You said you were going’ to Frisco, stay a couple of months.
I always liked San Francisco, I was there for a party once.
- MAYBE SOMEDAY

Good news. CMS Geeks are getting tanked up all over the world, and it’s spreading. We all drink and blabber on the last Thursday on every month, unless a conference or something means we should move the date for an uber-event. Here is a quick summary of where we are.

London (MeetUp, LinkedIn) - The original, a.k.a. #LastThursdayCMS. Thanks to Kenton and the other guys at Squiz for starting it. Been going a few years now, and had many celebrity visits. We will have lots of nice photos once our most recent celebrity visitor, @theresaregli, figures out how to download from her camera.

New York (LinkedIn) –  Follow this one on #CMSGeekUpNYC. There have been a few meetings, with another big one coming soon. Irina (@irina_guseva) has taken the baton here.

San Francisco (MeetUp, LinkedIn) - The first one is TONIGHT (20 May 2010), moved to coincide with Gilbane SF. The Mad Monks (@pmonks) is your guy for this one, and it’s on #CMSGeekUpSF. Hoping for some photos soon.

Amsterdam - The first event is tonight, and they’re using #CMSGeekUpAMS. The SDL Tridion folks will be there in force and you may see a Hippo or two. With the @erikmhartman event in town, it’s likely to grow. Don’t be put off by the stupidly small beers they serve in Amsterdam. Just drink more.

Boston - Yet to have a meeting, but the intentions are good. Threatening to organise is @natea. This should get big with many vendors based in the Boston area. Not sure we have a hashtag yet.

Paris (MeetUp, LinkedIn) – Just created! First event is on Monday 14 June, after which is becomes Last Thursdays. Created by @adeforsan and @elieauvray, and you can follow it on #CMSGeekupParis. Expect free drinks from Nuxeo, Jahia and others.

Geneva (MeetUp) – We’re “spreading like cholera”. A new joiner, set up by @scroisier. Looking forward to hearing about their first event.

So if you live in/travel to one of these areas, join your groups and tell your friends. A few cities with a visible CMS presence haven’t joined in yet. I’m talking to you Stockholm and Copenhagen. And Western Europe could use a couple. Australia (Yuval, you listening?), New Zealand, South Africa and India need to represent too.

Start spreading the word and creating those groups. Finally, feel free to map a better map than my horrorshow.

Celebrity Guest In London

We heard the Sermon on the Mount and I knew it was too complex,
It didn’t amount to anything more than what the broken glass reflects.
When you bite off more than you can chew you pay the penalty,
Somebody’s got to tell the tale,
I guess it must be up to me.
- UP TO ME

Here we go again. Peter (@pmonks) and Laurence (@piewords) are at it again. The current enormously important discussion topic is whether the ‘E’ makes any sense in the term ECM.

The idea that WCM + ECM = CM is bollocks. I do agree that ECM = WCM + RM + DM + some other things. But what does CM equal? I’m going with Peter here. ECM = CM and the ‘E’ needs to go. If there is a good reason to keep the E, do we also need EDM, ERM and E-EveryThingElse?

In Pie’s blogpost, he lists some important characteristics that form the essense of ECM. However, they all hold true for CM too. They really differentiate between ECM/CM and WCM.

So let’s have a quick look at the word “Enterprise”. Here are some uses:

• An Enterprise is an organisation. When used in a product name, it normally means stuff that happens behind the firewall. For example, Yammer is an Enterprise Twitter. I’m not sure anyone thinks that ECM is for internal stuff (including partners and suppliers) and CM is for stuff you share with the world. Or do they?
• Enterprise License – this usage is similar to the above. It’s an all you can eat for your organisation, that starts expensive and gets worse.
• Enterprise Architect – I’m not sure what this means exactly. It’s not something I’ve ever wanted on my business card. Technical Architect or Solutions Architect work just fine.
• Enterprise Java Beans – Now that was a fuck up, wasn’t it? It really just means bulky and complex – the opposite of lean and simple. Ask any of the guys at Vignette who are trying to make core changes to the product. Newer, simpler technologies have bitch-slapped EJB’s all over the place. It feels to me like the E in ECM and the E in EJB are the same thing. It’s the E that makes me scared.

Interesting aside: CMSWatch have recently renamed the Enterprise Tier product category in their report to “Complex Enterprise Platforms”. The use of the word Complex here is particularly intriguiging. In my simple mind, Complex is always a bad thing in a product, even when the problem domain has complex problems. The product’s aim in life should be to hide that complexity from everyone. I wonder if the fact that all of the platforms classified by CMS Watch as complex (Autonomy Interwoven, EMC/Documentum, IBM, Open Text/Vignette, Oracle) are J2E based means anything (Interwoven has Perl and other stuff thrown in too). While we’re on it, 5 of the 6 Upper Tier products are Java too, except for Tridion which is a .NET/Java/COM mashup.

Here is the truth – you’ll only hear the words “Free” and “Enterprise” in the same sentence from an economist, never a CMS salesman. And Enterprises are by their very nature big and slow. The closest thing to an Agile Enterprise that you’re likely to see is Captain James T. Kirk taking a sharp left while evading those pesky Klingons. These days, Enterprise is a mindset which implies Complex. And Complex is Bad. Please, Lord, help me keep things simple and take away that E.

You can either go to the church of your choice
Or you can go to Brooklyn State Hospital
You’ll find God in the church of your choice
You’ll find Woody Guthrie in the Brooklyn State Hospital
And though it’s only my opinion
I may be right or wrong
You’ll find them both
In the Grand Canyon
At sundown
- LAST THOUGHTS ON WOODY GUTHRIE

Forgive me, WordPress, for I have sinned. It’s been 8 weeks since my last blog post. And in that time many people have slandered WordPress, accusing it of not being a Web Content Management (WCM) platform at all. But that’s not important right now.

What is important is the main reason for my 8 week lapse – the arrival of my very own WCM – Willow Coco Marks, born 19 Feb and smiling ever since. So I’m now the proud owner of two darling little sproglets. And no-one would ever dare to ask me which of my children I love more. That would be horrible. It would be like asking a CMS vendor to take five super important features decide which they love the most. No-one who has seen Streep bawling her eyes out in Sophie’s Choice would go there.

So, here is the deal. I challenge any CMS vendor to rate these in order of priority:

• Editors – A user interface that is a editor or publisher’s wet dream
• Performance - The fastest, most stable and scalable CMS in the world
• Features – The richest set of features any CMS could dream of offering
• Developers – An open, standard, extensible product that makes developers salivate
• Website – A product that can give you a kick-ass website, really really quickly

Yes, yes, yes, we know they are all important. But not equally important to you. For example, would you choose a proprietary format if it made the editor interface better? Would you add the feature the developers all want if it affected performance?

So, dear vendors, have a long hard introspective and submit your answers in the comments in the form E P F D W (assuming you like the random order I listed them in) with the first being most important and the last less important than the other four. And no, there isn’t a right answer.

Who wants to play?

Trails of troubles,
Roads of battles,
Paths of victory,
I shall walk.
- PATHS OF VICTORY

The votes have been tallied, checked and verified by our independent auditors. With over 250 tweets to the #cmshaiku hashtag and 114 votes in the Grand Winner category, it’s been more popular than expected. Time to announce the #cmshaiku 2010 winnners. The worthy Grand Winner from Cheryl McKinnon (who knows a thing or two about legacy vendors and legal):

Legacy vendors
want to play haiku too but
poems stuck in legal

I’ve always suspected that Peter Monks is actually a Bot written in Erlang, but he proved me wrong. He’s actually a BotNet with a powerful Poetry Plugin. Sadly, his Distributed Denial of Justice attack meant that poor Kathy Brown’s masterpiece was pushed into third. Philippe came a close fourth, although yours truly thinks his was probably the most inspired entry.

Cheryl (Self Promotion) and Peter’s (Random) legions of voters meant they also won their categories. Embarassingly I won the Product category by a country mile. Laurence Hart won the General section, and Paul Carvill won the Despair section. I fear I did Philippe (@proops) a disservice by including both his genius open source haiku and my fork in the same category, thus splitting the vote.

So, I owe Cheryl, Peter, Kathy, Laurence and Paul beers. You’ll receive your prizes next time we happen to be in a bar together. All liability for events occuring after drinking said beer falls squarely on the drinker. Kathy can tell you what happened last time I bought her a beer …

If you need a bit more poetry in your life, you can follow all the entrants using this Twitter list.  Also, a special shout to Tim Walters for laughing in the face of the Forrester personal brand building embargo.

Lastly, make sure you get your copy of the book from our friends at Gilbane Outsell.

And please, I beg, tweet /  haiku should inspiration / find you! For the book.

Took an untrodden path once, where the swift don’t win the race,
It goes to the worthy, who can divide the word of truth.
- I AND I

It’s the biggest competition to hit the web in a long time – The 2010 CMS Haiku Beer Contest. We created the fourth worst poetry in history, caused the CEO of Sun to resign, and inspired a prize for the Gilbane Conference in San Francisco. If I have forgotten you, please leave your entry in the comments. You can still make the book.

But enough of that, it’s time to pick the winners. Due to the overwhelming response, I’ve divided the best into six categories of five. Please vote in each category. Voting closes on Feb 10. I’m buying beers for all the winners.

There were many other fine entries. Sadly, a few good ones didn’t meet the strict traditional 5/7/5 syllable rule. We decided that an @ or a # could count as a syllable, but didn’t have to.

Happy voting, and watch this space for the winners.

Through this open world I’m about to ramble,
Through ice and snows, sleet and rain,
I’m about to ride that mornin’ railroad,
P’raps I’ll die on that train.
- MAN OF CONSTANT SORROW

During the panel discussion at the recent British Computer Society Open Source event, there was discussion (and confusion) about Open Source versus Open Standards. I was asked “So, can you give us some examples of Open Standards”. I rattled off a few, but I thought I’d add a few more here. There is a lot more to be said on the topic, but a good place to start is to list the standards that I think are important.

If I get the time, I plan to turn this into a nice diagram that is much more easily digestible. If there are important standards that I’ve forgotten about that anyone interested in web sites should know about, please let me know in the comments. I’d avoided worrying about file formats (e.g. PNG, MPEG, PDF). And REST isn’t a standard – it is an architectural style that was developed in parallel with the HTTP/1.1 protocol. I’m sure there are many many important ones I’ve left out though.

This is a long and boring post with a record-breaking number of acronyms. So maybe you should stop reading now.

The Internet Plumbing

These standards are the plumbing of the Internet. Like the sewers under a big city, they are impossible to change and will be there forever. They’re infrastructure. Some people are saying Twitter has already become infrastructure, but I’m not convinced about that yet. These standards are split into layers – the link layer is about physical connection to a network and include standards such as Ethernet. The Internet layer routes packets of information across one or more network using the Internet protocol (IP). The Transport Layer is responsible for the reliable delivery of messages, and uses standards such as TCP or UDP. Finally, the Application Layer provides higher level application specific protocols such as DNS, HTTP (and WebDAV) for web servers, FTP, SMTP for mail servers, NTP for time servers, LDAP for user directories and so on. But I’m not here to talk about any of these. I want to talk about the standards that sit on top of these, specifically for web pages.

Making Web Pages

First 10 Years of the W3C - Click for large version

Let’s start with the standards we know and love that make up web pages. Of course we have HTML 4, XHTML and the eagerly awaited HTML 5. We make our HTML pretty using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and we interact with the page using the Document Object Model (DOM), which has a large number of associated standards. Note AJAX is not a standard, despite what you might hear. The XMLHttpRequest DOM API (which can be used to implement AJAX) is currently a last call working draft and may be a W3C standard soon. Another client side standard, Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) never really took off and probably never will.

So we have standards to make interactive web pages that may or may not be semantically rich. But the world would be a better place if these pages can be accessed by as many people as possible. So we have accessibility standards as part of the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). These include Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) for your web page and the imminent Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA).

Excellent! Our HTML is neat, we’ve styled it, and all humans can interact with it. But what about the machines? They don’t understand our badly structured markup. If we want machines to be able to understand the content, we need to engage with the semantic web standards and Resource Description Framework (RDF). The UK public sector is keen on HTML+RDFa although this is not a W3C standard yet. You can query your RDF data set using SPARQL and define your ontology (formal representation of concepts and relations between them) using the Web Ontology Language (OWL, not WOL). While we’re at it, a related and very succesful standard which touches my world is the Dublin Core Metadata Standard, which is an ISO standard. I like this good introduction to Semantic Web standards if you want to read more.

The Biggest Standard of the Naughties

Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a hugely successful standard. If you judge the success of a standard by its adoption (which I do), it was the Hit of the Decade. XML Schema (XSD) has replaced the ill-thought-out DTD standard for defining XML structures. Other child standards include the node selection language XPath and query language XQuery. XSL Transformations (XSLT) is my favourite templating language. XML Inclusions (XInclude) joins XML documents together. They’ve also given us XForms to collect data – sadly it hasn’t taken off as I’d have liked.

Also XML related, the Web Services Standards have given us a wonderful way to make remote services play together. The Holy Trinity behind Web Services are SOAP (previously Simple Object Access Protocol) to define the message formats, Web Services Description Language (WSDL) to give service descriptions and Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) to find the services. UDDI is actually an OASIS specification, not W3C, but it fits better here.

OASIS standards

OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards), in their own words, “drives the development, convergence and adoption of open standards for the global information society”. The OASIS standards that touch my world include, in no particular order:

Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks when you’re tryin’ to be so quiet?
We sit here stranded, though we’re all doin’ our best to deny it
- VISIONS OF JOHANNA

The end of the decade is nigh, and the mystics at CMS Watch have been throwing the bones again. They’ve released their very interesting 2010 Technology Predictions. The first of these caught my eye:

CMS Watch: Enterprise Content Management and Document Management will go their separate ways

I don’t agree with the terminology here. In my world, Document Management is one of the pillars of Enterprise Content Management. Enterprise Content Management is not a technology, it’s a business problem. Documents are one of the types of content the Enterprise needs to manage. So they can’t really go their separate ways. The wise Pie responded quickly to this prediction with an alternative:

Pie: Enterprise Content Management and WCM will go their separate ways.

Now this I agree with more than the CMS Watch version.  Parts of ECM include Document Management, Records Management, Collaboration, Imaging, Workflow and all that good stuff. It is these pillars that allow a business to manage their content. The end game of all of these technologies is content sitting in a repository that can be easily found and consumed. The includes all the fun with versions, security, compliance and anything else you’d want to do with it. But it does not include setting up web based delivery channel that exposes some of this content. WCM should not be considered part of ECM.

Now Pie also acknowledges that his prediction isn’t going to happen, although it should. My prediction is even less lightly to happen, but here it is anyway:

Jon: Enterprise Content Management is well defined. The term WCM is horseshit, unnecessary and should take a long walk off a short pier.

I can already see the news headlines: LONDON, 2009 – SHOCK HORROR! WCM Geek Demands Death of term WCM. But it’s true. I’m of the camp that wished the term WCM would cease to exist.

The W is meant to stand for Web, which makes people think Web Site. But it also includes Mobile, Kiosks, TV and various other HTML based delivery channels. Many vendors are trying to deliver their WCM content to print channels too. I want any product that ends in “CM” to focus on content creation and management. As Pie said, this content should be accessed via an API or repository standard. A Content Management System should be an extensible application that works pretty well out of the box. The kind of standard these systems care about include data/process standards (for example DITA, BPEL, or Dublin Core) and repository access standards (for example JCR or CMIS).

The other half of the coin is the delivery framework. These are called Web Publishing Tools (WPT) in NPR’s COPE and Presentation Management Systems (PMS) by Peter Monks. Things like Struts, Spring Web, ASP.NET MVC, Ruby on Rails and many many more are all delivery frameworks. So are Portals. They let you manage authentication, URLs, site structure, templates, layouts, page composition, personalisation, aggregation and more. They understand standards like JSON, AJAX libraries, Web Services,  SAML, OAuth, OpenID, Open Social, Portlets, Gadgets, WSRP, and so on and so on. They let you call any API to bring in content or functionality from any source.

Of course you can use these technologies to power sites that aren’t “content managed” at all.  They should treat CMS driven content components, SoCo powered UGC components, DAM powered media components and anything else that can sit on a web site as equals. Interestingly, it isn’t uncommon to see “Web Content Management Systems” used to power sites that that aren’t really content managed. Take something like Drupal – it’s often simply used as a delivery framework without any content modules. I’ve launched sites running on .NET “WCM” systems that have never intended to have any content changed post launch. In these examples, the WCM product is being used purely as a good delivery framework.

But sadly, my prediction it isn’t going to happen. I’m just going to have to keep thinking of a WCMS as a tightly coupled hybrid of a content management system and a delivery framework. On the plus side, I’ll continue to make money out of poor customers that think a “WCM migration/replacement” doesn’t involve a complete site rewrite as they’re throwing the delivery baby out with the content bath water. Losers.

Here’s to Cisco an’ Sonny an’ Leadbelly too,
An’ to all the good people that traveled with you.
Here’s to the hearts and the hands of the men
That come with the dust and are gone with the wind.
- SONG TO WOODY 

 As everyone knows, I think the CMS Watch Content Techonology Vendor Map is awesome. They’ve just released the 2010 version. As far as I can tell, the main differences between this and the 2009 version are shown below:

Get the high res version from the CMS Watch site. 

 So, what’s changed? Firstly, the big mergers and acquisitions:

• Adobe decided to buy Omniture for reasons I haven’t figured out yet. It’s made the map more topologically tricky.
• OpenText has gobbled up Vignette, removing another of the big dots
• Oracle has bought SUN, which hasn’t changed much since Oracle had a few of everything already.
• JBoss and eXo have merged Portal platforms
• ClearStory is now The FeedRoom, who have been recently acquired by KIT digital.

New Kids On The Map:

• Vyre isn’t new, but it’s now recognised as a DAM product too. This was discussed last time. OpenCms has made the WCM big time, along with Hannon Hill, Telerik and Omniupdate.
• Mark Logic storms onto the XML Component Management line after creating quite a buzz in the last few months. Quark is on there too, Revolutionizing Publishing. Again.
• Cisco’s new tools get them onto the Social and Collab line. It’s busy there though – they’re joined by Salesforce (the Daddy), Yammer  (like Twitter for the Enterprise), MindTouch (Open Source Enterprise Networking Platform) and KickApps (another community builder).
• Three ECM platforms I know nothing about: Fabasoft, DocuWare and Objective.

And finally:

• FaceBook has gone. Maybe not enterprise enough. Which is probably why Twitter isn’t on either.
• Poor EPiServer still hasn’t made it onto the SoCo line, even though they’ve got a very mature Community product
• SAP still isn’t considered a CMS, which is fine by me.

So that’s that. A 300 page report costs about the same as an overpaid consultant researching badly for a couple of days to prepare that disappointing Google-fleeced document you were embarrassed to show your boss. It’s a no brainer. Buy the reports. All of them. They rock.

The empty-handed painter from your streets
Is drawing crazy patterns on your sheets.
- IT’S ALL OVER NOW, BABY BLUE

Every now and again, certain tumultuous events coincide that makes us feel insignificant. A bit like a total solar eclipse, which is a rare and humbling thing. This week three seemingly unconnected occurances came to pass which made me stop and think. Firstly, CMIS was mentioned in the New York Times. Yes, the New York Times. Secondly, Jeff Potts released his “Getting Started with CMIS” tutorial. And, finally, I had the chance to drink beer and talk shit with the great David Nüscheler.

So, to honour all of this, I drew a picture.

Why, you may ask. Well, after chatting to David, I felt inspired to think (and blog) more about the JCR, CMIS and OSGi. But while doing my cursory research (that’s a strong word for what I do, but anyway), I discovered that there were quite a few things I knew nothing about, and a few products that I’d never heard of. I also coined the word Dignorance in honour of my newly found knowledge gaps.

So here is a small version of the picture. Click for a large one, or download it as PDF. Do whatever you want to with it. If you think it is useful, or think it needs fixing, leave comments here or get in touch. I’m sure it’s completely wrong all over the place. If you want the original Visio drawing to play with, let me know.

Next time I come to your office, I except to see this printed as A3 and stuck on your wall.

UPDATE 18 Dec 2009: I’ve written an article on CMS Wire which explains some of this. Have a look:

http://www.cmswire.com/cms/web-cms/wcm-field-notes-the-skinny-on-jcr-cmis-and-osgi-006279.php

These be seven curses on a judge so cruel:
That one doctor will not save him,
That two healers will not heal him,
That three eyes will not see him.
That four ears will not hear him,
That five walls will not hide him,
That six diggers will not bury him
And that seven deaths shall never kill him.
- SEVEN CURSES

Better late than never. I promised I’d scribble something about the Web Idol Competition at JBoye 09. The competition involved 6 vendors each presenting a fast paced 7 minute demo to the crowds, mimicking something like Pop Idol. The judging is done by an “expert” panel of 3 judges who offer inane commentary. The audience vote holds all the power over the final outcome.

