I’ve been thinking about that post as we got ready to launch our Online Marketing Suite announcement and wondered what you might think about a vendor bringing a lot of the tools together that you are currently integrating today. While I totally agree that we vendors shouldn’t box you into using our embedded out integrated tools(like MVT, or campaign mgmt), shouldn’t we vendors be trying to not only allow companies manage content more effectively, but allow them to build and manage more effective websites? Sites that generate more conversions, build more engagement, drive more revenue.

Now, I fully realize that technology alone can’t do this. This is just as much about people and process, but shouldn’t we (as vendors) be looking for ways to get the technology out of the way? Assuming of course, it’s not half baked technology (cooked up for some random customer), but well architected stuff, that’s pluggable and with lots of hooks and events to plug into other technologies. Shouldn’t we be bringing together all the technology that is needed to build websites that deliver the results their marketers are striving for? I think for the longest time, we WCM vendors just tried to be all things to all people, and I think that time is comming to an end. You are seeing vendors like us (Sitecore) and Interwoven and even Tridion start to focus on trying to solve the real business problem, not just offer tools and components. IMHO, that’s where the commercial world will start to really differentiate and pull away from the open source world and the average content management needs. Anyhow, I talk more about how we’re thinking about the market from a WCM vendor standpoint on my blog, but great topic as always.

Please take a look then at Jahia (www.jahia.org). Quite similar in term of end of use to a PHP solution such as: http://concrete5.org but JEE based and with better support for all enterprise wide features (clustering, multilanguage, site factory, workflows, LDAP/AD, WebDAV,…)

Did you see my other post about this vendor map. Had a few questions for you guys: http://jonontech.com/2009/03/09/cms-watch-subway-vendor-map-2009/ – I’d love a response to that

I personally think there is room for propriety companies to move into open source territory just as much as open source is moving into areas dominated by propriety software. For instance, at the same time Microsoft is pushing SharePoint they are also pushing PHP solutions onto IIS and making it easier for users to download open source applications onto the server via the Microsoft Web Platform.

People who need to work with both open source and propriety management systems will definitely start looking much more closely at those products/projects that have implemented CMIS.

I really like they way you put this: “push the proprietary providers into an even smaller percentage of the market”. I think that is exactly how it is going to play out. Be interested to see just how small it gets.

Also, maybe it would be useful is all CMS products declared the level of technieness of their target markets? Most of the smaller vendors in the lists above are targeted entirely at non-developers. The next level up could be those that can produce a site without a developer, but can also be extended. Next would come those that need a techie to install at set up. From there we’d move on to the products that need a few developers and possibly even a Managed Services/Support team to maintain. I’ve never though about it this way. Interesting …

And I’m looking forward to the bloodbath!

Having been through all the implementation phases with content management projects within various organisations, from html sites to bespoke systems to enterprise solutions and now proprietary mid-market systems and also worked for CMS vendors too – I’ve found it almost always comes back to a case that CMS Watch has long promoted – ‘best fit’

The reality is the vast majority of websites out there only have a small number of editors at most and simply don’t require the functionality offered by the longer standing business orientated .NET and Java based solutions – hence there is very little ‘community orientated’ coverage of them. The entry level licence points of most proprietary CMS solutions mean they will never be on the radar of the majority of website operators (hence not even mentioned in Wikipedia lists for instance).

You have operated very much in that 5% of organisations globally that require more from their web presence and regard it as ‘mission critical’ and will therefore be drawn to what they see as being ‘enterprise proven’.

The long standing ‘scare positioning’ against free and open source that I have used myself in the past is 1. over-reliance on those with technical knowledge to build and maintain the solution and 2. often not having one person/point of contact who can be shouted at/fired/not paid as and when something goes wrong.

My current project is a global website deployment using a proprietary CMS but during the 12 month period it has been running so far I have been using Joomla and its various plug-in components on a personal project. In terms of the ability for a non-technical power user to create a website from scratch and add in core functionality I would rate Joomla as superior to the proprietary CMS I am currently using and those I’ve used previously.

