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

Recently, I got an e-mail newsletter (from: company name redacted) – one of those that goes almost immediately to trash following a quick scan. What made me ROFL was this line:

Blogging is easy, usually free, and most importantly, fun!

Now, I am not perfect (well, am nearly ) and could use more self-blogging discipline, but whoever wrote that statement must’ve never blogged a single line in his/her life. It sure is ain’t that easy (Oh, yeah, after all, I live in the South).

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After working very hard (yet, effortlessly ) on diligently neglecting this dear child of a blog, let me recap the past 68 days. Yes, it’s been that long – LinkedIn is very good at rubbing it in with their WordPress widget day counter. So, here are the CMSWire stories and happenings that have been on my radar in those 2+ months:

ECM

• Open Text unveiled its 2010 product roadmap at Open Text Content World in Orlando, highlighting many rebranding changes that are to come, including those for RedDot/Web Solutions and Vignette. The community still doesn’t appear to be appeased. But business is business. In the meantime, I am revisiting Shakespeare’s Hamlet in preparation for my next piece on Open Text planned for early January 2010.
• Open Text appeared in the news again with the announcement on expanding its ECM solutions portfolio for Oracle.
• IBM continued to focus on analytics as a way of better management of unstructured and structured content.

WCM

• Crownpeak integrated its SaaS CMS with the Website Optimizer Experiment Management API, which is based on Google Website Optimizer, alleviating the pains of tedious cut and pastes of those pesky JavaScript snippets into your content or templates.
• OmniUpdate continued to work the hi-ed crowd with new version 8.10 featuring multi-lingual and multi-output previews.
• Sitecore v6.2 saw the light of day (I, personally, wasn’t much impressed) and took a bite of online engagement and social communities through Telligent Community integration.
• Ektron’s “big guns,” including the newest addition to the team Tom Wentworth, previously of Interwoven, showed off the new version 8 of CMS400.NET (yes, the one that was inelegantly leaked some time before the official release).
• Nstein walked me through their “New Kind of Site Search” with 3S (Semantic Site Search), interesting ideas there with multi-index federated search, embedded Text Mining Engine, semantic widgets and a more flexible presentation layer.
• CMS Watch sliced and diced the market in its Web CMS Report 2010.
• EPiServer entered into a partnership with Mediachase in order to add eCommerce capabilities to its Web CMS and Relate+ community platform offerings.
• Web publishing vendor WoodWing turned to celum for a DAM integration.

J. Boye ‘09 in Aarhus

While in the handsome town of Aarhus (aka the City of Smiles), heaps of content management fun were on the menu (topped off with duh! delish herring), including:

• Jarrod Gingras and Peter Sejersen’s look into the pitfalls and best practices of selecting a CMS.
• McBoof, Janus Boye, et al’s attempt to #fixwcm, while heatedly debating some of the inconvenient truths and challenges of the content management industry.
• David Nuesheler’s of Day Software session on top 8 trends in web content management architecture and standards (CMIS, JCR 2.0, JSR-283).
• BJ Fogg’s preso on “hot triggers,” “cold triggers,” persuasive technology and why Twitter and Facebook are winning.
• A myriad of fantastic, thought-provoking, brain-activity-inducing conversations in hallways, at dining tables, at social events, while braving the rain and the cold – you know who you are.

PS: I miss Århus. Thanks, Janus!

Gilbane Boston 2009

The who is who of content management came to Boston for the Gilbane conference. I was fortunate to moderate a Content Management in Practice session, and attended a few others:

• Content migration, the dirty little secret of content management, where content migration challenges, stumbling blocks and techniques to avoid them were discussed. One of the simplest, yet most often overlooked takeaways: Know your content.
• One of the hottest topics of the event – open source and its rise in content management. One little tidbit of info signaling a broader acceptance of open source even just looking at Gilbane — there were virtually no OSS vendors here 4 years ago. This year, there were 6.

PS: Great fun seeing/meeting the usual CMS crowd suspects IRL and chatting about royal matters of the content management kingdom Thanks, Frank!

Open Source CMS

• Hippo held its ForgeFriday as planned (read event recap here from Tjeerd Brenninkmeijer) and released Hippo CMS 7.2 aiming to deliver more TLC to end-users with several Hippo Site Toolkit (HST) treats.
• Bill Beardslee called to say he moved to Miami and left Percussion for dotCMS.
• And soon after, dotCMS announced its intent to embrace CMIS.
• Nuxeo now has their very own DAM system in addition to the existing ECM and DM products — all tightly knit together. Another first is their international user conference planned for March 2010 – NuxeoWorld.
• Magnolia CMS concentrated on hierarchical content modeling and interoperability (still based on the JSR-170 standard) in version 4.2.
• Alfresco started offering an option for fault-tolerant, load-balanced, complex configuration deployments of its ECM product in the cloud with help from RightScale.

Social Media

• The CIA continued its investment in open source and technology and got more visibility into social media (=open source = data in public domain) after giving some $$$ to the social media monitoring firm Visible Technologies. Any social content (open or hidden) can be scraped, scored and displayed in a nice dashboard.