I was lucky enough to be asked to be one of the three judges on the panel. Teaching me the ropes were Erik Hartman, a grandfather of Content Management, and Sara Redin of JBoye. The night before, I was out drinking with a Dutch guy called Erik and was enormously impressed by how much he knew about all the CMS products out there. Idiot that I am, I didn’t put two and two together and only realised that he was the Erik when I sat next to him on the panel. I’ve been a fan of his for ten years.

Anyway, the participating vendors (in the order they presented, from our right to left in the picture) were Microsoft, e-Spirit, Kapow, TERMINALFOUR, 23 Video and Sitecore. So 4 content management vendors, a content migration vendor and a video startup.

First up was Microsoft, presenting a Web Content Management interface in SharePoint 2010. I think it is a massive improvement over the monster that is MOSS 2007, but my fellow judges didn’t think much of it. The much hated Ribbon interface (as featured in the new versions of MS Office) received scorn. The demo didn’t show anything profound. While it is true that we didn’t see anything that other systems haven’t been doing for years, at least it brings SharePoint into the ballpark. I’ve been violently opposed to the idea of using MOSS for public facing sites, but the new version might warrant a rethink.

While we’re on this, those of you that saw Steve Ballmer’s discussion with Tom Rizzo in October 2009 must have had their ear’s prick when they heard this:

We have a lot of customers using SharePoint in Internet sites, and with the capabilities of 2010, we expect to see that explode. But it wasn’t the initial design point for SharePoint.

Wait, Steve, did I hear you right? After The Righteous have been fighting (and losing) the SharePoint For Public Facing Sites for many a long year, you suddenly say that Internet Sites were not a design goal of the initial SharePoint. No shit. But why couldn’t you have saved everyone a whole lot of pain and said this when MOSS was released. And if, in 5 years time, you end up saying the same thing about SharePoint 2010, I think I’ll kick you in the starboard testicle.

Next up was e-Spirit, showing off the FirstSpirit CMS. e-Spirit aren’t a vendor I know much about. They’re really big in Germany, and are trying to get into other markets. I actually quite like the interface we were shown, although it does look rather complicated. It’s always hard to judge as we were show the interface as seen by an administrator. Maybe it’s simpler if you’re logged in as a lesser mortal. The drag-and-drop of multiple objects looked rather nice. That said, the demo didn’t go well at all. The connection to the interwebs was very slow which screwed the demo badly (my comment about everything being run on local machines was wrong). And the choice of things to show wasn’t great either.

Third on was Kapow, doing a content migration demo. I thought the demo was decent, taking content from the conference site and sticking it into SiteCore. However, I suspect that most of the audience probably weren’t sure what they were seeing. For me, the demo was a lot more interesting than the rather dry Kapow presentation the night before. They showed the web interface for scripted remote control of a browser for migrating content. If I understood it correctly, it’s a bit like the Selenium IDE. Seeing as I’m more a fan of coding/scripting than pointing/clicking, it didn’t do much for me. I’m sure there is a scripting interface too, but we never saw it. I know the Vamosa product suite far better than I know Kapow, and the demo I saw didn’t allow me to compare the two.

TERMINALFOUR was fourth. Piero showed a nice solid demo of the interface with a bit of WebDAV thrown in, but again nothing profound. Later that beer-fuelled evening, Janus introduced Piero to someone from the Danish digital agency 727 online, and we all spent the next half an hour talking shite about 727 landing on TERMINALFOUR. You probably had to be there.

Fifth was 23 Video, a startup that also produced the video for the conference. While the previous four demos were feature showcases, this demo was scenario based, which the judges preferred. But as the judges are all CMS geeks not Video Sharing Sites geeks, there weren’t too many questions. For example, my company uses the YouTube API and Viddler at the moment. The demo didn’t convince me to consider changing. I’d also have loved to see a video upload, but I guess the restrictive conference bandwidth probably meant they were clever to avoid this.

Last were defending champions SiteCore, presented by the defending champion Lars Birkholm Petersen. This was probably the most feature poor seven minutes of all of them. The whole demo consisted of creating a form with a CAPTCHA, and trying to fill in the form. There was a peak at the newly released Online Marketing Suite. They cleverly did not ever actually show the SiteCore interface which some of you will know also contains an Office-style ribbon.

However, it was a brilliantly presented featureless demo. Lars had hats representing conference organiser Janus, and CMS Analyst Adriaan Bloem (who wasn’t at the conference because he wasn’t capable of passing the CAPTCHA). He told a great story and got lots of laughs from everyone. You can watch the all the demos below.

The results:

• 3rd – TERMINALFOUR
• 2nd – 23 Video
• 1st – Sitecore, defending their title

Unsurprisingly, the votes went according to the quality and style of the demo, not according to what was actually demoed. And the best demo certainly won. But none of the vendors showed any profound features. Throughout the conference everyone was talking about The Next Big Thing, Social Media, Engagement, Web 3.5, etc, etc. Yet all the CMS vendors simply showed their content entry forms! If I’d had a vote, I think I’d have voted for Microsoft (shock, horror!) based on a Most Improved Award mentality.

The whole event was great fun. The other two judges were mean – Erik being the hardest to please. I’m told that Erik looks like a kitten compared to Tony Byrne, who makes vendors cry. Finally, I often wonder how important the “sizzle” factor is in demos that are part of formal RFPs. I hope the buyers judge on more than the audiences at Web Idol do.

In the dime stores and bus stations,
People talk of situations,
Read books, repeat quotations,
Draw conclusions on the wall.
Some speak of the future,
My love she speaks softly,
She knows there’s no success like failure
And that failure’s no success at all
- LOVE MINUS ZERO/NO LIMIT

Just finished my “Inconvenient truths and unsolved industry challenges” session at JBoye Aarhus 09, with Janus Boye (the organiser) and Jarrod Gingras of CMS Watch. The session was fairly lively, and the #fixwcm hashtag was nice and busy. Over 300 tweets so far, and it’s still going strong. Keep the discussion going. If you’re at the conference, grab me for some beers over the next couple of nights.

You can download the slide deck as a 2MB PDF here:
http://jonontech.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/JBoye20091103_v1.2.pdf

The slides probably don’t make any sense without my commentary. In fact, they probably don’t make any sense with it.

I know a few people have blogged about the session. So far I’m aware of:

• Janus Boye – Rethink web content management
• Jarrod Gingras, CMS Watch – Is WCM fundamentally broken?
• Irina Guseva, CMS Wire - #jboye09 Web Content Management: Inconvenient Truths and Industry Challenges
• Ron Miller , FierceCM – Is the vendor solely responsible for WCM project failure?
• Michael Kowalski- Hey everybody, let’s #fixwcm right now!
• Yuval Ararat – What went wrong? #fixwcm!
• Vern Imrich – Get the most out of a WCMS Trial, Test, or Proof of Concept (POC) (Sales Pitch Alert!)
• Ian Truscott – Does WCM Really Need a Fix?
• James Hoskins – #fixwcm – some thoughts from the front line
• Seth Gottlieb – The world’s worst WCMS
• Bryan Ruby, CMS Report – When WCM is no longer fun
• Philippe Parker – Something rotten in WCM
• Tristan Renaud – Fixing the WCM: don’t forget your crampons, your rope and your guide
• Lokesh Pant – Who should #fixwcm?

And thanks to the kind people that took the photos I stole without credit from Google. Sadly, I stole them from stolen sources so really don’t know who to credit. Finally, here’s a taster of some of the many tweets that came in:

• bjfogg OH in #jboye09 session: If we can name things better, we can put standards around them #fixwcm
• RussellNelson #fixwcm 1 happy cms customer in a room of 20 – that meets my definition of something that is broken
• jameshoskins #fixwcm not all the buyers fault – WCM vendors need to focus on long standing pain points as much as those business winning new features
• tednyberg Often times when companies switch #WCM often I think it’s a sign of dissatisfaction with the implementer, not necessarily the #CMS. #fixwcm
• sigdestad #fixwcm Dare to say no to the customer – Good advices some times require courage
• adrianmateljan Are the likes of @cmswatch diverting us from the real implementation issues? Perhaps #agencywatch would be more appropriate? #fixwcm
• theresaregli @janusboye says a big part of education is finding people who are trusted #jboye09 #fixwcm
• irina_guseva If you’re waiting for #WCM vendors to wake up and fix the problems, it is unrealistic, says @janusboye #fixwcm #jboye09
• yuvalararat Guys the products are fine the way we implement and the way clients envision the system is the failure, Kill the sales guys #fixwcm

Standing next to me in this lonely crowd,
Is a man who swears he’s not to blame.
All day long I hear him shout so loud,
Crying out that he was framed.
- I SHALL BE RELEASED

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?

On Wednesday morning, the Web Content Management Track of the Greatest Web Conference in the World kicks off. The opening session, “Inconvenient truths and unsolved industry challenges “, has a rather unambitious aim – to solve the world’s WCM problems. A bit like WCM World Peace. On the panel we’ll have Janus Boye himself representing the customer viewpoint, Jarrod Gingras of CMS Watch representing the analyst massive, and little old me defending the honour of the implementers.

The topics are sure to be varied, and our esteemed moderator will be sourcing questions from the crowd, and from Twitter. We’ll be using the hashtag #fixwcm so be sure to set up your Twitter search now, and get involved in the discussions. Apart from blaming each other for multiple disasters, some other issues we might be covering include:

• Does the term WCM even make sense these days?
• Are there too many vendors out there, and will we see consolidation?
• Can buyers navigate the marketplace themselves?
• Why do so many projects fall on their face?
• Will Open Source vendors dominate in the future?
• Do you need hard requirements to select a CMS, or is it a philosophical decision?
• Are more Web / Content Standards the answer to our prayers?
• Why are the Requests for Proposal always so bad?

You can start shaping the session right now by tweeting your thoughts using our #fixwcm hashtag. We want to hear why you think WCM is broken, and what the biggest challenges are. Or if you just want a 140-character rant about a horrorshow of a project, that’ll be fun too.

Join us live on Twitter on Wednesday 4th November between 10:30 and 12:00 CET to throw in some curveballs. And if, for some reason, you’re attending the conference but choose to attend one of the competing parallel sessions (like the great Kristina Halvorson, Bob Boiko, Jane McConnell or Shawn Shell – it’s a tough pool), you can still participate on Twitter at the same time!

See you in person or in the Twittersphere. It’s going to be cold as hell in Aarhus, but the discussions are sure to get heated.

P.S. If you think the main WCM problem is the design of the content repository, it looks like @pmonks, @justincormack, @micycle and others might have it fixed before our session starts. Hope they’ll share their findings live! The Content Tree is Dead. Long Live the Content Graph.

Well, early in the mornin’
‘Til late at night,
I got a poison headache,
But I feel all right.
- PLEDGING MY TIME

I managed to get to the EPiServer Customer and Partner Day in London on Tuesday. I presented there last year, but this year could relax and go to lots of sessions. There were over 250 people, a big increase. They’re doing rather nicely in the UK, and everywhere else. They claim to have launched 500 new sites in the last three months. Personally, I hate the number of sites metric. I wish vendors would use number of new clients. For a nice, general overview of the day read James’ blog post. I’m just going to ramble a bit as usual.

EPiServer are still moving extremely quickly, which I talked about six months ago at the Swedish event. The main goodies on the roadmap are the new Marketing Arena, and EPiServer 6. And I stayed till far too late and still have a headache two days later, but that’s a story for another time.

Yams, Yams everywhere

Yes, we’ve got Yet Another Marketing Suite. Hot on the heels of  SiteCore’s Online Marketing Suite, Tridion’s Unified Online Marketing Suite and Autonomy/Interwoven’s Optimized Landing Page Solution, our friends at EPiServer showed off their new Marketing Arena. EPiServer’s product has four main prongs (each sold separately, batteries included):

Campaign Monitor and Optimiser (CMO)

The CMO has two parts. The Landing Page Optimiser (LPO) performs A/B Testing and has a nice interface. It is an entry level product that doesn’t include demographic information in the A/B testing which, for me, is something they need to introduce before I’d consider using it. The tool needs to be able to say, for example, “Page A performs best for US customers and Page B for European customers”. It also doesn’t perform Multivariate Testing but who know what the future holds. It provides basic web analytics, but wouldn’t claim to complete with a niche analytics product. In summary, it’s a nice entry level tool.

The second part, EPiServer SEO, performs good static analysis of your site and provides friendly instructions about how to improve your searchability based on the ever-changing rules of the search engines. It does all the things it should, looking at sematic code quality as well as content quality. It summarises this into a single number (your Digital Visibility) in a similar way to WebSite Grader. It’s a hosted service maintained by a third party. I wish I’d known about this before an we could have tried to set up a partnership with LBi instead – we have a service that’s very similar.

One thing I don’t like is the fact EPiServer SEO also has basic web tracking, to provides things like Heat Maps showing where users focus. Other parts of the CMO already have script based tracking. Two products doing this is one too many. And another trend I don’t like – black seems to be the new white. CMO has a shiny black background on their new “funky” product, while everything else is still white. Vignette did it with their Rich Media product. What’s wrong with white backgrounds anyway?

B2B Adapt

This is cool. Using an enhanced version of the Dun & Bradstreet company database, it maps the visitor’s IP address to their company’s Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) code. From this, the product can tell the vertical industry of the company, the number of employees and even the annual turnover. These attributes are then fed into the rules engine to allow you to target different content to the revelant people. For example, you could show a very different pages to a small Swedish fishing company and a large US pharma. This is a hosted service which contains both the up-to-date database of companies as well as the rules.

I’d really like to use a service like this simply to get the demographic information and then put it to use in my own evil ways. However, I’m told this isn’t legal. There are strict (and somewhat quirky) rules around how company demographic information can be used.

B2B Prospect

This is a lower-cost option using the same technology as B2B Adapt. It simply provides a report of the companies that visited your site, including contact details and other useful things.

From Zero to Hero

Those of you that are wise in the EPiWays will recognise a few of the features mentioned above. EPiServer have a really really strong development community and an extensible API, so third parties are continually adding modules and features. They’ve just taken the first step towards an EPiAppStore with the release of the EPiServer Extra directory which includes free and commercial modules created by EPiServer and third parties. Many of these modules are now in the main product. Some of the extras that have made the big time include:

• dropit - Their X3 add-on has become EPiServer Composer, part of the Create+ package.
• Meridium – Their ImageVault DAM add-on is also part of Create+ (and they stayed late and had lots of beer)
• Ottoboni - Their InteractiveScene is in Create+ too.
• Online Services – XTractor for EPiServer has become EPiServer SEO.
• Enecto - The adaptivecontent and prospectfinder are B2BAdapt and B2BProspect respectively.
• EPiTrace – this is now bundled in the Marketing Arena.

I really like this model, by the way. All the most of the integrations are loosely coupled, and using partners like this allows the EPiServer guys to focus on the core.

What’s in EPiServer 6

The other big news is, of course, the arrival of EPiServer 6. Technically, this isn’t a massive change and the upgrade from 5.x promises to be trivial. As @rogerwirz pointed out in his closing presentation, it’s more of an “editorial training upgrade” than a technical one. I loved the comedy-act demo from @sunnaster and @mathel, sucking Tweets into the new Dynamic Data Store. I’m slightly uneasy about the Dynamic Data Store “Big Table” architecture, but I think this is because I’m old-school and fear change. But don’t get fooled into believing that this is anything like Google’s BigTable which isn’t an RDBMS and wouldn’t pass the ACID test. The EPiServer “Big Table” really is just a big bastard of a SQL table which sounds pretty hard to index. But I’m sure they’ve got it right. Something to talk to Roger about next time he’s in town.

I liked the demo of the new Dashboard (and how to write extensions for it) from @epirach and @bevan_souster. This Dashboard is based on the new EPiServer CMS Shell framework and provides good Portalesque features. However, I think it also overlaps enormously with many of the features of EPiServer Composer. So much overlap, in fact, that keeping both technologies alive doesn’t make sense. If I was a betting man (which I am) I’ll wager the heart of EPiServer Composer will be ripped out and replaced with a shiny new one in one (or at most two versions) time. At least I hope so.

Some other new features of EPiServer 6 which excite me:

• Completely browser compatibility on the editorial site
• Complete mirroring rewrite, which is a very good thing
• Access rights on page types
• Access rights on languages
• Drag and drop page tree ordering

Final Thoughts

The thing I like most about EPiServer is their geekiness and honesty. For example, in the keynote, they happily admit which products are simply OEM’ed partner products. Some competitors will wax lyrical about how their product has won Award XYZ, which happened before they even OEM’ed it.  The final presentation was a tech demo that everyone was forced to watch. I did hear some less-technical people saying that some of the presentations aren’t slick and “marketeer” enough. Which is great. Keep it up I say.

But please use a shorter hashtag than #episerverdayuk09 next year.

Never bein’ able to separate the good from the bad,
Ooh, I can’t stand it, I can’t stand it,
It’s makin’ me feel so sad.
- DEAD MAN, DEAD MAN

ACME Corporation have decided to launch a web presence to support their thriving cartoon supply business . They hire you as the brand new big technical cheese to realise their vision. And this vision, as usual, includes everything: Content Management, of course; Search so that you can find the products; a Community to provoke discussion about new product design; Digital Asset Management to store the images and blueprints of the products; Analytics to track down who is interesting in committing nefarious deeds; CRM to improve the way they deal with their prospects; and mapping software to track Road Runners. And something to glue these all together. So, Mr Big Cheese, what are you going to do: buy a single one-stop-shop product that does everything, or assemble together a set of best-of-breed products?

The ACME Corporation Web Site

What do the RFPs say customers want?

The majority of the CMS Vendor Selection RFPs that I see demand feature ticking around search, analytics, SoCo, DAM and all the rest. They ask for it all. These RFPs are geared towards procuring a single product that does everything. Most also all assume that the Content Management System will also be the delivery layer and ask for many delivery layer features. A pure-play decoupled CMS wouldn’t stand a chance. If the scoring was done purely on the features lists, a portal would often beat a CMS. The vendor presentations tend to focus more on the features of the canned demonstration site they all have than on the CMS back end.

What does the research say customers want?

The research doesn’t agree completely with this. The recent eConsultancy CMS Survey showed that more customers want best-of-breed suppliers over a one-stop shop, especially for companies with more than 100 employees.

What is the strategy of the vendors?

Well, they all seem to heading towards the one-stop-shop solution. Sure, they’ll release new features to their core product. But more and more, they seem to be differentiating by moving into other areas. CMS vendors, in particular, are packaging in social/collaboration software, search software, shopping baskets and payment modules, basic DAM and the kitchen sink. Everyone is producing their own Analytics and MVT software. For example, SiteCore recently announced their Online Marketing Suite and EPiServer called with their Marketing Arena . Seeing as most of these features really sit at the delivery layer, not the content management layer, the number of pure decoupled CMS vendors is on the decline. There is a huge amount of M&A activity at the high end of the market as everyone tries to cover all the bases.

So, the strategy of the vendors seems to be on diversification. Gut feeling would imply that finding a niche, or focussing on improving the core CMS would be front of mind. Not so, they’re all playing “RFP feature ticking”. They all bang on about being “open” and supporting open standards, while at the same time singing about their proprietary, tight integration between their newly aquired products. For example, a typical conversation:

Me: So, Mr Vendor X, why do you think we’d use your new Analytics|Search|Community product over the one we currently use?
Vendor: Because our one has a ‘much deeper integration with our product’ and ‘understands our product’  better.

There are problems with this as I see it, some of which include:

• everyone is building monoliths
• as parts of the system become obsolete, and it becomes harder to take advantage of unexpected future goodies
• you really are at the mercy of a single vendor

What does the future hold?

I would have expected the fact that standards are improving to mean that we’d have more focussed best-of-breed vendors that allow you to plug their product in to any CMS – the nice Lego-block style architecture diagram. However, currently it looks like we’re heading the other way, which really depresses me. We might even be buying the Google CMS Appliance before long.

If it continues at this rate, our friends at CMS Watch might need to consolidate all their lovely reports into the “Web In A Box” report quite soon …

Oh God said to Abraham, “Kill me a son”
Abe says, “Man, you must be puttin’ me on”
God say, “No.” Abe say, “What?”
God say, “You can do what you want Abe, but
The next time you see me comin’ you better run”
Well Abe says, “Where do you want this killin’ done?”
God says, “Out on Highway 61.”
- HIGHWAY 61 REVISITED

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 is quoted below:

Paul Steep – Scotia Capital

What sort of the timing for the integrated platform, and I guess, would the plan be to migrate that Vignette product over to RedDot that [number] there. I think they are on a different architectures as I would recall?

John Shackleton

Actually, it probably be the other way, Paul, where we would migrate the RedDot to the Vignette platform. We will be showing a detailed road map at the conference in October, so I think you’ll get a good clear. But it looks pretty interesting, the way that things are shaping up.

Ho hum. Another migration in a box. I really liked the post from Markus Giesen on the Unofficial RedDot blog. He asks many of the questions that customers, implementors and investors should be asking. He also has good inside knowledge, and so I’m not going to repeat what he’s already explained so nicely. Read his post. Instead, I’m going to outline the options as I see them.

