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.