Intranet Blog

Buying or moving to a new CMS? Be very careful…

Toby Ward — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 07:22:00 -0700

A CMS can be expensive: usually more than $100 – 200k, sometimes more than $1 million. Now these complex systems can house a lot of information: usually 10,000s or 100,000s of files – sometimes millions.

But what happens if you want to move to a different CMS or portal? What do you do with all that content? The question is very complex, often very expensive, and extremely time consuming. The trouble is there is no one or simple answer.

This is why the freshly announced Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) specification or standard is so important (and why non-techies need to understand this… so attention communicators, marketers, and HR people! Spend another 30 seconds reading this as it could save you boatloads of money!).

CMIS defines a model or framework ensuring that content can be used by one or more Enterprise Content Management repositories or systems.

“Whether it’s exploiting the value of this information, reducing the costs associated with managing it, or simply complying with various edicts regarding compliance and retention – many people think it’s the new battleground in information management,” says Chuck Hollis, VP and Global Marketing CTO with EMC (see CMIS – It’s Not JAS).

“Having a standard way to identify and manage content – the valuable stuff – could create the same kind of breakthrough that SQL did with transactional data, and XML did with web content – a standard, vendor-neutral way of moving content from application to application (CMS to CMS), and preserve important metadata.”

Chuck’s colleague, Lee Dallas, offers some caution (see CMIS – be careful what you ask for):

“It’s good for developers but make no mistake that making use of standards will benefit the vendors. It is simply easier to code to a good set of universally accepted requirements. Unfortunately they could actually hobble the efforts of the also-rans that support the spec but can’t keep up with the pace of innovation. Standards at some level work against competitive advantage and force a vendor to differentiate their product lines on capabilities that are not necessarily relevant to the core function the standard was intended to support.

I’m not saying I’m against standards - I am glad our industry is now mature enough to settle down around them. They are inevitable, necessary and a critical part of the maturation of our industry. But I wonder, did JSR 168 really break any silos for portals? It is arguable that the spec didn’t improve throughput of development either yet we all checked that box when we picked portal related products - except when it came to Microsoft.”

The CMIS technical draft specification (v0.5), announced Sept 10th 2008, has been developed jointly by EMC, IBM, Microsoft, Alfresco, Open Text, Oracle, and SAP.

In short though, I wouldn’t spend a whole lot of money on a new CMS for a few months if at all possible… and I’d be inclined to limit my purchase to something very inexpensive, or a product from one of the above vendors. Its good to see an open-source solution like Alfresco on board. I’d like to see others like Joomla and Plone follow in-step, and commercial vendors like Vignette (although they might not be around too much longer), Interwoven, Day, Sitecore, ThinPaper, Ektron, The Level, and others also sign-up.

Prescient’s own Jed Cawthorne is monitoring this issue closely and provides some running commentary on his blog. Jed points to some of the best commentary and analysis of this emerging standard in World Peace declared in ECM industry.

RELATED READING:
Alfresco has set-up a CMIS wiki for information and resources.
Use Google to see the latest CMIS related news and blog posts.
Cover Pages provides a summary of the issues.

CMS report offers open source

Toby Ward — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 16:41:00 -0800

“There are no SAPs of web content management and although IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft have their products, they are lagging rather than dominating the WCM (web content management) market,” says Seth Gottlieb, author of the new Open Source Web Content Management in Java report.

With more than a 1000 CMS solutions on the market (some say more than 2000), and some costing millions to purchase and implement (say nothing of the annual support and licensing costs which can cost up to 30% of the original licensing purchase – invoiced every year!), open source is a booming market. Dozens of open source (free license) solutions are now available with a few leading solutions becoming competitive products to the big name, off-the-shelf vendors.

For an organization looking to escape heavy licensing and support costs offered by commercial CMSs, this report is an important read and guide when considering the appropriate tool for publishing and managing content on your corporate intranet and/or websites. Without the proper and thorough intelligence and analysis of the best possible solutions, selecting a content management tool is often reduced to a dangerous guessing game leading to a potentially perilous and expensive mistake.

