It ain’t that I’m questionin’ you.
To take part in any quiz.
It’s just that I ain’t got no watch
An’ you keep askin’ me what time it is
- IF YOU GOTTA GO, GO NOW

A Quiz

Right, the quiz. It all started when I got invited to play some dumb-ass quiz on QuizTweet.com. Something about Which Mixed Drink Would I Be. Now I only drink beer these days, so I ain’t no mixed drink at all. But all the CMS cool kids were turning out to be Martini’s, so I bowed to the pressure to prove I was different. QuizTweet is pretty sneaky as once you’ve invested time and energy answering the questions, it then asks you for your Twitter creds so it can tweet your results. You find out how you’ve done at the same time as the world finds out. So I break my own rules and give the QuizTweet app access to my Twitter account. And it doesn’t really warn you either. @QuizTweet – if you’re reading this, I really think you need to add in a notification screen so people realise what is about to happen.

Once I’d sold my soul and creds to QuizTweet, I figured I’d try to set my own quiz up. The interface is pretty sweet and I was done in 20 minutes. You first define the different possible outcomes (with a description and an easy-to-select image), and then write the questions. For each question, you need to write an answer for each outcome. Which means I needed 13 possible responses for each question. This is far too many – I wish that I could assign multiple outcome to the same question response. The screenshot belows shows the kind of interface you get for each question. I’ve only shown 4 of the 13 response form elements though.

I’ve no idea how the system selects the outcome. I presume that it picks the outcome with the most responses, and is random in the event of a tie. In my quiz, I’m guessing selecting 3/10 questions for a certain outcome will be enough. If I’d known how popular the stupid thing would become, I’d have given the questions more thought! As of now, over 600 tweeps have taken the quiz and it has made page 1 of the Top Quizzes. It’s even “Trending” which isn’t bad considering the small target audience. The annoying way that it tweets the results for you also makes it very viral. I think QuizTweet has potential.

For those that are wondering, the 13 possible outcomes are Alfresco, Alterian, Day, Drupal, EMC Documentum, EPiServer, Fatwire, MOSS (SharePoint), Notepad, Open Text, SDL Tridion, Vignette and WordPress. Day was added late. Alfresco and MOSS added even later. The choice of what was included was pretty random – they are systems I know something about, and are not too close to one another.  I really liked the cheap marketing stunt from @martinvm with this tweet claiming to have done the quiz and got GX WebManager – even though it wasn’t an option. Nice work, Mr Product Manager.

As QuizTweet doesn’t let me see the results, I am monitoring them via a Twitter Search and am getting them emailed to me via Twilert. If people are interested, I’ll post them in a couple of days.

In case you were wondering, it turns out I’m not different from the other CMS nerds. I’m also a Martini. If you have the urge, you can play the CMS Quiz here. And if you’re really impressed or truly horrified by the result it gave you, please leave a comment.

Some Beers

If you don’t live near London, you can stop reading now. Maybe do the quiz again. However, if you do live near London and you’re still reading, I figured I might as well plug the Last Thursday CMS drinks. A few people get together over some beers and talk about Content Management, the web industry and other random things. We meet on the last Thursday of every month. It is a bit like the CMS/Pub/London drinks we used to do about 5 years ago. If you’d like to find out more, have a look at Meetup.com Event. Everyone is welcome. The only rule (especially for CMS vendors) is no hard selling please. Any attempt to sell anything to anyone must be preceded by buying a round of drinks for everyone within earshot. Note that although one of the organisers works for Squiz.Net, the event is in no way affliated with or sponsored by any vendor.

So far there have been about 5 meetings, and they’ve been good fun. Hope to see some more of you there for interesting discussions. By the way, did you know that there is a Free Beer published under a Creative Commons License? That’s free as in speech, not free as in beer.

A Celebrity Visit

Some breaking news. There is going to be a Danish celebrity having some beers in London on July 2 – that’s next Thursday. Come along and get a beer and an autograph. The Danes don’t make beer, but if they did, it would probably be the best beer ever.

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.

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