Top 10 CMS Stories in 2009

No year-end predictions, no resolutions. Not even debating the acronyms. Just simple numbers: the top 10 most trafficked posts in 2009 on this blog:

• Review: SDL Tridion R5 Web CMS

The post was inspired by several years of being an SDL Tridion customer, when the company was Tridion and the product was R5.x.

• Things We Hate About Content Management

The Motley Crew’s collaborative Google Wave post, a riot, really, about all things CMS we collectively umm.. dislike. Ah, the power of putting several great minds into one wave 😉

• Clickability Viciously Attacks Vignette

Step-by-step guide on how to develop (and advertise) bad taste in writing CMS marketing materials, including white papers. ‘Nuf said.

• Interwoven Layoffs Are Imminent

Long before Interwoven’s fate moved from acquisition intent to the ranks of a done deal, there were indications of changes and “cost savings” coming.

• You’ve Been Tagged in CMS Vendor Meme

Still giggle every time I think of that morning.

• What Will Happen to Interwoven Post Automy

The first big acquisition of 2009 set some folks, including me, into the pondering mode about Interwoven’s future. Since then the dust settled, some people left, products were Autonomy-zed to some degree, but it’s still fun to look at initial reactions and crystal ball gazings.

• Review: Day Software’s CQ5 WCM

CQ5 marked the end of a 3-year-long silence from Basel and Day not Communiqué-ting much aside from a couple of point releases. The world was agonizing in anticipation of what the R&D-focused vendor came up with. I got a chance to install the product and poke around.

• Implementing a CMS Costs More Than Buying a CMS

Just like in marriage, the expense doesn’t stop at a Vera Wang dress. Or, even earlier, at a short-list.

• Vignette Marks 2008 Year-End With Layoff

About this time last year, Vignette let some of its people go (was it à la Moses act of freeing?) in preps for prettifying itself for the Open Text acquisition.

• 10 Things About Me

This one is only vaguely CMS-related, infectious as all memes, yet curable. The real #1 of this top 10 list was actually the about me page. Go figure.

CMS Going-Ons That (Almost) Didn’t Make it Here

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.