CMS Watch Ektron Feed

Web CMS Thoughts from Gilbane Day One

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 10:48:00 -0400

After participating in the first day of the Gilbane San Francisco conference yesterday, here some short observations in no particular order.

By my count, once-little Ektron has seen four years of hyper-growth. The company says they now have 200 employees. If accurate, I'll guess this head-count puts them at about US$30-40m in revenues, which sizes Ektron in the ball-park of some of the larger standalone Web CMS vendors (like FatWire, or Tridion before the SDL acquisition), or even the CMS product groups of some larger vendors. You're probably not surprised to hear that Ektron customers tell us this growth has not come without associated growth pains.

Forrester analyst Rob Koplowitz, who once worked on SharePoint Portal Server 2003 at Microsoft, called the MOSS 2007 platform a "collection of festering boils." You can ask him for clarification, but he seems to have meant it with love...

Speaking of SharePoint, two channel partners told me that their local Microsoft reps were marketing MOSS for public websites really hard. Evidently Redmond wants to beat the rap that the tool is not ideal for public-facing sites, and doubtless would like to lengthen this customer list. So the integrators are asking themselves, "when Microsoft hands us a great lead to follow, how can we have a candid conversation with the prospect about their real alternatives?" Not a new story in the channel business, but a pressing one right now, and you the buyer should understand the institutional dynamics. See, this presents you a bit of a dilemma as well: ideally you'd find a vendor-neutral consultant to help you sort out your choices, but if MOSS wins your competition in the end, you really want to go with a partner who brings very deep skills in Web Publishing in SharePoint, because it's not a simple beast. If Redmond keeps pushing its partners, then "vendor neutral with very deep SharePoint skills" could become an oxymoron.

If the exhibit hall is any indication, the Web CMS marketplace continues to expand, especially at the lower end -- perhaps dispelling the myth of a SharePoint steamroller, at least in this space. Smaller vendors here -- some of whom have participated for multiple events now -- include Acumium, Bridgeline, Broadchoice, Hippo, Telerik, and The Level, plus many of the other usual suspects we cover in our Web CMS Report 2008.

Of course, exhibitors come and go from year to year. One thing doesn't change though. Despite all the talk about Web 2.0, a lot of customers bring some very basic questions they want addressed about web publishing and CMS tools. I hope I can answer some of them at my tutorial tomorrow.

CrownPeak's New SaaS Option

jgingras@cmswatch.com(Jarrod Gingras) — Tue, 5 Feb 2008 09:35:00 -0500

On the heels of Clickability's announcement yesterday that it has received a second round of VC funding, the other pure-play SaaS vendor we cover in the 2008 Web Content Management Report, CrownPeak, is making some news of its own. Today the company announced a new product, ContentManagement.com, aimed at offering a SaaS option at a lower price. The company says the new product will be a scaled-down derivative of the current CrownPeak CMS product.

The new product that starts at $1250/month seems like an attempt at trying to challenge Open Source alternatives and products that offer low entry costs like Ektron. As with Ektron (and many others), ContentManagement.com is offering a free trial that allows a potential buyer to try all of its features except publish content to a live site. It will be important for potential buyers to take advantage of the free trial because - while CrownPeak claims to have packaged the "most popular" features of its CrownPeak CMS product and left out some of the more complex options - your needs could differ. Be sure test the product carefully before committing, even if the up-front price is attractive.

Current CrownPeak customers may be wary of the implications of CrownPeak supporting two distinct product offerings (and code bases and support levels, etc.). It remains to be seen if CrownPeak can keep up with the needs of two separate client bases, especially now that they are targeting clients of varying sizes and budgets.

The world is your oyster, but is the Geo-web right for you?

tregli@cmswatch.com(Theresa Regli) — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500

We all have our computer time-wasters. For some it's games, for others, IM'ing with friends. For me, it's the geo-web. Just as I used to while away the hours with my beloved Rand McNally atlas as a kid, studying the roads and mountain ranges and imagining what it would be like when I got there some day, now I do it with Google Earth. These days I don't have to be as imaginative -- it's all right there on my desktop. Not only can I see the mountain ranges, I can preview the slopes I'll ski on my next vacation in the Alps (if the dollar ever stops being a toy currency). I can search for news stories that happened within a 5 mile radius of the hotel I'm booking, be it in Cleveland, Corsica, or Cape Town.