Option 1: Sophie’s Choice

This one is easy to explain – a tragic choice between two unbearable options. Kill either RedDot or Vignette, one bullet for the CMS product (VCM or LiveServer) and one for the Delivery product (Vignette Application Portal or Delivery Server). This is most likely to mean bye-bye RedDot unless, of course, the people at Open Text pay more attention to the Gartner Magic Quadrant than me, in which case it’s goodbye Vignette. However, there is no chance at all that VAP will die so I think Vignette is safe. Option 1 isn’t going to happen.

Option 2: The Quick PurpleDot Brundlefly

So, next option. Merge the two products together into some kind of new hybrid product. Now this simply isn’t going to work. I’m not going to waste anyone’s time by listing the numerous reasons why this is insane. Instead, I’ll let the good children of South Park explain this for me:

Kyle: Well, what about our pot-bellied elephant?
Mephesto: Oh. Well I’m sorry children, but, pig and elephant DNA just won’t splice … Although, maybe I could help you add a few asses to that swine of yours.
Cartman: You can keep your hands off of Fluffy’s ass!

‘Nuff said. I’m not sure if you’ve ever tried to implement a site on a CMS with four asses. It isn’t pretty. Trust me.

Option 3: The Long Winded PurpleDot Brundlefly

Okay, so we’re not killing a product, and we’re not merging them either. The next option that is being discussed is the creation of a brand new product using the best engineering ideas and lessons from both products. Realistically, however, it’ll take far too long to build a brand new product from the ground up. In reality this will either end in the euthanasia of a product  or a slower route to market for a PurpleDot Brundlefly. I see this option as a marketing spin on the infeasible Options 1 and 2. Not going to happen.

Option 4: The Alterian Gambit

Here is a viable option. Keep them both, keep supporting them both, and keep both products separate. Re-assure existing customers and implementers that nothing is really changing. This approach would keep existing customers happiest, but might make new sales more difficult. However, I think there are many ways they could differentiate the products, as I explained in this post. They could split by technology (Java/.NET), by industry vertical, or by dramatically reducing Red Dot’s license fees to compete lower down the food chain.

Option 5: The SKU Jedi Mind Trick

Keep them both and make the sheeple believe they’re part of the same integrated product suite. It’s amazing what new product name and a CSS change can give to a marketing manager. So in reality this is similar to Option 4, with a bit of confusion thrown on top. This is a fairly likely outcome.

Option 6: The Maintenance Milking Machine

Now this isn’t really a separate option, but a given. Open Text would be insane to rock the boat and potentially scare of the maintenance paying existing customers. The MMM could work in conjunction with either Options 5 or 6. The Shareholders will demand it. Expect to see both products being supported for many years to come, although don’t hold your breath for too much innovation.

While I can’t predict what’s going to happen, maybe history can teach us something. In the spirit of ignoring copyright rules, I’ve attached a screenshot from the CMS Watch CMS Report from 2004.

Extract from CMS Watch 2004 report. Please don't sue me.

We all know what happened last time. Let’s see if history repeats itself.

Thought I’d seen some ups and down,
Til I come into New York town.
People goin’ down to the ground,
Buildings goin’ up to the sky.
- TALKING NEW YORK BLUES

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.

My working life started out pretty sweet. The day after my last University exam, I hopped on a plane to New York town armed with only my wits and a fistful of quickly devaluing South African currency. I was planning to flip burgers or sometihng, but was lucky enough to get a job writing Oracle Pro*C programs for Standard and Poorson Wall Street. For about 4 years, I did about 10 months in the Northern Hemisphere contracting and 2 months back in South Africa, completely avoiding winter. Among other things, I wrote some ODBC drivers in London and did a Verity K2 gig for ABN Amro in Amsterdam.

Although I had played with Java applets at University, the web wasn’t really a big thing at all. In 1997, I did my first pseudo-agency job for Electric Ocean in Cape Town while tutoring 3D Graphics and not doing my planned PhD. Although this was all web based, there was certainly no concept of an out-of-the-box Content Management System. The closest thing to a product then was Netscape LiveWire on Netscape Enterprise Server, which is now iPlanet. It was really just a lot of haxoring with C++, Perl and server-side JavaScript, and a bit of sysadmin on the side.

Then, in early 1999, I started a job on a start-up Accenture (then Andersen Consulting) project which had a big idea and a whole load of funding. I mean really a whole load of funding. We were partying like it was 1999, which it was. The tech team I was on probably peaked at around 15 people, and I found myself sort-of-leading the web tier. We were using Sybase’s Jaguar CTS server, all the Netscape Servers and good old CORBA. And some new thing called Vignette Story Server 4.1.

No-one in the team had ever seen a CMS before, I got to know Vignette really really well. I started out doing the Content Delivery Application (CDA) with my newly aquired TCL skills. Anyone else remember syntax like this:

[SEARCH TABLE retro
INTO var
SQL "select RETRO_OID, RETRO_NAME from CMS_SYSTEM where ( SYNTAX = $crap)"]

I love [FIELD RETRO_NAME [FIRST $var]]

Then, about a month into the Vignette implementation, someone had the nerve to ask how content was actually getting into the system. It was about that time that we realised Vignette Story Server 4.2 didn’t actually come with an interface and we’d have to, um, build on ourself. So we panicked, flapped, scritched and pokked for a while. A team photo at the moment of realisation is shown below:

Team Photo after realising we had to build our own authoring interface

Quite a schoolboy error for a multi-million pound project. So the project plans were hauled out again, and I became Content Management Application (CMA) gimp. If I have to say so myself, we built the best darn CMA in the whole of the UK.

My summary of the project looking back - we didn’t know what the hell we were doing and it is a testament to Accenture’s impressive project management methodology that we actually managed to deliver the project. The startup became Sportal.com and did pretty well in the end. I managed to make a good few friends on the project, many of whom I still see today. Some might actually read this – please comment if you do. After this I guess I became a Vignette consultant for a while and, when Content Management became mainstream, I ended up in agencies doing Content Management implementations all over the place.

And that’s the story of how I met Vignette over 10 years ago. And although the Vignette name will soon be dead, it might just be hanging around for another 10 years. But that’s a story for another time.

P.S. I think #cmsorigins is a cool Twitter hashtag. If there is a Meme ID out there, let me know.

There’s kissing in the valley,
Thieving in the alley,
Fighting every inch of the way.
Trying to be tender
With somebody I remember
In a night that’s always brighter’n the day.
- SEVEN DAYS

Picture the scene

You work for a big organisation. 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. Let’s start with a cartoon which I made using the wonderful Project Cartoon.

You don't want this to happen, do you?

How Many Tenders?

So you need WCMS, Search, UGC and Analytics. We’re going to call these The Four Pillars for today. First question: How many RFIs/RFPs do you issue? Just the one so that a single vendor (or consortium) supplies all of the products? Or how about a single one with “Lots” allowing vendors to only respond to part of it? Or, on the other extreme, a separate RFP for each product? Some of you won’t have this choice as it is dictated by your procurement rules, but let’s pretend you do.

While each product certainly covers a Separate Concern of the site, the reality is that there will be a lot of integrating to do. The world doesn’t have mature enough standards to allow you to switch them in and out like the proverbial Lego blocks. The products will also certainly have large functionality overlaps. If you go for separate RFPs or split it into Lots, it is exceptionally important that you explicitly list the integration points between them. I’d suggest that WCMS and Search probably have the most integration points and should get special attention. User Generated Content/Social products often have widly different architectures and so should also get a lot of focus. They won’t all slot neatly into your solution in the same way. On the other hand, the major Analytics products all have the same basic architecture and so is, in my opinion, the one that is easiest to tender for in isolation. Because I am nice and want to help you all, I plan to write a followup blog post listing the most common integration points soon.

If each product is being selected in isolation, you need to be extremely careful. You could follow the selection and evaluation criteria by the book and end up with four products that are each “best of breed” and match your requirements wonderfully. But throw them into the same architecture diagram and they behave like four cats on heat. On the other hand, if you go for one process to select all the products, you could end up with a monster that you don’t really understand and that would need to be replaced in its entirety should one part of it become obsolete. I think its a fairly safe bet that you’d want to replace at least one of the Four Pillars within the next 2 or 3 years. You need to make very sure that this doesn’t mean you need to replace the other three. Finally, make sure your developer-ninjas have input into the selection criteria. You don’t want your team of C# developers to all have to rush to a COBOL training course.

Give a budget range. Seriously.

Janus Boye started a discussion about this on his blog entry CMS Selection: Reveal budget in the RFP? I’ll repeat the comment I left on his blog:

I’ve seen 2 RFPs in the last few months in which client didn’t specify a range and got something like this (I’m paraphrasing, of course):

2000 Ford Taurus SES – $2,482
1993 Toyota Camry LE – $3,582
2008 Lexus LS 600h L – $99,995
2002 Hyundai Sonata GLS – $4,300

They wanted to buy the Lexus, but their procurement was having none of it. They had to extend the RFP to attract more responses that allowed a “like for like” comparison. If think they’ve even had to go back to the Ford, Toyota and Hyundia salesman and ask them what they could do for more money … If the RFP had given a range (say $75,000 – $150,000) they’d have saved themselves a load of time and effort.

Also, if you have a weighted scoring matrix, make your selection criteria transparent so vendors allocate an appropriate amount of time to each section. Procurement like a fair fight. If they don’t think it’s fair, they might throw the whole thing back in your face.

Other Procurement Gotchas

The whole process can take a lot longer than you think. Many of the RFPs we respond to are extremely clear that they will never, under any circumstances, extend the deadline for submission. However, many of these delay the announced decision dates by weeks or even months. That’s not really fair now, is it. Give yourself enough time. Remember, the longer your RFP, the longer you’ll need to read and evaluate the submissions. In addition to procurement, include your legal department early too. Dotting i’s and crossing t’s isn’t as quick as it sounds.

Some clients I deal with have to go to procurement for everything. It seems a pity to go through a massive process to by a $99 Web Server Plugin. Make sure you know the thresholds so you can start the process in good time. I recently suggested to a client going through this that they buy all five options rather than going through procurement to select one. I was sort of joking and it probably isn’t legal, but the sad truth is that would be cheaper and all the vendors would be happy.

Something else I’ve seen a couple of times recently revolves around cross-country procurement. The rules in different countries are often different and, if you plan to use the software in multiple regions, you might need to go through “global procurement” or some equivalent. I still don’t really understand how to define when software is “used” (and so needs to be procured) in a region. If I have a server farm in country A and country B each hosting their respective country sites, then I’ll probably need to procure for both. But what if I have a single farm serving all coumtry sites? Or what if the whole shebang is *aaS hosted out of the Cayman islands? Bearing in mind you probably won’t know the architecture of the product when you issue the tender, it is even more important you understand the procurement rules.

Another gotcha I’ve seen a few times recently – falling foul of procurement’s “we’ve already got a Global Enterprise Unlimited Uberlicense for product X so best you used that instead”. Dilbert explains this better than I ever could:

Finally, make sure you cover license costs for development, staging and pre-production environments. And think about disaster recovery licenses and maintenance fees. Sometimes this isn’t as easy as it sounds as you haven’t procured all the products so probably don’t know your architecture yet. For example, having an Active-Active DR environment often means very different license costs from an Active-Passive.

My advice: involve procurement in the process early to ensure you understand the process. Although procurement exists to ensure you negotiate a good deal (which is great) in a fair, ethical manner (which is even more important) you need to make sure you don’t get hammered by a process that screws your plans or timelines. You’d be surprised how often software procurement is on the critical path and delays a project.

You say my eyes are pretty and my smile is nice
Well, I’ll sell it to ya at a reduced price
You don’t understand it – my feelings for you
You’d be honest with me, if only you knew
- HONEST WITH ME

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. Most vendors say yes to nearly everything, and the top products have interfaces and patterns that are converging. Many experts are agreeing that having long lists of requirements doesn’t help anyone anyway. So, how do you differentiate between these things?

When picking a CMS, I think the actual product is only about half the story. The other half revolves around the intangibles including the vendor themselves, their support, their roadmap and priorities and, very importantly, how much you trust them. So, to mix things up a bit, why don’t you ask the vendors a few of these questions during your next RFP or Q&A session. When you interview a candidate for a job, you always throw in a few odd questions to keep them on their toes. Let’s do the same to the vendors.

1. Who was the last vendor to beat you in the last round of a selection exercise? Why do you think they won? – This doesn’t have a right answer, but every vendor has lost a few. It would be interesting to see how they answer this.
2. If, in a few years time, we decided to move away from your product, how would I go about migrating all my content into a new system? – I want a system with a nice content export and a vendor willing to admit it is a possibility.
3. How many active developers do you have on your developer forums? – This is something you can check. If you ask in the demo and you think they’ve made up a number, say “Show me”.
4. All of these are important, but please rate these in order of your priority: a) Product Features b) Performance and Stability c) Usability d) Security – Again, no correct answer. I’d expect most to say c) as customers give this as the biggest selection criteria. But still interesting to hear what they say after they’ve repeatedly said they’re all important.
5. How much would I expect to pay a contractor developer that is skilled with your CMS, and are they easy to find? – If a vendor says they don’t know, they’re probably talking horseshit.
6. Assuming your CMS license cost 10 groats, how many more groats would you guesstimate we need for our entire implementation? – I’d expect them to say somewhere between 10 and 40, depending on the project. But fun to hear what they say. Implementing costs more than buying.
7. Why are the URLs on your demo site/corporate site so ugly? – Most of the demo sites have crap, non-SEO friendly URLs. If the implementation of Friendly URLs is as easy as the vendor claims, what haven’t they done it on their own sites.
8. If we selected your CMS, how would you recommend we went about selecting an implementation partner? – Three kinds of answers here: a) we’ll build it for you b) we have an extensive partner network or c) we recommend Company XYZ. I’m skeptical of a), but even if you like that option it’s a good discussion to have with the vendor.
9. How important is accessibility to you, and why doesn’t your site (which is presumably built with your CMS) validate? – They almost never do. I did a W3C validation test here not so long ago. Most will blame the implementation. Say will say it wasn’t a requirement, which I don’t buy. They fact that they don’t validate 100% isn’t a disaster, but it has got to look like they’ve tried.
10. Your product also includes modules for analytics/search/community/collaboration/outbound email. When should I use these instead of the existing products I own for these, and what benefits do your products give? - Many vendors seem to use features that I wouldn’t consider core to Content Management in order to differentiate. I like my CMS to be focussed, but I’ll concede that sometimes getting other components as part of the same product might be interesting. But ask things like “So, how does your analytics compare with Omniture” and see what they say.

Even better, during the meeting you could have a screen running a Twitter search for the vendor’s name. You’ll see a fair bit of “Looking at XYZ” and “XYZ Industry News”. But you’ll also see a lot of  “A Pox on XYZ and all of their houses” from angry developers.

Assuming it isn’t illegal to ask this kind of thing, I’d love it if people gave it a try. Or do you already have similar questions you ask that I could add to the list? One day I might be sitting as the same meeting as you and we can both enjoy some questions we haven’t heard twenty times before.

Now I gotta friend who spends his life
Stabbing my picture with a bowie-knife
- I SHALL BE FREE NO. 10

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. Our involvement started after I saw this:

How To Get A Free Venue

Darren and I hooked up, and the rest is history. So Twitter can get you free stuff too. The 20 people was a bit conservative – turned out that nearly 60 people signed up. Even CMSWire covered the event which makes it famous. According to Darren, the biggest cock-up of the event was the live coding demo which, true to form, failed spectacularly. I never trust a live coding demo which works properly so maybe that isn’t such a bad thing.

Waiting near the barista before the start

For me the highlight was a chat with Niels Hartvig (@umbraco), Umbraco founder and guru. We talked mainly about XSLT which, I think, he likes. W00t! Turns out that he’s presenting later in the year at the Best Conference in the World. Yours truly is speaking there too. Come along – you know you want to. He flew over from Norway to be at the Umbraco Day, which kept all the groupies very happy.

Niels reveals the bonus features in the upcoming Umbraco version

I also really enjoyed chatting to Gregory Roekens (@roekens), CTO of Wunderman. It’s great to have a couple of beers with someone that works for another big agency and has to deal with the same kind of issues that I do. Hoping we’ll be able to do it again soon and, in his words, become good frenemies.

Thanks to Darren for organising, Marcus for doing all the logistics at LBi and Percipient Studios for taking a whole load of cool photos that I’ve stolen. You can also read more about the day on the LBiQ blog by @bijeshtank and @mobragauk. If anyone else knows of any other blogs or photos, please add links in the comments.

I went into a restaurant
Lookin’ for the cook
I told them I was the editor
Of a famous etiquette book
- BOB DYLAN’S 115TH DREAM

So, 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. To start, here it is:

Gartner Magic Quadrant for WCM Aug 2009

Who Is It For?

I think the introduction to the research is interesting. It starts by listing who would benefit from it:

This Magic Quadrant will help CIOs, and business and IT leaders that are analyzing their Web strategies to assess whether they have the right WCM offering to support them.

This seems to list everyone except the people that are actually going to use the thing and, as a result, seems to place very little weight on the things I care most about: usability for the editors and a warm fuzzy feeling for the developers. The report is far more concerned about market share, geographical penetration and long term company prospects. History shows us that a typical WCM implementation have an average lifespan of only three years. Is this because the buyers aren’t thinking about long term CIO/Business/IT issues? Or is it because the world changes fast and we shouldn’t worry our pretty little heads too much about things too far in the future?

CMS Watch had something to say about the report, mainly around the fact that it is too high level and strategic, and tends to ignore the “nitty gritty” details that can be so important. CMS Wire also talk about it here but they seem more happy with the whole thing.

As an aside, I also don’t necessarily think that a large stable company always leads to a large stable product. Just look at all the recent acquisition activity. The road map for some of the big boys is far from clear and some well established products might start to fester due to lack of R&D investment.

Gartner vs Forrester

So, how much to the two big analyst firms agree? Let’s have a look at the Forrester Wave from a couple of months ago:

The Forrester Wave™: Web Content Management For External Sites Q2 2009

So they do agree on a most things. Both have Autonomy/Interwoven and SDL Tridion in the Leader area. Fatwire, Open Text (pre-Vignette acquisition) and Day are all up there. Microsoft is struggling on both, although Forrester prefer their strategy while Gartner prefer their current offering. IBM, Vignette and EMC are also put into the same ballpark.

Gartner covers a few more vendors. The three smaller .NET vendors (Ektron, SiteCore and EPiServer) all make the grade. I’d have expected to see the EPiServer dot in almost the same place as SiteCore as, in my experience, the two always come extremely close in all evaluations I’ve seen. I’d have put them both ahead of Ektron, but maybe that’s just me. I guess EPiServer are only just starting their US invasion which might have penalised them a bit.

The two reports also agree on not including Open Source vendors for various reasons. Quite a few people in the blogosphere are upset about this. The cynical amongst you might think that this is because Open Source vendors don’t pay analysts as much to include them on reports, but this couldn’t possibly be anything to do with it.

But What About Oracle?

Aaah, yes. The anomaly. Oracle UCM nee Stellent comes first in the Gartner report while a distant tie sixth in the Forrester one. Oracle is going mental about this on Twitter and any other advertising channels it can find. The research cites Oracle’s strengths as the ability to integrate with other Oracle products, including their CRM system. I’m not a fan of these so-called “tighter integrations” which are diametrically opposed to my view of loosely-coupled separation of concerns. Sounds like Gartner want Oracle UCM to become a monolith which reaches far beyond the boundaries of what I’d define as Web Content Management. Interestingly, Gartner’s three leaders are all vendors more traditionally associated with ECM. Price doesn’t seem to be a factor at all in the quadrant.

For the very observant among you, note that all the URLs to Gartner’s public “sponsored” research contain /oracle/, not just this one. So I wouldn’t get hung up on that – I presume it’s the platform they use? [UPDATE: See the comment about this below]

Niche Players: Good News and Bad News

Here’s the good news. Gartner advises that maybe a Niche Player is good for you:

Gartner advises organizations against simply selecting vendors that appear in the Leaders quadrant. All selections should be buyer-specific, and vendors from the Challengers, Niche Players or Visionaries quadrants could be better matches for your business goals and solution requirements.

Here’s the bad news. I can’t for the life of me figure out why anyone would want to look at a Niche player according to Gartner’s metrics. They have no ability to execute, and no complete vision. Sound like a bunch of losers. In fact, in my view it’s probably better not to be on this MQ at all than to be a niche player. You’ll save yourself a bunch of money, and a bunch of bad publicity. Nstein tweeted happily about being included on the quadrant for the first time. On the other hand, I’d be furious if I was an established vendor like Alterian and got stuck in the bottom right. So, a question to all you vendors – would you rather be on this as a Niche Player, or not on it at all?

Note that in the MarketScope from 2008, both IBM and MediaSurface (Alterian) were “Cautions”. IBM have progressed safely into the Challenger zone while I’m not sure exactly what they’ve done in the last 12 months to get there. And poor Alterian seem like the victims here, being penalised primarily, it seems, for having more than one WCMS product. Now while this can be confusing, they certainly aren’t the only vendor in this position.

