Irina Guseva: Random Thoughts on CMS, WCM, ECM and Other Acronyms

It was a lovely Friday morning/afternoon, and we were Waving. The experiment initiated by McBoof (yes, that one) brought together 6 CMS folks from around the world. The event gathered together analysts, journalists, vendors, system integrators to Wave on a topic that was decided at that very moment. We had one hour (in between conference calls and other job thingys) to pick a topic and Wave it.

A little collab on what exactly to Wave about later, we decided to do “a mindmap of things we find annoying in CMSs.” To up the ante, we also decided to take the original bullet points (deemed “too easy”) and convert the whole thing to prose. Was the tool given really up to the task? Were our minds flexible enough to wrap around this kind of realtime collaboration?

In the beginning – we blame the tool — we were Drowning, not Waving. We (almost) didn’t fight about edits. We almost didn’t step on each other’s toes. All in all, it turned out to be a fun and productive collaborative exercise. Read on to see for yourself.

Cosmetic Issues

There really should be a CMS UI fashion police. As there should be a Magic Quadrant for shoes and handbags. Why? Well, there’s a couple of issues.

For instance, sloppy, non-designed design. You know the kind of thing that has not been thought about and reworked and made to feel right. The sort of thing coders do if you don’t force them. But at the same time, over-designed interfaces can be just as bad: the designers and developers really need to be on speaking terms.

When building a system that works, you can’t have the development team in the basement on a sustenance of Jolt coding away into the night, and the designers in the penthouse in turtleneck sweaters sipping espressos. Too many CMS designs end up being programmer vs. end-user friendly. And this is not the best way to charm away those marketing and web content folks.

Developers and designers need to talk to each other and essentially, both should talk to users - not just eat your own dogfood – but listen to what dogs like to eat. A developer or UI designer are not content editors, marketers or knowledge and information workers.

Some vendors say that the agonizingly and depressingly black UI backgrounds are hip and modern. Well, they are not, really. Who told you that? Especially if you add a Star Trek theme to it and sprinkle in some stars and cosmic swirls, because if Apple does it, it must be cool right? Not pointing any fingers, but I would quit if I were a content manager having to spend my 9-5 staring into the “black hole” of some of the CMS UIs that are out there on the market.

Even pop-ups seem less annoying when compared to dark UIs. Which brings us onto…

Interface Issues

Interfaces need a comfortable lived in feel. Content management is something people work with every day, it is their interface to their job. You meet people who hate the interface, and that makes their work a heap of pain. I have seen people who describe the 44 clicks it takes to insert an image. You have a responsibility to these people, to make them love the content and make the tool disappear.

We all hate it when the interface does something on its own that ruins your context. E.g. a page refresh, or in Wave the jumping around of the scrolled window in some cases ;-) Or the lack of an easy way to bookmark, so you can reference someone to the content. Remember people will be collaborating and need to send links around. Make sure the UI is a proper web application with URLs. And why do tasks that are easy to describe and often repeated in exactly the same way still take more than a few clicks? (Or maybe even dozens of clicks.) With bonus points for forcing users to use dialogs or tabs to enter mandatory information. Remember people do not have all the information in the right order.

Also, we need sane conflict merges. Check in and check out is too extreme for most uses. But people want to edit offline still. Of course Wave doesn’t have an offline: Google thinks this problem is going away, it’s real time so there are never conflicts (that’s defined in the XML protocol; it’s quite interesting if you are that way geeky). Does Google have the right answer here? Well, the Motley Crew is struggling here, and some browsers lost sync during this experiment.

“Power users” (those who use it all day long) of CMSs needed to have a “Desktop” experience. What does Desktop Experience mean? Well, it doesn’t really have to be on the desktop – these days it is perfectly possible to get very close to a hitherto Desktop experience in a browser or similar. these are qualities: very low latency from action to response, no page refreshes, modal and modal-less dialog boxes as appropriate, “push” notification.

