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Vendor criticism of CMS Watch

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Fri, 16 May 2008 10:43:00 -0400

As you know at CMS Watch we write critical product evaluations to help you avoid expensive procurement and deployment mistakes. We write reports that detail both the warts and merits of big vendors like EMC, Oracle, Xerox and IBM -- through to smaller specialist vendors like Hyland, Autonomy and Nuxeo. Readers of our reports often ask me "what did vendor x say when they read that!" The assumption, sometimes correct, is that vendors freak out on reading such criticism.

In an industry whereby most of the "independent analysts" are heavily dependent on revenues from the very firms they claim to be "independent" of, it's unusual to see truly critical research get published. So it becomes a surprise to both buyers and sellers when they read such criticism. In our reports we widely distribute the compliments and brickbats -- if something is truly terrible we will tell you.

But most of the time it is not a case of bad technology versus good technology. Rather it is a case of good fit versus bad fit: a product that could become an outstanding performer in a larger legal firm may make a terrible fit in a mid-sized manufacturing and ERP-centric environment. Hence we urge you the reader to study all the alternatives and balance them out, rather than look at one preferred vendor in isolation.

Speaking of isolation, the marketing groups of some vendors seem to operate in in a kind of vacuum. I guess it's part of the job for them to drink their own Kool Aid, but some of them seem to think it's part of their job to attack and stop any criticism of their product or company. At CMS Watch we're often on the receiving end of that wrath; that stinks sometimes, but so be it. Just as it is the vendor's job to wax lyrical about the joys of their product, so too is it ours to unearth the reality. If you want to get an insight into this particular dynamic, whether you're a curious end user or a vendor AR (Analyst Relations) person, check out the article I published today.

A caution about Drupal as a social software platform

apoorvdurga@gmail.com(Apoorv Durga) — Tue, 13 May 2008 18:03:00 -0400

The open source package Drupal is one of the few social publishing platforms built on top of a longstanding Web CM (WCM) system. It has a strong foundation with a very flexible taxonomy system which -- along with thousands of 3rd-party modules -- enables you to assemble social publishing applications.

However, these modules could be your biggest problem as well because many times, module upgrades do not keep pace with Drupal upgrades. Even though Drupal has released version 6.2, many of the more popular modules are still on 5.x. These include Organic groups (for building communities or groups), MySite (module for MyPage or MyYahoo type functionality), Panels (module for creating more flexible layouts) and Views (module for creating flexible lists of content) -- all modules that are necessary for building such social publishing applications.

Meanwhile, some of the problem related to 3rd-party modules could be reduced with the new firm Acquia announcing a commercial Drupal version which will include support for many of these 3rd party modules. Even though Acquia has received a bit of publicity (and VC funding), the first release of "Carbon" (its commercial offering) won't be released until the second half of this year.

So if you are planning to employ Drupal for your social software project, pay special attention to the modules that are required and test them thoroughly on Drupal. It is quite possible that you do not need any of these 3rd party modules because Drupal also includes many modules like Blog and Forums in its core. But if you do need external modules like these, your best bet would probably be to go for Drupal 5.x (and the same holds good for those looking to upgrade from 5.x to 6.x as well). As we continue to research social software in the enterprise, look for more details in these pages on Drupal and competing platforms.

Now more than ever, reading is not believing

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Tue, 13 May 2008 00:06:00 -0400

As a content producer, it has been fascinating to watch the evolution of channels where technology suppliers talk to technology customers -- the trade press and industry conferences in particular.

Take conferences. In the go-go 1990s, prospective speakers were busy making money, and conference organizers (of which there were many!) aggressively courted panelists and often paid them to speak. During the last recession, most conferences stopped paying speakers (except for keynotes and training). In fact, in many venues the pendulum has shifted towards pay-to-play, and you see more exhibitors on conference panels than ever. Not surprisingly, when this happens the quality suffers apace.

The trade press has not been immune from this trend either. Still, I was shocked last week when a UK-based IT publication asked one of our analysts to pay the publisher to run an article that the magazine itself had solicited. This was not a "sponsored white paper," but a regular article in a regular trade publication. Everyone knows the 4th Estate has fallen on hard times, but I didn't realize it was that bad, and in any case one would hope that basic ethics don't get lost amid shifting business models.

