Jon On Tech

Just finished my “Inconvenient truths and unsolved industry challenges” session at JBoye09, with Janus Boye and Jarrod Gingras of CMS Watch. You can download the slide deck as a 2MB PDF here

How many WCM implementations leave customers grinning from ear to ear? The statistics make sad reading. But if so many projects don’t meet expectations, who is to blame? Is it the vendor, either because of a crappy product or dodgy practice? Or the implementer that eats your budget while making a beautiful product smell real bad? Or are the customers naive, unrealistic or worse?

It’s almost 17:00 on a Friday afternoon, and I’ve just spent the last hour trying to write a blog post on Google Wave with The Motley Crew. Rather than say any more, read the post we made. I’ve embedded the wave below for those that have a Wave account, and the full blog text is at the bottom.

So I managed to get to the EPiServer Customer and Partner Day in London. The main goodies on the roadmap are the new Marketing Arena, and EPiServer 6.

CMS RFPs seem to want everything these days. But should you buy a single one-stop-shop product that does everything, or assemble together a set of best-of-breed products?

People are talking about Open Text’s CMS roadmap again. There were some interesting statements made in the latest Earnings Call, the most notable of which implied a migration from RedDot to Vignette.

People have been talking about their entry into the Content Management world. Pie started it. Lee Dallas followed, as did others. They’ve all got a common thread to their stories – getting sucked into Content Management completely by accident. So I thought I’d join in.

You’re not going to believe this. I’ve been getting some criticism. “Your posts are too long”, some people cried. “Lose the Twitterfeed”, shouted someone else. “Your Southpark Avatar is so 15 year old” claimed an anonymous coward. Hey man, I made that avatar myself. That hurts. But seeing as I work for an agency that prides itself on its insight and user research, I decided it was time to do some user research of my own.

You’ve initiated a new major WCM project. You’ve got your board approval, you’ve had your budget signed off, and you’ve a vague idea of what you want: a friendly CMS, a decent Search Engine, something to handle User Generated Content and some kick-ass Analytics. You’ve got a team of pragmatic-developer-ninjas waiting in the wings to integrate them beautifully. You’re in a good place. Time to procure some products. That should be easy.

It’s official. The geeks pwn Twitter. Just when one started to think the normal people were taking over, #songsincode enters the fray. Now this is without doubt the geekiest hashtag to trend. Yes, you heard me. #songsincode is trending.

We’ve all read plenty of CMS Evaluation RFP response documents. And we’ve all sat through many a long CMS Vendor demo. Maybe it’s just me, but they’re all starting to look pretty similar. So, how do you differentiate between these things?

Last week, LBi hosted the Umbraco 2009 UK meetup. This was mainly due to the enthuasism of the organiser, Darren Ferguson, and the power of Twitter. Niels, the founder, joined us from Norway.

Web Content Management has progressed from a Gartner MarketScope in 2008 to a Magic Quadrant in 2009. I’m normally quite a fan of Gartner, and was fortunate enough to hear Mick MacComascaigh (the lead WCM Analyst) give a great presentation at a recent event. We even had a nice chat about WCM Maturity Models afterward. However, I’ve got to say that it’s quite difficult not to treat this research as a giant advert for Oracle.

I got my Google Wave sandbox account not so long ago, so figured I’d try an embed.

Fifteens years ago, two great Americans, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, created something. Ross Garber and Neil Webber’s product came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Content Management editors who had been seared in the flames of unmanageable sites. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their tedious static HTML updates. But fifteens years later, the CMS world is still imperfect. Fifteen years later, thousands of vendors are still sadly crippled by a lack of standard patterns, terminology, tools and concerns. Fifteen years later, CMS vendors still live on a lonely islands of in the midst of a vast ocean of potential standards. Fifteen years later, there still isn’t anyone who has done it properly. So we have come here today to dramatize a shameful condition.

If you are into Content Management, here is a list of people you should follow on Twitter. And an easy way to follow them all in a few clicks.

I’ve now been live for about 100 days. This post talks about a few new plugins, further validation, authoring, SEO and traffic driving.

I like puzzles. And I really like puzzles you can do in a pub over a few beers. So I figured I’d dredge up a list I put together about 13 years ago and publish them here. If you get the trick, you should be able to figure them all out in a few minutes without pen and paper.

As promised, here are the completely meaningless results from the “Which Content Management System are you?” quiz.

Someone at Clickability has had a really bad idea. Firstly, they decided it was a clever to launch a smear campaign against one of their competitors. Secondly, they made the mistake of misquoting a few sources while doing it. The negative tactics and bad journalism were enough to annoy many people, so Irina just kicked them in the nuts. And I’ve got thoughts on the content too.

A light hearted post. I created a CMS quiz on QuizTweet which turned out far more popular than expected, so some information on that. Plus a plug for CMS geek events in London.

An interesting play by FatWire. Our knights in shining armour have heard the shrill cries of distress from the damsels stuck at the top of Tower Vignette and Tower Interwoven and have gallantly offered to migrate them away to the safety of Castle FatWire for free. The name of the package (FatWire Rescue Program) implies the damsels are in serious trouble. Maybe this is a marketing stunt, maybe it is a genuine way for customers to save time and money.

Twitter is a good traffic source for clowns like me that have just started a blog. How many times is one meant to announce the arrival of their latest and greatest blog post on Twitter before they look like a knob head?

Just read the Econsultancy CMS Survey Report 2009. It is an good survey, and the results make interesting reading. There were over 800 respondents, with just over half representing customers, with most of others being CMS Vendors or implementers. The customers and vendors only really had different opinions on three questions. And I have some interesting observations. At least, interesting to me.

It’s something I’ve been thinking about a fair bit these days, normally in the middle of the night. I’ve been burned a couple of times recently by extremely unpleasant content migrations, and extremely unpleasant nappy changes. Here are ten similarities. For those on the other side of the pond, a nappy is a diaper.

What exactly is a Full Service Digital Agency? What services do they offer? And how big does an agency need to be to credibly offer them? Who are the big boys? Does size really matter? Read on …

It’s been about 65 days since I started this blog, and about 50 days since I moved from hosted WordPress.com to a self-hosted version. Since gaining my freedom, I’ve learned a lot about blogging, WordPress and various tools of the trade. For some reason, I’ve struggled to find resources that list all of the nice tips and tricks out there. In this post, I’m only going to talk about how it is built – the on-site stuff. In Part II I’ll talk about how the off-site pieces – things like Twitter, Directories and external checking tools.

More like this please. As much as I enjoyed the CMS Vendor Meme, I have to admit that the results are fairly meaningless. Most of the answers were extremely corporate and towed the party line. So I was overjoyed to see Adrian Mateljan post his view on the Open Text response to the meme. I hope other developers will follow his lead.

It’s been a few days since the announcement that Open Text will absorb Vignette. Most of the larger analysts have thrown their opinions on the deal into the ring, and some patterns are emerging. I’ve even got some of my own thoughts too. And they’re not all good.

I gotta admit, this one took me by surprise. Open Text has just announced that they are aquiring Vignette. There is more to come, but here are my initial thoughts.