I’ve decided I certainly prefer the research that doesn’t rank the vendors and serve as self-fulfilling marketing for the vendors that do well. The strengths/weaknesses listed are really high level and vague, so you need to take a leap of faith. This kind of advertorial isn’t for me, I’m afraid. Maybe if Gartner published the complex calculations (and they are complex) that go on behind the scenes I’d trust it more.

So Why Trust Me?

Well, I’m Head of Development for the company that came first in the most recent Forrester Wave™: European Interactive Agencies — Web Design Capabilities. What more proof do you need?

Arthur Weasley: This is very, very peculiar. It seems as if your hearing is to be in front of the entire Wizengamot.
Harry Potter: I don’t understand. What has the Ministry of Magic got against me?

My American dream
Fell apart at the seams.
You tell me what it means,
You tell me what it means.
- HEARTLAND

I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest vision for The Future of Content Management Systems.

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.

I am not unmindful that some of you CMS vendors have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have code bases that are ten years old and will resist change at every turn. Some of you have lucrative clients locked in to long term contracts who will not be easily upgraded to new systems. Some of you have come from attempts to differentiate yourselves from your competitors that have left you battered by the storms of feature bloat and staggered by the winds of pricing wars. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive.

Go back to Open Text, go back to Autonomy, go back to Microsoft, go back to SDL Tridion, Day, Alterian and Fatwire. Go back to the smaller commercial vendors and hordes of Open Source vendors, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed. Let us not wallow in the valley of proprietory isolation.

As we Separate the Concerns and Embrace the Standards, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead. We cannot turn back. There are those who are asking the devotees of standards, “When will you be satisfied?” We can never be satisfied as long as systems all use different names for the same thing. We can never be satisfied, as long as CMS vendors ignore their core features and focus on gimmicks for sales pitches. We cannot be satisfied when content migration from one system to another takes longer than building a house. We cannot be satisfied as long as as Content Management, Community, Analytics, eCommerce and more are moulded into a giant monolith instead of walking hand in hand like loosely coupled brothers.

I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the Content Management dream.

I have a dream that one day the vendors will rise up and live out the true meaning of interoperability: “We all need to work together to succeed, and those that don’t play will be left behind.”

I have a dream that one day all vendors will stop building exactly the same thing in slightly different ways, and that ridiculous templating languages will be replaced with the beauty of XSLT. And that repositories will not differentiate between data and metadata.

I have a dream that one day even the commercial vendors, who are often centres of innovation, will implement their systems using standard formats and will interoperate with open source tools. And let the best of these standard formats not start with a J and alienate more than half of the vendor community.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day log into every CMS system using their OpenID and avoid the perils of priopritary user databases.

I have a dream today.

Let logical, standard XML formats replace rigid, sparsely populated relational databases!

Let existing tools such as SVN or GIT release us from the limitations of badly implemented priopritary versioning systems!

But not only that; let these same versioning tools gives us virtualisation and deployment using branching and tagging!

Let authentication happen outside of the CMS. And let Workflow tools operate externally with any payload, not by adding an attribute to a content object.

Let freedom ring from every W3C validator and every WCAG recommendation. From every friendly URL and SEO ranking, let freedom ring.

Let freedom from vendor lock in ring from Austen, Texas to Stockholm, Sweden!

And when this happens, when we allow standards to pervade, when we let them ring from every commericial CMS and every Open Source CMS, from every XML format and every JCR specification and every CMIS binding and every new standard we so sorely need to produce, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s users, authors, developers, content migrators, administrators and system procurers, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the lucky stakeholder who moved to a new CMS quickly and easily, “Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”

And the ship’s wise men
Will remind you once again
That the whole wide world is watchin’.
- WHEN THE SHIP COMES IN

So, you want to follow the CMS world on Twitter. How about the ability to follow the creme de la creme of the CMS Twitterati in a couple of clicks. Well, my friend, you’ve struck gold. [UPDATE: Even more gold than promised. The list is growing. More than 40]

First, here’s is my list. I’m sure I’ve forgotten people so many apologies and DM me to get added or if I’ve spelt something wrong. I’m not including any CMS vendors here. I am including people who work for vendors but don’t use Twitter to sell. You can get a list of vendors on Twitter on the Gilbane blog. For those that are impatient, I’m recommending Twitterator to follow all the users in one go. All of these folk are engaging on Twitter and active in the blogosphere. You can filter them first if you’d like. In no particular order:

1. cmswatch – My favourite CMS analysts
2. cmswire – My favourite CMS news source
3. cmsreport – More CMS news and chatter
4. jboye – Organises the best CMS conference in the world
5. TonyByrne – CMS Watch, Founder
6. theresaregli – CMS Watch, Search and DAM
7. jarrodgingras – CMS Watch, Content and Usability
8. kasthomas – CMS Watch, Geek, Web CMS
9. adriaanbloem – CMS Watch, Search and SoCo
10. janusboye – The man behind jboye
11. lwelchman – WelchmanPierpoint, Web CMS and Operations Guru
12. cpierpoint – WelchmanPierpoint, Coffee Addict
13. jdavidhobbs – WelchmanPierpoint, CMS Consultant
14. dkonizeski – WelchmanPierpoint, Web Operations
15. apoorv – Wipro Guru – Portals and Web CMS
16. irina_guseva – CMS Wire writer, says it as it is
17. barbmosher – CMS Wire writer, SharePoint junkie
18. fgilbane – COE of Gilbane Group, Content and Web
19. billtrippe – Gilbane Analyst
20. lehawes – Gilbane, Collaboration and KM
21. lciarlone – Gilbane, Content Globalisation
22. tim_walters – Info and Knowledge Mgmt., Forrester
23. kreidy – 451 Group Analyst, CMS and Collab
24. jmancini77 – President of AIIM
25. skjekkeland – Vice President of AIIM
26. sggottlieb – Content Guru and Open Source Analyst
27. halvorson – Content Strategist, Author
28. rahelab – Content Strategist, Intentional Design
29. StepTwoDesigns – Intranet Talk from Down Under
30. jimmurphyamr – Knowledge and Content Management, AMR Research
31. netjmc – Intranet and Portal Strategy
32. ldallasBMOC – Big Men on Content
33. dankeldsen – Co-founder of Information Architected
34. McBoof – Compiler of useless info and lists.
35. jameshoskins – Wise CMS man
36. jamesurquhart – The Cloud Myth Buster
37. piewords – ECM/CMIS techie/blogger
38. pierotintori – CEO of TERMINALFOUR. CMS Techie.
39. jessewilkins – ECM, ERM, Former USMC drill instructor
40. julesdw – SDL Tridion – blogger
41. puf – SDL Tridion Developer Ubergeek
42. davidnuescheler – Day Blogger, CMS Guru
43. kevinc2003 – And the Day CMO
44. IanTruscott – Alterian Blogger
45. yuvalararat – Vignette Blogger
46. johnnewton – Founder of Alfresco and Documentum
47. dcaruana – Alfresco Chief Architect, CMIS, Open Source
48. jeffpotts01 – Optaros ECM practice lead, Open Source fan
49. bdelacretaz – Open Source, Apache Foundation and Day R&D
50. trieloff – Day DAM and SoCo expert
51. dirkmshaw – Vignette Social Media Strategy
52. ebarroca – CEO at Nuxeo
53. sfermigier – Yet another Nuxeo ECM man
54. efge – Nuxeo R&D, Architect. CMIS man.
55. MartinSS – Open Text ECM architect
56. pmonks – Alfresco consultant. CMS visionary
57. justincormack – Squiz Tech Guru. CMS visionary
58. darrenferguson – Interwoven and Umbraco CMS Dude
59. cherylmckinnon – Open Text, Enterprise 2.0
60. twentworth12 – Web Solutions Evangelist, ex-Autonomy>/li>
61. craighepburn – RedDot (Open Text) Social Media Strategy
62. adrianmateljan – RedDot (Open Text) CMS Blogger
63. jeanmariepascal – Open Source ECM Consultant
64. erikmhartman – Independent Consultant, Writer, Speaker
65. LuisSala – Alfresco Big Gun
66. scroisier – Jahia Strategy
67. OlegR – Content and Text Mining Evangelist
68. athraen – EPiServer R&D Developer, Blogger, CMIS.NET
69. danielchalef – KnowledgeTree CEO, fellow Saffa
70. tony_bailey – Gin Drinking CMS consultant at Acquity Group
71. tednyberg – Agency side EPiServer MVP, Umbraco and more.
72. proops – Independent, CMS Blogger
73. izahoor – Independent, Public Sector CMS Dude
74. daponovich – CMS Myth blogger
75. jeffcram – CMS Myth blogger

So, next step is to copy the nicely formatted list at the bottom of this post, and paste them into Twitterator as shown in the screenshot below. You need to give them your Twitter creds, sadly. James promised he’ll write me a bulk following program that uses OAuth. Don’t worry if you’re already following some of the users. It handles these pretty well.

[UPDATE: Forget Twitterator! TweetML is far better. Use this link: http://tweepml.org/McBoof-s-CMS-Gurus/]

And here is the list in a nice cut and paste format. Stick them into your clipboard, and off to Twitterator. That’s it. Happy following. Don’t forget to delete me if you only like serious CMS chatter. Finally, if you want some of these people’s blogs, have a look at the OPML Feed of my blogroll, or the large list compiled by @proops.

cmswatch
cmswire
cmsreport
jboye
TonyByrne
theresaregli
jarrodgingras
kasthomas
adriaanbloem
janusboye
lwelchman
cpierpoint
jdavidhobbs
dkonizeski
apoorv
irina_guseva
barbmosher
fgilbane
billtrippe
lehawes
lciarlone
tim_walters
kreidy
jmancini77
skjekkeland
sggottlieb
halvorson
rahelab
StepTwoDesigns
jimmurphyamr
netjmc
ldallasBMOC
dankeldsen
McBoof
jameshoskins
jamesurquhart
piewords
pierotintori
jessewilkins
julesdw
puf
davidnuescheler
kevinc2003
IanTruscott
yuvalararat
johnnewton
dcaruana
jeffpotts01
bdelacretaz
trieloff
dirkmshaw
ebarroca
sfermigier
efge
MartinSS
pmonks
justincormack
darrenferguson
cherylmckinnon
twentworth12
craighepburn
adrianmateljan
jeanmariepascal
erikmhartman
LuisSala
scroisier
OlegR
athraen
danielchalef
tony_bailey
tednyberg
proops
izahoor
daponovich
jeffcram

Trust yourself
And you won’t be disappointed when vain people let you down.
Trust yourself
And look not for answers where no answers can be found.
- TRUST YOURSELF

It seems the “Which Content Management System are you?” quiz entries are slowing down, so I might as well post the results as promised. They mean nothing at all.

I had to get them by running Twitter searches – the quiz site doesn’t give any access to the results. So I can’t show any more detail about who answered what for each question, which might have been fun. Also, this means I can’t see results from people that have protected tweets either, so not all the results are reflected. 676 people have answered it so far, and I have the results for 470 of them. I think Twitter search is missing some Tweets.

I’ve kept the 1 result for GX WebManager and Frontpage, even though they weren’t even options.

So, without further ado, the results are:

2009 Psychometric Jon Bar

SDL Tridion did really well in the 2009 Forrester Wave, but coming top in the 2009 Psychometric Jon Bar must mean so much more to them. I hope to see press releases, and see this chart in their presales PowerPoint Deck in the near future. This is the same PowerPoint deck which, last time I saw it (about 2 hours ago), used the logo below to represent AJAX on their standards page!

I like any CMS with Triple Window Cleaning action

Nobody to rescue me,
Nobody would dare,
I was going down for the last time,
But by His mercy I’ve been spared
- SAVED

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. According to the press release, they have a lot to worry about:

This limited-time program enables organizations that are constrained by the rigidity of their current legacy WCM products, or concerned about the future direction of their current WCM vendor

I love the sneaky use of the word legacay here. Vignette and Interwoven are suddenly legacy simply because they’ve been bought by OpenText and Autonomy respectively? Looking forward to seeing a response from VIGN/OTEX and IWOV/AU.  Interwoven is the fastest growing ECM vendor and Vignette, despite recent troubles, are still fighting and releasing some cool new things. They certainly aren’t legacy in my books.

It is going to be cheap and painless to migrate. No license costs! Woot! The press release tells us that

The program enables customers of these recently acquired companies to upgrade to FatWire’s industry-leading solutions at no license cost, when they employ FatWire’s proven migration tools and services that reduce the risk and increase the speed of migration.

Oh, wait, maybe it isn’t that cheap at all. Our knight comes with strings attached. You need to use FatWire’s migration tools. These come in the form of partnerships with Vamosa and Kapow, two heavy hitters in the world of automated content migration. My first observation here is that these two, while both offering an excellent service, normally compete with each other. So I’d be interested in learning more about the way a company (or FatWire) decides which of the two products to run with. My second observation is that both of these products can come with a reasonably large price tag. I presume the model here is that FatWire will take some cut of the migration cost in return for referring customers to Vamosa or Kapow.

The other piece of the revenue pie will come from the associated implementation services, either from FatWire Professional Services or an implementation partner. As Irina mentioned earlier today, implementing a CMS costs more than buying a CMS. And what if it isn’t only a CMS in the mix. For example, you might have Vignette Portal in there too. Or one of Autonomy Interwoven’s many other products. FatWire don’t have a product suite to replace all of these components quite yet, so this offer seems to focus primarily on customers that only use the WCM product from their current vendor.

I don’t know enough about this offering to guess whether this migration will only cover the content management and migration aspects. Any delivery side “migration” will involve a significant amount of work. Maybe FatWire already have tools in place that can either statically deploy the same files generated by a baked Interwoven site, or replace the Vignette/Interwoven API with the FatWire one for fried sites.  All three products have a Java API so at least we don’t need to worry about language-level changes too.

Maybe this is a marketing stunt. I received my email from FatWire marketing as the announcement was made. But maybe it is a genuine way for customers to save time and money if they are planning to migrate from their current platform. FatWire is a solid choice (Forrester just patted them on the back in the WCM for External Sites wave) and the content migration products are industry leaders.

The Forrester Wave™: Web Content Management For External Sites, Q2 2009

If you are considering this option, I’d love to hear more from you once you know the costs involved and how the process will operate. They are many ways that this could work, and it’s all going to come out in the wash.

I got my dark sunglasses,
I’m carryin’ for good luck my black tooth.
Don’t ask me nothin’ about nothin’,
I just might tell you the truth.
- OUTLAW BLUES

Just looked at the Econsultancy CMS Survey Report 2009. It’s a great survey, and the results make interesting reading. There were over 800 respondents, with just over half representing customers, and most of others being CMS Vendors or implementers. There is a good spread of company sizes and business sectors. Most of the vendors/agencies are quite small with 90% of them having less than 100 employees. I’m not going to include any of the graphs or anything from the report as I’d probably end up in the same place as the Pirate Bay dudes. If you want to see them, you’ll need to buy the report yourself (£150) or download the free sample. The report was carried out in association with Squiz.net.

I wasn’t that surprised by most of the findings. The thing that struck me most was how well Customers and Agencies agree. The report kindly separates out the responses from the customers and suppliers, and I didn’t see many fundamental differences at all. This must be good news for the industry if everyone has basically the same world view. However, this does beg the question – if the companies and the agencies think in the same way, why are some parts of the process often like medieval torture?

The three questions that did yield significant differences:

• Why CMS projects fail – One notable difference was the scoring behind “CMS technology limitations”. Behind ease of use, customers cited this as the second most common cause of failure, with 44% selecting it. The agencies, however, had it as only the sixth biggest reason with only 25% selecting it. Of course I’m with the agencies, here. The customers often confuse the core technology with bad requirements or a poor implementation.
• Downsides of current CMS – Here, 47% of the customers cited “Lack of support for Web 2.0 functionality”. The agencies didn’t swallow the Web 2.0 buzzword hype quite as badly and it came in second, with slightly less. The agencies had “Not intuitive to use” as the major drawback (64%) while only 39% of the customers thought this. Maybe the customers are easier to please than the agencies. I’d have expected more customers than agencies to complain about ease of use.
• Are your clients planning to spend more or less on CMS in the next 12 months – An interesting difference here. It seems that the agencies and vendors don’t trust the clients to spend what they think they’ll spend. The customers think they’re going to spend more, the suppliers think they’ll spend less. Not too surprising.

Some other interesting observations:

• The average lifespan for a CMS system in the survey is about three years. That’s about what I would expect, although most customers would be horrified if you told them that. I am assuming that average “Length of time of CMS usage” for the current CMS equates roughly to average lifespan, but I think that’s probably fair. Janus Boye also thinks three years is about right.
• More customers prefer best-of-breed supplier with focus on a specific capability than a one-stop-shop solution covering the entire CMS space. This is even more true for the larger companies. Paradoxically, most of the big CMS vendors are trying to offer the one-shop-shop solution. Maybe they haven’t done their research – seems to be a supply/demand mismatch going on here.
• There was one result which surprised (nay, horrified) me. About half the customers wanted the implementation services from the CMS Vendors. No wonder so many vendor Professional Services teams rake in the cash. I’m very skeptical of this approach. I’m not particularly fond of vendors with a large PS arm that compete directly with their own partner network. And I hate vendors that claim to be partner channel only, but slip in the sneaky implementation when they think the partners aren’t looking. We’re watching you – don’t you go starting that vendor-partner dance again.
• Only 10% of customers want to do the implementation themselves. That’s good, and a sign of a more mature customer that has been burned in the past. Most customer IT teams don’t have much experience with the newly selected CMS, and the first time you implement a system is invariably a bit of a balls up. As Willy once said: Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Surveys Rock

Finally, I’m pleased to report that according to the survey, CMS customers are happy. In fact, they’re even happier than the agencies think they are. Maybe they are just whining to us to get discounts and freebies! The CMS’s are split into 4 categories here: Community Open Source, Supported Open Source, and Proprietary Specialist CMS Vendors, Proprietary “Household name” vendors such as Microsoft or Oracle. The last group gets the worst results in the customer satisfaction survey. The others all come out quite close with less than 20% of the customers and agencies giving them a Poor or Very Poor. 80% of CMS implementations are Okay or better. About half are Good or Excellent. All in all, it sounds like a happy customer base. Woot \o/.

On a night like this
I can’t get any sleep,
The air is so cold outside
And the snow’s so deep.
- ON A NIGHT LIKE THIS

Well, it just is. 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. For those on the other side of the pond, a nappy is a diaper.

Some of the similarities are:

• The content is often extremely difficult to classify, and the consistency of the content is extremely variable
• Bad content never smells very good regardless of the quality of the repository you try to store it in
• Sometimes the state of the content is a symptom of some other illness
• You never have all the tools you need within easy reach, and it gets really messy if you don’t know what you are doing
• There is always more content than you thought was possible, and if the system is in a bad state, the content export can take much longer than expected
• There is no chance you can completely automate it
• It often involves running scripts throughout the night – it is never just a day job
• You thought it was out of scope until you find yourself doing it
• Shortly after you think you’ve finished migrating the content, you find more content to migrate

Trust me. I’ve migrated a lot of content, and I’ve changed a lot of nappies. Fortunately, there is one big difference – it is much harder to extract the content from the source than to put it into the target repository. Thankfully, when changing a nappy, the content only comes out. And content never pisses in your eye.

Now, if someone offers me a joke
I just say no thanks.
I try to tell it like it is
And keep away from pranks.
- GOIN’ TO ACAPULCO

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. If you are a developer and don’t know what this is about, or haven’t seen the response from your CMS vendor, the summary and all the responses are here.

Score one for the good guys

In a very honest response, he calls major bullshit on two of the answers, and questions quite a few more. He spots some cunning marketing-speak that I missed completely first time round. Open Text gave themselves 40/45 (actually, I marked their answers, but anyway). Adrian gives them a more believable 34/45. Please, developers, get in the ring.

His thoughts on Question 4:

4. Eval versions of the latest edition(s) of our software are always available for download from the company website.
Open Text’s Response: Yes, all our software is always available for download to our customers. The same is true for early beta version to those customers and partners that participate in beta programs.
Open Text’s Score: 3
Adrian’s Response: Although this is true, I don’t think it answers the spirit of the question – which is that this software should be available to non customers to evaluate – which as far as I am aware, it definately isn’t. In my experience, the whole procurement process of Management Server is very tightly controlled by Open Text and its sales team and is in no way “open” *until* you have signed on.
Adrian Score: 1

For more like this, read his full post. If you disagree with the responses from the vendor you know and love, follow Adrian’s lead and have your say. I suspect the majority of the responses have holes in them. I might even be tempted to break rank and do a few myself.

And Mr Google, if you’re watching, have one of these: 9c56d0fcf93175d70e1c9b9d188167cf

UPDATE: List of the developer responses so far is:

• May 12, 2009: Open Text – Adrian Mateljan
• May 13, 2009: Interwoven – Darren Ferguson

Well, my head’s full of questions
My temp’rature’s risin’ fast
Well, I’m lookin’ for some answers
But I don’t know who to ask
- MIXED UP CONFUSION

It’s been a few days since the announcement that Open Text will absorb Vignette. Most of the important analysts have thrown their opinions on the deal into the ring, and some patterns are emerging. AIIM’s John Mancini has compiled collections of commentary here and here for those that want everything in one place. I’d like to offer my thoughts on what has been said from the tech perspective. I’ve no idea about exactly what keeps shareholders happy. Everything in this post is of course pure speculation.