I think these trends reflect a broader phenomenon: There is more marketing money than ever chasing finite buyer attention. You see it at conferences that are longer on exhibitors than attendees. And webpages that are longer on ads than content. We've written previously on the substantial conflicts of interest baked into traditional analyst industry models.

What does all this mean for you the customer? It means you need to be more skeptical than ever. At some level you already knew that, but it's possible that your colleagues helping you to make technology choices do not. That's why you need to hard-wire careful, hands-on testing into any software procurement. Surely, there are products and vendors out there that really could offer a good fit for your needs. But in the end, experience really is the best selector.

We think doing proper advance homework is essential, or we wouldn't sell evaluation reports for a living. But now more than ever, you need to trust your own judgments. Base those judgments more on actions than words.

Reinventing the Java application server

kthomas@cmswatch.com(Kas Thomas) — Tue, 6 May 2008 13:03:00 -0400

Just when you thought the Java application server market was pretty well saturated (if not in actual decline), along comes a brand new entrant with familiar-sounding promises of "lighter, faster, easier." What's doubly ironic is that this new contender comes from the very folks who've done so much (intentionally or not) to make "Java appserver" a bad name in recent years. I'm talking about the people at SpringSource (purveyors of the celebrated Spring Framework).

The newly announced SpringSource Application Platform is (according to its creators) "a completely module-based Java application server that is designed to run enterprise Java applications and Spring-powered applications with a new degree of flexibility and reliability." Spring geeks will recognize it as the long-awaited integration of Spring with OSGi.

Source: www.springsource.com

OSGi, by way of background, is a fairly mature specification (dating to 1999) encompassing a dynamic component model in which Java classes are deployed as bundles, which are in turn registered as services within the OSGi execution environment. The OSGi framework provides automatic versioning, dependency resolution, and secure "find and bind" functionality such that bundles can discover and safely call the right versions of each other. (Think of it as a kind of SOA microcosm inside a running JVM.)

The real value-add of OSGi comes in terms of lifecycle management of classes, cleaner isolation of code, and more thoroughgoing code reuse. With OSGi, there's no need for every deployed web app to hide its own copy of xalan.jar (or whatever) under WEB-INF, as so often happens on J2EE appservers. A bundle gets exposed once, and the various apps that need to use that code can do so without getting caught in classloader hell.

More interesting is that bundles can be hot-swapped without breaking any running apps. You can update part of an app (just the bundles that need updating) without disturbing the rest of the app or having to bounce the server.

There are other benefits as well, but efficient code reuse and the ability to hot-swap code modules are core to what OSGi is about. Which may explain why WebSphere, WebLogic, JBoss, Jonas, and others are moving to (or already have moved to) OSGi-based architectures.

What (if anything) makes SpringSource Application Platform better than any of the other OSGi-enabled app servers? On a purely technical level, SSAP tends to expose low-level OSGi internals more directly, for developers who want programmatic access to OSGi-based magic. (Other appservers tend to hide OSGi's innards.) Also, SSAP is more flexible with regard to deployment options. And (oh yes), it uses Spring.

Still, there's a down side to all the wonderfulness. New programming patterns are in play with OSGi (representing a new learning curve for developers), and overall complexity has not gone down; it has merely been shifted around. Also, some people are put off by the project's GPLv3 license. (Spring itself will continue to use the Apache license, however.)

Our take? The OSGi-powered SpringSource Application Platform represents an important paradigm shift, one that has the potential to revitalize Java EE development (much as Spring itself did when it debuted on the first day of Spring in 2004). How? By raising expectations around code reuse, serviceability, reliability, remote management, hot upgrades that don't break anything, version-based conflict resolution, and other difficult issues that (frankly) have long needed solving in order for Java EE development to go to the next level.

For people who implement, customize, maintain, upgrade, and/or administer Java-based content management systems, the potential payoffs of OSGi are many. Note that the WCMS vendors best positioned (in theory, at least) to benefit from the new paradigm are those already using Spring, such as Alfresco, CoreMedia, Enonic, and Hannon Hill. Mind you, it's not a given that any vendor currently using Spring will migrate to the SpringSource Application Platform. But it's definitely something to watch for. We'll be following the situation closely; and we intend to let you know what "develops."

Mediasurface for sale?