With the M&A activity in the content management space not dwindling down despite the economic crisis, it’s only natural to see the ECM and WCM talent move around. At times, that happens in a fashion resembling the game called “A Cold Wind Blows.”

Recently, Web CMS vendor Ektron announced Tom Wentworth joined them as VP of business development. Wentworth comes from the Enterprise CMS player Interwoven, where he was evangelizing various web solutions that fall under the Autonomy Interwoven ECM suite roof for the past 2 some years. Before that, he worked for over 6 years in Interwoven sales engineering roles.

In the new role, Wentworth will report to Ektron’s founder and CEO Bill Rogers, who is counting on Wentworth’s “experience in driving corporate strategy and revenue.” For Wentworth, working for a much smaller vendor should be a welcome change in scenery.

We’ve a slew of Interwoven employees leave for other CMS companies before, so this announcement doesn’t come as a surprise. Yet it spurs many questions.

Are things that bad at Interwoven that even the most passionate evangelists are looking for the exit sign? Is it the Autonomy acquisition fallout and the inability to effectively use the acquired talent? Is it because of Autonomy’s reportedly far from nurturing corporate culture and the “fear-and-intimidation style of upper management”? Are we about to see Interwoven navigate the CMS waters a la Titanic?

Expect to hear more from Ektron soon. The recently leaked version 8 should get its official entrance to the CMS arena soon.

Cross- published on CMSWire.

Apparently, there was a little mishap in the Web CMS vendor Ektron’s scheduled publishing activities.

The new major v8.0 release of CMS400.NET (that wasn’t supposed to see the light of day for at least another week or so) surfaced in production, online, for all to see in its full video-and-all glory on this microsite. Should  it no longer be available when you read this, there are some screenshots below.

Ektron’s preceding version was 7.6.

Ektron seems to be prematurely (?) reporting that version 8 of its CMS product includes such new and/or improved features as:

• New GUI for workarea
• New features for activity streams and micromessaging
• Multivariate Testing capabilities
• Calendaring integration
• PageBuilder enhancements
• eCommerce engine improvements

Without much detail into what each new feature entails, it doesn’t look like the landing page was quite ready to be workflow-approved and pushed into production. Oops.

Ektron CMS400.NET V8 Landing Page

Ektron V8 “Smart Desktop”

Ektron V8 Video Frame

Ektron found its sweet spot as one of the Visionaries in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management. We’ve seen Ektron on other “lists” before, including Gartner’s MarketScope. And now, hello, the Magic Quadrant.

Partially, Ektron attributes this positioning to the ability of their CMS product — EktronCMS400.NET — to deliver on the Web 2.0 capabilities front. Web 2.0, as Gartner says, “is… breathing new life into the WCM market.”

The CMS vendor has been working on several strategic initiatives over the past year, so it really should not come as a surprise that Ektron gets a nod from Gartner. We told you about many of Ektron’s happenings, including:

• Ektron’s CMS deployment in the Amazon Cloud
• Professional Services growth
• New offices in Texas and California
• Stronger focus on sales
• Enhancements and updates to EktronCMS400.NET
• Revenue growth in Q1 2009

Ektron thinks that some of the differentiators they have in the competitive Web CMS market are their core CMS product, social networking modules and the professional services group along with partner engineers.

The fact that Ektron is not a sole owner of the Visionaries Magic Quadrant should inspire the company to work even harder and build on the current momentum. Let’s see what they come up with. It’s probably not the best time to rest on laurels.

Originally published on CMSWire: Web CMS Vendor Ektron Finds Its Way to the Magic Quadrant

The cloud appears to be the new black in the fashion of web content management. One after another, vendors are conquering the cloud in hopes of dazzling their customers with more hosting options and improved scalability.

Ektron’s CMS400.NET content management system is now also cloud-friendly, thanks to their eSync technology that can do bi-directional synchronization with the cloud.

Hosting is also part of the offering. Ektron is using the Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) as a hosting option, allowing customers to run and manage their production, development and staging environments in the cloud, in any combination.

Ektron’s eSync technology can be used for bi-directional synchronization between the cloud and a customer’s local environment for the entire web site, specific pages or select pieces of content; giving developers the ability to code locally and sync up with the cloud.

Ektron says it will provide a set of free Amazon Machine Images (AMIs), on which customers can deploy their CMS400.NET instances. Using these Ektron-provided AMIs, new virtual machines can be provisioned with CMS400.NET. Developers can take advantage of the provisioning and automated software deployment.

While the cloud option may not necessarily work for all Ektron Web CMS customers, it is certainly worth looking into.

Original on CMSWire: Ektron CMS400.NET Deployed in the Amazon Cloud

From East to West… Ektron is now ready to jump into those cowboy boots and embrace the oh-so-desired Bay Area. The Web CMS vendor (quite predictably so) announced the opening of two new offices — in San Francisco, California, and in Austin, Texas.

The addition of the new offices will extend Ektron’s market reach and provide additional support and services critical to the company’s expanding customer base and partner channel.

Full article on CMSWire: Ektron Makes a Move to the West