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

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.

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.

You don’t need a weather man
To know which way the wind blows
- SUBTERRANEAN HOMESICK BLUES

You’re not going to believe this. I’ve been getting some criticism. “Your posts are too long”, some people cried. “Lose the Twitterfeed”, shouted someone else. “Your Southpark Avatar is so 15 year old” claimed an anonymous coward. Hey man, I made that avatar myself. That hurts. But seeing as I work for an agency that prides itself on its insight and user research, I decided it was time to do some user research of my own. As the budget I assign to run this blog is three fifths of fuck-all, Survey Monkey was the logical choice. Thanks so much to the 37 people that answered it.

Firstly, let’s talk about the Bob Dylan blog introductions that I’ve been pouring my heart and soul in to. As the chart below shows, more than a third of the respondents don’t read them. And another bunch want a change of theme.

So I thought about this. Granted, some of the quotes are, at best, very tenuously linked to the topic at hand – I need to improve the relevance. But Bob’s got so much more to give. I’m going to try not to repeat songs yet, but again, some tunes have so many classic lyrics that I might have to. If I do a new a brand theme, it’ll be in 2010. After deciding this, I tweeted my new found conviction:

To which someone responded:He has a ridiculous avatar, and what kind of  name is @golansleepweed? What does that mean, anyway? Nevertheless, this clown also happens to be the Head of LBi Intergalatic Creative Domination so I feel obliged to listen. I know which way the wind is blowing, so Bob is staying on the blog. After all, if he’s good enough for sat-nav, he’s good enough for me. Thanks, Chris, for the vote of confidence.

Some other findings of the so-called “research”:

• 19% of you actually want links to open in new windows. 64% agree with the no-new-window policy. 19% don’t care. Sweet.
• Only 13% of you found the survey annoying. 87% of my readers are all round nice guys. The web is about giving, man.
• This one surprised me. 76% like the automated Twitterfeed announcements.  13% don’t care and only 11% want them dead. So they’re staying, giving me less reason to retweet my own posts and feel like a douchebag.
• Only 12% think I should tweet with my real name instead of @McBoof. 41% don’t care, and 47%, for some reason, like my dumb-ass name.
• On the other hand, more people think my beautiful South Park avatar is lame (29%) than like it (24%). Most don’t care
• 56% don’t care about my WordPress theme, 44% think it rocks, and 0% (yes, zero) think it sucks. Woot.

And the highlights of the comments:

• Most people want me to swear more. There was a wee bit of concern of kids reading over shoulders and evil corporate firewall traffic snoopers. There was far more swearing on the survey than on my blog.
• I need a proof reader. Badly.
• My posts are too long and ramble a bit. This is because it’s quite difficult to write a well-constructed, thought out post that actually has a point.
• Someone wants me to write more about Kas Thomas.

Finally, I’d like to point out that I’ve been involved in more than a few projects on which the client commissioned my agency to perform high quality user research and then chose to ignore the results. They’re idiots. I guess that makes me an idiot too.

P.S. @Ivanka, I hope you aren’t reading this. See what happens to User Research here after you leave …

Don't worry, Bob. I'm not ditching you just because the crowds are baying for blood

I’ll go to some bar room
And drink with my friends
- MOONSHINER

Today was Day 1 at Internet World 2009 a.k.a. #iwexpo for the Twitterrati. I got there nice and early, got myself a coffee and settled in to CMS Watch’s Theresa Regli talking about “Findability in a Web 2.0 World”. It is really difficult for the speakers to pitch these at the correct altitude as the audience is so varied, but I quite enjoyed the talk. My favourite part was when she called most marketing “crap”. A nice relaxed, honest presentation.

I spent most of the day chatting to vendors. Got the lowdown from (in alphabetical order) Alterian, CoreMedia, Ektron, EPiServer, EZ Systems, FatWire, FirstSpirit, Gomez, Hybris, Jadu, Kentico, OpenText (nee RedDot), SiteCore, Squiz and Vyre. I enjoyed my chat with Ian about the crazy CMS shit we all got up to in the late nineties.

I am alway interested to see who has the biggest stands at these events. A few years ago, Tridion were all over Internet World but they aren’t at here at all any more (maybe the SDL influence?). Vignette and EMC weren’t there either. Autonomy/Interwoven were there although their collateral isn’t merged yet. Last year, Vyre had the biggest stand but they’ve decided to spend their marketing budget elsewhere and went for a normal stand this year. EPiServer seemed to have biggest stand and the most people this year. SiteCore had a big one too. Peer 1, a dedicated hosting company, had a massive stand and some really hot chixors in hotpants who looked nothing at all like network engineers.

There was a stand labelled “Plone” which made no sense and smelled a bit like a systems integrator trying to pull a fast one. It was actually manned by a company called Netsight that were trying to hijack the Plone brand. I don’t like those guys at all. Don’t give them any money please. [UPDATE: I got this very wrong. They did actually get permission to do this and are, by all accounts, good guys. So you can give them money. See the comments below or the Netsight blog for their explanations. Apologies to Netsight, Matt and everyone else. Although I'd still be happier if the booth company name said Netsight. ]

One of the cool things about these events are the freebies. I couldn’t find many stress balls this time. I did pick up one from Kentico and another from SiteCore. I’ve recently defined a new approach to Vendor Selection Exercises, so thought I’d ask the expert (my 11 month year old son) to perform an one:

After much thought, he picked SiteCore over Kentico. I’m pretty convinced he went for the rugby ball shape over the football shape, but it might have been down to cost or the developer API. As soon as he can talk, I’ll let you all know. Sometimes vendor selections can be rather random.

I watched LBi’s Dom Collier and Jill Lloyd (and our friends at the British Red Cross) talking to a packed session about a recent LBi project. For the LBi groupies, Mikey and Mark are talking about British Gas tomorrow at 13:00. One of my personal favourite projects. Get along and have a listen to that one.

The highlight of the event was, for me, the drinks afterwards. Was lucky enough to share quite a few pints with Tony Byrne from CMS Watch, Lau Andreasen from JBoye, LBi’s very own Microsoft guru Riaz, wise man James Hoskins and some other top secret guests. I can’t think of many things I enjoy more than a few pints of Guiness and a chat about CMS. Hope we can do it again some time soon. And I hope Tony has a better photo than my crappy iPhone one below.

All in all, a really interesting and enjoyable day! More tomorrow. I love this game.

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.

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.

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.