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.

CrownPeak CMS Gets URL Shortener, Goes Social Media-Friendly

CrownPeak recognizes the importance of URL shortening for social media and social networking, while retaining the ability to measure that content through web analytics tools.

The news release of the CrownPeak URL Shortener allows CrownPeak CMS users to take advantage of the automatically generated short URLs, or modify them manually to create a customized URL. Voila, and we are social media-ready.

A job that can be done by services like bit.ly and 3.ly, is now handled within the CMS itself to generate CPeak.us and alike URLs.

More on CMSWire.com

Vignette Stockholders Approve Open Text Acquisition

Open Text said it’s a done deal. The planned acquisition of all of the issued and outstanding shares of Vignette (worth approximately US$ 321 million) has been completed late yesterday following a shareholders’ meeting where the voting and approval took place.

While Vignette is busy nostalgizing, Open Text says it’s working on the strategic aspects of what may come next. Let’s not forget that Open Text already has a WCM-centric group called Open Text Web Solutions. Offering an even broader range of (quite similar) products is going to take some brain activity. Then again, this would not be the first quilting exercise for Open Text.

In the meantime, there’s still some Vignette cash to recognize on OTEX’s balance sheet.

According to the “big brother,” support will continue for Vignette’s products and (the relatively quickly decreasing) installed base (bringing in the licensing revenue). The same applies to existing Web Solutions products and customers. No comment has been made in regards to new(er) Vignette products.

There is a talk about a “combined product,” but no details on what it will be, except for providing a supersized meal of a “full set of feature options, from… fast-to-deploy web publishing application, to… enterprise-class e-business platform for large-scale deployments.”

Vignette’s social media, DAM and personalized content seem to be some of the most palatable notes in this content management connoisseur combo. Open Text also expressed intent to potentially leverage some of Vignette’s components in its ECM Suite.

More details on the product strategy and the product roadmap are not likely to be announced earlier than October, when Open Text’s annual conference — Content World 2009 – will take place.

Restructuring is expected. We should know more about the range of that initiative around the end of August.

Originally posted on CMSWire: Vignette Stockholders Said Yes to Open Text Acquisition

Open Text Brings Together Conservative ECM and Trendy Social Media

It would be an understatement to say that social media is a hot topic nowadays, including in the enterprise. You may be terrified of using it in your organization, but you really have no choice. Social media is here to stay, and you may as well embrace it rather than fight it.

Open Text watches this trend closely and acts accordingly, in its true “candy and aspirin” fashion. Today, the vendor has announced a new addition to the Enterprise CMS platform — Open Text Social Media, which may help conservative organizations to (safely) warm up to social media.

From the technological perspective, Open Text largely tapped into its resources gained via an acquisition. There is, of course, some new code and a brand new UI, but the underlying engine used in the new product is FirstClass Communications Platform from Centrinity, which was acquired by Open Text in 2002.

Now Open Text’s Scott Welch co-founded SoftArc Inc., which started developing and shipping FirstClass in early 90’s. In 1999, SoftArc merged with MC2 Learning Systems to form Centrinity.

In addition to Centrinity’s platform, Open Text Social Media is also tied to what used to be called Livelink — Open Text’s collaboration and knowledge management product— using it as the main repository. Web services technology and proprietary APIs were leveraged to tie in the existing platforms.

The new software can, naturally, be integrated with Open Text’s own records management(RM) and archiving products as well.

With all of the above in mind, it doesn’t come as a surprise that Open Text Social Media is quite document-centric at the moment.

More on CMSWire: Open Text Marries ECM to Social Media

Gilbane SF: Content Standards — CMIS, JSR-170, JSR-283

One of the final sessions at Gilbane SF yesterday was around content standards: CMIS, JSR-170 and JSR-283.

Many realize there are several challenges with CMIS in particular and efficiently working with content from disparate content repositories in general.

The session aimed at shedding light on some of these challenges and possible solutions in the standards space.

Too Much Content in Too Many Content Repositories

Chances are, if you’re in the enterprise content management space and you have an ECM system, this still doesn’t solve all your ECM problems. There are also document management and digital asset management systems, for example, you need to be able to “talk to.” Users of one ECM system often need to access and store documents in an entirely different content repository.

Scattered data repositories only add to the challenge. The majority of companies have an assortment of repositories, be it ERP, PLM, PDM, BI, KM, WCM, or DM systems. The problems we run into with multiple repositories are compliance, eDiscovery and business intelligence.

Add to that the fact that 80% of data is unstructured, and the enterprise world looks very gloom. Search gets harder as data sets grow. It takes longer to index. Thus, it takes longer to search.

ECM: CMIS or JSR-170/283?

Naresh Devnani, managing director at Lean Management Group, gave us a peek into real-life scenarios and impressions of implementing a standard’s wrapper, from the times when he was working for Vignette PS.

Devnani talked about implementing a JSR- 170 (the standard that was led by Day Software) level 1 functionality for an RDBMS-based web content management system.

Speaking of lessons learned, Devnani mentioned:

• Lack of ease in implementing a contained 1-n parent-child relationship
• Inefficient reference model in certain cases
• Node types not useful for WCM object wrapper
• No multidimensional view of repositories
• Big ramp-up

One of the examples at the session was quite shocking, actually. According to Devnani, some customers think of interoperability in terms of a content migration and moving things around from one repository to another. But there are still high hopes for CMIS.

Full story on CMSWire: Gilbane SF: Content Integration Standards — CMIS, JSR-170, JSR-283

Gilbane SF: Keynote Analyst Panel Highlights

One of the most anticipated sessions here at Gilbane SF was the Keynote Industry Analyst Panel moderated by Frank Gilbane. Unsurprisingly, the panel revolved largely around all things social media.

As Gilbane pointed out, it is the second time in a row when this panel is “focused on social media. That fact itself is a very import thing to consider.”

This time around, the following analysts gathered on the panel:

• Jeremiah Owyang, Forrester
• Hadley Reynolds, IDC
• Larry Hawes, Gilbane Group
• Lisa Welchman, WelchmanPierpoint

LW: I agree that we should be user-centered. The challenge has been is that we can’t do it.

One of the biggest things that people are ignoring is the revolution in product development that grows from paying attention to quality.

What are your quality controls like? Are you measuring for quality?

JO: The biggest finding in a recent Forrester research indicates that every page on the web will soon be socially ranked and rated. Google Chrome will get some social features. You can’t stop it.

The social movement is happening, and you better damn well embrace it, have a strategy and do it right.

JO: The reason we see so much fear when it comes to social media in the enterprise is due to the lack of strategy. Technology is only 20%, while strategy (roles, process, governance, measurement) is the other 80% of the objective.

LW: The number one disengage with social media in the enterprise is lack of engagement and guidance at the executive level.

LH: Social media is about the innovation process. Dell.com’s Idea Zone, for example, is used to attract ideas on how to improve products. Dell uses this social aspect to supercharge their innovation process and improve the flow of ideas.

LW: ’Cuz I gotta say web governance at some point today… You really can’t control real-time collaboration.

Full story on CMSWire: Gilbane SF: Keynote Analyst Panel Highlights