Why did they buy it?

According to this CMS Wire post, Open Text CEO John Shackleton has the answer:

[Shackleton ] indicated that Vignette is one of the last big players in the market and they saw a number of synergies with the web content management assets that the Vignette deal brings them. Along with sharing a number of high profile brands, Shackleton also indicated that Vignette’s records management expertise and their analytics capabilities had caught Open Text’s eye.

The fact that they share clients is true, but I don’t get why that makes it a good idea to buy them. Surely they want to buy new customers, not the ones they have already? The WCM synergies bit might make some sense. The rest is nonsense. I’ll talk about Open Text’s more mature records management expertise later in this post, but what exactly are Vignette’s analytics capabilities? If we mean Vignette Experience Optimization Products, I thought that those were:

• Recommendations, which is an OEM’ed Baynote with a light sprinkling of new features
• Analytics, which is just Omniture SiteCatalyst and a “best practices integration guide”
• Advanced Search, which is “a more powerful version of the IDOL engine from Autonomy”. Not sure what the “more powerful” bit means. I wonder if Interwoven will get the weak version from their new parent company.

Surely Open Text isn’t buying OEM deals? Let’s try another justification, from RBC Capital Markets analyst Mike Abramsky:

Vignette’s WCM solutions/technology/expertise brings to OTEX sophisticated features (transactions, analytics, ecommerce, etc) required by larger online accounts, which represent a lucrative opportunity and potentially a growth area when the economy rebounds.

Where do they get this stuff? Analytics mentioned again. What “transaction” or “eCommerce” sophisticated features will Vignette’s WCM solution bring? I suspect they bought it for exactly the reasons I don’t understand, don’t like, and will eventually screw the implementers and customers. Which is why none of the official press releases make much sense. The unofficial commentary from people like CMS Watch (Kas, Alan) is surely closer to the truth.

Vignette was sitting in the Enterprise CMS Vendor Clearance bucket, so Open Text got it extremely cheaply. The reasons for the acquisition are certainly strategic and don’t involve technology. Open Text have bought plenty of other CMS vendors and the products ended up on the fast track to oblivion. Five years ago, a post from Bloor Research entitled Open Text Rolls Out The First Fruits Of Its Merger With Ixos started like this:

You could imagine that Open Text had been suffering somewhat from indigestion after having recently acquired a range of content management and Web publishing companies that include Ixos and Gauss, not to mention Corechange and Obtree. Open Text says that the fit between Ixos and Open Text, its most significant acquisition, has been excellent with very few overlaps in capability.

Where are Ixos, Gauss, Corechange and Obtree now? I wonder if history is repeating itself.

Will the Technical Stacks Ever Merge?

As I said in my previous post on the acquistion, the Open Text and Vignette technology stacks overlap enormously. Virtually every Vignette product is man-marked by its Open Text counterpart. So will there be consolidation and integration within the product suite? Most likely, no. Most analysts think that the products are going to stay separate. Even if they wanted to, they probably couldn’t. I like Alan Peltz-Sharpe’s summary of this the most, from his CMSWatch posting Why Open Text bought Vignette — the real story :

Gluing them together is just not feasible on this scale, it cannot be done regardless of what the marketing from Open Text (or Autonomy in it’s turn) might like you to believe. All you can really do is to slash costs where possible, leave the technology pieces alone as much as possible, and milk the product and customer base as cash cows.

So Can Open Text Milk These Cash Cows?

Where does Vignette currently get its revenues from? Here is a summary of the figures from Q1 2009 taken from the earnings report. It compares the numbers (which are in $ millions) from Q1 2009 with the same period in 2008.

The numbers are lower in 2009 than 2008. No surprises there. Digging a bit deeper into the three areas:

• Licenses - New license sales seem to be about 20% of the revenue, and that’s likely to continue to decrease significantly with the current economic climate and the uncertainty created by the aquisition
• Maintenance and Support – This is currently over half of their revenue. Certainly the fattest cash cow which needs to be milked with care. Service levels need to remain constant or improve. Many existing customers will be relieved that Vignette have been acquired and will happily continue paying here if Open Text can keep them sweet.
• Professional Services – This was traditionally a large part of Vignette’s revenue. I remember people saying that at one point it was 50% of the total but my top secret sources (Yahoo! Finance) don’t think it has been that high for many years. It was 33% in Q1 2008 and down to 25% in Q1 2009. I can’t see this rising dramatically. VPS earn cash when new projects are sold, so their revenue contribution will fall as licenses fall. I wonder if VPS and Open Text Professional Services will merge.

Clearly just milking the Maintenance and Support cow isn’t enough as Vignette is currently losing money. What about new opportunities for OTEX:

• Migrations - The existing Vignette customers will not have an appetite for expensive migrations to Open Text products, and would probably like to stay where they are. It is also unlikely that Open Text would want to migrate any customers in the other directions. Not many migrations will happen in either direction.
• Cross Sells/Up Sells – This seems to be where everyone is betting the farm. If OTEX can’t sell new products or services into the existing (non-profitable) client base, the whole thing might have been an extremely bad idea.

This is summerised nicely by Gartner’s Toby Bell in his article Win ‘Em, Wring ‘Em, and Wean ‘Em. He also adds an important insight about the timing of Open Text’s move:

Open Text seems to have wisely waited until the falloff of potentially more fickle customers and prospects had been completed. The business core thus revealed, it swooped in with the right offer at the right time. VIGN’s value to Open Text is not the technology, it’s the seats. The very plushy ones of large enterprises with global potential to look at one of its own (now) incumbent suppliers to provision other user needs. And, Open Text has options for those enterprises in spades.

Open Text have now Won ‘Em. I don’t think they’ll be able to Wring ‘Em for much. The most important piece is how well they will Wean ‘Em.

What’s the Open Text new sales strategy going to be?

Let’s forget the past, for a second. Picture the scene – you’re a sales guy with a Vignette history and an Open Text business card and you’re meeting with a new prospect. What are you going to be selling?

You’ll still be selling Vignette Content Management (VCM). It has the perception of being “more enterprise” than Open Text Web Solutions nee RedDot. It is possible that they’ll follow a similiar model to Alterian and have two different tiers. Alterian have Corporate Edition (Immediacy) and Enterprise Edition (Morello). However, Open Text already push their RedDot solution as Enterprise ready (for example, this recent press release ), so I think it is more likely they’ll split on technology. If a customer has an existing J2EE infrastructure they’ll sell Open Text Web Solution For Java (a.k.a Vignette), and they’ll sell Open Text Web Solution.NET (a.k.a. RedDot) to the Microsoft based clients. Of course they need to brand all this nicely so that the customers don’t get confused.

Vignette Application Portal (VAP) will also be on your selling list. It is the only major product that doesn’t have an Open Text alternative, so it could lead a long and healthy life. Open Text might also push this to their existing customers as the delivery mechanism of choice. I hope they only do this when it is appropriate – see my previous rant on Portals That Walk And Talk Like Ducks. If both VAP and VCM are sold, that probably means that Dynamic Portal Module (DPM) won’t get the bullet quite yet. Pity about that.

Digital Asset Management will be Open Text’s Artesia. Possibly the end of Vignette’s Rich Media Services. Maybe it will still be sold into certain verticals, but I wouldn’t bet on it. Vignette IDM already has an integration with Artesia. Speaking of which, I’m not sure if the Imaging part of this will survive either. The Document Management product of choice going forward will undoubtedly be LiveLink. After the Tower aquisition, “Vignette never really figured out what to do with the document management solutions and they dropped out of sight as far as the market was concerned.” Open Text as a company understands Transactional Content Management better than Vignette does, has a long history of Records Management, and I think all their products will dominate in this area. The quote is taken from the timely article Google should buy Vignette – but not for the obvious reasons by Michael Wilson, who knows more than most about Vignette’s capabilities in this area.

The bad news for our hyphothetical salesman is that I don’t believe we’ll be seeing many large new sales this year. Some people think otherwise. For example, Yuval Ararat blogs here that the Financial Sector is going to wake up soon, and that’s going to be good news for Vignette and their pipeline-waiting-to-happen. They do have a large financial sector client base, but this might be part of their problem at the moment. I hope Yuval is right, but I don’t share his confidence.

It’s been over ten years since Vignette IPO’ed. I started working with it in the days of Story Server. I hope that some of the technology makes it into the next generation of Open Text products. Surely they wouldn’t spend all that money and kill off the tech? But $310 million is a fraction of what Vignette paid for OnDisplay in the dot-boom days. And we all know how much of that technology survived.

We grew up together
From the cradle to the grave
We died and were reborn
And then mysteriously saved.
- OH, SISTER

I gotta admit, this one took me by surprise. Open Text has just announced that they are aquiring Vignette. There were the usual rumours in the air, but I don’t think many people took it seriously. I know I didn’t. First RedDot. Then Vizible. Now this. Anyone remember Gauss and Obtree? I’ve been using Vignette since 1999 and have become very fond of it. Maybe this is the Stockholm Syndrome, but anyway.

I’m not going to write much now – I need time to digest things – but there is a lot to think about here. But off the top of my confused head:

• The Vignette name will probably vanish in the same way that the RedDot name recently did. How about “More Open Text Web Solutions”? That’s catchy. The end of an era, as I blogged about here.
• I suspect that Vignette Content Management is going to be around for a while. A lot of customers have been through a lot of effort recently to get onto the latest versions. I can’t see Open Text messing with that baby. So it looks like three Open Text CMS choices for a while – the original, the ex-RedDot and the ex-VCM.
• Vignette have a Collaboration product, and have recently announced their new Vignette Community Services. OpenText have a large Collaboration and Community Management component. Something is going to happen here.
• I think the Portal will stay as it is. Open Text currently have the Open Text Portal Integration Kit. Expect to see this become tightly ingrated with VAP via the JSR-168 portlets. Hopefully it will replace Dynamic Portal in the longer term. Open Text don’t have their own portal.
• The needs to be some Records Management consolidation I would think. No point have both Open Text Records Management and Vignette Records Manager is there? I’m guessing one of these will become dominant, and customers will be (slowly) migrated. This will take many years, though.
• Maybe there will be a similar product collision in the Imaging/Workflow/Capture area, and the Business Process Management areas. I don’t know much about this stuff, so ain’t going to guess anything.
• Open Text have a more more mature DAM offering in Artesia. I wonder if the much heralded, newly launched Vignette Rich Media is going to have a long and healthy life. Maybe some of the fancy front end technology will get used (Vizible is more fancy). I suspect the Vignette’s DAM days are numbered.

I really really hope that this is going to be a good thing for Vignette. Maybe it is exactly what they needed. But, on the other hand, maybe it isn’t. In my experience, these things are never that smooth for the company that gets absorbed. I do worry about the existing Vignette employees. These kinds of deals are never without pain, and I hope that the people that have been sweating blood for VIGN aren’t badly affected. I also worry about the existing Vignette customers – I see roadmap changes on the horizon. I’m sure the customer-centric analysts will have a lot to say here.

And finally, I wonder how much fun Tony Byrne is going to have drawing the 2010 Content Technology Vendor Map. The number of big stations is getting smaller every day.

Can’t talk any more now. Got a call with a Vignette OpenText client.

[UPDATE: It seems not everyone was as surprised as me! Laurence "@piewords" Hart gazed into his Crystal Ball and called it in January. And the Big Men On Content picked it up last August. Matt Asay even had the numbers right back then. They've got their ears to the ground.]

He cocked his rifle
And began to shout,
“You’re that travelin’ salesman
That I have heard about.”
- MOTORPSYCHO NIGHTMARE

I work in a very cosmopolitan area of London. Our office is on Brick Lane , which is known for its curry houses, vibrant night life, art, fashion and live music. If I work late or have a couple of brews after work, it isn’t uncommon for someone dodgy to sneak up on me and say something like “I got some ‘ash man“, “Yo, want some pure bomb?“, “I have some LSD, wanna trip?” or “Dude, you wanna fly?“.

But I find all this far less annoying than the advances I repeatedly got at Internet World . “Pssst. Do you do Web Content Management?“. I’m not even sure I know what that means. Do I *do* content management? It’s always an annoying salesman sidling up to me and popping some flyer into my hand. Most of the time I just smile and walk on by but every now and again I stop of a chat and wish I hasn’t.

Now, I’m not into drugs. Drugs are bad. But at least the dealers know their products. These CMS Flyer guys seem to have very superficial (if any) understanding of their product, and always seem to be disappointed when it turns out I’m from a potential partner, not a potential customer with a cheque book. Some stands have girls in hot pants or tinkerbell outfits that look pretty, smile, give you a flyer and point you to their stand. But at least they don’t also start babbling about their products. The CMS Salesman say things that they don’t really understand like “Oh yes, it supports <something> perfectly”. Their products do everything. And they like to sell hard. And watch out for the licensing models that try to get you hooked first, then fleece you when you’re dependent on the “product”.

It seems that the CMS vendor stands have two different kind of salesman. They have the people that really know their stuff and are extremely interesting to talk to. These guys are pretty honest, and I can really engage with them and share war stories from the past. These are the guys I enjoying sharing a beer with, and all vendors have a few of them. They sell indirectly. But then there are the walking commission calculators that don’t seem to know much about their products or their industry at all. They might as well be selling cars or shoes. And every vendor seems to have a couple of them too. I know that times are hard and cold-calling (or proactive selling) is probably a necessary evil. But it’s an evil I’d rather avoid and one that make me get depressed about these shows. The smell of desperation in the air doesn’t make for good conversation.

If any of you have seen The Wire, you’ll also know it isn’t cool for rival drug gangs to be selling their product in the same place. Imaging four gangs selling from the four corners of a busy intersection. It would be pretty awkward, and get messy quickly. Yet this is exactly what happens at Internet World. Really convenient for people like me that want to see as many vendor demos as possible, but you do sometimes get the “How Dare You Also Speak To Our Competitor” evil-eye from across the way. Some of the sales guys also have their standard line for slagging off each competitor. Something like “Oh yes, XYZ is a good product. Unfortunately, they don’t have <feature> X or any support in <region Y>”. These are targetted and XYZ = the vendor from whose stand you were previously at seeing they know exactly where you’ve come from.

Another thing the dealers and CMS Vendors have in common is that they both refer their customers as “users”. One main difference between them is that the rival vendors at Internet World don’t shoot at each other when the competition gets tough. Sometimes I think it might be more fun if they did.

Mr. Frog went a-hoppin’ up over the brook, Uh-huh,
Mr. Frog went a-hoppin’ up over the brook, Uh-huh,
Mr. Frog went a-hoppin’ up over the brook.
A lily-white duck come and swallowed him up, Uh-huh.
- FROGGIE WENT A COURTIN’

Had a look at the People’s United Bank site that has just been launched and recently tweeted. Firstly, well done to everyone involved for getting it live. Always nice to see a new big CMS driven site. It looks good too – nice and clean. Hats off to the designers.

But I do have to ask my friends at Vignette – was it really necessary to use your portal products (Vignette Application Portal and Dynamic Portal Module) for this? I have only looked at the site for 15 minutes, so have probably missed something huge. But I’m going to assume I haven’t and soldier on.

I realise it is a bank, so there are probably a lot more Portal suitable features behind the different logins. But all of those seem to go off-site away from the Portal implementation at the moment. It’s often the other way round. The post-login functionality is driven by a portal, not the pre-login informational/marketing section. The site seems to be primarily static content. Maybe the content differs depending on your ZIP code – not easy to tell.

Portals are meant to aggregate applications, not provide a set of off-site links to them. The login goes to a server running ASP.NET. The career application is an offsite IFRAME. The branch finder goes to MapQuest. The search goes to Mondo with a secure/unsecure warning. Even the search results are displayed on Mondo, but maybe this is for the term highlighting.

I’ve noticed on the Vignette site that the Portal product is now classified under Intranet , not under Web Content Management. That’s a step in the right direction. It can make a mighty fine Intranet. But it still seems to get recommended as the delivery mechanism for every site you launch.

Maybe there are no downsides to using the Portal for this site. But if it is so easy to fix the friendly URLs , the validating markup, and the TABLE based layouts , I’m looking forward to seeing them in the next release of this site. Google really digs that stuff, and banks really dig organic traffic. At the very least, please put the <link> to vgn-ext-templating.css somewhere after the opening<html> tag.

The implementation was probably a fair bit of effort too, I’m guessing. Did you choose an external spider for the site search because it felt right, or because it is actually quite difficult to implement an internal search on a Portal? Any issues with sessions and bookmarking? Do the editorial team need to use both the VCM and VAP to create new pages, or do they have a nice, single tool that they use to create pages and content? And it is all easy and cheap to maintain?

I guess someone might have played the “we’re not using the Portal functionality for Phase 1, but we need a future-proof platform to carry us forward” card. Or did someone say synergies a lot? Oh for a penny for every non-implemented planned Phase 2 feature I’ve seen. We all love agile development these days; whatever happened to agile product choices? If the post-login part of this site is live on VAP in the next 12 months, however, I’ll eat my hat, apologise, and buy everyone lots and lots of beer.

I really like the VCM. And I really like VAP. But this site isn’t a Portal. Dear Vignette, please don’t make us use VAP for everything. You do have other delivery mechanisms. Dear other major vendors, stop smirking. Many of you do the same.

Not every site is a Portal. Sometimes a Portal is really a Gate To Hell. Here there be Demons.

Half of the people can be part right all of the time,
Some of the people can be all right part of the time.
But all of the people can’t be right all of the time.
I think Abraham Lincoln said that.
“I’ll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours,”
I said that.
- TALKIN’ WORLD WAR III BLUES

Is the tail wagging the dog?

A recent posting caused a rather lively conversation. One question I didn’t get around to answering came from Adriaan Bloem, an analyst at CMS Watch:

But just ask yourself this: 1. Do you design the visitor UX, then use a CMS as a tool to build it? Or 2. Do you consider the process of building and maintaining the lifecycle of a site (the actual *managing of the content*) to be as important as the visitor-facing facia of it? If 1., and not 2., the CMS is going to be thrown out together with the site it produces like a pair of badly hurting shoes as soon as the opportunity arises. And it’ll have caused plenty of hurt by then.

Badly hurting shoes?!? Hey buddy, this is my baby you’re talking about. So, in order to answer this, I’m going to first talk a little about what I want from a content management system.

I want it to manage content, and give me a sensible way to get at that content. And I want this to be easy and logical. That’s all. Done. [UPDATE: My attempt to be sarcastic may have failed. I know it isn't that simple and there are a hundred Content Management Features that influence the decision. But those aren't what this post is about. See this comment]

But content management systems these days do more than this. I’m still an old-school fan of decoupled delivery, although most products now also provide delivery capability and a whole boatload of extras. And the infamous RFP matrices I see focus far too much on delivery side issues that are nothing to do with the CMS. So what do I want from the delivery framework? Not much either, really. In some vague order of importance, these are the biggies.

Every <Tag> is sacred

I want full control over the markup generated by the product. Our interface developers (the front end guys) take their HTML/CSS/JavaScript very seriously, and I want to be able to emit their code byte for byte. I’ll accept some things. A <FORM> tag around a .NET page is expected, with a hidden VIEWSTATE input. Adding extra styles to the front end when doing inline editing is okay too. But when viewing the site as a normal user, I don’t want any of those either. I certainly don’t want their JavaScript and CSS stomping all over my JavaScript and CSS.

The “Egg Analogy” presentation below is a Microsoft one, which I first saw when our friends from Redmond popped into our office to demo their Expressions product suite. The first 9 slides really touch a nerve for me. Don’t bother with the propaganda from slide 1o onwards. The slides mirror our development process pretty well, as does the end result if the delivery framework places constraints on the markup. We don’t like breaking the egg.

If it ain’t broke, don’t break it

So, we’ve got our perfect HTML. Let’s make sure the editors can’t break the egg either. This is more a Content Management than Content Delivery issue but, I beg you, don’t let the editorial team play with the HTML directly without ensuring the markup is valid. It isn’t that hard to do. Don’t publish something that isn’t valid, at the very least. Applying some accessibility guidelines doesn’t hurt either. I also need the editors to have full control over the URLs, including multiple “campaign URLs” for the same entry point. Don’t allow illegal characters in these URLs, please. Oh yeah. Tell your Rich Text Editor not to convert relative URLs into absolute ones that point to my staging environment.

Play properly with the interwebs

HTTP status codes exist for a reason. Please can your “Page Not Found” page actually also return a 404, not a 200. Please use 301 and 302 redirects in the right places. Please use proper caching headers when serving static files. And dynamic files too. Did you know that SharePoint serves an “Exires” header (without the ‘p’)? WTF! Form builders need a good excuse not to use XForms.