”Many buyers in the market now are replacing technology that failed their expectations, are skeptical of commercial products, and are looking for alternatives,” add Gottlieb.

Gottlieb reviews seven leading Java open source WCM solutions with a critical eye from the perspectives of both the business user and techie.

Source: Open Source Web Content Management in Java, Seth Gottlieb, Content Here

“Buyers of WCM technology quickly become disoriented by the number of options - not just the number of products, but also the different ways to acquire a platform,” adds Gottlieb. “The old question of "build versus buy" seems laughably simplistic when you consider that in addition to buying a commercial product, a company can share the technology by using open source or rent it from a Software as a Service (SaaS) vendor. But whatever they choose, they will be doing a considerable amount of building because the term "out-of-the-box" is generous with most WCM features.”

Among the criteria evaluated, the Open Source WCM report examines each Java solution for:

Ü solution architecture & development

Ü integration potential

Ü usability factors

Ü presentation & interface

Ü content editor & WYSIWYG editor

Ü navigating the repository

Ü content workflow

Ü search engine optimization

Ü user forums (community)

An excerpt of Open Source Web Content Management in Java can be found at http://www.contenthere.net/reports/jwcm-workgroup-1.0-sample.pdf

Purchase the report with a special $150 discount (use discount code: vkndds).

The report can be purchased at http://www.contenthere.net/reports/jwcm.html

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Free Sharepoint & more Web 2.0 mediocrity

Toby Ward — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 21:18:00 -0800

An interesting post I did a couple of days ago on the free version of Windows Sharepoint Services and the surprising breadth of available features (from Setting-up a free Sharepoint intranet:

Ü Announcements

Ü Calendar

Ü Contacts

Ü Tasks

Ü Projects

Ü Wiki

Ü Blog

Ü Message Board

Ü Image Library

Ü Forms Library

Ü Shared Documents

Ü Surveys

Ü Meeting Workspace

Read my full post Setting-up a free Sharepoint intranet at the Intranet Insider blog on Communitelligence.com.

“Collaborative tools are overloading employees and killing productivity—to the tune of $588 billion a year, according to a January study by Basex, a collaboration technologies consulting firm,” writes Brian Watson of CIO Magazine (see Web 2.0: Too Good to Be True?). “It’s the money-saving argument that’s getting pushback lately.”

Web 2.0 does not deliver the ROI, does not live up the hype, and is not even close to being a top priority for senior management (not all, but most).

A CIO Magazines study, Top Technology Priorities for 2008 finds that even techies don’t consider Web 2.0 as a priority. A survey of 250 “top IT executives” from a collection of small, medium and large organizations doesn’t even touch on the issue of Web 2.0.

Continue reading "Web 2.0 fails the grade, according to executives" on Content Matters.

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GlobalIncidentMap.com showcases content best practice

Toby Ward — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 22:51:00 -0700

As we’ve learned from the new social media sites (Web 2.0), people not only like but need visual cues. The biggest social sites YouTube, Facebook, and MySpace are all very visual; chalked full of multimedia.

GlobalIncidentMap.com is mostly visual and in fact buries traditional navigation and information architecture by instead presenting a home page that is dominated by a highly interactive world map. The site is described by the creators as a tool to “give the public, law enforcement, military, and government individuals a new way to visualize, and become instantly aware of terrorism and security incidents” across the world.

Read my complete article: GlobalIncidentMap.com showcases content best practice (Content Matters)

The baking versus frying CMS

Toby Ward — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 22:01:00 -0700

Personalization is all the rage, but deploying a personalized intranet portal or website is a complex process. Most companies don’t offer personalization, don’t need to, and have users (employees) that don’t want to use personalization. While personalization might be overkill for most, it is important to some and distinguishing these complex solutions from traditional CMSs is an important consideration.

Seth Gottlieb, a leading expert on open source CMS and the founder of Content Here, has published an intriguing analysis of CMSs (see CMS Deployment Patterns) and uses the baking versus frying analogy to distinguish two principal types of CMS.

