All the tired horses in the sun
How’m I supposed to get any ridin’ done? Hmm.
- ALL THE TIRED HORSES

Where there is smoke, there is fire. In this case, it’ll be a shitstorm of a fire that’ll consume everything useful in it’s path. A bit like a Scorched Earth Campaign of Content Management.

Of course I’m talking about the Autonomy/Open Text speculation here (@hakana), here (@ldallasBMOC) and here (@piewords). In truth, the few rumours are, according to the crowds, highly unlikely to have any substance so this whole post is a waste of time. Apart from photos of CEOs in bed with hookers, no-one in Twitterville can produce a single good reason for it that I can swallow. But if this post even slightly reduces the miniscule chance of this joke of a deal materialising, it’s time well spent.

The whole is less than the sum of the parts

Onward. It’s pretty clear there is no way that this deal could make a new sale more likely. The number of different CMS and search products The Firm would have warrants the invention of a new Collective Noun. How about a Gaggle of Products? Or Confusion of Products. Or Mindfuck of Products? Should some poor customer go through a vendor selection exercise and pick Opentonomytext, they’d need to go through another one to pick the product. Ain’t gonna happen.

And the poor existing customers. Following the Open Text/Vignette deal, many poor customers are still wondering whether or when their product will be discontinued. They’re playing Russian Roulette with about 2 bullets in the chamber. If this deal happens, they’ll have about 4 bullets. Some will jump ship, so the whole idea of creating a maintenance revenue cash cow doesn’t make sense either. In simple maths terms: (Autonomy Maintenance 2011) + (Open Text Maintenance 2011) < (Opentonomytext Maintenance 2011).

Spare a thought for the search engineers at Vignette. They OEM’ed Autonomy as their search for years. “Best of Breed”, they all cried. Then arch-rival Interwoven was aquired by Autonomy. “We’re not paying our arch rival cash every time we sell a product”, they  cried. “Autonomy is a piece of shit. Let’s embed the Open Text search engine.” So they did. Hopefully they didn’t delete the code, cause they may be flipping it back pretty soon.

And spare a thought for yours truly. I’ve pushed my MS Paint skills to the limit creating the Super Spliced Open Text Logo. I think the only way I could make a logo for the new beast is on a Möbius strip, and I don’t have any lying around.

Now I’m not saying that the road ahead for either company is paved with gold. But they’ve both got some good products, some great people and a fair bit of cash. If they roll up their sleeves and innovate, they might just be okay. If they keep playing Pass The Parcel with products that develop more slowly than tectonic plates, they’re toast. Wait! Hold on a second! What’s that putrid smell? Oh, look, it’s an an elephant graveyard. And elephants don’t make good software. Especially dead ones.

P.S. Remember, this isn’t actually going to happen. Surely. They’re gonna buy someone else. Answers on a postcard.

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

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

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

Yams, Yams everywhere

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

Campaign Monitor and Optimiser (CMO)

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

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

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

B2B Adapt

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

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

B2B Prospect

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

From Zero to Hero

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

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

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

What’s in EPiServer 6

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

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

Some other new features of EPiServer 6 which excite me:

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

Final Thoughts

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

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

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

An interesting play by FatWire. Our knights in shining armour have heard the shrill cries of distress from the damsels stuck at the top of Tower Vignette and Tower Interwoven and have gallantly offered to migrate them away to the safety of Castle FatWire for free. The name of the package (FatWire Rescue Program) implies the damsels are in serious trouble. According to the press release, they have a lot to worry about:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More like this please. As much as I enjoyed the CMS Vendor Meme, I have to admit that the results are fairly meaningless. Most of the answers were extremely corporate and towed the party line. So I was overjoyed to see Adrian Mateljan post his view on the Open Text response to the meme. If you are a developer and don’t know what this is about, or haven’t seen the response from your CMS vendor, the summary and all the responses are here.

Score one for the good guys

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

His thoughts on Question 4:

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

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

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

UPDATE: List of the developer responses so far is:

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

You will search, babe,
At any cost.
But how long, babe,
Can you search for what’s not lost?
- I’LL KEEP IT WITH MINE

Had an interesting meeting with Bruno Pereira from Autonomy/Interwoven yesterday. He gave us an eye-opening update on the future plans of the company after the merger with Autonomy. The ink on the contract finalising the merger is hardly dry, yet I am proud to present the first architecture diagram of the new, integrated product suite. Here it is:

The Not-So-Official New Autonomy/Interwoven Product Suite

Okay, so I lied. It’s just a scribble on a flip chart. Hopefully a better version of this will come up shortly. For those of you that can’t read the writing, the boxes say things like WorkSite, OD (OpenDeploy), TeamSite, LiveSite, MT (MetaTagger), MB (MediaBin), Optimost, Virage, Meridio, etalk, Zantaz and IDOL. More here and here.

I really enjoyed the meeting. I’d not met Bruno before, but his enthuasism for the company is obvious and infectious, and he clearly knows his trade. He was able to talk at many different levels, and showed us a few demos too. I was pleasantly surprised by the vision that he painted. He assured us that the knowledge from the long forgotten Verity is all safely tucked away in IDOL these days. And he could even answer my collegue’s question about custom fixed layouts in LiveSite, which was cool. We’re hoping SP1 is going to help us out a bit.

One piece of news that I was glad to hear – we no longer need to wait with bated breath for TeamSite 7. The version numbering system is going to continue to jump in little increments. So I think we’re going to be living in 6.x land for a while.

Sadly, I forgot to ask one of the questions that has been on everyone’s lips. What’s going to happen to the other CMS vendors that OEM Autonomy in their product? For example, will Vignette continue to ship Autonomy for their repository search, or will they become yet another CMS Vendor that moves to Lucune/Solr.

All this should unfold soon. Keep your eyes glued to your RSS readers …

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

“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