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Tue, 6 May 2008 00:32:00 -0400

I've been hearing various rumors recently about mid-market Web CMS vendors up for sale. If true, you could imagine all sort of marketplace shifts (both good and bad) causing ownership stakes to start moving. Certainly one toolset in play is Serena Collage. Almost all these vendors are privately traded, so such rumors are...just that.

But one WCM vendor, UK-based Mediasurface, trades publicly (on the "alternative investment market" of LSX), and quietly had to explain a recent stock bump. I say "quietly" because we only got wind via an investor-blogger, who first mentioned a company communication (pdf) -- a statement that remains more or less hidden in the investor-relations area of the Mediasurface website. In the short memo, Mediasurface "...notes the recent share price and announces that it has received a preliminary approach, which may or may not lead to an offer for the Company."

In recent years Mediasurface has grown -- a bit haphazardly we thought -- via acquisition, but evidently failed to control costs, and a surprise announcement (pdf) of losses late last year sent the stock tumbling from around 25p to languish at about 5p per share, at least until this latest courtship. You can track the stock price here.

If consummated, a match with "a UK company that does not compete directly with Mediasurface" might not be a bad thing for the vendor's customers. Like direct competitor Tridion (sold to SDL earlier this year), Mediasurface has global ambitions, and sometimes global reach, but struggled a bit beyond its regional base. As Web CMS Report 2008 readers know, Mediasurface's flagship Morello product suffers from a rather dated back-end, but the company has innovated enough on features to keep it interesting even for larger buyers. Things may start to get even more interesting soon.

Budget time: How much should I set aside for software licenses?

info@jboye.dk(Janus Boye) — Sat, 3 May 2008 17:14:00 -0400

When budget-building time comes up, many technology customers face the interesting question of how much money to put aside for new software licenses. Even without looking at specific vendors, you might have to tell your manager some ballpark figure for expected license costs.

As an analyst I'm frequently asked about license prices. A recent interesting discussion among peers challenged my views and provided helpful feedback that might assist you in arriving at the right numbers in today's marketplace:

List prices aside, buyers can presently obtain significant discounts on enterprise portals and on Web CMS tools. This may be caused by the increased SharePoint infiltration. A commentary in February on big software discounts and recent numbers from Vignette seems to confirm this trend. SharePoint licensing for websites is the exception that proves the rule. In general if the Web CMS comes from an ECM vendor, it will be more expensive -- potentially way more expensive

With enterprise search at the high end, the reverse is true. The marketplace is seeing strong demand at the moment. Many enterprise-tier search offerings come only as a bundled offering, so there is little list pricing to benchmark against. Deals quickly run into the millions of Euros in large, global, and complex enterprises.

Among the huge array of mid-market vendors across different content technologies -- many them local/regional in footprint -- you can typically find solutions that meet the needs of even organization-wide deployments in most enterprises, but at a factor of five (or more) cheaper than the higher-end solutions

If you are willing to serve as a reference client or appear on the customer list -- or better within a press release -- this is very valuable for the vendor and should help you to get significant discounts. (And of course as you look to evaluate vendors and they provide such testimonials, you should also understand how this game is played.)

Remember that enterprise deals entail complex negotiation and pricing models that ultimately boil down to what the salesperson thinks you can afford. Perhaps needless to say, but still: Implementation costs are higher than licensing costs and open source projects are not necessarily cheaper just because you might save licensing costs.

Thanks to Alan Pelz-Sharpe, Apoorv Durga, James Robertson and Martin White.

Content Management - UK vs. US

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Fri, 2 May 2008 08:55:00 -0400

On a flight back to Boston from London yesterday I took a little time to digest what I had observed during the past week in the UK. It was an odd week really, and somewhat disconcerting as the contrast between the US and the UK was quite stark.

First, it must be said that there was no sign of a recession or downturn in the content management industry in the UK. The doom and gloom we hear daily from all and sundry in North America is not echoed across the Atlantic. Far from it. People across the board that we met talked of project growth, and vendors boast of business improving quarter on quarter. Of course, part of this could be that I was attending a web-oriented conference, and WCM has remained frothy around the globe, in this recession as in the past. But still, the mood in London was unusually upbeat.

