CMS Watch PaperThin Feed

Cold Banana?

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Tue, 5 Aug 2008 16:10:00 -0400

We've been following Web CMS vendor Hot Banana for some time now. The little Barrie, Ontario start-up challenged pre-eminent ColdFusion-based vendor PaperThin with a somewhat simpler and very marketing-oriented offering.

Then online marketing roll-up vendor JL Halsey came calling, and Hot Banana agreed to get acquired. A thinly-capitalized former health-care company, JL Halsey was best known for its flagship Lyris e-mail marketing package and ultimately assumed that name. Then, as readers of The Web CMS Report 2008 know, Hot Banana seemed to stall a bit; customers complained of poor support and some internal disarray. Lately we've heard of a couple would-be buyers struggling to get Hot Banana's attention amid rumors of staff turnover and a difficult transition to a SaaS-based delivery model.

Turnover and organizational change are part of life in any software company, but something here is setting off little alarm bells in the back of my head.

You see, roll-ups are tricky: they seem so promising, but "synergies" among different products (in this case, really different companies) rarely pan out, and when it comes time to meet real quarterly revenue numbers, things can get tough. I don't know entirely what's going inside Hot Banana (they won't return our messages), but if you're considering them as a supplier, you'll want to make sure you perform careful diligence first.

Update: 07 August -- a Lyris exec e-mailed us declaring Hot Banana alive and well. We'll offer an update after the company's forthcoming quarterly SEC filing.

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.

Rethinking PaperThin's value

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 13:30:00 -0400

CMS vendor PaperThin likes to tout the fact that CMS Watch cited their CommonSpot tool (among others) twice for good value (2005, 2004). See, for example, the closing "About PaperThin" paragraph in this or other company press releases. However, vendors and marketplaces constantly change -- the Web CMS market faster than many others. In the last several editions of The Web CMS Report we have questioned CommonSpot's value, citing comparatively slower R&D and problems with customer support at PaperThin. The company has since lowered its pricing a bit and is moving to shore up tech support. Value is important, but always a moving target. In the end, make sure to factor in "fit" for your business scenarios when assessing the value of any vendor's solution. [Update, 26 March: PaperThin tells us that this release language was a mistake and that it had removed its CMS Watch reference from other releases dating to last year.]

Speaking of hosted solutions...

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Fri, 10 Dec 2004 00:00:00 -0500

Content management as a service continues to gain traction. One measure of its growing popularity is the high percentage of start-up CMS vendors electing to go the hosted route. Established players also continue to experiment with hosted offerings. In some cases market reaction has been underwhelming -- Stellent and RedDot's hosted content management services have not taken off. Recently PaperThin and MediaSurface have announced hosted Web CMS offerings. They too will face challenges: it can be hard to run software as a service that wasn't built that way from the ground up, and both companies risk alienating integration partners. Nevertheless, for buyers this experimentation means more choices, and choice is good...
PaperThin's Hosted Edition
Mediasurface Plans (See Trend #7)

Not ready to call implementation partner

Tony Byrne — Fri, 6 Aug 2004 00:00:00 -0400

Do you have any clue about CommonSpot pricing?

Looking for a Mid-range CMS based on Cold Fusion

Tony Byrne — Tue, 27 Jul 2004 00:00:00 -0400

Can you recommend a mid-range CMS with a ColdFusion backend for my university?

Out of Whose Box?

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Wed, 10 Dec 2003 00:00:00 -0500

One of the things that has always made us impressed -- and uneasy -- about PaperThin's CMS product "CommonSpot" is its ease of implementation and use. In industry parlance, the product is very "out of the box." But remember that whenever a software product offers quick solutions, the vendor necessarily makes assumptions about how you want certain features executed. One particular CommonSpot shortcoming is the substantial constraints it places on HTML markup within both the CMS interface and rendered pages. In a recent wide-ranging interview, designer Todd Dominey describes some of the challenges he encountered implementing a new layout for PGA.com on top of CommonSpot. (Thanks to Darrell Austin for the link.) The import is less about PaperThin itself and more about the types of trade-offs you'll inevitably face at the lower end of the marketplace...
Read the interview at the Web Standards Project

Public boasting, private financials

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Tue, 21 Jan 2003 00:00:00 -0500

This is the time of year when CMS vendors start crowing (or eating crow) about their 4th Quarter results. Some of the most boastful pronouncements typically emanate from privately-held firms, who can avoid the inconvenience of publishing real financials in an openly-accessible manner the way most major bourses require of public companies. We would tend to agree that -- especially compared to their larger competitors -- many private CMS vendors appear to be doing well, but well enough to still stay afloat? When you get deep into the software selection process (read: contract negotiations) with them, private companies will disclose some nuggets of information, perhaps even audited financial statements. They know that for many buyers, it can be emotionally too late to withdraw an intent to purchase based on, say, a sickly balance sheet. Below you can find out about some private CMS vendors' Q4 results. But in our opinion, you'd be wasting your time...
FatWire PaperThin Percussion Tridion

Paperthin Closes Big Gap

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Mon, 24 Jun 2002 00:00:00 -0400

One of the raps against against CommonSpot (Paperthin's CMS that appears to lead the ColdFusion-based pack) was that it was not object oriented. That is, you couldn't easily disconnect content snippets from a site's overall structure for greater re-use without the cumbersome copy-paste routines associated with lower-end solutions. The new 3.0 version attempts redress through the addition of "custom elements." Unfortunately, these need to be scripted carefully by an administrator, and we'll want to see how the approach fares in real production, but the direction appears worthwhile. BTW, note the Sec. 508 compliance module in the new version. So what's missing in CommonSpot 3.0? Answer: XML anything -- the new version still predated ColdFusion MX...
What's new in CommonSpot 3.0