“The Web
content management market is mature and expanding,” says Gartner’s latest
MarketScope for Web Content Management (MacComascaigh, Gilbert, Bell, Shegda, Andrews). “Vendor
consolidation has fallen (slowed)… functions such as workflow, ease of use and
multi-site management are no longer differentiating factors; they are the
norm.”
Findings:
Open source solutions (OSS, represents only 3% of the
total WCM market) are increasingly stable, robust and growing in market
share
Web 2.0 phenomenon is driving
WCM innovation
Change management and user
adoption will need to be applied to both internal and external users
The total WCM market, at $750
million per year, will grow at an annual rate of 15% through 2012
(representing 25% of the total ECM market)
Recommendations
for implementing a new WCM system (CMS):
Develop specific business
goals and link these to business objectives
Understand the cultural shift
represented by Web 2.0
Interoperability (multiple
systems working together or migrating from one to another) needs to be
considered, as does rationalization of multiple WCMs
Hosted SaaS solutions are not
growing as fast due to business and technical reasons
Total cost (TCO) of OSS solutions should take into
account initial price tag
Highest
rated vendors (strong positive):
Interwoven
Ektron
Lowest
rated vendors (caution advisories):
IBM (Lotus)
Mediasurface
Also of
note:
Vignette gets a positive
rating but with caution due their financial performance (also read Vignette
still in transition)
Microsoft SharePoint (MOSS)
is listed as a very average “promising” with lots of caveats and listed
weaknesses (see What the experts say about SharePoint (MOSS)
Gartner estimates a typical
replace of a WCM system to be around 5 years
My
analysis:
Gartner’s
MarketScope is somewhat different from the average Magic Quadrant in that the
qualifying vendors must have $10 million in licensing revenue to qualify, and
there is no magic quadrant but rather a 5-point rating scale:
Strong negative
Caution
Promising
Positive
Strong positive
While
there are hundreds of WCM solutions (thousands, really) only 17 qualify.
The
report is concise and solid intelligence for a representative snapshot look at
the current marketplace. This report is a good starting point to understanding
the market, but is not an adequate tool for helping an organization select a CMS. If you have significant
experience with WCM (CMS) and have very detailed and documented requirements and
plans for WCM, then a better report is the CMS Watch Web CMS Report 2009. If you
don’t have a solid understanding of the market and solutions, and what to watch
out for then you better consider Prescient’s CMS
Blueprint service.
Additional
notes on vendors:
Interwoven – Though due for a major tech upgrade, I
like how Interwoven has evolved in the past couple of years. The updated, AJAX-powered
U; the campaign management functions, etc. This is a
very powerful system, but overkill for an intranet… it’s sweet spot is the
external, product marketing website.
EPiServer – the Swedish-based
vendor is a real up-and-comer – and it’s average contract value is below
$10,000 which gives all the others a run for its money.
IBM (Lotus) – despite its
caution rating, this is still a reasonable solution… if you’re a Lotus
shop and/or use WebSphere. Outside that, there are far too many good-looking
alternatives.
Microsoft – I think it’s
generous to label SharePoint (MOSS) as WCM. It really is a portal /
development platform that is really quite weak bang-for-the-buck for WCM.
Garter cites its weaknesses particularly “ease of content reuse, multisite
management, workflow and enterprise-level federation capabilities such as
replication and multi-farm synchronization.” MOSS is a good enterprise
portal solution in a small to medium-size organization.
What is
absent:
The Content
Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) specification or standard was
ignored in this report.CMIS defines a
model or framework ensuring that content can be used by one or more Enterprise
Content Management repositories or systems. Frankly, I wouldn’t buy a WCM (CMS) if the selling vendor hasn’t
agreed to implement this standard.
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.”
“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.
"The Long Neck is where the business case of your websites lies. It is the small, crucial set of tasks and content that your customers really come to your website for," writes Gerry McGovern in Do you know your long neck?
"Intranet or public website, government or commercial-every website has a Long Neck. It is crucial that you know what your Long Neck is so that you can deliver maximum value with scarce resources."
Gerry’s bang on. Although, on an intranet, the long neck representing the most commonly accessed content or tools, is probably stretched longer.