Second, it seems clear that the vendor landscape and the channel landscape is becoming ever more regional. Of the 300 plus vendors at Internetworld, only a small fraction were from North America. In the past North American vendors dominated events, but not any more.

Third, there is a real appetite for governance and strategy consulting in the UK. Buyers appear to be aware that content technologies change business practices, that content needs to be managed...and that software cannot do that for you.

Fourth, the need to create multilingual sites and manage multilingual content is far more acute in the UK and continental Europe than the US. Be that Hindi, Gujarati, or Punjabi in the UK -- or French, German, and Italian in Switzerland -- the skills to do this are honed, the solutions found, and the workflows better understood.

I don't really know why there is such a stark difference between the two markets. It's not new really, it was evident in 2007 and 2006, but it appears to be getting more acute and the divisions widening at a faster pace. One factor is probably an overall more positive and optimistic economy in the UK, but there are other industry-specific things to consider.

Very high-speed internet access in Britain is typically faster and more widespread than in the US. Many homes in the UK have faster connections than typical SMEs in the US (8mbps is common in UK homes). Greater bandwidth has allowed companies to exploit rich media and more complex websites more effectively than their US peers. There is greater advancement of 3G cellular phone technologies, and interactive television services, and these have provided a welcome challenge to content developers and publishers to exploit.

Greater adoption of standards across the EU have by definition fostered greater interconnectivity at the network, device, and delivery levels - and have also provided more suitable benchmarks to purchase against. Take for instance the MOREQ 2 specification for records management, a standard that is both practical and designed for general usage, as opposed to DOD 5015 that is a somewhat over-engineered military specification. Consider also the universal adoption of shared cellular networks, and device portability across providers -- as opposed to the confusion of competing networks and proprietary devices in the US.

At the procurement level, one can also see slower buying cycles and greater attention to vendor intangibles the UK paying off in the long run. Historically, (though there are many exceptions) purchasers of technology in Europe have taken longer to come to decisions, but then also stick with their chosen technology supplier for much longer than their US counterparts. It means that there is time to develop, test, and really get to know a product over time - and ultimately to use it to its maximum potential.

Of course all is not rosy in the UK. Big customers still get ripped off by big vendors; projects crash and burn, and all the problems we know about here in the US are encountered regularly there too. But there is certainly something to be learned from the UK's experiences. If you are in the process of buying Content Technology you should of course always ask for and follow through on customer references. It might well be a good idea to ask for specific UK references to be provided. Particularly if you have multi-lingual, governance, or mobile web issues to address. It may well be that they can give you better insights than colleagues in the US.

Recessions come and go, and economics is like political polling; since it is the most inexact of sciences, the experts usually get it wrong. However, we are in the midst of gloomy times here in America, and rather than get envious of our friends across the Atlantic, we can potentially turn the gloomy times to our benefit.

Mortgage crisis: The least of Vignette's worries

kthomas@cmswatch.com(Kas Thomas) — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 08:53:00 -0400

Vignette announced its first-quarter numbers last week, and the results weren't pretty. For the first three months of 2008, the company lost $839,000 (down sharply from the $4.8 million earned in the same period a year before). The poor performance was due in part to a severe drop in license revenue, down 37 percent for the quarter (to a little under $10 million) compared to Q1 of 2007, continuing the trend we reported on last January.

Company president Mike Aviles, in the earnings call of April 23, confirmed what we've long suspected, which is that Vignette suffers from an agility problem: The company is slow to innovate, and has trouble taking its innovations to market on a timely basis. "We're late," Aviles said in response to a question about time-to-market. "As an innovator in the marketplace, [Web 2.0] is something we should have been on years ago . . . But over many years I think we lost an edge at Vignette that we are now starting to get back." Still, Aviles candidly admitted: "The bottom line is we did not execute. We are not making any excuses for it."

Aviles noted that the recent turmoil in the financial services industry has been disruptive to Vignette's business. (Financial services has historically constituted an important vertical for Vignette.) If indeed the sub-prime loan crisis is partly to blame for Vignette's woes, it could be a troubling portent for the likes of Day Software and Terminal Four, who also do significant amounts of business with customers in the financial services industry. It's certainly a trend worth watching.