However – when it comes to devolving editing and administration to others around the organisation then the proprietary solution wins out as it is far more intuitive and easy to use. From a business perspective, user adoption is and will continue to be the top measure for Return On Investment. When issues have arisen they are resolved very quickly – in contrast to the many hours I have wasted in evenings and weekends trying to find answers to Open Source component problems in the community forums. There are also a whole bunch of cowboys out there hanging on the shirt tails of open source and it’s easy for the uninitiated to get burnt.

As you well know, many CMS implementations are driven by those with a business and marketing focus and the Open Source communities are still very much steeped in participants with a clear disliked and disdain for anyone ‘non-technical’. It is here that the proprietary providers have advanced most in being able to engage effectively with all audiences and decision makers within an organisation – they’ve had to as it is more than likely that the ‘non-techies’ are paying the bill!

From discussions I’ve had over the last year or so with agencies such as yours, open source CMS is undoubtedly crossing the divide and I think this will accelerate in the next year or so, particularly with governments starting to mandate its use. If the big open source communities can start to engage more effectively with non-technical participants then they will move forward a lot faster in enterprise adoption and push the proprietary providers into an even smaller percentage of the market. A bloodbath? You bet!!!

Other problem with “CMS” is that it also gets referred to in Tweets like “Help. 20cms of snow” and new recent batch about the size of one’s ePenis

I think you’ll find that your particular search results will be more interesting if you use the terminology of the vendors themselves, specifically, OpenText serves the WCM market. The term CMS is still developer centric, where as WCM encapsulates the space as defined by the analysts and such. Now, what end-users (those who are non technical) end up searching for when expressing their own needs, that’s an entirely different story!

Hope this helps your research.

Yes, I know all about CMS Matrix and other CMS sites that deal with the “mainstream” vendors. Really like James Robertson’s stuff too. I find these sources tend to cover the same systems, which makes life easier for us. I was aiming to highlight the proliferation of the little guys.

I like your list of Enterprise features. Probably worth expannding on this in a full post one day. I still think the NFRs are the main differentiators, though.

And finally, I’m not really panicking. The Dylan lyrics used as the intro to this post sum up my feeling better

Good post – something I’ve been heavily dealing with lately.

A list you didn’t mention but that’s been around a long time, and which I use often: http://www.cmsmatrix.org.

I don’t think you need to panic, but we all do need to monitor what’s going on in the open source arena – it’s evolving quickly, and I believe that soon we will see open source options that can meet the needs of an increasing number of enterprises.

@Rory – the important issue is not who your audience is (e.g. teenagers), but what functionality you need. Even a publisher who targets teenagers may need enterprise-class capabilities that the open source offerings don’t provide.

@franz – I like your comment that CMS vendors are “promising people that they can express themselves on the web.” However, I’d now add that an increasing number of vendors are now promising that their software can provide audience participation/increased stickiness or loyalty/community via Web 2.0 capabilities.

@Jon – You did a good job of listing the enterprise features that most often rule out open source options: scalability, supportability, performance, workflow, security, localisation/globalisation. A couple more I’d add:

o separation of content from presentation
o implementation of the concept of “content types”
o multi-site capabilities
o granular privileges
o role- and group-based security
o integration with LDAP, Active Directory…
o digital asset management
o integration with translation services
o variable templating
o a robust api
o sandboxing

There are a few open source solutions closing in on meeting these needs. The next few years are going to be fun to watch.

There’s very clearly a selection effect based upon the context of the word CMS. Isn’t that why vendors make liberal use of the word “Enterprise” to differentiate themselves?

“Your world” is dominated by clients who are used to spending money on their infrastructure. There’s a strong distrust of free products. Probably justified on the premise that if “it was any good they’d charge money for it”. Then there’s the: “who do I shout at if something breaks?”…

But I think this is a generational thing. As people who’ve grown up with the internet always “being there” reach upper management the revolution will have happened without a shot. (Can you even imagine an office environment without computers? I can barely imagine one without an internet connection…)

The fact that the scripting communities are now centred around stacks is also telling (Ruby+Rails, Python+Django, PHP+Drupal). It certainly feels like the tide is coming in. Still, who knows when? They have some big disadvantages such as the very difficult task of “getting their message out there” (e.g. franz’s post). Not to mention the low barrier to entry leading to a lot of poor examples to ruin the reputation (such as the connotations of “PHP”).

Interesting times!

