otherwise participate?
- What happened to the “traditional” ECM attributes like DAM, document and records management, eDiscovery, retention, ODR, workflow, BPM, IM, KM, etc., etc.? None of which are mentioned in the questions list.
- The question list seems to be tailored specifically around Vignette’s products (keywords: portal-like, financial and government deployments, see #6, etc.)
- Hence, no need to answer the questions — just do the tagging bit?
- “We provide a one-stop shop for enterprise Web Experience (VIGN keyword — see #4) needs, offering a full range of capabilities including at least 6 of these 7 commonly requested enterprise functionalities:
- Web Content Management” — Doh!
Maybe, I am just completely and utterly confused, but I don’t get this. No offense, I applaud the effort to engage further with the community, but this one is me meme not. Or, like others said:
[updated April 4] Alfresco’s @LuisSala offered his opinion on Vignette’s ECM meme effort. Very detailed, with many examples, which should not come as a surprise given that Sala is a former VIGN employee. One of the quotes I found interesting:
…these are instantly recognizable as a thinly veiled and highly biased checklist highlighting Vignette’s self-perceived “strengths”.
My take-away: some things are better to be vendor-neutral, not vendor-authored. Another reason why we have organizations like @cmswatch.
Irina Guseva 
Harsh, but fair I think. It appears to focus on the Web part of ECM, which could make sense. I think you’re right in that there will not be many responses, but time will tell. I still hope there are. Makes interesting reading.
Hi Jon,
Thanks for your opinion! I can see the web part of ECM happening here, agreed. Just don’t see how the original meme didn’t accomplish the same task.
Don’t mean to be harsh, just asking questions. Not a personal attack against Vignette. There are lotsa things I like about Vignette, including people.
@kirstenpetra clarified that DAM is “intended to be included in the Rich Media & Video mgmt portion of the one stop shop question – is deftly important.”
My original thought about Kas Thomas’s meme was that it was more tailored towards smaller CMS systems – not enterprise ones.
Nobody expects a 2-mln dollar CMS installation to have a standard installer program available in czech language. Large installations are done by people who speak English.
Thus by responding to that meme, enterprise vendors a-ka Interwoven, Vignette, Nstein, etc.- will be at disadvantage to out-of-the-box $100-dollar solutions (at least to the readers who are not savvy in this market).
Thus I do see a need for a vendor-neutral, enterprise/large-scale installation meme.
I’m sure an extensive one like that, targeted at enterprise clietns, will get a lot of traction from vendors, their prospects and analysts that focus on enterprise ECM
Thanks, Oleg, for your input! That’s an interesting take. I didn’t get the same feeling from Kas Thomas’ reality check.
There may be a need for another enterprise-focused, vendor-neutral reality check. But it would be better if it was vendor-neutral, not vendor-authored.
I think Jon has got the gist of what I was trying to get at … maybe I could have been clearer that I mean to call out the WCM specifics for Enterprise-Class deployments primarily for public facing websites. I didn’t mean to go into more Records & Documents oriented transactional ECM.
The reason I wanted to continue the conversation as Oleg notes is that I felt the first meme didn’t address the full spectrum of Enterprise-Class business drivers and was a bit too focused on operational details that don’t get to the heart of why we think a customer would choose an option as a best fit. I thought it a valuable exercise to hear from the players themselves instead of getting the information re-factored through an analyst report.
I did my best to be objective by reaching out to others – but obviously – since this is coming from Vignette, it is fair for you and anyone to look with a skeptical eye. The only thing I do want to point out is that the term “Web Experience” is not something that is Vignette coined, though I wish we had:-) FatWire (on their home page) and Interwoven (most recently in a Nov 08 press release) both use this in their own messaging at times and is something that we hear from the mouths of the online marketers we talk to on a daily basis.
I’ll be authoring my response this weekend (as it wasn’t pre-written:). Regardless, I echo John and would be interested in more conversation … if not … no worries …
Thanks much, Kirsten!
ECM vs. EWCM
I believe there is significant confusion in the acronyms, especially around ECM, so much that the Wikipedia article comes with a couple warnings about its clarity. In the latest revision, AIIM defines ECM very broadly, as everything an organization needs to manage content end to end from record and document management to web content management.
An ECM meme should include the elements Irina mentions like retention and eDiscovery. However, the meme that Kirsten developed was focused on Enterprise Web Content Management (WECM?) , which is simply Web Content Management for enterprise organizations, generally defined as those with over 1,000 employees and/or over $1B in revenue.
Oleg hit the nail in the head. We believe there are significant differences between the SMB organizations and the and enterprise organizations in terms of their needs, resources, processes and use cases. It is clear some of the criteria in the original meme are not relevant for a n enterprise organization deploying a global system and that there are other criteria that are very important for these customers that are not mentioned in the original meme.
Thanks for your input, Gerardo!
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