In any event, we think Vignette's troubles are probably larger than any temporary tumult in the banking industry (or even in the U.S. economy). Vignette's product release cycles are long. Its sales force seems unfocused. The company is under pricing pressure (something CFO Pat Kelly admitted in the earnings call). And as CEO Mike Aviles himself suggested, Vignette is not the bastion of innovation it once was.

Vignette is hopeful that its (not yet completed) acquisition of online-video-technology company Vidavee will help get innovation jump-started again. Whether it will succeed remains to be determined. We're watching closely. Stay tuned.

What WCM can learn from DAM

kthomas@cmswatch.com(Kas Thomas) — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 08:30:00 -0400

Having spent a great deal of time in recent weeks talking to vendors, consultants, and customers in the Digital Asset Management space (in preparing for the upcoming release of our Digital & Media Asset Management Report 2008), it occurs to me that the Web CMS world could perhaps learn a few things from the DAM world.

Established DAM vendors tend, surprisingly often, to be older than the most established Web CMS vendors (predating the Web itself, in some cases). This fact, coupled with the demanding scalability, storage, network-bandwidth, and other requirements of the DAM domain, have given DAM vendors a unique perspective on what it means to manage content.

In the Web CMS world, "content" tends (broadly speaking) to be something that has the potential to convey information. In the DAM world, content is a bit more abstract: it's something with value, hence an asset. The distinction is subtle but important. In DAM, a piece of content does not become an asset until it has been classified, indexed, versioned, secured, stored, possibly reformatted or canonicalized in some way, and (typically) assigned a lifecycle state, a unique ID, and an owner. These are the things that make a piece of content an asset.

What's the key to making it all work? Metadata. In the DAM world, it's what you know about an object that makes the object findable and reusable, thus valuable. These days, it's not unusual for unstructured content to come with its own embedded metadata (in the form of XMP, say), but the general assumption in DAM is that any object, of any kind, regardless of whether it has its own embedded metadata, regardless of whether it's structured or not, should be enlistable as an asset in the system. If an asset comes into the system totally bereft of metadata, information about the object will be extracted, either from the object directly (via rules created beforehand) or from the person who uploaded the object, manually. DAM offerings vary greatly in sophistication with regard to metadata handling, but the point is, nothing gets into a DAM system without some kind of metadata association.

Something else DAM vendors seem to have figured out is that there should be at most one authoritative copy of an asset ("the truth"), from which all other renditions and copies are derived; and the one true copy should live on a file system, whereas the metadata associated with that asset should live in a relational database. "File system" can mean one or more file servers, and/or Network Attached Storage. The noteworthy point is that assets are unpredictable as to size and structure, hence are a poor impedance match for RDBMS storage, whereas they are a good match for a file system.

Keeping metadata in a database, on the other hand, means you can manage information about files separately from the files themselves. You can manage metadata security separately from asset security. You can run sophisticated queries and stored procedures against metadata stored in tables; and you get to enjoy all the advantages of a modern RDBMS in terms of ACID transactions, connection pooling, familiar reporting and data-mining tools, the ability to integrate with other systems, and well-understood best practices around capacity planning, clustering, performance tuning, data backup, and so forth. Metadata tends to be compact and very highly structured, hence is a good match for a relational database (particularly an XML database).

If there's a larger point to be learned here, it's that Web CMS vendors (and their customers) are frequently not thinking abstractly enough about the 'C' in CMS. Content can have structure or not have it. It can be textual or binary. It can be anything. It's what you know about it (and how you manage what you know about it) that matters. Even if your website is mostly text, you can't really depend on your search engine to attach the appropriate meaning to it.

The upshot? Look for Web CMS vendors to add stronger metadata-handling capabilities to their products over the coming 12 to 18 months. The more aggressive vendors will build text-analytics tools into their WCMS products or partner with (perhaps even acquire) text-analytics companies. We can also expect to begin hearing more (much more) about the use of XMP not just in conjunction with media files and PDFs but a wide variety of file types that you wouldn't necessarily expect to be associated with XMP.

And if you're a prospective Web CMS buyer? Give careful consideration to how the products on your short-list deal with capturing, storing, and managing metadata — for all types of files. (Look to Part 3 of our Web CMS Report 2008 for further thoughts on this.) Metadata isn't just for media any more.