“Baking style rendering systems generate pages when content is published. Frying systems generate pages on the fly when they are requested by the end user,” writes Seth. “Whether a system bakes or fries content tells a lot about its architecture and what it is good at. Baking systems are great for high volume sites that do not need to personalize content. Frying systems excel when requirements include personalization, access control, and other presentation logic that uses information about the user in order to decide what to show and how.”

What are the leading baking and frying CMSs?

“I can't risk my vendor neutrality by showing favorites,” exclaims Seth. Good answer. Some systems work well for some organizations, but do not work well for others with differing priorities and requirements.

However, Seth did share some of those that he likes, and I’ve added a few of my own to mask both his neutrality, and mine (Prescient Digital Media is also technology neutral with no technology partnerships):

Some of the leading ‘baking’ CMSs (commercial and open source):

Percussion
Serena
Hannon Hill
TerminalFour
Contribute (not true CMS but can be built upon)
CrownPeak
Tridion
Bricolage (open source)
Krang (open source)
Alfresco (open source)

Some of the leading ‘frying’ systems (commercial and open source):

Vignette
Sitecore
RedDot
Day
Stellant
IBM
Quantum Arts QP7
Ektron
Mediasurface Morello
Fatwire Content Server
eZ publish (open source)
Drupal (open source)
Joomla! (open source)
Plone (open source)

In his annual review of the CMS marketplace, CMS Kudos and Shortcomings, CMS Watch founder Tony Byrne is careful not to single out winners and losers. Instead Byrne focuses on specific areas of a CMS(e.g. personalilzation, templating, usability, etc.) that particular solutions excel at, or are found to be lagging.

“Some vendors might get several mentions, and others none at all, but that doesn't automatically mean you should include (or discount) them in making your short lists,” writes Byrne. “Alfresco doesn't offer decent personalization services; should you care? Perhaps not.”

Instead, Byrne urges caution when looking at CMS vendors. Instead of evaluating vendor offers and technology, evaluate them against your specific requirements using likely scenarios in which a CMS will be used.

“I urge you to take a scenario-based approach that will help you understand which functionalities and attributes matter most to you,” adds Byrne. “And, as always, carefully evaluate the implementation team as closely as you vet any software vendor.”

RELATED READING:

CMS Kudos and Shortcomings

CMS Deployment Patterns

Content Management Proves Costly Without Planning

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Pros and cons for enterprise intranet portals

Toby Ward — Sun, 03 Jun 2007 23:18:00 -0700

Silver bullets that solve all your problems are rare in life; and nearly non-existent in the intranet world. Far from being a silver bullet, enterprise intranet portals are extraordinarily are exceedingly powerful, but are also complex, pricey and pose many, many challenges for large organizations.

There are few enterprise applications that, when implemented properly and maximize the value of the cost, are more complex than the enterprise intranet portal. Enterprise resource planning (ERP), business intelligence (BI), and customer relationship management (CRM) are all complex and costly endeavors, but the optimal enterprise intranet portal (EIP) has a bigger scale and scope that involves and engages all employees and can (should) include composite application integration of all of the above.

PORTAL VERSUS PORTAL PRODUCT

Now let’s be clear (at the risk of further complicating an already complex solution), you don’t need a portal product to have a portal. A portal is a door or gateway of importance. Your custom-built or content management driven intranet home page may be a portal. However, the enterprise portal solution is a multifaceted piece of software that has some distinguishing features from an average intranet home page. The enterprise intranet portal solution has three distinguishing characteristics:

advanced user personalization capabilities;
security (authorization and authentication); and,
enterprise application integration (EAI, the software and processes that link together or integrate an organizations many applications (e.g. ERP, CRM, HR applications).

PORTAL APPLICATIONS

Now, if those concepts are not complex enough to understand for non-techies, the typical EIP delivers a lot more bells and whistles than the above distinguishing characteristics. Some solutions like the powerful Oracle Portal or IBM WebSphere Portal come with hundreds of portlets, many, many bundled applications, and a bevy of plug-in suites and additional solutions with some big and complex tools unto their own including:

Search
Content management
Document management
Web 2.0 tools (blogs, wikis, etc.)
Collaboration suites (e.g. team pages)
Analytics and reporting
Development platforms, tookits and ‘factories’

These and other powerful enterprise portal products from Sun, Vignette, SAP, BEA, Microsoft and others, have wicked horse-power capable of solving complicated business requirements. The catch: it comes at a price, and an opportunity cost.

