(AARHUS, DENMARK: jboye08) You’ve seen American Idol, and perhaps even the brutally awful version from Canada, Denmark, the UK and others… and now there’s Web Idol, for CMS vendors.

 

A fast-paced, entertaining set of competitive demos alla American Idol. Five CMS vendors present 7-minute demos showing the best features of their CMS systems. Five succinct, comparative presentations are judged by an expert panel of judges that offer pithy commentary. However, like Idol, the audience vote for the winner!
 

This year’s judges:

• Claudia Urschbach (UK)
• Erik Hartman (HOL)
• Tony Byrne (USA)

 

eZ systems is the defending champ from both Web Idol 2006 and Web Idol 2007 and faced easy competition.

 

This year’s competitor’s:

 

• e-Spirit
• eZ Systems
• Hippo
• SDL Tridion
• Sitecore

 

The presentations:

 

1. Sitecore led-off and did competently in the 7-minutes provide for the demo. I like the insite editing alla Red Dot. The ciritcs were fair, but critical.

 

2. SDLTridion followed and was… confusing. I like the on-page AJAX driven editing without having to load multiple windows. I like the Tridion folks, but the critics were harsh.

 

3. Open-source CMS Hippo was next-up. More focused, I like the drag-and-drop AJAX interface under user management. I don’t like the lack of in-site editing – it’s the 21^st century. To quote Tony Byrne, “…like a hippo it’s (the CMS) potentially fatal to humans.” Overall, the judges appear to like Hippo best… thus far.

 

4. eZ ran in 4^th. The two-time defending champ and open-source CMS led with a very smart demo site that included advertising and lots of multimedia, and even Google maps. I like the integration of commenting and Web 2.0 with the in-site (in-context) editing. The judges seem confused and uncommitted.

 

5. e-Spirit in the anchor position had a very competent, but lightning-fast confusing demo. The presenter was very quick and the system seems quite capable… but drab. The speed of the demo confused me greatly… I couldn’t follow what he was doing or why. Unlike the other vendors, e-Spirit finishes early… but I’m confused. I shall not be casting my vote for e-Spirit. The judges also seem confused.

 

Tony was a very good judge with some very good remarks, analysis, and quite funny. Erik and Claudia however looked and sounded lost… Where have all the good judges gone?

 

VOTING

 

Remember, like Idol, this is not comparative analysis of which CMS is best, it’s a popularity contest based on a lightning fast demo. The winner is voted on by the audience. I voted for eZ Systems. I like the AJAX, multimedia and Web 2.0. The demo site was nice and progressive.

 

The audience cast their votes…. And the winner is…Denmark-based Sitecore (1st time winner).

(AARHUS, DENMARK: jboye08) “SharePoint is good at a number of things,” says one SharePoint expert, addressing a group of SharePoint users and followers here in Aarhus. “But it’s bad at just as many.”

 

There continues to be much discussion, debate, interest, enthusiasm, and caution about SharePoint (MOSS 2007). Such is the case here at jboye08 where I’m addressing the conference on the subject of Intranet 2.0 (today) and eHealth 2.0 (tomorrow).

 

Gartner nails the analysis in its spring report Five Best Practices for Deploying SharePoint:

 

·          “Though it covers a broad spectrum of capabilities, MOSS 2007 is not yet a full enterprise content management (ECM) system. Organizations requiring advanced content management capabilities and process-centric applications will need to augment their capabilities with partner offerings, or deploy MOSS 2007 alongside an ECM system rather than as a replacement for it.”

 

Our own Jed Cawthorne, our resident MOSS expert at Prescient Digital Media, offers his own conclusions on his blog, ECM Stuff:

 

• It might be the product for you, but how do you know unless you analyse your requirements
• A phased implementation appears to be more successful, add bells and whistles later
• Sharepoint in itself is not a 'strategy' - it can be part of ECM, Intranet or collaboration elements of your overall Information Management strategy
• Contrary to MS marketing hype, Sharepoint does not actually do everything brilliantly
• A Sharepoint deployment, like any other technology implementation will ultimately fail if not aligned with strategy, and if not properly planned with comensurate governance in place

 

I should disclose at this point that perhaps it might appear that I’m not a fan of SharePoint – or that I oppose it. Not at all; in fact, we use SharePoint for our own intranet and are upgrading to MOSS 2007. As well, we have many clients that use WSS and MOSS. However, I do think however that SharePoint is being used by too many organizations, including clients, that aren’t well served by it.