Web content management vendors Ektron and Escenic, as well as Australian enterprise search vendor Funnelback, are among the few content technology vendors that integrate geo-web map applications with their own. They're often spun under the rubric of "Web 2.0," given that's the moniker put on anything that might also be described as "cool" or "interactive," and vendors of course want to come off as both. Escenic has found a niche supporting news organizations, allowing users to search for news geographically. On the web, Flickr allows you to search for photos that are tagged geographically, simply by clicking on a map. As is often the case, these mashups are heavily reliant on good metadata, or a geographic taxonomy. In other cases, text mining technology will sift through your managed content, look for location-based clues ("London," "Eiffel Tower" or "SFO"), and then assign GPS coordinates to that content as associated metadata, which is in turn fed into the mapping application.

Like many tools that vendors pass off as completely their own, many of the geo-mapping mashups you might see in WCM or enterprise search demos use OEM'd products. Sniffing backwards along that path, I recently chatted at length with the folks at MetaCarta, whose raison d'être is integrating content and maps, delivering what they call "geographic value" to unstructured content. MetaCarta combines text and geographic searches, then plots the results on a map. Smartly, MetaCarta is "map agnostic" -- meaning they'll use Google's, Microsoft's, or anyone else's mapping system to show the results. Note how it works on the Reuters news site; news is automatically plotted on the canvas of Microsoft Virtual Earth.

As a result of such software, a whole new layer of geo-specific data is added to our content. Standards are emerging to support this geographic tagging, including Google's Keyhole Markup Language, or KML and the Open Geospatial Consortium's GML. If your car or your cell phone has GPS technology, you are creating content just by moving around, or going to pick up milk at the corner store. An interesting new company called Socialight has set up a geographic-based social network letting mobile phone users attach "sticky notes" to locations, so that the next person who drops by can "pick it up." A brave new world of geo-data is emerging, and you will have to manage it.

While this is surely a growing piece of the 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle that is Enterprise Content Management, there's not necessarily a practical business application for the geo-web in your enterprise. Don't be too quick to be dazzled by the demo; after all, do you really need your CMS to tell you where the local pizza joints are? MetaCarta claims that 74% of documents on the Internet are "geo-relevant," or plottable on a map. Is the same true of the content in your enterprise? Will plotting your documents geographically add value to the experience, or enable you to manage or find content more effectively? Perhaps, but as with any software that may look cool on the surface, be sure to assess your real business needs before you invest.

Taxonomies, folksonomies, and my love/hate relationship with my iPod

tregli@cmswatch.com(Theresa Regli) — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 13:29:00 -0500

Last week The Malcontents invited me and Tim Denby (formerly of Web CMS vendor Ektron and now an independent consultant) on their podcast to banter about a few of my favorite topics, taxonomies and folksonomies, and the advantages/disadvantages of each. It was particularly timely for me to be part of a podcast on this topic, as I'm just getting acquainted with my new iPod. Admittedly, obsessive about metadata as I am, very little bothers me more than how bad most CD metadata is when you rip the songs into iTunes. There's a lesson to be learned by importing 20 CDs of Beethoven's symphonies and piano concertos: no two collections of recordings list the composer's name the same way: Beethoven; Ludwig van Beethoven; van Beethoven, Ludwig; Beethoven, Ludwig van; L. V. Beethoven, and so on. Some put his name in the "artist" field (as if he's playing on the CD!), others, the "composer" field, which at least makes good sense. Either way, it's an inconsistent mess that makes the otherwise fabulous faceted navigation on the iPod terribly annoying, because I end up with 8 different collections for the same composer. The best user interfaces will still suffer when content metadata is inconsistent, and every day with my iPod, it's quod erat demonstrandum. Don't let your corporate content suffer the same fate, and establish standards for your metadata, as Tim and I argue in this podcast. Now, I'll go back to normalizing the metadata in my iTunes...