Architectural Issues

Architectural issues of the wave overtook any architectural issues of Content Management Systems. The fact that we authored this entire article in a single blip didn’t help, and slowed everything down enormously. McBoof learned the hard way that he really need a new laptop and spent most of the session giving his machine CPR. Next time we’ll do each paragraph in its own blip to stop FireFox going down like a Led Zeppelin.

Monolithic systems. Build it out of pieces that the client can not use all of. Obviously your pieces may work together better, but there should be components. Do not try to reinvent all kinds of wheel. ”Best of breed,” though, is just another weasel marketing idea, as if systems are pinnacles not about meeting requirements.

Marketeers are adroit at using the term Best Practice to position Their Way as the only way that a particular matter can be solved. (Many of us live in that netherland of having to pedal that point of view, but it is a falsehood that the careful buyer should try to see through.) I think this devalues genuine best practice, vendors should cite references

Most often a marketeer’s Best Practice view is the only one they subscribe to as their product development has paddled up the wrong stream and cannot or won’t reverse their architectural design (probably because of the cost of doing so). This intransigence most often causes a product to doom itself. (Think of IBM and The Mainframe Is The Only Way To Do Serious Business).

Who really still believes that there is a place in this world for Flash or Java Applet based Rich Text Editors? TinyMCE, FCKeditor and others are filling the gap left by Ektron when they bit the hand that feeds and entered the CMS market. Ephox is trying to spread, but I find it difficult to come up with an excuse to use an Applet over HTML with javascript these days. Stick with the standard.

Business Issues

Where you are buying into something that you may very well need to change or integrate with there is strong benefit in considering Open Source. Open Source used to frighten commercial software companies but we have come along way on that road to understand that commercial organisation can operate in an Open Source world and benefit. This does not necessarily mean that their prized system needs to be fully opened up, but taking the spirit of it to mean that you are completely open to people seeing and learning from your code how it operates.

Exactly what you need to see opened up varies. In a CMS there may be a subsystem that stores the content or one that allows a Rich Text Editor. These arguably don’t need to be opened up, but when a CMS ships with modules for, for example, an RSS feed widget, calendaring tool, prebuilt webforms, users who then want a variation on this module can benefit from seeing how the “pros” did it, they can then use it as a starting point for their own different implementation.

We really don’t need vendors that pay lip service to the buzzwords. When they think the new CMS buzzword “engagement” is just a screenshot of Google Analytics. Or when they add an image picker and call it DAM. And a cross-over between WCM and ECM? Don’t think WCM is like ECM and it’s about organizing content, not about effectively communicating with the audience. And don’t think that if you organize the content, you can aut omatically communicate effectively.

Completely different, but equally frustrating, is procurement (and the procedures that go with it.) Procurement folk don’t recognise the importance of user adoption to the success of the project — of the black background and all the UI issues pointed out previously. If a CMS is procured according to procedure, the selection is a success to them. But those same rules are often a recipe for ignoring what the users really need.

At the same time, budgets that aren’t transparent are an issue - customer and vendor should be able to have a sensible grown up conversation. As a customer, of course you want good value, but how cheap are you? But to vendors: many licensing models don’t make any sense, and force you to do stupid things. People are scared to have that conversation - the best architectural fit first I say, lets figure out an appropriate license around that.

Conclusion

So much hatred rolled up into a tight little ball of anti-CMS rage. Who would have expected it from such a respected bunch of CMS folk. We hate the designs, the interfaces, the architectures and the business. Time for a beer/wine? Wave good bye!

(Note: This is a cut/paste (as is, no edits) from Google Wave)

Open Source ECM vendor Nuxeo included several new features in the latest release of Nuxeo Document Management. Nuxeo DM 5.3 highlights include support for OpenSocial API, tagging, SharePoint and interoperability with CMIS Server as an add-on component.

On top of that, Nuxeo EP 5.3, the vendor’s enterprise content management system core, reached the RC stage.

Nuxeo DM 5.3

This time around, Nuxeo concentrated on the increasingly popular social applications support and a few other things that many DM users may find helpful and welcome.

Using Nuxeo’s support for OpenSocial — a common API for social apps access across various websites — users can add and/or build social networking gadgets, for example.