Cheers
Carlos

I would love it though if -

Google builds a CMS that would work best with a Google Android OS Netbook. I’m a big fan of Google too and would love to see the netbook run off cloud computing. Their products almost cover your daily needs.

Sorry going off in a tangent here lol…

I guess I’ll have to move it at some point. Win some, lose some.

I think, in general, that people who’ve been exposed to several systems (from the very simple to the highly complex), or are at least aware of the differences, won’t find it too hard to decide whether a project could be done with a “simple” solution or whether it really requires something with more (specific) capabilities.

The problem — as I see it — as that people will usually stick to what they know (which is often just two or three systems), think that’s the whole breadth of the CMS landscape and end up choosing Ferrari’s to haul furniture or trucks to enter F1.

To someone who’s aware of the landscape and knows where to get detailed info — like you — I would say: don’t shy away from the “cheap and simple” solutions, since they can be incredibly (cost) effective. As long as you know what the limitations are.

As for what those limitations are — well, like I said, you’ve summed it up nicely, and it’s pretty much “all of the above”.

Maybe more interestingly, when I reviewed WordPress, I ended up thinking “this is a great system for blogging — I hope they don’t add a bunch of features for web content management because that’d turn it into a really mediocre CMS”. The lightweight systems run a real risk of losing their advantages when they try to evolve into something more — there’s already plenty of solutions out there doing the same, and having been at it for years.

Every now and again I wonder if these lightweight systems might actually do a decent job in place of an Enterprise System. What are the main features that make them unsuitable for the projects with budgets in the hundreds of thousands (or millions) of £££/$$$? Is it more about the clients’ reluctance to take a risk, their lack of faith in the small vendor, the feeling that the product is too cheap for their big aims, or about real product features. If it is the latter, are these features more about the non-functional requirements (reliability, scalability, supportability, performance, etc) or “enterprise level” functional requirements (say workflow, security, localisation/globalisation to name a few).

Just to make sure no-one misunderstands me, I do firmly believe than on 90% of the projects I work on, the commercial CMS we use was the correct choice or, at the very least, a good choice. However, on the other 10%, I’ve seen some pretty expensive bloatware where something much, much, much simpler could have done an equivalent (or better?) job …

Would love to hear your thoughts.
Jon

But it makes sense, since a CMS is many different things to many different people. And there’s literally thousands around — last time someone tried to count: Bob Doyle came up with 1800 (and that was several years ago).

If anything, the term CMS is becoming more common. Ten years ago, I had a hard time explaining to people what I was doing. Now, they just tend to oversimplify the kinds of problems a large-scale implementation deals with (and compare it to their own blog running on WordPress). I’m not being elitist about this — it’s just a completely different scenario.

So your problem isn’t that you’re out of sync with the world moving on. And there’s no need to panic. The problem isn’t that you’re not up to date, the problem is that it’s becoming harder to filter out information about systems that are relevant to you and the scenarios *you* are dealing with

Do you do any better than me when reading through the list of CMS’s on the sites I’ve mentioned above? Has Tridion ever gone head to head with any one them on an RFP?

And good to see Tridion on the Wikipedia list. At least someone good came from my post

And yes, I think the Enterprise CMS Vendors should be worrying. They can only hold off the next generation of product for so long. And again, that’s another posting for the future

So wait, WordPress does do that, doesn’t it? Going through that page any further hoping to kick out WordPress does not really help matters – it is listed! SDL Tridion? No where to be found (corrected now though)!!

I think I’ll just have to live with the fact that there are CMSs for the individual, small businesses and big busisnesses. But the line where one starts and the other ends is very fuzzy. I shall continue to integrate SDL Tridion and WordPress together for customers just to make life even more complicated.

Sometimes you’re talking about offline software, sometimes it is consumer focused, sometimes its FOSS (free) and sometimes it’s got a license fee in the 6 figures…

My personal opinion is this is like the automobile industry in the early 20th century – there’s so much interest because everyone sees a huge potential there, and no one has it right yet..

Well, except us of course.. http://concrete5.org is the best cms ever. And it’s free. Of course it is PHP based, you know, good enough for facebook & countless other big players… – but yeah separate conversation..

Of course, getting the word out about concrete5 is, to put it mildly, an uphill battle. You’re right there’s just so much noise and miscommunication about what CMS is and should be, that it’s hard to even get on the radar.