SharePoint, accessibility, and web standards

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 15:22:00 -0400

Our new SharePoint Report explains how one of the core challenges with the platform -- dating from inception through to MOSS 2007 -- is that the needs of a collaboration service often conflict with the requirements of other information services, particularly around website publishing.

One example: like many other portal vendors, by default MOSS wants to insert a lot of extra code and non-standard mark-up on every page to create an interactive collaboration dashboard. As this MSDN brief on how to performance-tune a MOSS 2007 WCM site warns, "Office SharePoint Server, by default, is not XHTML compliant." This has manifold implications for website publishing, not the least of which is accessibility.

Can you fix this? Yes, with an experienced developer carefully going into the innards of the tool at various levels to replace code. Not particularly friendly.

Of late, Redmond has been touting its "Accessibility Kit for SharePoint." At least one avid researcher points out that the fix remains incomplete. (Link thanks to Martin White.)

As Web CMS Report readers know, some competing web content management packages quietly suffer the same problem. At least with SharePoint you can read all about it publicly. But Microsoft casts a huge shadow on this space, and their relative disregard for core web standards just lowers the bar for everyone else.

A Greener CMS?

jgingras@cmswatch.com(Jarrod Gingras) — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 07:30:00 -0400

"Recycling" information (a.k.a., "content reuse") is a critical goal for most content management systems. On this Earth Day 2008, I thought it appropriate to share another green movement that's emerging in the content management industry. While researching SaaS (Software as a Service) solutions for The Web CMS Report 2008, I talked to several customers who stated "it is greener" as a reason they decided to choose a hosted solution for their enterprise.

Granted, it was not the decisive reason -- apparently getting out of the IT business is more compelling than saving the planet -- but it was the first time that I heard it as a factor.

Many observers consider SaaS greener to the traditional installed approach because SaaS providers host multiple "tenants" on the same servers. This more efficient approach requires less energy and releases less CO₂ than if each tenant were running their own servers.

So it should come as no surprise that two of the four SaaS CMS vendors we cover, Clickability and CrownPeak, both promote their offerings using the "greener" message. Clickability promotes their Four Green Tenets of the SaaS Model, and today CrownPeak announced a site devoted to helping other companies achieve carbon neutrality.

In an era of increasing server virtualization, this argument holds less water, at least within larger enterprises who are increasingly mastering virtualization. But for the mid-market customers that most SaaS vendors target, energy savings could become quite real. The bigger benefit may come in not having to employ people to babysit your Web CMS servers -- quite literally reducing the carbon-based footprints in your enterprise...

Of course, SaaS isn't for everyone. Bringing the wrong solution into your enterprise can generate a lot of hot air and steam, too, so consider all factors here.

Happy Earth Day.

On RedDot and Balance

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 13:38:00 -0400

Last week we received an e-mail from an IT staffer at an outfit that is looking to buy a Web CMS tool, with PaperThin's CommonSpot and RedDot CMS (part of the extended Open Text family) under particular consideration. The e-mail was a forwarded message from a RedDot salesperson, excerpting significant pieces of our Web CMS Report 2008 to make CommonSpot look bad and RedDot look good.

This is an explicit violation of our no-commercial-use policy, which forbids vendors or anyone else from using our findings as marketing material (our policy is modeled after that of the famous U.S.-based evaluation service, Consumer Reports). Somebody or some bodies at RedDot clearly took a lot of time to either OCR or re-type the text (you can't copy-paste from the PDF). They then took a lot more time to extensively -- if quite disingenuously -- redact portions of the text to make it look like we love their product (we don't) and dislike CommonSpot (we don't). I imagine other RedDot competitors were lined up and chopped down in similar fashion.

Consider the following excerpt from the RedDot salesperson's 4-page message:

"Open Text also holds a yearly LiveLinkUp conference for all of their customers and partners,... You can also find regional user groups around the world, an annual international summit, and an online developer community."

And our actual report text with the redacted clause italicized:

although RedDot customers we met there departed wondering where their web publishing needs fit in among the enterprise-focused Open Text strategy

Or this from the e-mail:

"...the product is mature, with a large customer base (over 2,500) and significant internal and external consulting expertise for customers to tap, plus a modestly active user community..you would buy it from a well-regarded vendor, Open Text, with a solid (if complex) "ECM" strategy..."

