Web CMS trends for 2008

By Kasman Thomas at 2007-10-23 10:10:00 |

In completing The Web CMS Report 2008, we've again had a chance to observe significant changes in the Web content management (WCM) landscape, some merely continuations of themes we've cited before, others that are new. This article recaps a handful of the more noteworthy trends we're seeing.

Trend #1: A Return to Coupled Production and Delivery

Customers are more willing to consider Web content management systems that couple content production and delivery -- or put another way, systems that couple content management with website management. Vendors are responding accordingly.

One of the main drivers here is the business imperative to customize and optimize the consumption experience in a (near) real-time manner. Web 2.0 feeds into this phenomenon by fostering higher user expectations with regard to immediacy and responsiveness. AJAX has made it easy for widgets to either consume services or push data out to them in real time, blurring architectural boundaries. And user-generated content may mean the (re-)insertion of management services in the delivery tier.

We see a greater confidence in high-traffic dynamic delivery infrastructures, but also some sticker shock at the licensing implications of distributing Web CMS services across multiple machines in the consumption tier. Interactivity comes with a price.

Trend #2: WS-Apathy

We may be nearing the point where SOAP is a dirty word. It seems few customers are using the (mostly) new Web Services APIs being trotted out by vendors. There is increasing interest in REST (REpresentational State Transfer) as a basis for services-over-HTTP. The frenetic pace of Web development requires a level of agility in the face of constant change that WS-* is ill-suited to enable.

To be sure, there are some success stories of WCM vendors using Web Services internally within their products -- mostly for content deployment services -- but not for swapping other vendors' services in and out, and as such, the industry remains very, very far away from Services-Oriented Architectures (SOA).

Trend #3: Support for XML, but not Content Reuse

XML support is everywhere these days, but while WCM most vendors deliver on the promise of content repurposing through XML, there is precious little provision for actual content reuse. Typically, documents stored as XML represent whole web pages, or other coarse-grained entities that are self-contained. Vendors enable "reuse" of these large pieces as large pieces: A news story can be placed here or here, or used again over here, or sent to that mobile device, and so on.

But composing a new document out of smaller (fine-grained) chunks is still not something that can be done easily with most WCM systems. And yet we foresee ever-greater demand for this kind of DITA-like compositioning, and an even greater demand for ongoing management of XML fragments, including usable dependency reports.

In short, don't (yet) look to your typical WCM tool for single-source print publishing as well.

Trend #4: The Return of the Add-On Module

After a (short-lived) trend towards simplified pricing and licensing, vendors are now starting to find it expedient (and profitable) to up-sell customers on additional modules as a supplement to -- or in lieu of -- core product upgrades. Vendors counter that they are simply trying to allow the packaging and licensing of functionalities to be more easily tailored to customers' needs.

Prepare and budget accordingly for the long-term.

Trend #5: AJAX-Feature Delays

Every dot-release of a product seems to come with assurances that "our next version will have fantastic AJAX features." But tomorrow is taking a long time to come.

We've noted this trend before, and it continues to be an ongoing concern. We suspect it's because AJAX applications are notoriously difficult to test and debug (owing in part to browser cross-compatibility issues), and the technology itself changes on front and back ends with some regularity. In some cases, vendors have developed AJAX-based control panels, but then default to clunkier interfaces for actual content contribution.

Trend #6: JCR Indifference

Several vendors say they are working on Java Content Repository compliance for upcoming versions of their products, but there doesn't seem to be much urgency to any of these efforts. Vendors whisper that customers aren't (yet) demanding JCR support, and perhaps they're right.

In theory, JCR offers the promise of being able to federate multiple content repositories (of different types) behind a common repository-access API, in effect accomplishing a neat bit of silo-busting and code reuse. But ironically, CMS vendors are not typically in the silo-busting business. Quite the contrary. Intentionally or not, they're in the business of establishing new silos, to house web content, metadata, and system artifacts. If and when JCR takes off, I suspect it will be at the level of ECM first, WCM second (if at all).

And yet...innovation

Lest you think we only have negative things to say about the industry, I'll point out that commercial vendors and open source projects continue to innovate at a rapid clip. Sure, sometimes innovation means undertested features and unexpected performance hits. But Web CMS tools continue to get broader and deeper. And as you might expect, most innovation happens at the lower and middle tiers of the marketplace. You can get more services and power, more flexibility and options, more managerial controls and better author enablement, and even more choices for simplifying your environment, for the same amount of money, than ever before.

So the question is: what are you going to do with all that? We get excited about the technology, but in the end, there's a reason it's called content management.

Final Thoughts

Trends can be illuminating, yet they don't necessarily offer guidance for you the customer seeking to address a business problem. Something that works for the rest of the industry might not work for your enterprise in the context of your business needs. So when we write The Web CMS Report, we consider each CMS offering individually. There is no perfect CMS solution, any more than there is an "average customer" or a "typical need." Keep this in mind as you weigh industry trends against real-world requirements.