The following seven areas likely represent between 60-80% of all requests on the vast majority of intranets I’ve worked with:
If an organization can master these seven areas, with the proper planning and governance as a supporting foundation, then the resulting intranet will be dam good. Easier said than done of course…
ON A PERSONAL NOTE: I’ve been remiss in welcoming new clients as of late… but I’ve been too busy looking after many of them and others! A big welcome (would a hug be inappropriate?) to Thomson Financial, GMAC, Intrawest (Playground), the Municipality of Halton, Degussa, and I know I’m missing someone… I’m sorry I’ll make it up when my memory returns.
In addition to running the business and trips back in forth between Vancouver, Detroit, Toronto and Calgary, with multiple speaking engagements in the past couple of weeks, my wife is away for a few days so I’m running the house and assumed the role of interim COO of the girls… must sleep soon…
But first I have to get something off my chest: Gary Bettman almost ruined the league with over-expansion and soaring salaries and then had to force an acrimonious year-long lockout of players (the longest of any professional sport) to fix the dam mess he made. Now the owners have rewarded him with a 5-year extension. Not to mention his amazing ability to always sound like an ass while belittling almost every reporter that interviews him. (Someone on a local talk show today called-up to say, "I finally figured out who he sounds like! That rabbi from Seinfeld!") For more check out: Gary Bettman Sucks
Finally, I send my sympathies to Rex Grossman for quarterbacking the Bears to their first Super Bowl appearance in 21 years in his first full season as a player. Yes, he made a couple of mistakes, but the Bears losing had little to do with his play, and a lot to do with the Bear’s brutal defense and a stellar Colts offense.
(TORONTO, ON) It seems that nearly every company I talk to is in some form of “intranet redesign” -which could be a complete overhaul, a design tweak or something in the middle that might include a new technology platform such as a portal or content management system.
One facet of the redesign (by the way I hate that term “redesign” because of course it emphasizes look-and-feel which completely understates the main value and intent of a complex business system – but since its part of our modern vernacular…) that is often overlooked until a problem occurs, is the migration process from old to new. Migration involves a lot… from content to applications to platform. A lot can go wrong with migration.
Paul Chin offers some sage advice in Move It on Over: Intranet Migration Basics on Intranet Journal (no, this is not one of their now all-too-common product announcement or advertorial articles).
Paul’s article summarizes some of the key technical considerations of migration including:
Component migration
Multiple environments
Working with users
Post-production safety measures
Rollback measures
Post-production support
One key thing that is rarely or thoroughly accounted for in the initial plan is the time required for migrating content. If your intranet has thousands or tens-of-thousands of pages or more then full content migration likely will take weeks if not months. It’s not uncommon for some content migration to be phased over a couple of years. Deploying a platform such as a CMS that has ‘batch’ importing capabilities will certainly help, but all content should be reviewed, updated, edited or deleted prior to a migration – and this requires a lot of human effort.
The process of updating or deleting content begins with a content audit – which should be done long before the implementation of a new technology platform. One client at a 750 person company used two summer students armed with a browser and an MS-Excel spreadsheet to track and document all 10,000 pages on their intranet. It took them one month and a half to review and document all 10,000 pages (about 3,000 pages per auditor per month). The good news was they identified all the content and found that only 4,000 of the 10,000 pages were of any value. In one full swoop they wiped out 6,000 pages which saved them a lot of server space and maintenance costs not to mention helped preserve business continuity and accuracy of information.
Here’s the key point: a redesign is a face-lift of the look-and-feel, a perfect project for a design agency or PR firm. What most of those design agencies or PR firms have little experience or knowledge of is measures like rollback plans and content audits. Intranet migration to a new site and/or platform (usually one in the same) requires a lot of thought and planning, and an intense commitment to detail and process.
I’ve spent much of the week highlighting what I refer to the immaturity and ‘smoke and mirrors’ of the CMS market (see Ziff Davis event shows immaturity of CMS market). Of course, don’t take my word for it. Ask Tony Byrne, the founder and editor of CMSWatch.com, who wrote a very timely and bang-on piece on the industry, Sex, Lies, and CMS Vendors
“Most CMS salespeople I know are good educators, but they also have quotas to meet,” writes Byrne. “Under these circumstances, vendors will sometimes short-cut important discussions about functionality and pricing with simple -- but not always completely truthful -- answers.”
Byrne lists his top 10 most common myths you might hear from a CMS salesperson (and they are all too accurate - in green below):
MYTH: "Our interface will sell itself" (This is the sex part)
As I have noted in the past, everyone says they have a WSIWYG editor. Few actually have one.