I believe there are two telling quotes, both by Shawn Shell and Alan Pelz-Sharpe, the co-authors of the CMS Watch The Sharepoint Report 2008 (TSR) (the best analysis report on MOSS that I’ve seen) that best sum-up MOSS:

 

• “SharePoint does a lot of things, but it does very few things very well.” Shawn Shell (see The pros and cons of SharePoint).

 

• “MOSS is very good in smaller, workgroup environments (it’s not traditionally very good for 5,000 or 10,000 concurrent users),” Alan Pelz-Sharpe (see SharePoint overview (pros & cons, MOSS).

 

Also…

 

• “Without proper architecture and governance, I can guarantee you that SharePoint will fail,” says Bob Mixon, President of Mixon Consulting, addressing the annual Enterprise 3 conference in San Diego (see SharePoint requires proper architecture & governance ).

 

A number of experts and users (owners / licensees) have weighed-in on their expert opinions and analysis of SharePoint. To avoid any controversy and to protect the individuals who were freely expressing and sharing their opinions here at jboye08 in Aarhus, here are some of the more frank quotes:

 

• “The perception is that the search engine is terrible. I’m not 100% in agreement… the engine is pretty good, but the search interface can be weak (e.g. the engine does support wild card and Boolean searches, but usually the implemented interface does not).”

 

• “Personal sites (My Site functionalilty) is both interesting and scary at the same time.”

 

• “The complexity across farms is ridiculous. Make sure your consultant (MS partner or implementer) give you a list of those things that stop working across farms.”

 

Still more advice from Information Week writer Nicolas Hoover (thanks to our own Cathy Mcknight for bringing this to my attention, Can Microsoft Keep SharePoint Rolling?)

 

“The software's Swiss Army knife approach helps companies create more useful intranets, set up document sharing, offer blogs and wikis, and build a richer online company directory. This boundary-blurring nature is part of its appeal, and can even help in budgeting: IT teams that might not get the nod for document management software have been known to slip SharePoint into the Microsoft Office budget.

But SharePoint's feature sprawl can be part of the problem. By taking what comes bundled in SharePoint, companies can end up compromising on critical functions compared with best-of-breed tools. And SharePoint deployments easily can go wrong if IT teams just turn on additional modules without considering the business case, requirements, and training needed to make them part of a business process. SharePoint's all-in-one appeal may lessen as content management standards become more prevalent, making best-of-breed approaches more viable. Still, it's undeniable that SharePoint's on a roll because of intense demand to better manage and share an expanding glut of diverse content."

 

If you have MOSS, or are thinking of buying, Gartner offers the following recommendations:

 

• To ensure that SharePoint does not become another content silo, build or update your enterprisewide content management strategy to address collaborative and basic content management.
• Build a broad inventory of existing content management applications and repositories and assess the investment levels in those before bringing in another platform such as SharePoint.
• Define business requirements and the corresponding technical and functional needs, which may span collaborative and process-centric content applications. Map your content management products to them with an eye toward minimizing the redundancy in application development, IT operational or other costs.
• Examine the integration points required between MOSS 2007 and an ECM suite and assess the availability tools and technologies to ensure interoperability.
• Establish and enforce governance policies regarding when to use and when not to use SharePoint.

 

MOSS 2007 is a wonderful solution – but its ideal for smaller companies, and can be a “massive problem” for larger ones. I like it a lot, but I’m technology neutral and am frank about its strengths and weaknesses. I’ll continue to recommend MOSS for some, but not for others.

 

ADDITIONAL READING:

Advice for SharePoint customers

Sharepoint to be the new Windows?

The pros and cons of SharePoint (MOSS)

SharePoint overview (pros & cons, MOSS)

SharePoint requires proper architecture & governance

Can Microsoft Keep SharePoint Rolling?

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