Nuxeo DM 5.3 serves as both the publisher of gadgets and the OpenSocial container. Just for comparison, other known OpenSocial containers include MySpace, Ning, LinkedIn, iGoogle and many others.

CrownPeak, a SaaS Web CMS vendor, also did an OpenSocial integration back in early 2008.

Microsoft SharePoint can be accessed from Nuxeo DM 5.3 for basic library services and common file operations. For those die-hard fans of Windows Explorer, there’s a native integration, so they may not even know they’re working with another document management system.

There’s also a Microsoft Office integration that allows opening, saving, editing of files directly to/from Nuxeo DM.

It was about time Nuxeo put more effort into tagging and metadata capabilities of their DM system. The new tagging service is fairly easy to use and allows users to categorize content by applying existing or adding new tags. Tagging can then result in more ways for retrieval and display of content stored in Nuxeo DM.

Tagging recommendations and dynamic tag cloud are also part of the deal.

Nuxeo DM 5.3 Tag Cloud

The vendor also says they improved search and indexing, which should play in nicely into the tagging offering.

Having been longtime fans of CMIS, Nuxeo added interoperability into this release as well with their add-on CMIS Server, which is based on the CMIS draft 0.62. The most current (and the official OASIS Technical Committee) CMIS draft is 0.7.

The idea here is that organizations can use Nuxeo DM, while also being able to search across multiple ECM, ERP, DM and other systems.

Nuxeo EP 5.3

Currently an RC, the new version includes that same WSS (MS SharePoint), tagging and OpenSocial widgets support we’ve seen in DM 5.3. In addition to that, the import/export service was improved and performance is said to be enhanced following some benchmarking efforts.

The Nuxeo EP 5.3 RC also features a CMIS implementation based on Apache Chemistry that we discussed early spring — both with Nuxeo’s Florent Guillaume and Day Software’s David Nuescheler.

It would be unreasonable not to notice the wave of recent activity at this Paris-based open source ECM vendor. With new people on board and an aggressive product roadmap, Nuxeo (if not disrupting) is clearly starting to gain more traction in the global enterprise CMS market.

In the end, when it comes to open source, successes can be measured by the activeness of the community, as well as customer growth — among other metrics. In the U.S., for example, Nuxeo still has quite some space to spread its wings, if the vendor wants to. And we tend to think it will.

Cross-posted on CMSWire.com: Open Source Nuxeo EP and DM 5.3 Support OpenSocial

That is a conclusion Basex, an analyst and research firm, came to in a (at times, admittedly questionable) report entitled Content Management Systems: The New Math for Selecting Your Platform released in September 2009.

The researchers are saying the content management market is set to explode in the next several years, and open source CMS vendors are contributing to this growth, as well as to how customers are changing their CMS selection processes. Let’s take a look at details — some of them you may find quite amusing.

Basex estimates that the U.S. market for content management reached about US$ 4.1 billion in revenue in 2008. By 2014, it should jump to US$ 10 billion.

Basex says that Alfresco and Bluenog are “leading the charge” in the commercial open source market. Umm, many may not agree with this stance. What about players like Nuxeo and Acquia? If we were to judge market leadership by the number of customers and license deal sizes mentioned in this report, the math wouldn’t be the same. But let’s go on.

Then the research firm adds that “Fortunately, it’s gotten simpler to find the right [CMS] tool.” Umm, really? We do like this wording (found in the same report) better: “Choosing the right content management system is far from straight forward.”

Breakdown of CMS vendors into tiers in this report is slightly unconventional with Microsoft ECM and SharePoint sitting right next to Percussion and Alterian. Not to mention the lack of clear differentiation between on-the-premise and hosted/SaaS vendors. One would imagine this distinction would be of importance to many organizations selecting a CMS.

Leaving out DotNetNuke and eZ Publish from commercial open source CMS vendors seems like a significant omission. Some would argue Basex putting Bluenog in the commercial open source box – actually, we’ve heard that debate before – with its technology mix of proprietary code, Apache and other open source software.