Which is really this in the report:

RedDot may lack the R&D energy of an Interwoven, Tridion, Day, or Sitecore, but the product is mature, with a large customer base (over 2,500) and significant internal and external consulting expertise for customers to tap, plus a modestly active user community.

And yet, RedDot average deal sizes continue to grow. We think this reflects more the cachet and customer expectations surrounding working with a major ECM vendor like Open Text, rather than intrinsic improvements to the core product -- which indeed have been rather slow in coming. Indeed, for what you get -- a somewhat dated mid-marketish toolset -- RedDot cannot be a called a great value. Nevertheless, you would buy it from a well-regarded vendor, Open Text, with a solid (if complex) "ECM" strategy.

The hatchet job on CommonSpot was as bad or worse.

Now, you and I both know that software sales can be a hurly-burly sport. Caveat emptor and all that. And we've all seen vendors distill convenient quotes from analyst reports across the spectrum (though, disappointingly, often with those analyst firms' approval). What's a bit startling here, though, is the depth of the dishonesty behind the very many ellipses. Although possibly the work of a rogue sales exec, it would seem to confirm my growing suspicions over the years that RedDot as a company has a tendency to play it rather fast and loose.

This makes RedDot all the odder fit within Open Text, an ECM vendor that -- whatever its shortcomings -- has always maintained a conservative, lower-key reputation in the face of the Oracles of this world. In fact, you can really feel the distance within Open Text (c.f., the LiveLinkUp meeting mentioned above), as if Open Text considers RedDot a sometimes charming younger sibling whose misdeeds are ultimately an embarrassment to the family name. It's too bad, really, because RedDot customers probably lose out in the end.

The larger issue here, though, is the way you look at software. Software development is really about trade-offs. Unless we all start managing our websites exactly the same way, something that works well in a tool for one customer can be a detriment for another customer. Do not seek to discover whether a software product is "good" or "bad." Ultimately you have to take a tougher but more meaningful measure: is that product a good fit for what you're trying to accomplish.

This means that every time an analyst or consultant praises some product feature, you have to ask yourself whether, in your case, that feature is actually a demerit -- and vice-versa. A more balanced view of the products -- and your needs -- can get you to the right solution.

Love Your Local Data Warehouse Manager

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 11:35:00 -0400

Within most enterprises, the worlds of "data" and "content" remain far apart, despite recurring business needs to converge different types of information. Tony Byrne argues that data specialists have a lot to teach content specialists -- and vice-versa. The trick is finding common ground, allied interests, and a common vocabulary...

How do you like THOSE assets?

tregli@cmswatch.com(Theresa Regli) — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 17:33:00 -0400

There's nothing like promising a Playboy centerfold to drive people (well, men mostly) to an upcoming technology conference. In this case, her name is PAM -- the Playboy Asset Management system -- and PAM will will be shown in all her revealing glory at the upcoming Henry Stewart Digital Asset Management Symposium in New York, May 12th & 13th.

And while I'm no Playboy centerfold, I'll be there too (clothed and looking sharp), speaking about my last few months of research into Digital Asset Management. My colleague Kas Thomas and I have spoken to dozens of customers and taken a hard look at 15 leading vendors in the marketplace, and will soon publish a report of our findings. At Henry Stewart, I'll be moderating a panel about DAM Software procurement with DPCI president Joseph Bachana, leading a session about the DAM marketplace, and appearing on the analyst panel to banter about the state of the DAM market.

Finally, I'll be leading a post-conference tutorial on Wednesday, May 14th about the content technology marketplace, talking about the differences between DAM, WCM and ECM, and helping you sort out which ones you need (or don't).

I hope you'll join me for this great event. In addition to everything you could want to know about Digital Asset Management, the Henry Stewart folks always seem to find really good caterers....

Special challenges of managing school websites

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Mon, 7 Apr 2008 16:55:00 -0400

Today I spent a delightful morning with 75 web managers from "K-12" (i.e., primary and secondary) school districts around the U.S. at the first annual "Education Web Professionals National Conference." It was quite interesting to hear how their needs differ from web managers in, say, higher education. Some observations in no particular order:

When every school in a district has its own website, and in many cases teachers can operate their own sub-sites, then multi-site management becomes a very, very big deal. As Web CMS Report readers know, effective multi-site management is a key gating feature that tends to separate less expensive from pricier products (though not all pricey products do it well!). Not surprisingly, most Web CMS projects in this space have begun as experimental Intranet implementations. Most public sites get managed manually.