MYTH: "You only need XY thousand to get started"
It always costs more than they say. Licensing is often a fraction of the cost – implementation is where it adds up.
MYTH: "You can recoup your software expenses by re-assigning the web team"
Only in some rare organizations does a CMS mean saving headcount.
MYTH: "Our open-source solution means you'll get off cheap" & "Our commercial solution is better supported than open-source alternatives"
Open-source has the same implementation story – and it needs support too. Commercial solutions require paid support and they rarely have open communities of support (discussion boards, shared code, etc.).
MYTH: "Access to the source code protects you in an uncertain marketplace"
“Source-code escrow or open-source licensing is nice, but having to muck with source code is faint solace if your vendor expires,” writes Byrne.
MYTH: "No requirements? No problem! Our business analysts can get you started"
Content management requires three major components: technology, people and process. Technology is the often the least problematic. Defining a plan and all requirements requires experience and skill – and time. CMS vendors rarely focus much beyond the technology.
MYTH: "Most enterprises deploy our solution within 4-6 weeks"
Ha, ha, ha! Sure it is possible… in smaller, extremely well organized companies.
MYTH: "Our migration scripts will take care of your existing content"
Bad content is still bad content on a content management system – regardless of the migration system.
MYTH: "Our product is better than Vignette, for a fraction of the cost"
Yes, Vignette is expensive, but there’s a reason why Vignette is the market leader for enterprise content management. There’s a reason why there are thousands of CMS vendors with very few name client implementations. I’d recommend Vignette for very few organizations, but there are a lot of CMS vendors I’d never recommend to any.
MYTH: "We're the only product with..."
Sure. There are thousands of vendors… what are the chances that someone else has a polling feature too?
--
Oh speaking of sex, lies and CMS vendors… since uninviting me to their wine tasting and CMS event (sex), Ziff Davis has sent me the same spam invite four additional times (lies)!!! Since the event organizers never responded to my email or my article (see Ziff Davis event shows immaturity of CMS market), I wrote Ziff Davis’s PR director about their PR mess…. surprise, surprise – no response!!! Outstanding PR (can you hear the tongue boring a hole in my cheek?)
Managing content online content continues to be one of the top issues dogging intranet managers. Employee complaints about not being able to find certain information continues to be a top complaint followed closely by those about content quality.
Quality comes from good writing and management (i.e. cataloging, storing, tagging, etc.). Even the best communicators require refresher courses. For non-communicator employees who are managing content, training is a must – regardless of the content management system, publishing tool or established policies.
“With the increasing implementation of distributed publishing throughout organisations there is an increasing need to train content providers to help develop a more consistent approach and style for their online content, not just train people on how to use the software,” writes Nick Besseling, a New Zealand-based intranet consultant in Training intranet content providers (thanks for the pointer from James Robertson @ Column Two).
Training workshops are a good forum for educating managers about the dos and don’ts of online content management. Nick provides a 7-point framework for conducting content training workshops:
Before the workshop Send out pre-workshop questions and an online content article to help get participants into the online content ‘head space’ and start them thinking about issues/problems.
Audience and purpose Emphasise that the user of the information is the focus of content not the provider or the provider’s manager. This can be a major sticking point to get effective and useful content.
Intranet and online content conceptsCover concepts such as the idea that online readers skim/scan, the content triangle/inverse pyramid concept etc. Keep in mind that some of your content providers may have very limited knowledge of what makes online content successful.
Writing/online style guidelines Cover specific guidelines such as writing short sentences, ‘one idea’ paragraphs, use of tables, images, file types etc. Also cover the fundamentals in your organisation’s writing/communication style guide (get one developed if you don’t have one!). Be sure to highlight anything in the style guide that may clash with effective online content.
Discussion and exercises Emphasise discussion and hands-on exercises. Get people talking about online content and working together to share ideas and approaches and use these discussions to help understand where your content providers are currently at. Exercises should be based on current intranet content and cover both concepts and specifics as discussed above.
Managing participants Mix participants up across different business groups and keep numbers limited to a manageable numbers (10 or less), Get people working in pairs during the exercises and avoid domination of the workshop by more experienced participants (but be sure to use them when needed to elicit responses).
Cover editing/collating as well as writing If (as in many organisations) a lot content comes from existing sources rather than being produced initially for an online environment, put more focus on ‘editing for online’ rather than just writing.
Vignette
still in transition) 
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