Developers should dig it

The product should feel natural to them. No proprietary languages. No stupid development tools. No complex installations. Less quirks than average. It needs a logical API and useful templated controls. It should feel like it is an extension of the dev tools they know and love. The in-memory caching and decaching should be invisible to them. And it should be fast.

I want my configuration in configuration files and template code on the file system so it plays with our release management and continuous integration software. I only want content in the content database, so I can back up and restore databases without screwing up code. I want language files in standard places.

I love the products that do less rather than more. Using .NET as an example, your API should do less with each .NET release. Chuck out propriety authentication methods for .NET Membership. Chuck out your clever workflow engine for Windows Workflow. Stand on the shoulders of giants, and let my developers do the things they know already. Focus on the core use cases of a Content Management System.

Don’t try to sell me snake oil

I don’t want a non-techie sales guy telling me things like “Oh yes, our product does SEO really well”, “It also works as a Portal” or “It does an iPhone version” without knowing what it means. I don’t want the system to bloat itself with tightly coupled modules that need to be uninstalled with a scalpel and a bottle of gin. You can keep your Module X that has clearly been hacked together on a client project, produces crap markup, isn’t cross browser, doesn’t have an accessible fallback, and clearly isn’t ready for production. I don’t really want sub-standard features that have been implemented simply to tick a box on an ill-thought-out RFP. On most of my projects, the CMS isn’t the only third party application in the solution. It needs to talk to the others too. I already have products for my Analytics and MVT, thank you very much. If you also do e-Commerce, SoCo or something else, I might consider those as a loosely coupled optional extra. And I really really really don’t want fancy drag-and-drop site building demoware that is completely useless and downright dangerous on a real project.

Rant over. So, to answer Adriaan’s question at last

I believe that any delivery framework that meets the above requirements can be used to create any user experience. In fact, I like the idea that our UX, Creative and even Interface Developers can do their thing without knowing which CMS we’re going to use. So, I’m going to say we do both 1. and 2. at the same time. The front end is designed entirely with the users in mind, without caring about the CMS details. The CMS implementation is completely the opposite. It’s all about modelling the content and making the editors’ day job easier.

In a year or three, the customer may need a complete site refresh and the content and processes shouldn’t need to change unnecessarily. Or, alternatively, the Best CMS Product Ever might be released, and the customer might want to use it instead of the CMS we’ve implemented. They should be able to do this without losing the design, UX and HTML, which is a substantial investment. Or, to paraphrase Adriaan. I want to be able to throw out our CMS like a pair of badly fitting shoes, or throw out our website like a hat that is too tight. But I don’t need to throw them out together.

Finally, I reserve the right to violently disagree with any of the ill-thought-out things I’ve said in the above. Get out those hunting rifles – it is open season on Jon.

Well, Frankie Lee and Judas Priest, they were the best of friends.
So when Frankie Lee needed money one day, Judas quickly pulled out a roll of tens
And placed them on a footstool just above the plotted plain,
Sayin’, “Take your pick, Frankie Boy, my loss will be your gain.”
- THE BALLAD OF FRANKIE LEE AND JUDAS PRIEST

Corruption in Tech Paradise?

Janus Boye recently posted a thought provoking article on his blog (Is corruption an issue?) which highlights various activities in the online industry which he considers extremely dodgy. He gives some examples of some goings-on which sound pretty shifty. After listing these issues, he goes on to say:

I’ve seen many examples of contracts being signed with a vendor that was not actually the best fit for the project. As my old mentor always used to say: “The best product never wins”. Perhaps he was referring to the fact that many buyers are corrupt.

This got me thinking. He is, of course, correct although the “influencing” happens at many different levels. At one level, the corruption and kickback can get rather big. About two years ago, the US Justice Department sued Accenture, Sun and HP for fraud relating to exactly this. Many technology companies were also looked at (including a few vendors I deal with), and IBM and PWC have each coughed up more than $2 million. I’ve got no idea if the case has ended, or still going on. EMC are being investigated at the moment for similar things, although the events in this case are 10 years old.

But I digress. Before I get to the dilemma, here’s a bit of background. I work for a “full service” digital agency. I’ll write a post on what the hell this means at some point in the future, but in a nutshell the client hires us to do everything. This includes strategy, branding, research, media, creative design, user experience work and a whole lot more. Importantly, it can also include vendor selections, site build, rollout, hosting and support. There are many good reasons to want to have a single supplier perform all of these tasks for you. There are also many reasons why it might be a terrible idea. Maybe another blog post on this later too. I strongly believe that in most cases the positives outweigh the negatives – or I wouldn’t be working where I do – and for the purposes of my argument I’ll trust you to humour me.

A Hypothetical Project

Phase 2 (the implementation) isn't defined yet

Picture the scene. Client X has an idea for a large public facing web site, and engages a full service agency. At the risk of horribly over-simplifying, someone needs to do the following:

• Step 1: Firm up the requirements to an appropriate level, help with a business plan and plan the project
• Step 2: Perform some user research and testing to ensure the idea is a valid one
• Step 3: Design the user experience (UX), and do the creative work
• Step 4: Pick the tools (for example WCMS, Search and Analytics) that will satisfy the requirement, design and UX
• Step 5: Build and launch the site, which includes integrating the selected third party products
• Step 6: Continually support and improve the site post launch

Now this seems like a sensible order of events to me, with the vendor selection exercises being performed as late in the project as is sensibly possible. The more information we have at point of vendor selection the better. On all large projects, these exercises are formal and involve the customer’s Procurement department, who exist partly to combat the very corruption mentioned by Janus.

The Dilemma

So here is the dilemma. Even assuming no vendor kickbacks, no bribery and pure hearts everywhere, how can the agency/systems integrator that is going to do the build possibly be impartial?

Regardless of size, all implementers will be more skilled with certain products. As it is highly unusual that only one of the candidate products in a vendor selection exercise is fit for purpose, the deciding factor will often be which can be implemented in the most low-risk manner. Which boils down to selecting a product that your implementer is confident enough to guarantee delivery on. If using a formal scoring system, and Product A which I know well and have implemented many times scores 86/100, while Product B, which I’ve never heard of, scores 90/100, it will be better for everyone if we pick Product A. A different integrator would correctly select Product B if they have the appropriate skills. Experience is everything in the CMS implementation game.

So does that mean it isn’t ethical to select the implementer before selecting the tool as the “best product” may not win? If that’s the case, many projects are going to suffer horribly. And full service agencies like mine wouldn’t be able to offer the full service with a clear conscience. We’d have three options (referring to the simplified steps earlier):

• Perform Steps 1-4. Do the upfront planning, research, requirements and design. We’d help the client select the objectively best tools for the job (which I believe we can do), and walk away. The client would need to find an expert in the tool(s) we recommend for the build, who’d we would need to work closely with. Even if it was a tool we knew very well, we still couldn’t build as is it may look like the tool was selected for the wrong reasons.
• Perform only Steps 5 and 6. Build the site only once someone else has defined the solution and selected the products. We do a fair bit of this, but this isn’t full service so the client still might end up with all the issues associated with The Agency Finger Pointing Game.
• Perform all Steps except Step 4, and pray to all that is holy that the non-corrupt, impartial vendor selection exercise decides on a tool we can actually use.

In the first two cases, we aren’t performing our “Full Service”. The third case simply wouldn’t work. So if you can’t select the implementation team before selecting your tools, how do we take heed of the advice of one of Janus’ Web Content Management Inconvenient Truths:

It’s the crew and not the tool – forget about finding the best CMS, but do work hard to find the best implementation crew

A Little Crisis of Confidence

Wait a sec. What does this actually mean? I’ve always taken it to mean you pick an Agency/Systems Integrator (the Crew) first and then let them pick the tool (the CMS) for you? And tell Procurement to look the other way? Is this ethical? Maybe it doesn’t mean that at all. Do you pick the Crew and the CMS as a team, using another consultant with no ulterior motives to help you? If this is the approach you choose, you need to select the CMS very early in the process. It certainly isn’t a workable model for an agency like mine. Or do you pick the CMS first (maybe just flip a coin?) and put the real effort into the selection of the crew around that CMS.

Hmmm. Confusing. I’m starting to wonder if we (agencies and systems integrators) should offer formal vendor selection exercises at all. And which does comes first: the Crew or the CMS? Answers on a postcard. Help. Somebody. Please.

Sara, Sara,
Whatever made you want to change your mind?
Sara, Sara,
So easy to look at, so hard to define.
- SARA

So What Is CMIS?

• Dr David Choy from EMC (who really knows his stuff!) gives an friendly overview on YouTube: Part I and Part II
• The Alfresco CMIS wiki – http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/CMIS
• Kas Thomas from CMS Watch on CMIS
• The EMC CMIS Page
• The CMIS and Interoperability – AIIM 2009 presentation from Alfresco on SlideShare – very useful
• Laurence Hart’s Word of Pie blog
• [13 Apr 2009 UPDATED VERSION] Read version 0.6 of the specification (it’s longer than you think but a lot of prose)

I should also mention here that there is a fair bit of debate about whether CMIS is really RESTful. It’s hard to argue with Roy Fielding who defined the term. But a misuse of the term REST hasn’t stopped other APIs from gaining enormous popularity. This posting is only going to talk about Part I of the specification (the Domain Model), not Part II (the SOAP and APP bindings).

CMIS and the Java Content Respository

The CMIS goal has a lot in common with the Java Content Repository (JSR 170/283). The main difference that everyone cites is the fact the JCR interface is Java only, while CMIS allows access to any implementation. CMIS is much simpler, which may give it the kiss of life that the more functionally rich JCR seems to lack. CMIS is accessed via a remote API, while the JCR is accessed via Java methods, but I don’t think this difference is fundamental. The CMIS specification could have added a remote HTTP access protocol on top of the JCR to overcome the differences mentioned. Most of the contributors to the CMIS specification were also involved in the JCR, so the fact that this didn’t happen suggests to me that they felt something else was amiss. Get your chainsaws out ’cause I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that the main difference between CMIS and the JCR API lies in the query language choice – XPath versus SQL. Note that SQL is an optional extra in the JCR spec, while XPath currently isn’t an option in CMIS.

Below are some of my thoughts based on my limited understanding of the standard. I’m positive that the points I’m going to raise have been discussed in the CMIS committee meetings, and equally positive that I’m completely wrong on all of this. I’ve probably missed something obvious too. But I would be extremely grateful if those in the know could point me to any resources that answer the questions I have. My googling skills didn’t unearth anything.

The CMIS Relational View

In order to understand the choice of query language, one must first understand the virtual relational view of a CMIS repository. This consists of a collection of virtual tables. A virtual table exists for every queryable object type (content type if you prefer) in the repository. Each row in these virtual tables correspond to an instance of the corresponding object type (or of one of its subtypes). A column exists for every property that the object type has. The figure below, taken from the specification, tries to explain this. Someone needs to draw a prettier version of this.

Aside for another posting: One thing worth thinking about would have been the benefit of implementing an entity-attribute (or “skinny table”) relational view instead of a table per object. While the SQL queries against such a repository are dog-ugly, they would have many of the benefits of XPath I think.

So Why not XPath?

When reading the spec, I kept asking myself why the query language chosen is based on SQL (called CMIS SQL or CQL), not XPath like the JCR. The only reference I found to XPath and CMIS was in Russ Danner’s excellent blog . He says:

CMIS also specifies a SQL like query language. Unlike previously proposed standards that pushed XQUERY and XPATH, CMIS is adopting a well understood paradigm which I believe will only encourage its adoption.

So this is the opposite view to mine. My instinct screams XPath to me for the following reasons:

• XPath is a more natural way to search a hierarchy. ANSI SQL doesn’t provide this functionality although extensions like Oracle CONNECT BY and SQL Server’s Common Table Expressions make it possible. Most implementations would involve creating a denormalised table which flattened the graph. The CMIS specification adds 2 extensions (IN_FOLDER and IN_TREE) which I find slightly smelly.
• An XPath result set can naturally contain content of different types. In the SQL model, each content type needs to be added to the result set which would usually mean a whole lot of UNIONS and ensure that the columns selected from each virtual table are the same. Except that CSQL doesn’t do UNIONS. For example, if I want to find all objects that are green, I far prefer
  XPATH: /root//*[@color='green']
  to
  SQL: SELECT * FROM OBJ_TYPE_ONE WHERE ( IN_TREE( , ‘ID000XXXXXXXX) ) AND ( ‘green’ = ANY COLOR)
  which I’d have to issue for every object type as UNIONS are not supported. If I am querying multiple types I need to send multiple queries, and I can’t use ORDER BY across the types.
• With the standard as it is, I can achieve content of different types in the same SQL resultset, but only if they are sub-types. I’m not a big fan of deep type inheritance trees. And most of the content repositories that I deal with don’t support content type inheritance natively.
• I don’t need to change my XPath Queries if a new content type is added to the repository. Using SQL, I could dynamically generate the queries by using reflection (getTypes and getTypeDefinition) on the repository, but that’s an extra step.
• The Navigation Services API calls could probably be replaced with more XPath queries. Calls such as getChildren, getDescendants, getObjectParents, getFolderParents,
• Once I retrieve a document, I’d like to get the “folder breadcrumb”. I didn’t see an obvious way to do this. I think a multi-filed document might need the concept of a “primary folder” or, at least, an ordering of the folder-document containment relationship.
• The pagination functionality feels slighlty unwieldy, sending SKIPCOUNT and MAXCOUNT as optional parameters to the query function. Not that this is solved by XPath, but I thought I’d mention it anyway.

Maybe XPath is just too hard for the vendors?

So why didn’t they go with XPath? I think the biggest hint comes from the design goal is the CMIS specification:

However, it is an explicit goal that CMIS will NOT require major product changes or significant data model changes like other standards such as JSR 170 have required.

Wearing my developer hat, I think the API would be more useful if I could interogate it using XPath. However, from the point of view of the ECM vendor based on a relational database, maybe implementing an XPath search on their respository is just too damn hard! One would think that the vendors that support JCR already have done most of the heavy lifting. But not many vendors have implemented it, and maybe of those that have use Apache Jackrabbit.

So, in summary, my theory is that an XPath based query language is very difficult for the vendors to implement. Which means developers of CMIS clients are gonna have to bite the bullet and use CSQL. Which is still going to be great, and means we’re going to get far more CMIS enabled repositories than JCR ones. Which hopefully means the Day CMIS PlugFest is going to be a very busy event. But I do so love XPath, and here’s hoping that it makes it into a later version of the specification.

Rock on, CMIS.

“Oh no,” says the Sergeant. “I’ll have no such chat,
And neither will I take it from snappy young brats,
For if you insult me with one other word,
I’ll cut off your heads in the morning.”
- ARTHUR MCBRIDE

In the beginning there was the CMS Vendor Meme, which turned into a light hearted and entertaining exercise in which over 20 CMS vendors participated. As a response to this, Vignette posted a second meme which appears to have backfired. There aren’t going to be many (any?) responses, and Luis Sala has posted a rather biting response on his *personal* (not Alfresco’s) blog.

Before I comment on this, I’d like to say for the record that there is a lot about Vignette that I like. They were, without doubt, CMS pioneers. When Vignette V7 was released many moons ago, I genuinely believe it was the best Content Management System out there. Apart from a couple of major gripes, I still like the CMS and think certain aspects of it are uniquely attractive. VAP is one of the leading portals too. I hate the Dynamic Portal/Site integration but that’s just me. But I would still happily implement Vignette and do currently work with it.

Before reading this, make sure you read Luis’ post Vignette tries to start a WCM Vendor Meme (yawn!). I wonder if Vignette are going to respond to this, or just leave it at that. Vignette have lost their way a bit and I agree with a lot of the comments that Luis made. They have also been in the press quite a lot recently for a number of reasons, and I’m not going to repeat things that have been already said elsewhere. Some of the points in Luis’ post have been discussed in the CMSWire article Five Reasons to Choose Vignette (or Not…) by John Conroy and Irina Guseva. I am, however, going to add my thoughts to a few of Luis’ comments.

I would argue that one of the main reasons that happened was because Vignette, Interwoven and Documentum are entrenched in 7-15 year technologies and mindsets that have resulted in stagnation while the smaller, more agile vendors that ranked a little higher on the list can more successfully innovate and adapt to changing market conditions.

I think is completely true that the speed of development of the ECM vendors mentioned is much slower. Compare Vignette VCM 7.3.0.1 to 7.6 – not as much progress as one would hope in about 5 years. It isn’t only Vignette – we’re still waiting for TeamSite 7 for example having had a sneak peak 2 years ago at GearUp 2007. But I blame the technologies more than the mindsets. In the Vignette CMS case, I’m going to point the finger at an extremely complex J2EE implementation using some technologies that are pretty old by current standards. Aim some monitoring software like SpotLight at the VCM, change and publish a simple content type, and watch the party. Quite staggering just how much is going on behind the scenes. Not surprising that it is complex to extend and change. In addition, I think the larger players are hamstrung by backward compatibility promises as they tend to support much larger, business critical implementations. You’d think this means that their upgrade paths are easier and more reliable, but sadly recent history his taught us the opposite.

That’s probably one of the main reasons Vignette’s earnings continue to drop and, more alarmingly, Vignette Professional Services account for roughly 50% of their revenue. Very scary…

Yes, Vignette’s PS account for a large part of their revenue. From the agency/systems integrator (that’s where I live) perspective, we are very cautious of this model. It doesn’t make our lives any easier when we need to compete against the vendor’s PS team if we recommend their CMS for an implementation. More and more small vendors are moving to the Partner Channel only model, which makes life much more pleasant for everyone. And I appreciate that the vendors need to ensure that partners have the skill to implement correctly and want to certify some parts of the solution, but I believe the Professional Services should be contracted to the partner, not directly to the client.

All vendors must be very careful about claiming “massive scalability” as every implementation is unique and while the software may be capable of scaling in one use-case, it could die in sputtering, driveling fits in the other.

Of course. Bad implementation can kill any software. Let me tell you a story that depresses me a bit. 10 years ago, Vignette had what I consider an excellent caching model. They used “Components” which actually ended up as output cached HTML fragments. They used Server Side Includes (SSIs) to allow for an extremely flexible mix of cached and dynamic content on the same page. They didn’t have a very sophisticated dependency graph based de-cache back then, but no-one really did. They were very proud of it, claimed it had multiple patents, and I think it was the dog’s bollocks (that’s a good thing for the non-UK readers). The model vanished in later versions, and was replaced completely when Vignette Application Portal (VAP) become the recommended delivery mechanism.

A couple of years ago I was presenting at Vignette Village 2007 with a customer. One of the main themes of this Village was that Vignette had the fastest, most scalable delivery mechanism in the universe, ever. Another main theme was that the product roadmap was very driven by customer demand. “You asked, we listened” kind of thing. So I found it quite ironic that a major product launch at Village was a brand new component that sped up the delivery even more: Vignette High Performance Delivery (HPD). Now the fastest delivery mechanism in the world is even faster! And the architecture behind HPD is remarkably similar to the caching model they had in the late 90s!

I’m going slightly off topic here, but I don’t like the way the blurb on the site for this product says “HPD lets organizations deliver fresh, customized content online without either the high cost of hardware or the unacceptable cost of slow site performance“. There are other options. For example, Vignette really did a great job on the Atlanta 2004 Olympics site. It looked excellent and performed well under massive load. But this was all Akamai fronted. I’m a big fan of CDNs and ESIs for massively scalably delivery.

After wasting investing hundreds of millions buying OnDisplay, DataSage, Revenio, Epicentric, Intraspect, Tower Technology and most recently Vidavee, one could argue that Vignette could *possibly* address all those areas, but the dirty little secret is that even over a decade after some of those acquisitions occured, Vignette has positively and quite spectacularly failed in truly integrating all those services.

I think the key word here is “truly”. Some of the products are reasonably well integrated, but these are point integrations between product A and product B. I’d like to see a generic integration architecture instead. A single repository (or illusion thereof) for the different products would be the dream, but that seems unlikely. I think the word wasting is unfair, although some of the acquisitions have been worse than others. I’d also like to add that I believe Vignette are aware of these issues, do embrace and support enabling emerging standards (JSR-168/286, JSR-170/283, maybe the new favourite CMIS) which could help with their integrations, and still have some really smart people. But their current product stack makes this a really difficult problem which is going to take them a lot more time (which maybe they don’t have?) to solve.

The Vignette Application Portal is pretty much the only *simple* way to render content. While the sales and sales engineers might say that customers can create websites using any web framework and programming language, a realization of the effort involved will serve as a near-instant death-knell to such foolhardy notions.

I’m going to disagree with this on two points. I like the VCM Content API and have successfully implemented systems that use a non-Vignette (this doesn’t mean bespoke!) delivery framework. Surely one of the main benefits of the “decoupled” ECM approach is that one does have the option to use the ECM suite simply to manage content to be consumed by any delivery channel. My second disagreement is that VAP is a simple way to render content. For a public facing site that does not need a portal, I believe that using VAP (or any portal) is overkill and fraught with peril.

Customers foolish enough to buy from Vignette are faced with an 8 page-long pricesheet (please take a look!)