For starters, most of the above functionality, often referred to as utility applications, are ‘thin’ versions of stand-alone products. The robustness of most portal search engines and content management systems (CMS), for example, are far less than the individual versions. Often, many organizations don’t use the search engines that come with a portal, they plug in Google, Autonomy or Endeca which are almost always far more powerful than their portal brethren.

PORTAL AND CMS

In addition to offering bundled applications like those listed above, many of the portal vendors sell separate content management systems – and vice versa. A traditional CMS vendor, Vignette has also become a leading portal vendor. CMS vendors Day, Interwoven, and others also have portals.

While the CMS vendors roll-out portal products, the portal vendors now sell content management systems – not only included in the portal solution, but also as separate products. Oracle not only has a portal product, Oracle Portal, with two different CMS packages, it also owns and sells the Stellent CMS seperately. IBM Websphere Portal has different CMS options, but also recently bought and now sells FileNet which has separate CMS and document management products. To complicate things further, FileNet now OEMs the Day content management system, and IBM and Interwoven have a long standing partnership that allows for easy integration of the TeamSite CMS into WebSphere portal.

But wait: it gets more complicated. Some of the portal vendors now have multiple portal products, and multiple CMS products. BEA sells the AquaLogic portal (formerly known as Plumtree) and the WebLogic portal. OpenText is known for document management and has a portal offering, but it recently bought Hummingbird and its products, which bought RedDot and its CMS offerings. Oracles sells the Oracle Portal, and a second portal product, the new WebCenter portal – in addition to its CMS solutions, and a wide array of complex middleware products to complex to address in this article.

“The distinction between portal and CMS is not that meaningful… users shouldn’t have to buy separate products,” says portal analyst Matthew Brown of Forrester Research. “If I’m a user, I should be able to construct a page and I should be able to run static content or incorporate a portlet or gadget. There is so much that overlaps between the two.”

But there’s a good reason to have separate stand-alone products – for some organizations – while others require an integrated solution. “Portals and CMSs still peacefully coexist,” adds Brown, who intimates the need for separate products, all the while having the option for integrated solutions. It all depends on the requirements of the buyer.

Microsoft is leading the challenge for a single, integrated solution. No longer does MS offer a separate CMS and portal product, the new Sharepoint Server 2007 combines the two. There are of course pros and cons to this – too many to go into in this space – but this is a solution that works for some organizations, and not at all for others. Unfortunately though, as described by Janus Boye on CMSWatch.com, Sharepoint has yet to share its plans for Sharepoint (see Still no official roadmap for Sharepoint 2007).

Of course each product comes with different editions and versions which can further confuse buyers. Oracle has some incredibly powerful offerings, but following the different versions, editions and products can also flummox even the most intelligent minds. To quote portal aficionado and analyst Janus Boye, author of the Enterprise Portals Report (version 3 has just been released) from CMW Watch: “Most Oracle documentation labels the current version Oracle Portal 10g Release 2. This reflects the current version of the appserver where 10g Release 2 is the same as 10.1.2.0.2. This review (the review in the Enterprise Portals Report version 3) covers Portal version 10.1.4.1 which is an update to 10g Release 2, but unfortunately the old version naming is still used. The 10.1.4.1 maintenance pack is the current release which came out in June 2006. If you’re an existing customer, you need to first upgrade the application server to 10.1.2.0.2 and then upgrade the portal repository.”

Huh?! What version does what now to whom?! Hey, it is not Janus’ fault, nor is it Oracle per se, this is complex stuff. Powerful solutions come with a certain degree of complexity, and rich technology.

COSTS

With the rich technology comes, rich prices. Power solutions cost money. Many of these products only run on proprietary application servers, and databases (e.g. Sharepoint, WebSphere, WebLogic, and Oracle Portal to name a few). So you’re not just buying a portal, you’re making a bigger financial commitment than you think – you’re either buying additional solutions or you’re further locking yourself into current platforms.