Not surprisingly, web teams strapped for funding have great interest in open source, but even a simpler package like Joomla! can seem complicated to non-technical webmasters (and it won't effectively manage multiple sites). Like many government agencies, some school districts are longer on staff than discretionary funds, but the extent of their technical resources varies widely. I met some specialists from one of the wealthiest counties in the country who had an enviable technology testing lab, and then two minutes later chatted with a staffer from a small rural county who wanted to make more use of his PHP background, but spent most of his days putting out fires as the sole webmaster for the school district.

In general, districts make available more resources and attention for instructional technologies than school websites. Many districts license commercial learning content management systems (LCMS) like BlackBoard. But the open source LCMS Moodle is rapidly gaining in popularity. Some schools are stretching Moodle a bit to serve as a kind of Intranet portal and internal "Web 2.0" platform, even though that isn't what Moodle's really intended to do.

As in other sectors, most Web 2.0 initiatives (especially blogs) remain mostly behind the firewall. One school district superintendent wanted to blog publicly, but was shot down by her legal counsel, who pointed out that everything she wrote publicly became official policy and carried legal weight. No personal opinions. Too bad.

On the other hand there is great potential in podcasting, whatever the pedagogic (and production) challenges. One ambitious district figured out how to develop inventive podcasts in areas where their high school students were under-performing. The podcasts apparently became something of an underground hit, with students listening to them in the privacy of their own MP3 players, where no one could accuse them of being "uncool."

Parents often have higher expectations for school websites than the schools themselves. Central district web leaders use parental surveys and focus groups to leverage standardization measures across tiers and schools. Calendars are the #1 requested parental resource. Sports information and stats are another popular area. Parents frequently ask for printable, high-res photos of their little darlings after they appear on a school website (one district pays "Smugmug" $45 a year to handle this for them).

However, one school district manager observed that parental focus groups tend to be dominated by power-volunteers, who often are not power web users. But then more sophisticated parents complain when website redesigns end up insufficiently modern/functional. Hard to know how much of that was a stereotype. But student reactions were almost universally predictable: "the site sucks."

E-mail remains the most predominant electronic info distribution method, far dwarfing RSS. But school districts have also learned to carefully meter the frequency of these communications (lest parents opt out amid the flood of other mail they get), as well as carefully monitor them for editorial content. Suggests to me that integrated e-mail campaigns must be a more important requirement for CMS buyers in this community. Still, one web manager had mixed feelings about these blasts: "We're training parents to be passive," she argued.

If you're in the school website business, I encourage you to check out the nascent group that's forming here.

Readers' challenge - name our new chart!

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Sun, 6 Apr 2008 17:11:00 -0400

Since moving to the US in 2002 I have become a fan of The Atlantic magazine, and in particular the last page of each edition that contains the "Word Fugitives" column. In this column readers ask for new words to meet commonly demanded needs.

For example, in the most recent issue somebody requested a polite but meaningful phrase for a couple to use when they are trying to conceive a child. My favorite of the suggested responses came from Laura Whitman, of Redwood City, Calif., who wrote, "In our group when a couple is married and everyone is wondering what their plans are in regard to procreation, we always ask if they are in the product research or product development phase...early product development refers to your correspondent's criteria." You see there is always somebody out there with the right answer.

So to our current challenge, we have designed a wonderful (in our own opinion) chart that provides buyers of technology with an at-a-glance risk/opportunity review of the products we cover in a particular segment. We refer to this currently as the Vendor Risk Report -- and internally as the "VORP" (Vendor Opportunity and Risk Profile). Not exactly terms that roll off the tongue. Now some of you may be aware of similar chart like products from other firms, charts that have catchy names like "Magic Quadrant" or "Wave." Well we want a catchy name too but haven't thought of a satisfactory one.

So in the spirit of Word Fugitives, we are throwing the door open to you. Please send me your thoughts and ideas and we promise to publish and credit the best of them here on the site. And for the very best one we will send a box of gourmet chocolates or bottle of good champagne (your choice). The gauntlet has been thrown down, can you rise to the challenge?