Actually, the PDF version is more like 30 pages. In response to the “Simple Price List” question in the initial meme, part of the response was “Look out for a pricing innovation coming soon to a price sheet near you … it will probably be simple enough for a five year old”. Vignette are aware of the over-complication and hopefully will address it. If they don’t, they’re in trouble.

Vignette’s product suite is so expansive and disjointed that the typical Vignette sales engineer cannot even fathom how to install them all. So Vignette has a “Sales Enablement Team” whose primary job function is to figure out how to install all these moving parts and set up a hosted VMWare environment so that they can demo it. I pity my brethren there who still have to run more than one Vignette app on their laptops.

*cough*

Anyway, enough of this now. Let me close my coffin on this near extinct meme with a final thought. I still believe Vignette has some really good software and some really good people. They’ve also got some really big architectural and software problems. I, for one, hope they can sort them out before it is too late. If they don’t, they wouldn’t be the first US Pioneer to die in Texas. And it is only 81 miles / 1 hour 22 mins drive from Vignette Corporate Headquaters to the Alamo.

Come gather ’round people wherever you roam
And admit that the waters around you have grown
And accept it that soon you’ll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you is worth savin’
Then you better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’.
- THE TIMES THEY ARE A-CHANGIN’

As some of you may be aware, the ECM Maturity Model (ECM³) was recently released. The aim of the model is to provide a structured framework that allows an enterprise to measure their level of capability in various ECM areas, and provide a roadmap for improvement. If this doesn’t sound like your cup of tea, maybe you should read this instead. If you don’t know what ECM is, have a look at this excellent AIIM Slideshow. If, like me, you think this is super cool and long overdue, read on. Also, if you’ve ever seen anything like this in your directory structure at work (names deleted to protect the guilty), read on too …

The model is released under a Creative Commons license and is the result of the collaboration between four firms – Wipro, CMS Watch, Smigiel Consulting Group and Hartman Communicatie. No-one is trying to make any money out of this. Just a bunch of smart people trying to provide some rigour in an area which certainly needs it. Importantly, the model does not cover Web Content Management (WCM) but instead looks at traditional ECM (Document Management, Digital Asset Management, Knowledge Management, Records Management and Business Process Management ). It has a handy glossary if you want more information on any of these.

In summary, the framework provides 13 maturity dimensions, categorised as one of Human, Information or Systems. The general idea is that a company should rank themselves on a scale of 1 (unmanaged, you suck) to 5 (pro-active, you rock) against each dimension. This figure taken from the document shows all the dimensions. A fuller description of each is included in the framework.

So, how do we categorise ourselves against these dimensions? And what does each level mean for each dimension? That’s the genius – a really well thought out single page chart provides the tool to do this. In my humble opinion, this chart is worth its weight in gold. When I first looked at it, it just felt right. Logical, well thought out and user friendly. Here it is (click to enlarge):

I downloaded the 37 page document about a month ago, but felt I had to test it before writing about it. So on Monday a guest speaker canceled and I was able to hijack my company’s weekly Technical Architects’ meeting. Sweet!. I gave the others a 10 minute summary of the model, handed out the 5 copies of the chart, and we all independently rated our own Enterprise. We then took the average (did somone say crowd-sourced?) and drew our own ECM Maturity chart which is now stuck on the wall next to my desk.

After performing this exercise, I like the model even more. The independent rankings provided by my colleagues were all remarkably close. No-one was ever more than 1 point away from the average score on any dimension, which tells me that the framework is generally logical and unambiguous. The whole meeting only took an hour.

“So what is the point?”, you may ask. The first step in solving a problem is admitting you have one. This exercise really highlights where your efforts should be focused. For example, there is no point buying expensive software if you don’t have executive buy-in, if you have not performed a thorough content audit, or if your IT function cannot support you. It helps you “understand where you are over- and under-spending in one dimension or another”. The document even provides suggestions describing how best to progress to the next level in each area. It’s your free ECM roadmap in a box and a great tool for getting sponsorship from those that hold the purse strings.

According to this posting, the model has already been downloaded nearly 1000 times. I would really like to send my appreciation to the 5 people (Alan Pelz-Sharpe, Apoorv Durga, David Smigiel, Erik Hartman and Tony Byrne) that devoted a large chunk of their valuable time (2 elapsed years!) to create this so that people like me and my clients can benefit. I’d urge you all to test it internally or with your clients and feed your thoughts back to the community via the team blog.

I do have some thoughts and suggestions around improvements to the document. If anyone is interested, you can read my more formal feedback (some of which is pretty anal) here: ecmmmfeedback20090403.txt.

Finally, before anyone asks, I am not going to lift the corporate skirt and reveal our scores. Suffice to say, we didn’t have enough 4′s and 5′s and we even had a 1. And we’re meant to be experts. No-one ever said ECM was gonna be easy.

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.

There’s a lone soldier on the cross, smoke pourin’ out of a boxcar door,
You didn’t know it, you didn’t think it could be done, in the final end he won the wars
After losin’ every battle.
- IDIOT WIND

Part 1: The Beginning
Part 2: The Meme Spreads
Part 3: The Aftermath

Right, it is time to draw this chapter to a close. If you don’t know what this is all about, please read Part 1 and Part 2 mentioned above first. There has been a great response, and there is talk that an ECM focused meme will start soon too. This has been reported by Julian Wraith, who also did an excellent job keep track of all the responses. Thanks! Google Bertrand Delacrétaz’s Meme ID to find everything there is to find: 9c56d0fcf93175d70e1c9b9d188167cf.

For the record, the 24 vendors that responded (with links to their responses) are: Jahia, Ektron, Hippo CMS , Magnolia, EPiServer, Nuxeo, GX, Midgard, Knowledge Tree, infopark, Day, Alfresco, CoreMedia, Sitecore, OpenText, Alterian, dotCMS, Vignette, Autonomy/Interwoven and Escenic. Not yet in the table: eZ Systems, e-Spirit, Enano, Sense/Net.

Below is my summary of the results. Click the image for a larger version. Please note that everything here is extremely subjective. You’d be insane to use this as part of any vendor selection exercise!

Summary of the Scores

Notes on the scoring:

• Vendors shown with a blue background did not score themselves. So I scored them based on what I think their answers meant.
• GX gave themselves a 0 and a 1, where they meant a 1 and a 2. So their score rises from 40 to 42.

The Overwhelming Yes Questions

These questions had an average score of 2.8 and above:

• Amazingly, everyone thought their Software Does What It Says it did. That’s great news for the CMS buyer. Everyone is honest . Most don’t even try to justify this, although Ektron justify their reply with the fact that they have “more WCMS implementations than any other vendor in the marketplace”. I’d be interested to see the list/research on which this is based.
• They all claim to have a Free SDK. I wonder if Kas Thomas had a vendor in mind when he put that question onto the list?
• The No Reboot topic caused a bit of controversy, with three vendors claiming it isn’t important. I disagree with this. A reboot doesn’t cause any downtime in a load balanced environment, but I feel it is architecturally wrong for the CMS to go so close to the Operating System to warrant one.
• Alfresco were the only ones to admit that they need their technical presales engineers to help the Sales Guys. Maybe the other vendors included these techies as part of the sales team so gave themselves full marks.
• Again, Alfresco were the only ones that confessed their Sample Site wasn’t great. I’ve seen a lot of these sample sites, and some of them are really quite dire. I think a few more vendors should have given themselves a “Sort Of” here. But I guess the question did not ask for a Good sample site, so they are technically honest. They all have a Tutorial, most of which are good.
• Three vendors admitted that they didn’t have a Full Installer. dotCMS lost some points here, but at least it is on their roadmap. I do think that the Hippo were a bit hard on themselves. I prefer a standard EAR/WAR deployment to an install Wizard, especially in a large, clustered environment. A One Click Update question would have brought some interesting answers as upgrades are often much hard than installs.

The Differentiator Questions

These questions had an average score below 2.8:

• About half the vendors struggled on the No English challenge. The smaller US based vendors normally do worse here as many of their clients are single language. The European based vendors live and breath multi-language every day.
• Interwoven is the only vendor that does not offer a Download. Six others offer one with conditions attached.
• Most vendors eat their own Dogfood, apart from SiteCore, who drink their own pre-release champagne. Quite a few aren’t on the latest version though. Escenic gave themselves a 1 for this, while many other vendors gave themselves a 2. And I’m taking bets on when Vignette’s site is going to be running V7.6. KnowledgeTree gave themselves a very kind 3 seeing as they don’t do WCM. But their score does prove that most of the questions are noting to do with WCM and could apply to almost any software vendor.
• Escenic were the only ones that admitted their Price List is able to “adapt to a large variety of customers”. I believe that all the major vendors do this, and that the price can vary enormously. Maybe the answers refer to list price as opposed to the actual golf-course price, but I think Escenic showed honesty here that some of the others could have done. Vignette did also admit their model is complex. Half claim a 5-year old could understand it. But I hope this five year old can also drink a lot in the pub and negotiate a good discount or he is going to get screwed.
• Surprisingly, the question with the lowest average score was the Raise Issues From Product one. All vendors have an issue logging system, so this would be extremely simple to implement. It could just be a link from the admin screens to the support screens.
• The most controversial question was probably the All Help Files And Documentation are Part of the Install. Now I’m going to disagree with Kas on this and side with some of the vendors. I prefer online documentation to local installation for a number of reasons: It is kept up to date and continuously enhanced, it can include user submitted contributions, it can be powered by an advanced search engine, it can contain offsite links, and I don’t like having extra items installed on the servers. I do like to have a local of the SDK, but this should be embedded in the IDE and be an optional extra download as part of the SDK. And if people do still work when they are offline, the ability to download all the documentation would be a bonus.

The Jon Vendor Meme Awards 2009

Any great competition needs an awards ceremony. So, in the spirit in which this whole contest was conducted, I’m honoured to be able to announce:

• The Jon Award For Transparency goes to Escenic. Sure they came stone last, but I trust the guys.
• The Jon Award For Agility Above And Beyond Expectations goes to Vignette. I really didn’t expect them to respond, yet they were the first ECM player to do so.
• The Jon Award For The Best Product Name goes to Hippo CMS. Of course.
• The Jon Award For Anti-Cheating goes to Nuxeo, who miscounted their score on the low side. I’ve added a point to their reported score.

And thanks once again to Kas Thomas for his “A reality checklist for vendors“, and Day for starting this party, giving CMS geeks like me something to smile about. It’s been real.

UPDATE: 28 March 2009 – Added KnowledgeTree and Ektron.

UPDATE: 03 April 2009 – eZ Systems have responded. I’ll update the chart when I have more time.

UPDATE: 08 April 2009 – e-Spirit set themselves up for a fall by giving themselves a perfect score. Anyone know enough to see if they’re being cheeky? Not a vendor I know much about sadly. 45/45 seems a bold claim to make. They didn’t publish any contact details for question 15. I notice @espirit_news joined Twiter 15 minutes ago. Just in time. Well done, e-Spirit! Thanks for playing.

UPDATE: 09 April 2009 – Adding Enano (seeing Julian included them in his list) and Sense/Net.

Now, there’s a woman on my block,
She just sit there as the night grows still.
She say who gonna take away his license to kill?
- LICENSE TO KILL

Just come back from a nice Brick Lane curry and a few beers with my old colleagues from Accenture. Just enough beers, in fact, for a minor rant. Before I start, I’d like to say that there is nothing I dislike more than someone that complains about problems without offering a sensible solution. Which is exactly what I’m about to do.

Here’s my problem. My day job involves me drawing many system architecture diagrams. This poses many challenges: How do I ensure that the solution is fit for purpose, reliable, scalable, extensible, performant, resilient and more? How do I select the best-fit third party products? What colours should the boxes on my Visio diagrams be, and should they have round corners? And how do I say my clients money?

Don't want to do this

It would be ideal if the vendors’ licensing models allowed us to harmoniously achieve all the goals stated above. The sad reality, however, is that the licensing model sometimes means that we have to sabotage our architectures in order to save a fortune on licensing. Some examples situations are given below:

• A per site or domain cost – Many vendors will charge you per “site”, the definition of which isn’t clear. Sometimes this is an IIS site or Application pool, but more often than not it is based on domain. So, if I have a global presense and use domains such as www.globalcorp.com, www.globalcorp.co.uk, www.globalcorp.jp and so on, I can get hammered with a 60 site license. Whereas, if I go with www.globalcorp.com/en-GB/ or www.globalcorp.com/jp/ instead and place simple redirects on my top level domains, I have a single site license. I prefer the first option, but not if it is going to cost the client tens of thousands of $$$/£££’s. Which means we sometimes reluctantly go for option 2. That said, option two does have it’s advantage in that single domains can be easier to manage (SSL certs, SEO and more), but I still prefer a domain per region.
• A per machine / CPU cost for a very small component – There are some vendors which will charge extra for each machine on which a component is installed. My pet hate here is a deployment listener, which is most often seen in a CMS that operates a decoupled publishing model. If, for example, I publish a news story from my content staging environment behind my firewall to my load balanced production environment on the other side, two things normally happen. The content is published to a remote database cluster, and the associated static files (images, for example) are remotely copied to the file system of each in the cluster. If the CMS employs a baking model, the content is normally also deployed as a static file. Now this is all great, until my web tier server farm gets large and I have to pay a ridiculous license fee for each box for the priviledge of having a file copy. The workaround here is simply to install the deployment listener on one server in the cluster, and run some free file system synchronisation tool (for example rsync) that copies that content to the other machines in the cluster. Another workaround is expensive hardware (like a SAN) which may be overkill.
• A cost for each named CMS user or editor - I believe it is extremely important for each user of a system to have a unique username and password, mainly for security and audit trail reasons. However, I’ve seen cases where a single login is shared by multiple editors purely to avoid a per login license. I wouldn’t be surprised if this arrangement violates the licensing terms, and it isn’t something we’ve ever done. I think this model is rare these days, normally replaced with a concurrent user limit.
• Vagaries around inter-, extra- and intranet use – Some licensing models depend on which part of the Enterprise use the system. I think the difference between an internet site and intranet site is still fairly well defined, but an extranet can cause enormous grey areas. Falling foul of this can have massive implications on licensing and needs to be considered when designing the architecture.
• A per hit cost for an Analytics products – Now this is off topic and more a question than a statement. Some of our clients use a free service (you guessed it, Google Analytics), but most use a larger commercial product such as Omniture or WebTrends. The licensing model is often based on the number of hits received by the tracking server. And this is what I was wondering: If I have an extremely high volume site, what happens if I only sample the visitors by, for example, tagging 1 in 1000. This sampling is a bit like an exit poll in an election. It would be quite expensive to ask everyone who they voted for when leaving the booth. Asking a small subset is much cheaper, and yields reliable results if the sample is truly random. This could potentially save a significant amount on licensing, and all I need to do is read my reports in terms of 1000′s of users. Of course this is a terrible idea when using advanced techniques such as A/B Testing or Multivariate Testing to increase the value per user. But it might be a good idea if you’re simply tracking behaviour. For the record, I’ve never tried this and don’t know if it would violate the licensing agreement. Does anyone have any thoughts on this?

I could probably go on a bit more. There are considerations around physical machines versus virtual machines, active-passive Disaster Recovery configurations and the definition of a staging/pre-production site. If anyone could add to the list above I’d be interested to hear from you.

I wish I could end this post with a suggestion for the perfect licensing model for the vendors, but sadly I have no answers. The vendors are all well aware of the short-comings of the existing models and people a whole lot wiser than me have been trying to find logical and fair ways to repair these. If any major vendor does think their price list avoids all these issues, I’d love to see it.

Until these issues are properly addressed, we will have to continue to consider vendor licensing models when designing our system architectures. But it depresses me enormously when a quirk in a pricing matrix makes me do something that I know smells a little bit like horseshit.

Ye playboys and playgirls
Ain’t a-gonna run my world,
Not now or no other time
- PLAYBOYS AND PLAYGIRLS

Like many others, I use Twitter Search to listen to the word on the street in the areas about which I’m passionate. Recently, I’ve been doing a lot of searches for “CMS“. In this case, however, the problem I have is that very few people are talking about the kind of CMS product in which I am interested. To illustrate this, have a look at the search for “CMS” using one of my favourite visualisers – the Twitter Stream Graph.

Twitter Visualiser for "CMS"

You probably can’t see the detail here (click the image to see the current stream), but it is clear that when most Twitter users say CMS, they mean WordPress, Drupal or Joomla!. There’s always a big PHP strand in there too.

So I panicked a bit. I know WordPress (from this blog, mainly). We very occasionally see Drupal in a vendor selection, and never see Joomla! at all. I’ve never been involved in an implementation with either. In fact, the technology team where I work is 45% .NET, 45% Java and 10% Misc. We tend to avoid PHP, Python, Perl and other scripting languages for various reasons which I won’t go in to here. So, are we really that out of touch?

I thought I’d dig around a bit more. I found the CMS Focus: CMS Report’s Top 30 Web Applications article and, of the 30, I’ve heard of about 60%. But we only implement 2 (SharePoint and Alfresco). That’s 7% of the top CMS products. Not very good.

So I tried the Open Jason 50 Content Management Systems list for a bit more choice. Of the 50, I’d only ever heard of about 10, most of which are blogging platforms (TypePad, MoveableType, Blogger and WordPress. Drupal and Joomla! are there. But this list is a year old, and the only new ones that have come onto my radar recently are Silverstripe (now available on the Microsoft Web Platform Installer) and GoodBarry. The rest have names like Moodle, Pligg, Triggit, Jogango and Weebly which just make me feel old . And we’ve never implemented any of these for a client, excluding simple blogs. So that is 0 / 50, or 0%. Things are going from bad to worse. Had a look at the 52 More Content Management Systems from the same source. Got a bit better there. Heard of maybe 20, and actually implemented three (Alfresco, eZ Publish and LifeRay).

I needed a more recent list, I think. Found 10 Promising Content Management Systems by Jacob Gube. Heard of 5, implemented 0. It’s getting desparate.

Fortunately, it seems, the clients that we work with don’t play in this space either. Just to reassure myself, I re-checked the list in my bible (that’s CMS Watch). Still good there. Of the 42 vendors covered, I’ve dealt with about 70% of them, and been on projects with about 50% of them.

Which brings me to my point. There are two worlds out there, in which the term CMS means something different. The Big Wide World, and My World.

To the Big Wide World (which includes Twitter, and all the sites I’ve mentioned above), CMS means “Free Open Source CMS with Low Cost of Ownership”. The commercial Open Source CMS solutions don’t make the cut either. Four of the five Open Source CMS products reviewed by CMS Watch (Drupal, Joomla!, Plone CMS and TYPO3) live in both worlds. Open CMS doesn’t as my feeling is it is a bit too complex. Alfresco, DotNetNuke and ez Publish made one of the lists above, but don’t really feature in the Tweetosphere.

I inhabit a world populated by analysts, commercial vendors, systems integrators, large agencies and other such creatures. I don’t believe we pay much attention to the other world until a product jumps the gap. And it seems difficult for a product that isn’t Java or Microsoft based to make it in to My World.

Looking at it from the other side, it seems difficult for a product that is Java or Microsoft to make it into the Big Wide World. There are very few good open source Microsoft (which I don’t find surprising) and Java (which I do) CMS systems. The open source community has embraced the scripting languages. If anyone has a simple, easy to use, Java based CMS that they really like, I’d love to hear from them.

In my head, the two worlds are still quite far apart. My “web generation” is extremely uncomfortable even calling WordPress a Content Management System. But the scary thing is that I suspect that I’m probably completely wrong on this. The two worlds might collide sooner than I think. Or maybe they have already and I just didn’t see it happen.

P.S. Here are two great posts that highlight various super cool Twitter visualisers:

• 6 Unique Twitter Visualizations by Ben Parr
• 17 Ways to Visualize the Twitter Universe by Nathan Yau (a year old but still cool)

P.P.S. The Open Source CMS Market Survey by Ric Shreves gives a really good overview of the Open Source CMS market. I wish I’d read that before I wrote this blog entry.

I ain’t lookin’ to compete with you,
Beat or cheat or mistreat you,
Simplify you, classify you,
Deny, defy or crucify you.
All I really want to do
Is, baby, be friends with you.
- ALL I REALLY WANT TO DO

Part 1: The Beginning
Part 2: The Meme Spreads
Part 3: The Aftermath

It was the morning after the night before, and the CMS Vendor Meme started by Day Software began to spread. Two further vendors (Magnolia and Alfresco) were infected on the first day, but the days that followed saw the meme spreading like the Undead. So far, we have 18 Vendor Zombies. What follows is a day by day account of the unfolding events.

dotCMS have good designers

Big news. Vignette have responded using a FaceBook note. I gotta be honest, I didn’t think they would. Hats off to them, I say. They started with an intro explaining how Kas’ checklist didn’t really apply to them, only to ” stand-alone, SMB-focused software targeted at companies” that are “managed by a very small IT team”. They also find “that the Enterprise customers we serve don’t typically let the needs of IT drive their Web experience decisions”. So what? Why does that mean that the checklist doesn’t apply? I would have left a comment, but sadly no comments allowed. [UPDATE: Mea Culpa. You have to be a Fan of Vignette to comment on their page. But you can.]

