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

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