Jon On Tech

Dear landlord,
Please don’t dismiss my case.
I’m not about to argue,
I’m not about to move to no other place.
Now, each of us has his own special gift
And you know this was meant to be true,
And if you don’t underestimate me
I won’t underestimate you.
- DEAR LANDLORD

So, the CMS Vendor Meme has come and, it seems, gone. 20 vendors of all sizes joined and in provided us with some valuable insights. Not to mention a list of vendors to follow on Twitter. Interestingly, all of the “Enterprise” vendors claimed the questions weren’t really suitable for them.

As promised, Vignette have posted a new set of questions, which they’ve called the “Enterprise Web Content Management (WCM)” Meme. Personally, I don’t really like the WCM abbreviation for this and so I’d suggest we call it the #ECMMeme, even if it is quite focussed on the web part of ECM and ignores many of the dimensions of classic ECM.

I’m not sure if the vendors will respond to this one as readily as they did the last. The first one was certainly a brilliant, original idea. I think this is great, but there is a chance that it could be considered the start of what @kirstenpetra calls “an ongoing ‘meme-off’”. I for one hope that they do respond.

Onto the questions. They cover traditional Content Management, but some stray into delivery services and products such as the delivery portal and social media solutions. They feel quite “By Vignette, For Vignette” and lack the authority of the last meme as those questions were drawn up by a trusted third party in Kas Thomas. Have a read of Irina Guseva’s thoughts on this.

I remember a long long time ago doing plenty of CMS selection exercises that ended up with Vignette against Broadvision (remember them!). Back then, Broadvision offered a whole range of products, while I favoured Vignette as they were “just a CMS” and “focussed on the core competencies of the product”. How times have changed, with every major vendor becoming an End-to-End eBusiness Solution.

A few additional questions I’d have like to have seen:

• The different products in our offering are fully integrated, and feel like they are part of the same family
• Our products are easy to upgrade, with most customers running on the latest version

Vignette have tagged Interwoven, Fatwire, SDL Tridion, Oracle, Day & OpenText – three of which didn’t reply to the first meme. Interesting that no-one is bothering to tag Microsoft. And does anyone count SAP as an ECM vendor these days?

And just so you know, you can actually comment on their FaceBook page. You just need to be a fan of Vignette!

Game on.