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.

Report: U.S. CMS Market to Explode due to Open Source

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

DMS Vendor KnowledgeTree Joins the CMIS Movement

CMIS, in its current state, seems to be best suited for document management scenarios. Hence, it was only a matter of time before a DMS vendor like KnowledgeTree jumped on the CMIS bandwagon (joining the many Web and Enterprise CMS players) and released its own implementation of the draft Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) specification.

Admittedly, quite a timely move, considering that the latest OASIS CMIS Technical Committee face-to-face meeting took place only two weeks ago, getting CMIS an inch closer to the actual standard level.

In the best spirit of interoperability, the CMIS implementation by open source document management systems (DMS) vendor KnowledgeTree is designed to follow the spec and allow ECM users to access enterprise document repositories that have a CMIS interface. The CMIS implementation for KnowledgeTree Community Edition Snapshot is available for download. The latest code can be found here.

Let’s not forget the recent CMIS Face-to-Face Meeting that took place in Colorado in the first week of August. According to Nuxeo’s Florent Guillaume, “…everybody is pretty happy with the spec as it is, and we’re nearly ready to start the OASIS review process that will first make it go through formal public review, and then open the OASIS vote for CMIS to become a standard.”

Guillaume hopes that CMIS “should be a 1.0 standard by the end of the year.” Read his Day 1 and Day 2 blogged observations.

More on CMSWire: Document Management Vendor KnowledgeTree Embraces CMIS

Vignette Tries Subscription-Based Licensing Model

Vignette has been getting some criticism on their pricing and licensing methods. Some consider it to be too expensive and too complex,  even for an enterprise-level CMS. Vignette listened and did something not many expected — introduced a subscription-based licensing model and announced new licensing models for its web content management solutions.

Given the current state of Vignette affairs, I can only guess what the future will bring and whether the new subscription-based licensing model will find its fans. At least Vignette is trying.

Full story + discussion on CMSWire: Vignette Tries Subscription-Based Licensing Model

Vignette and Its “Enterprise WCM Vendor Meme.” Really?

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):

1. 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…
2. 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?
3. 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.
4. The question list seems to be tailored specifically around Vignette’s products (keywords: portal-like, financial and government deployments, see #6, etc.)
5. Hence, no need to answer the questions — just do the tagging bit?
6. “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:
   1. 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.

What’s Bad for Economy is Good for Open Source

Open source offerings and associated services are getting better and starting to seem less risky, while IT budgets are shrinking.

Result? What’s bad for economy is clearly good for open source. A recent survey shows that web content management is one of the prime “targets” for disruption by open source.

Open source vendors rejoice, closed source companies nod in agreement and utter the magic word “interoperability.”

Full story on CMSWire: Bad Economy Is Good for Open Source