They didn’t give themselves a score, but gave a YES for most questions. The occassional NO was well justified. The one SORT OF that made me chuckle was the “running on latest version of the software”. They’re “not on the latest point release”. Well, have fun upgrading that. It’s only a point release after all. Shouldn’t take long at all. Just a click, I’d think …

20 March 2009: Nuxeo enter the fray with a 40/45. They haven’t tagged anyone since they think there isn’t “any serious player that hasn’t been tagged already” . And they seem to be my kind of company. They’ll trade SDK’s for beer. They’re threatening to spread the meme to DM and Collaboration too.

Sweet! Another big player is up for a bit of fun. OpenText have entered, but not given themselves a score. Like Vignette, they start with a well written but very corporate intro explaining how the rules of the game don’t really apply to them. Nevertheless, they kindly agree to play anyway as “our customers expect nothing less than a transparent, strategic vision from Open Text”. Impressive stuff. An extremely slippery dodge on Question 14 – one price sheet. They also manage to squeeze in a few sales pitches (question 9 and 10). The RedDot name didn’t appear once. The brand is truly gone it seems. All in all, nice one OpenText.

Hot on their heels comes EPiServer, who score themselves highly with 42/45. Right up there at the top. Now, I am a skeptical little man and that sounds on the high side. But I know EPiServer extremely well (believe it or not, I’m a certified developer who isn’t allowed to code) and I don’t think I can’t fault their logic. They’re certainly very accurate about their answer to the language question. If anything, when you install it as English you might see the odd bit of Swedish. And maybe I’d lower the 2 to a 1 on the licensing model as the definition of a site, as they confess, is confusing as hell. But a big thanks to EPiServer for entering. They haven’t tagged anyone yet.

SiteCore in next. They gave themselves a modest 40/45. A very nice response though. My favourite was the response to the Dog Food challenge – not only do they use pre-release versions on their site, but they call it Champagne instead of Dog Food. Also like their answer to the documentation question. I’m starting to think that the Documentation question doesn’t belong on the checklist. Online documentation is probably more useful than locally installed documentation. Thanks for playing, SiteCore. But I’m not going to link to your ugly red “star image” cause it is 500 KB big.

Autonomy/Intervowen and SDL Tridion – come out, come out, wherever you are …

21/22 March 2009: It’s pretty quiet over the weekend. Almost too quiet. Then, suddenly, another big player posts their response. Thanks to Tom Wentworth from Autonomy/Interwoven. It’s absolutely brilliant to have all the major vendors getting involved in this. Really good for the CMS Community, I think. Like the other Enterprise Vendors, they haven’t given themselves a score. I think if they were to score themselves, it would be pretty low. However, all their responses are sensible and highlight the fact that the ECM players considers themselves very different to the smaller companies.

So, it seems that only one large vendor that has been tagged who is staying out of this. I’m not going to name the chickens again, but I wil say that an anagram of their name is “sordid lint”. C’mon, people, air that dirty laundry.

23 March 2009: Things appear to be getting quieter now that most of the main players are in. Doesn’t look like the meme is going to infect non-CMS vendors. A new entry today comes from Alterian (who own both MediaSurface and Immediacy). I liked the tone of their response. Very collaborative, very honest, and even congratulating some of the vendors on their response to other questions. They, like others on Twitter, question the validity of the reboot on install challenge, about which I’ll say more when everyone is in.

They don’t give themselves a score, but we’ll forgive them as they would probably have to score their two products independently. This would confuse the league tables horribly. I think the tone of their response proves how wrong I was about how this was going to play out. It isn’t a Deathmatch at all. But “CMS Celebrity Deathmatch” is a more catchy title than “CMS Collaborative Love In”.

“Some think the noble hippopotamus a somewhat pointless rhinoceros“. Not these guys, though. Hippo CMS come next, tagging Open Source Vendors OpenCMS, eZ Publish, Joomla!, TYPO3, Plone and Drupal. If this meme spreads into the Open Source land, all hell could break loose. Maybe someone will tag WordPress? Anyway, Hippo join Jahia at the top with a whopping 43/45. And where they deducted points from themselves, you can tell they feel they have the moral highground. Who needs an installer when you can deploy WARS and EARS? And surely editors speak more than one language? Did you know that hippos kill more people in Africa than any other large animal?

Another great side effect of this meme is that we are finding CMS Gurus on Twitter to follow. They’re all crawling out of the woodwork. Bill Trippe is compiling a list. He said he’d post a link here in a comment when it is ready. [UPDATE: Bill has posted the link below, but I got this wrong. It is a list of the actual vendor accounts, not individuals].

Part 1: The Beginning
Part 2: The Meme Spreads
Part 3: The Aftermath

You’ve been avoiding the main streets for a long, long while
The truth that I’m seeking is in your missing file
What’s your position, baby, what’s going on?
Why is the light in your eyes nearly gone?
- SOMETHING’S BURNING, BABY

Following on from the wonderfully entertaining “CMS Vendor Meme” (a.k.a. the “CMS Celebrity Deathmatch“), I’d like to drill slightly deeper into Item #9 – Dog Food. For the uninitiated, “Eating your own dogfood” means that the vendor uses their own software to run their own site. All of them do, according to the responses to the Vendor Meme so far, although not always on the very latest version.

So, do the vendors’ sites, written on technology which is sold as fully accessible and built by experts (at least, one hopes the vendor has experts), actually produce markup that validates? I guess the first question one has to ask is does it matter if a site is accessible. And the answer: Oh yes. For many many reasons which I’m not going to go into here. I understand that W3C validation ≠ Accessibility, but that is another discussion for another time too. Validation is still an important part.

XXXHTML by Rob Cottingham

I know that it isn’t always easy to make complex site that validate. Where I work, sites should always validate when they’re launched – it is part of the User Acceptance Criteria. However, we are guilty of back-sliding when sites are in support /maintenance mode, and editors break things when abusing Rich Text Editors. Shock, horror – there are still a lot of CMS products that allow editors to enter broken markup.

WordPress do a pretty good job. This blog validates at the time of writing, no thanks to me. Admittedly, I did have to fix the FeedBurner RSS link which left the closing slash from the img tag, but that wasn’t WordPress’s fault.

I digress. I thought I’d test the home pages of a few major commercial Web CMS vendors – those listed as Enterprise or Upper Tier in the latest CMS Watch Web CMS Report. I tested the vendor home page, which may not be CMS related at all, especially for the big boys. The results are tabulated below. The numbers below were generated on 18 March between 21:00 and 23:00 GMT using the W3C HTML Validator. I didn’t check the CSS or Feeds, just the markup. Both encoding and doctype were left on “Detect Automatically”. I didn’t look into the details of the errors. The ones with a large number of errors might actually only be a few errors that are repeated, or have knock-on effects.

The nice surprise mentioned in the title is IBM. Big Blue really does care about standards, and maybe Java is going to safe place should the SUN deal materialise. Hats off to Fatwire, Day and Percussion who get really close and clearly try to ensure the markup is good. The other 9 out of 13, however, don’t look so promising.

So, what am I saying? I am not for a second implying that the products that do badly in the above are “not accessible”. I just think the question we always see in an CMS Selection RFP is incorrect. Asking about an accessible editing interface (which comes out of the box) makes sense. Asking about an accessible front end (which is different for every implementation) makes no sense at all.

So, instead, the question on the RFP should be “Does your CMS allow the developer full control over the markup. If not, please specify where?” Now, it is highly unlikely that any product can answer an unequivocal “yes” to this. For example, every .NET based product mandates that a FORM tag containing the VIEWSTATE exists. However, this does not cause a problem.

But as we add products into the solution, we hit more restrictions. Portals are notoriosuly bad at giving control. I promised myself I wouldn’t rant about Portals for Public Facing Sites here, so I won’t. Many AJAX libraries (e.g. some JavaServer Faces implementations and ASP.NET AJAX nee ATLAS) give you very little control at all. JavaScript libraries are normally pretty good.

I believe the problem in most of the examples in the table above could be rooted in one of:

• The technology makes valid markup impossible – I think this could probably be worked around in many cases. But sometimes you simply can’t get around the bad markup you’re given.
• Nobody knew it mattered – Ignorance isn’t an excuse any more.
• Someone decided it wasn’t important – this doesn’t need further comment. Give them some concrete shoes and send them for a swim.
• There isn’t time and/or budget to ensure it validates – in some cases it is more expensive to create a validating, progressively enhanced site. However, in many cases I believe it is cheaper to do it properly.
• The front end team lacked the skill - This I can believe. Hopefully this improves with time. Many server side developers aren’t any good at client side work. I know I fall into this camp. When I was coding, CSS didn’t exist, HTML still had TABLES in it and the BLINK tag was cool. I’m not allowed anywhere near the front end code where I work. We have professionals for that.
• Showing off with fancy client side technologies - There are far too many sites that use Flash/AIR/Silverlight for no good reason, without providing an accessible fallback. Now this won’t affect the W3C validation, but it annoys the hell out of me. Use these technologies where they are needed, not for the sake of it.

I’m sure there are other reasons I’ve missed out, and I’d love to hear about them. I believe the responsibility for convincing management of the importance of doing things properly lies with us, the technologists. And if they seem not to care too much about accessibility, play the Increased Revenue cards (SEO, multi-device target market, maintainable code, integration with as yet unknown services, working on IE8 and other future browsers, etc) instead.

And once again, nice one IBM for winning the Home Page test. I apologise for my behaviour in some meetings in the past about the markup from WebSphere Portal. But let’s not get complacent – it would be nice if you could make the deeper pages in the site validate too.

UPDATE: Does anyone have the energy to publish a similar test for the mid-range and Open Source vendors? I might do it in a week or three if no-one else does it first.

“There must be some way out of here,” said the joker to the thief,
“There’s too much confusion, I can’t get no relief.
Businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth,
None of them along the line know what any of it is worth.”
- ALL ALONG THE WATCHTOWER

CMS Vendor Day has responded to this in the “CMS Vendor Meme“, and challenging other vendors to do the same. They “called out” the vendors they consider to be their main competitors – OpenText, Coremedia, Interwoven, Vignette, Fatwire, Nuxeo, Magnolia and Tridion. I won’t repeat the rules of the challenge, which are outlined on all of the vendor sites linked to below. But the general idea is that the vendor rates their own product against the 15 categories, giving themselves a total score out of 45.

This feels like it is done in a very different spirit to the recent CMS Showdown at South by Southwest. The SXSW event involved three Open Source Vendors (Drupal, Joomla!, WordPress) competing in a good humoured manner, with the general feeling being that all three entries, and Open Source CMS in general, were the winners. The Day Challenge feels more like a declaration of war.

I think I really like this. According to the Daily Show tonight (the UK is a day behind the US), “angry popularism is all the rage”. I think that the community should put pressure onto the other vendors to respond to the checklist, and let the Herd decide how honest the answers are. Any vendor that elects not to rise to the challenge should be given a mental black mark. The response from Day is shown below. Very cheeky giving themselves a 3 star rating for Reality and justifying it with a smiley face only.

Day's Self Evaluation

I’m not for a second saying that I agree with Day’s self evaluation, but that isn’t the point. It’s quite brave of them to put their thoughts out there. It didn’t take Open Source Vendor Magnolia long to trump the 40/45 from Day with 42/45.

Magnolia Responds

Magnolia also tagged Alfresco (and many other open source vendors), who responded extremely quickly. They decided (wisely) that the Magnolia score was verging on the incredible, so toned it down a notch giving themselves an average 41/45. I like their honesty on the Help & Docs front. [ UPDATE: They have just lowered their score to 40. ]

Alfresco's Response

I’m sure that this thread has a lot of life in it left, and hopefully more vendors will join in and someone will tabulate the results. And the crowds will tear into any responses they feel are not as true as they could be. Maybe the vendors could go a step further and put some votes or surveys on their sites to see if the users believe their answers. I am really hoping on of the big 3 (OpenText, Interwoven or Vignette) respond to this. I think this kind of honesty (if it is honesty) is more difficult for them.

I’m going to leave it at that for now. But I am wishing that I hadn’t stuck with my Bob Dylan song lyrics theme for post entries, and could use something like Guns and Roses’ Get In The Ring.

Tagging with Meme ID: 9c56d0fcf93175d70e1c9b9d188167cf

Well, the rifleman’s stalking the sick and the lame,
Preacherman seeks the same, who’ll get there first is uncertain.
- JOKERMAN

It’s been a busy year in Mergers and Acquisition land in the CMS and Search space. I’m always extremely worried about the future of a product that is acquired by a larger beast, and always interested to see whether they survive the acquisition. And the re-branding is fascinating. To summarise some of the recent activity:

• The death of the RedDot brand has been formally announced. So another memorable product name is going to vanish, becoming part of the not-so-catchy Open Text Web Solutions family. I would be surprised if we see the re-branded product on CMS Vendor Selection shortlists as often as we saw RedDot.
• Last month, Microsoft announced their plan for FAST ESP and FAST Search for SharePoint. There was silence for a while, but it looks like FAST does have a fighting chance. It does, however, beg the question: If SharePoint Search was as good as we thought, why did Microsoft acquire FAST?
• In January 2009, Autonomy announced that they would acquire Interwoven. Forrester use the word “swallows” in their recently released report. As a random aside, amazingly parts of the Forrester research site still appears to be running on Vignette 5 aka StoryServer! Gotta love the URL format. It seems like only yesterday that Autonomy and Verity merged into the uber-search company, but that was three years ago.
• Oracle is still going crazy, finalising their BEA deal last year. According to wikipedia, they are now bigger than IBM. The acquisition came with all of the items that BEA had formally acquired. Does anyone remember the Plumtree Corporate Portal, which looked set to be the next best .NET based portal, before becoming BEA Aqualogic Portal and vanishing (although still active, we’re told) into the Oracle family? And remember about 20 months ago when Stellent became Oracle Universal Content Management. Another catchy name. Stellent appears in the Middleware section on the Oracle site!

There was an interesting article in CMS Watch recently noting how many companies unimaginatively name their system after the product or company (Christening your ECM product). It is also interesting how the big vendors are following the Microsoft naming convention. More and more products are being called <Vendor Name> Content Management or <Vendor Name> [Content|Web|Enterprise] Solution. Maybe it is just me, but I find it extremely confusing. Especially now that the big players invariably have more than one product. For example, In July 2008, the Mediasurface group was acquired by Alterian. Immediacy CMS and Mediasurface became part of Alterian’s suite of products described as an “Enterprise Marketing Platform”. I love the fact that Alterian Corporate Edition is Immediacy, while Alterian Enterprise Edition is Mediasurface’s Morello. The description of the products on the Alterian Web Site is extremely uninformative – especially the technology section. I’d be interested if anyone can extract any information for the whole section. Also, sadly, the name Pepperio appears to have survived.

Finally, on the topic of CMS M&A, a thought on CMS companies buying agencies. Now I work for an agency, and find it slightly strange that some of our competitors are actually owned by vendors. About two years ago, Microsoft acquired Avenue A/Razorfish. Even more strangely, about a year ago, EMC (the same people that bought Documentum in 2003) aquired Conchango, a smaller UK based agency. While I appreciate that Conchango was bought to form part of the consulting division, the fact that they also promote CMS products that compete with their parent doesn’t gel for me. I wonder if all the Conchango employees have become Fans on the FaceBook page yet.

I’m not sure what the point of this posting was. I would say that, in summary, the best place to get a decent overview of the CMS offerings from a major vendor is probably a report such as those produced by CMS Watch. The second best place is probably wikipedia. And the worst place is probably the vendor’s site. And if you don’t believe me, try to figure out IBM’s Content Management offering from the IBM site.

The wind it was howlin’ and the snow was outrageous.
We chopped through the night and we chopped through the dawn.
When he died I was hopin’ that it wasn’t contagious,
But I made up my mind that I had to go on.
- ISIS

Just come back from EPiServer Day 2009 in Stockholm. I’m pleased to report that this was a truly excellent two days. Interesting presentations, interesting people and an interesting product. There were over 1100 people there, which is extremely impressive in the current climate. Speaking of which, it snowed throughout the event, but not enough to deter the Lesser-Spotted Hardened English Smoker, captured on film below.

First, the speakers. I was really impressed with the Keynote, Tim Walters from Forrester Research on the Death of WCM. The quality of the thinking from the large research companies is always impressive, but the presentation was given in a relaxed, informal manner which I really enjoyed.

I also loved the “It’s Like Being In A Rock Band”presentation by Andreas Sjöström from Sogeti. It had a very simple message, but presented extremely well. I was glad to discover I still have my passion. Also, the Crowd Surfing presentation by David Brain was enjoyable, and had a few intriguing nuggets. The Trust Survey highlighted how people don’t trust CEO’s very much …

None of these presentations had much to do with EPiServer, but they were great anyway.

The EPiServer specific sessions were also informative, and as usual I was struck by the speed with which they develop things. If anything, the roadmap moves too quickly for me! But it was good to hear that the majority of the focus is on the core products – Content Management and Community. I’m always skeptical of a CMS vendor that trys to expand into too many areas. I don’t need another End-To-End eBusiness Solution. I need focused products that solve my customers’ problems.

I attended another session on EPiServer’s Create+ package, which was far more of a technical deep dive than I’d seen of it before. The X3EPiServer Composer product has gone up a couple of notches in my esteem. For some reason, I’d previously thought that a page was either an EPiServer page, or an Extension Page, but not a combination. This is because of all the demos I’d been shown, no-one had ever combined normal EPiServer properties with an Extensions page. I think a better way to think about it is that the Composer adds a new property type (not page type) to an existing EPiServer page.

As usual, there was a fair bit of socialising. We had a few brews and talked about Life and Content Management. While I was the only representative from LBi UK this year, I was lucky to spend time with collegues from Sweden and the Netherlands. I met a few new Content Management Geeks that I’d not met before, and had some interesting discussions. We sensibly avoided the 2:00 am trip to a late night drinking venue, so I started Day 2 bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.

Three London based Agencies had been nominated for EPiServer Awards (LBi, Rufus Leonard and Fortune Cookie), and we tried to stick together with the UK EPiServer staff. Unfortunately, our show of solidarity wasn’t enough to bring an EPiServer Award back to Blightly. In an extremely slick Oscars-like ceremony, the 5 awards were handed out. However, the voting felt rather Eurovision-esque, and while the UK received nil point, Sweden bagged 5 out of 5 awards. Earlier in the day, one of the keynote speakers asked the audience if they felt Sweden would be a top IT supplier in the next few years. After taking a clean sweep at the EPiServer Awards (beating 118 entries from 11 countries, if memory serves), they certainly already are. Maybe next year …

Finally, a note to EPiServer marketing. Changing the URL to the Events pages (Upcoming_Events to Passed_Events) makes linking to them pretty painful.

Expect another update from the next EPiServer Event in London Town.

Mona tried to tell me
To stay away from the train line.
She said that all the railroad men
Just drink up your blood like wine.
- STUCK INSIDE OF MOBILE WITH THE MEMPHIS BLUES AGAIN

The good folks at CMS Watch have released another version of their Subway Vendor Map. This thing is quite brilliant, and easy on the eye. In my office, the walls are plastered with pretty A2 posters of work created by our strategy, creative, experience, marketing and other teams. It’s great to be able to stick the Vendor Map post on the wall for the Tech Department – it looks much better than a technical architecture diagram. Click the diagram for a large version.

A few things I’ve also been wondering about.

• Does the order of items on a line mean anything? Why is Lithium closer to the centre than FaceBook? And poor WebTrends seems to be quite far into the suburbs.
• I find the size of the stations slightly misleading because, to me, they imply vendor size or market share. In reality, I think the size is simply proportional to the number of lines on which the vendor sits.
• I think the fact that this map shows Vendors could be misleading. Maybe it should show Integrated Product Suites or something similar. This becomes especially true when talking about the recent merged companies, such as Autonomy/Interwoven.
• I am glad to see EPiServer has made it onto the map (pretty close to Nichy), but I would have thought that they would also be on the Social Software and Collaboration line near Fatwire. They have a large community product, not just a Web CMS.
• I would like liked to see Vyre having a station on the DAM line, somewhere near Day. It is their heritage.
• We’re seeing a surprising number of clients talking about building their public facing sites using SAP Portal. The fact that SAP still isn’t on any CMS lines encourages me. Does anyone consider SAP / Netweaver a viable CMS / ECM option these days?
• The red SoCo line is a real jumble of vendors, which shows that the terminology is still being defined. Probably the only line on which the vast majority of the vendors don’t really compete with one another. I’m not sure why IBM is on there.
• I find the XML and Component Management line quite alien (my lack of understanding, not the report’s fault). I don’t see many of those products. I’d like to understand the rationale for including EMC and SDL Tridion on there ahead of other CMS vendors.

For those that like a bit of history, here is the version from 2008. Note the death of the Email Archiving And Management line, being replaced with XML Component Management. Is this because Email Archiving and Management is commodity now, or just not interesting any more? And the Social Software line suddenly has a whole lot more stations, which seems to be a sign of the times.