While the report is profiling 16 CMS vendor, the most mentions seem to be given to Bluenog and Alfresco (approximately twice as many, compared to other open source or proprietary CMS vendors). If in fact, certain vendors were involved in the makings of the report as underwriters, it would be nice to disclose that.

More on CMSWire.com

Not long ago, we discussed Vamosa’s work in the Enterprise Content Governance (ECoG) field and their new Check and Fix tool.

Recently, the vendor extended its Check and Fix functionality to cater more to eDiscovery and web records management scenarios.

Web governance can be tricky, even with a formal approach in place. That’s why we have tools to help us out. Vamosa Check and Fix can be used for multi-domain/multi-author website monitoring and reporting; and fixing issues with compromised standards, that are checked against a set of standard and custom measurement points. They can include HTML standards, compliance, branding and governance.

Vamosa’s Check and Fix is one of the tools on the market that can be used to take a snapshot every time content changes, providing a full audit trail. This version of the tool is sold at an additional license charge based on the volume of content monitored.

More on CMSWire.com

She is well-versed in matters of Enterprise CMS, Enterprise 2.0, collaboration and social media; specializes in VQA wines, weaves in candy and aspirin into one sentence and posts some of the yummiest foodie tweets out there.

Soon after her resignation, the former Open Text-er was asking on Twitter whether 6 pairs of shoes would be enough for one week in Paris, there was a chance that French bistros, Père Lachaise and walks down Canal Saint-Martin were not the sole purpose of the trip.

Meet Cheryl McKinnon, who, as of today, is the new Chief Marketing Officer of the Paris-headquartered open source ECM vendor Nuxeo.

As the new CMO, McKinnon plans, first of all, to put the right team in place (Will we see former Open Text-ers there?) “to make a big bang in the U.S.” and work on Nuxeo’s messaging across the web, print and other channels to deliver “what business and technical buyers need to hear about.” We should expect to see at least 15 more hires in sales, product development and engineering in both Boston and Paris, according to Nuxeo.

After learning the ropes of Nuxeo Enterprise CMS product (including Nuxeo EP and Nuxeo DM), McKinnon admitted she was “pleasantly surprised by the usability factor and a clean, intuitive UI.” “This is not a product you would struggle to use.”

With virtually non-existent experience, exposure or previously declared affection for open source, McKinnon sure did learn some lessons from the proprietary enterprise content management space that should translate well into both French and doing business the open source way. “There’s only so much you can learn in one place. The more that you wait, the more time that you waste.”

Why Nuxeo?

Quite a few of you are probably puzzled as to why someone would leave a position on the growth track at one of the ECM giants. McKinnon has the answer; she is a “big believer in leaving at the top of the personal game.” The last year of her career at OTEX “was the most fun and fulfilling,” due to being able to learn new products, explore social media and start writing again. But it was time to “take all lessons learned and apply [them] to a company on the brink of making a jump to the next level.”

In addition to that, Eric Barroca, Nuxeo’s CEO, “reached out and painted a picture.” No, he didn’t exactly DM her on Twitter, but this level of personal recruitment made McKinnon feeling “obliged to return the call,” even though she returned none of head hunters’ calls.

More on CMSWire: Former Open Text-er Takes CMO Job at Open Source Nuxeo

Well, if it isn’t open source CMS and PHP companies playing friendly again… Open source, PHP5-fueled Enterprise CMS vendor KnowledgeTree announced its embrace of the PHP-driven Zend Technologies in a partnership that aims to increase speed and performance of KnowledgeTree’s products.

Part of the partnership revolves around the forthcoming version 3.7 of KnowledgeTree’s on-the-premise commercial edition (due in Q4 2009) being deployed on Zend Server.

Looking for instant gratification? According to Philip Arkcoll, product manager at KnowledgeTree, the Zend partnership “represents the coming together of two PHP players whose goal is bringing enterprise-grade PHP products to the marketplace. KnowledgeTree on Zend Server delivers speed, performance, and reliability, particularly in Windows environments.

In fact, early tests show response time improvements of close to 40% when using Zend Server, and that’s with no changes to our application.” No word on how Linux behaves, but the vendor say this OS is supported as well.

More on CMSWire.com