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.

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.

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.

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.

Black crows in the meadow
Across a broad highway.
Though it’s funny, honey,
I just don’t feel much like a
Scarecrow today.
- BLACK CROW BLUES

It’s been yet another busy April Fool’s day. Sites like Techcrunch and Slashdot have enormous lists of tech related scams, but my favourite are listed below. There isn’t any particular order.

Warner Bros. Acquires The Pirate Bay Maybe I shouldn’t, but I just love those guys at The Pirate Bay. Following the lawsuit has been pretty funny, and I seriously hope nothing happens to them. Their home page now has a “Warner Brothers Heart Pirate Bay” image on it. And if any of you have some downtime, reading the letters on their Legal Page is quite possibly the best way to fill it. Be sure to read their response to the various takedown notices.
Introducing Joopal Finally, the difficult decision for Open Source CMS implementers is over. Drupal and Joomla! have finally decided to collaborate and have brought us Joopal. It has “the power of Joomla! with Drupal configurability”. Some of the comments on the thread are also pretty fun, with fans of both CMS systems having digs at one another. Now I’m eagerly awaiting Tridignette and Docuwoven.
Pay and Get Back your Original Facebook I’m one of the many that really doesn’t like the way FaceBook keeps changing things. It’s like supermarkets that keep moving products around to make you buy more. In fact, I’ve pretty much given up on FaceBook now. While I appreciate the fact that they’re extremely agile, it is also annoying as hell if you’re an old dude like me that fears change. Not only that, their last API change broke my first FaceBook App! But the good news is that “beginning today Facebook users will have an option to pay a yearly sum of $24.99 and get back their favorite Facebook“.
Twitter switch for Guardian, after 188 years of ink Now this is something that could actually happen one day. This time last year, we could have had an April Fool’s joke saying “Skittles Ditches Corporate Site For Twitter”. Anyway, not only are The Guardian becoming a Twitter-only publication, they’re also converting their entire archive into Tweets. My favourite is probably “JFK assassin8d @ Dallas, def. heard second gunshot from grassy knoll WTF?“. Read the article, and the history at the bottom. A classic.
Gmail Autopilot by CADIE – The easiest email could possibly be. This one got a lot of publicity of course. The world’s first Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity (CADIE) has been released, and Google are kind enough to let you use it for free to automatically reply to emails. Looks extremely useful, and will make you rich by automatically closing multi-million dollar deals with Nigerian bankers.
Introducing Opera Face Gestures The browser wars are hotting up. Using Face Observation Opera Language (FOOL!), they are able to “recognize pre-determined facial expressions and match them to commands on the Opera browser.” The video of the idiot operating the browser is awesome, and the handy guide to the gestures is pretty fun too. Nice one.
Internet Explorer 8.1 Eagle Eyes Leaked Maybe spurred on by Opera’s announced, Smashing Magazine have leaked news of Microsoft’s new browser – IE 8.1. aka “Eagle Eyes”. They actually did this quite early yesterday, and I know a few people that fell for it. It unveils a host of new features that actually look quite real. Eagle Eyes will even support Mozilla based add-ons and those tested “worked flawlessly (some of the developers even claim that – in terms of performance – they work much better under IE 8.1 versus Firefox 3).“
ECM Vendors Throw in the Towel at Philadelphia Summit Love this. And maybe even a hint of truth in it. Combining April Fool’s and the G20 summit, the guys at CMS Watch announce the death of ECM. The twenty main ECM vendors (the E20) declare the whole concept a waste of time. My favourite quote: “I can totally understand it,” says CMS Watch principal Alan Pelz-Sharpe, “hell, we can’t even manage our own documents.” CMS Watch recently reverted to its f: drive after a failed, four-year effort to implement a commercial document management system.
Up, Up, and Away – Cloud Computing Reaches for the Sky If, like me, you’re sick to death of hearing about Cloud Computing, this is the one for you. I’m just going to re-quote the intro and hope you’ll read the rest: For a while the cloud was simply a metaphor meaning “a bunch of computers somewhere else.” Until now, somewhere else meant good old terra firma, the Earth itself. After extensive customer research we found that this rigid, antiquated way of thinking just won’t cut it in today’s post-capitalist world. They need locational flexibility, the ability to literally instantiate a cloud where they need it, when they need it.
SlideShare Rockstars Let’s end on a slightly controversial one. To summarise, SlideShare made every presentation look like it had been viewed 100 more times than it had in reality. They then mailed users telling them that “they must have done something right” and that they should tweet their success to #bestofslideshare. They’ve had a bit of a backlash from users that didn’t find it funny. They say on their blog: “We sincerely apologize if we annoyed you … we notice from the reactions on twitter that some people are not amused.” Personally, I think it is hilarious. It’s April Fool’s people. Live with it. People still falling for it too.

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.