Price however is more than just the list price. The price of these solutions are more than just the advertised price found on these vendor websites and supporting materials. Oracles Portal costs a mere $10,000 per CPU. BEA AquaLogic is priced at $396/user for Application Suite + $38,000 per processor for the ‘process module’, and IBM WebSphere Portal costs $51,500 per processor; $67,000 per processor for the new Dashboard Accelerator. Note that these costs are per user, and per processor. In a large enterprise, these multiply dramatically.

These costs are on top of the databases and application servers. But wait, if you act now there’s more: service and support. Are you going to buy the product without service and support? Oh my, that would be brave. Over a few years, the total cost of ownership now can be in the millions. For some, its less, for others there’s still more…

Are you planning to launch the portal out-of-the-box with no customization, and no uniquely designed home page? Do you have, like all organizations, custom integration needs? Uh-oh – I forgot to mention the implementation costs. That’s right the software licensing alone can represent less than 10% of the total price. Yes, customization and implementation can be extraordinarily expensive involving highly-specialized and pricey developers.

“It is easy to blame the vendors, but in this case most organizations actually misunderstand the interface provided by portal vendors,” cautions Boye. “Portlets or web parts (what you refer to as cookie-cutter layout) is a good idea, but only an appropriate interface for very few and specialized used cases. All organization invests in the layout for their new intranet or Web site, but for portals this is rarely the case. Instead organizations assume the interface provided by the vendors, and don’t spend time changing. It’s always the problem when vendors provide samples, that organizations adopt it for everything. In this case, organizations should also invest in changing the layout and design.”

YOU NEED HELP

I don’t mean to scare you, or sound disparaging about portal solutions, I’m merely trying to manage your expectations about these great systems. Enterprise portal products are robust and potent solutions for very challenging requirements. The portal vendors have spent hundreds of millions of dollars developing these solutions to cater to your very complex needs, and they deserve to charge what the market will bear.

Additional requirements beyond the technology:

The business case that documents the value of the portal
An iron-tight governance model to manage the people and politics
A taxonomy to govern the classification and publishing of content
A people-content personalization map (who gets to see what content)
Employee engagement and research
Documentation of applications for integration

Finally, really do your homework – read lots, research everything, and tread slowly. And for god sake’s hire some help. Unless you intimately know the portal products, the vendors and the pros and cons of the technology – and the political, people and process challenges for implementing these juggernauts – you better hire help.

If you’re going to spend hundreds of thousands, or millions of dollars on a portal, then you’re putting your career on the line. Hire an outside firm to support you and make you into a hero, instead of a zero. Caveat emptor.

ADDITONAL READING:

Intranet portal solutions die, evolve & move to Web 2.0

Another portal bites the dust

The big deal about portals

The future of portals

Portals found lacking

The promise of benefit portals

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If you build it, they will not come... and the revolution

Toby Ward — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 23:24:00 -0700

I wrote two different blog articles today, and one seemingly contradicts the other. But only seemingly because the intranet, in many respects, is much like the Internet -- but it is dramatically different.

The content spawned revolution

Web content is revolutionizing business. Web content is revolutionizing life. Web content is revolutionizing the World.

Skeptical? Not sold? Need proof? Here are some numbers…

People click on web links 100-billion times per day
Five of the top 10 most visited websites are user-generated content sites that did not exist a couple of years ago
There are well in excess of 100-million accounts on MySpace – and growing at a rate of nearly 250,000 per day
1 out of 8 couples married last year in the U.S. met online

Read The content spawned revolution (Content Matters)

If you build it, they will not come...

A reprise my two most recent posts on intranet usage and increasing intranet traffic. In short, Great intranets inspire use, but also are supported by marketing. To build an intranet is not enough to inspire employee use. Like most things in business, the intranet has to be marketed so those employees that are not keeners and propeller-heads will come and visit.

Read If you build it, they will not come... (Intranet Insider)

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