Jon On Tech

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.