It's mostly about you: the lure of customer conferences

tregli@cmswatch.com(Theresa Regli) — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 19:43:00 -0500

Clickability's announcement of a pending 2007 user conference (2006 agenda here) reminds us that sometimes customer communities need to meet in person, even if they don't regularly communicate online. That's one of many reasons to attend user conferences if you're a current or potential future buyer of a CMS. Knowledge and experience-sharing with other customers is a start, but at the best such gatherings you can also participate in hands-on technical training sessions. Just beware of the ubiquitous cross-selling of the company's products you may not already own -- inevitable salemanship when there's a captive audience on hand. Some companies, such as Ektron (who just announced their first user conference in Boston for the fall of 2007), are savvy enough to solicit input from their customers in order to shape the conference agenda. This is a great way to let your vendor know what you need. Be sure to encourage customer extranets, forums and improved support, while you're at it. While big vendors such as Vignette and Interwoven have held user conferences for nearly a decade, there's no reason why smaller suppliers can't think bigger in a customer-focused way.

New IE7 Shakes Up CMS and Portal Implementations

tbyrne@cmswatch.com; jboye@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne and Janus Boye) — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 16:19:00 -0500

Is your CMS or Portal vendor ready for IE7? As your read this, Microsoft is updating PCs around the world, but Tony Byrne and Janus Boye point out that support for the new browser varies across the content technology marketplace. Whatever your application, you likely have some important testing to do...

Does your vendor have a developer zone?

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Mon, 3 Jul 2006 11:27:00 -0400

CMS vendor Ektron has launched a publicly-available "DevCenter." I think this is a good idea. Product support and community-interaction is available (to varying degrees) from large software vendors like Sun, IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle. So why not small vendors? The Ektron blogs run thin, but developer areas are really about building an ecosystem, and here Ektron is doing relatively well. There are code snippets to share, the forums seem comparatively lively, and product knowledgebases are just a few clicks away. And best of all, you don't need to log in (a hassle for customers and prospects alike). As CMS Report readers know, with so many choices in the marketplace, customers need to start edging their selection calculus more towards the community around a particular technology, and not just the product and vendor itself.

Ektron and the return of site management

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Tue, 18 Apr 2006 10:35:00 -0400

Lately, I've been speaking a lot about trade-offs in web content management technology. Historically, one important debate has transpired between developers of website management tools versus "purer" content management products. A few years ago the pendulum was swinging towards the latter, as companies wanted to publish authoritative content to multiple channels and avoid performance and other problems associated with dynamic delivery. Now, a new emphasis on "Web 2.0" patterns seems to be accellerating a shift we began to notice early last year back towards an interest in website management, and (perhaps more importantly) greater managerial control over runtime interactivity, ideally through the same CMS interface. So now we see Ektron -- a CMS vendor that unapologetically couples content management and delivery -- come out with a new version of their flagship CMS400.NET product with even more interactive features, including forums, blogs, and analytics. Of course, there are tiers in the CMS marketplace, and at upper levels, enterprises typically don't want to put all their eggs in one basket this way. But as a buyer, you have important choices here...

CMS Idol re-runs available

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Tue, 20 Dec 2005 16:23:00 -0500

Bob Doyle of CMS Review did a superb job filming the "CMS Idol" competition at last month's Gilbane Conference in Boston. To rehash, 6 vendors competed in live, 7-minute demos: Stellent, RedDot, WebSideStory, Interwoven, FatWire, and Ektron. The audience voted a winner (RedDot), but I thought they were all victorious for withstanding the critiques of the expert panel. Thanks to Bob, now you can see the re-runs yourself.

Ektron develops site replication tool

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 13:20:00 -0400

I recently dinged Ektron for its lack of native deployment capabilities. Well, the company has just announced a new site replication tool that is designed to allow customers to develop proper dev, staging, and production environments, as well as load balancing at the delivery tier. The module is brand new and merits close testing before rolling it out to end-users, but it represents a promising step-up for a vendor that continues to add advanced services at a relatively low price-point.

Putting a CMS Behind Your Existing Website

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Fri, 29 Jul 2005 11:15:00 -0400

Which came first, your CMS or your website? Probably the latter. But if your website employs a lot of dynamic logic, how do you preserve that investment while backing it with a CMS? Although not suitable for all use cases, one approach is to completely decouple your CMS and delivery environments. Percussion has aggressively advocated this approach and Refresh Software has simplified it to an extreme by handing off a populated database to your web tier. Conversely, Ektron has a bundled CMS and delivery architecture, but the company recently announced that its CMS400.NET product supports multiple scripting languages, including PHP, JSP, and ColdFusion for content delivery. Note that CMS400 still serves the content at run-time, and you must modify your existing scripts to access Ektron-managed items. Here's some sample PHP code for retrieving a specific list index from the respository:

<?PHP ecmListSummary ("MarketingNews",0,1,"", "Title,asc", "DateModified",0,"",""); 
  ?>,

taken from Ektron's public documentation (pdf).

Navigating Intranets by Folder

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Fri, 15 Jul 2005 17:28:00 -0400

Perhaps heeding the old saw that Windows Explorer is everyone's first content management system, vendors are constantly trying to make their tools more "Explorer-like." A couple of product demos today really brought that home. First, CMS vendor Ektron has discovered that many of its customers use its folder-explorer interface (see screenshot) to navigate Intranet content in lieu of traversing the actual site itself. Clearly, navigating folders is faster and more familiar to some employees than browsing or searching an Intranet website -- even when the desired content is an HTML page. But mostly it reminds me that good Intranet information design and navigation is difficult -- and the challenge of combining the typical admixture of shared files and web pages helps explain the growing popularity of workgroup portals. Which brings me to my second demo, of the new open-source document collaboration platform, Alfresco. Like many of its competitors, employees can mount the Alfresco repository as a shared drive and drag files into particular projects or business processes (see screen). For the enterprise, Alfresco pitches its rules engine here, but for the employee, the appeal is using good ol' Explorer.

Ektron releases document management product

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Tue, 15 Mar 2005 02:00:00 -0500

Ektron, long a purveyor of low-cost but rather durable web content management tools, has just released a DM product called "DMS400." It works off the same basic repository model and interface as the company's CMS tools. Ektron says it has tested the product and its native search engine against 100s of thousands of documents; we suspect it will work best against 10s of thousands of files. And we should note that the product is really optimized for managing files, rather than compound documents, though you can use .NET wizardry to extend the product. But at US$ 4k licensing (on top of their existing CMS), it shows one more example -- in addition to MS SharePoint, Xythos, and others -- that if you have simple needs you can find basic document management for a reasonable fee without resorting to a complex ECM product...

Ektron Gets Vertical

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Tue, 22 Feb 2005 00:00:00 -0500

The slow but steady maturation of the Web CMS marketplace finds vendors continuing to develop industry-specific solutions. This phenomenon does not have the depth you would see if you were looking for an imaging and document management system, where you could find numerous resellers intimately acquainted with your industry. Nevertheless, the ongoing development of vertical WCM applications should be welcome news for solutions buyers. CMS vendor Ektron has been quietly developing specialized solutions and now has offerings for various industries, including the rather active markets in higher education and healthcare. It's probably no coincidence that Ektron has been one of the few CMS vendors to develop a significant reseller channel...

Web Content Management Marketplace Circa 2005

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Tue, 11 Jan 2005 00:00:00 -0500

CMS Watch founder Tony Byrne identifies 6 trends across the Web content management solutions marketplace, taken from the 7th Edition of The CMS Report.

The Case for .NET?

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Thu, 29 Jul 2004 00:00:00 -0400

For a couple of years now, many smallish CMS vendors have boasted of new products "built from the ground up" on .NET. And for the most part, the marketplace has yawned. What did .NET really offer the everyday content manager? Nothing special. But now that more developers are mastering the latest Microsoft platform, some interesting opportunities have emerged, including the capacity to take advantage of faster processors and better security controls. Via Mono, .NET-based products might run on Linux, too. More generally, it means that programmers can take relatively inexpensive content management products like Ektron's "CMS400.NET" and begin to develop complex applications, just like they would with an "enterprise" plaform. Ultimately, what's good for developers becomes good for authors, too -- it just takes a couple of years...
Check out CMS400.NET