CMS Watch Sitecore Feed

Web Idol 2008

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Thu, 6 Nov 2008 10:39:00 -0500

Here at J. Boye 2008 in Denmark, yesterday we held the 3rd-annual Web Idol, where five vendors got seven minutes each to demo their wares and get critiqued by a set of judges (myself included). Ultimately, the audience voted the winner.

The general crowd consensus was that this set of demos were less interesting and polished than previous years. But I thought the choices vendors made about what to show were revealing. Sitecore, eZ publish, and SDL Tridion all demonstrated rather feature-rich (and daunting) "power-user" interfaces. We see this a lot in demos: vendors trying to appeal to the most sophisticated users in the room -- who presumably are decisive in the final selection. But do you want the most powerful system, or the easiest to use? Different stakeholders are going to have different answers.

All five vendors (including Hippo and e-Spirit) emphasized website management over basic content/information management. This follows an important trend in the industry, but still left some of the audience wondering a bit about how the workaday business contributor would simply edit a single page.

So who won the election? It was close, but no re-count necessary, with the Danish "home team" vendor, Sitecore winning the day.

No easy upgrade for Sitecore customers

info@jboye.dk(Janus Boye) — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 06:18:00 -0400

While Web CMS vendor Sitecore has been busy promoting the new user interface in its recently released Version 6, the company has attracted quite a bit of criticism from existing customers for the new version's lack of an easy upgrade path.

In a recent blog posting by Sitecore's VP of Technical Marketing, Lars Nielsen, he discusses their upgrade strategy and explains the company's choice between delaying the release of Sitecore 6 or let the database conversion tool follow afterwards. Similar to many other vendors in this situation, e.g., Microsoft, Sitecore decided to get the new product out the door and worry about upgrades later.

The definition of immediately afterwards may extend beyond the 2 months that have transpired since V6 came out, but I see that Sitecore themselves have still not upgraded their very own website. According to Sitecore, an alpha release of the upgrade tool is expected this week, but there is no news on when customers can expect a final release.

Regardless of vendor, upgrades are never straightforward, and you typically want to wait until the vendor has gone through the pain itself before teaching them the ropes. In this case, though, it is telling that Sitecore -- a vendor with a support model that we have previously questioned -- has focused more on pleasing new prospective customers and less critical analysts alike with exciting new demos rather than supporting its faithful customers. If the past is any guide, do remember to budget and plan any upgrade carefully.

Sitecore's new UI: We've seen this before...

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Thu, 29 May 2008 18:45:00 -0400

Sitecore is a very active Web CMS vendor with a tendency to adopt new technologies and techniques in advance of the rest of the market. As Web CMS Report readers know, in the past this has presented both advantages and problems for their customers.

One area where Sitecore has traditionally invested a lot of energy is their user interface. Or, I should say, user interfaces, since there are several different ones. With each new release, the interfaces get slicker, and more powerful, and they demo better to prospective licensees, but customers tell us in actual usage they can quickly get confusing, heavy, and a training burden for all but power users. We've noted repeatedly: slick doth not equal usable (though it might help you become a "cool vendor").

So please indulge my skepticism about the latest Sitecore product release, featuring -- almost inevitably -- a "Visually Stunning Interface and Effortless Control." To be fair, I haven't seen the new version yet. Maybe lightning will strike and I'll join the hordes who have "heralded [Sitecore] as having a gorgeous look and feel with an intuition that has no parallel in the industry."

But at the end of the day, it doesn't matter what I think; intuition is always very personal. True usability is fitness to purpose. Understand your colleagues' purposes, then very carefully test any interface under real conditions.

36 Hours at AIIM: Google, SharePoint, Customers

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Wed, 5 Mar 2008 22:20:00 -0500

Herewith some random thoughts on the first half of the 3-day AIIM Conference & Expo in Boston, MA, USA.

Google

Day One opened with a double-headed keynote. The first speaker, New York Times consumer technology columnist David Pogue, spoke about how enterprise software vendors could learn from the consumer space, particularly by maintaining a ruthless attitude towards simplicity of design. Two of his more memorable quotes:

If you improve software enough times you will ruin it
Wizards don't make problems easier, they just makes them longer

He concluded with a broadway-inspired repertoire that you simply need to see for yourself some day. Kudos to the conference organizers for inviting him.

A Google exec, Matthew Glotzbach, followed Pogue on the stage and tried to bask in the simplicity glow. I actually thought Glotzbach's keynote (advertorial, really) was a bit, well, off-key. A low point came when the guy boasted that the documents he was editing online in front of the audience would survive a hard-drive crash because they resided in "the cloud." Perhaps unbeknownst to him (since he appeared to have an ethernet connection), the rest of us in the audience having trouble at that time connecting to the "cloud" via the conference center wireless service were probably grateful that any files we were editing resided in the firmament of our local hard drives.

SharePoint

Microsoft in general and SharePoint in particular seem to be a bit less present here than last year. It's not because the MOSS wave has crested (lots of people still asking us about MOSS on the show floor). Maybe it has to do with Redmond hosting a SharePoint conference on the exact same days.

WCM vendor Sitecore showing their wares in the Microsoft Partner Pavilion at the AIIM Expo.

Customers

We have a booth again this year, and the best part about that is meeting report buyers who stop by to say hello. This Expo is particularly nice in this regard because it attracts a more international audience than most North American conferences in this space, and we've met already customers from New Zealand, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Denmark.

It's great to hear about their technology projects, how they selected vendors, what was successful, and what wasn't. At a professional level, it's quite edifying. At a personal level, it's totally gratifying. Hope to see you somewhere, sometime, in the coming year.

When Microsoft and partners don't push MOSS 2007 for web content management

info@jboye.dk(Janus Boye) — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 09:15:00 -0500

While Microsoft continues to push SharePoint 2007 as the answer to nearly all information management problems, it seems that not all local Microsoft offices and the partners have the same inflated expectations.

I recently came across two local Danish companies trying to overhaul their web publishing systems. Both had settled on MOSS 2007 for their Web CMS and wanted a proposal for an implementation. Surprisingly, here's what they got back:

In the first project they approached Microsoft directly, which then passed the opportunity onto 2 preferred partners. After a while the local Microsoft office came back and informed the customer that the partners had both declined making a proposal for MOSS 2007 as they did not consider the project a good fit for SharePoint 2007. Instead Microsoft suggested that Microsoft partner Sitecore had more suitable WCM capabilities in this case.
What happened in the other project was even more surprising. Here a well-known and considerably large Microsoft system integrator firmly argued for going with the old SharePoint Portal Server 2003 instead of MOSS 2007. They felt much more experienced with the old version, where they could also rely on a range of custom modules to help the project.

We should commend this Microsoft office for being honest, at least. But clearly there is a disconnect between the powerful marketing from Redmond and product realities on the ground around the world. We've documented this based on countless customer interviews in the detailed reviews of SharePoint in The Web CMS Report, The Enterprise Portals Report, and The ECM Suites Report.

It is quite unusual for loyal Microsoft partners to recommend another vendor, but even more unusual to recommend the 8+ year-old SharePoint 2003. While many other Web CMS vendors constitute a better fit than MOSS 2007 for most website scenarios, I can't imagine any situation where I would support installing SharePoint 2003, in particular considering a complex future upgrade and completely absent WCM features.

The case against Sitecore

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 15:10:00 -0400

CMS vendor SiteCore cites a previous version of our Web CMS Report to list some of the strengths we identified in their tool. Guess what they didn't publish from the same page of that report? Yes, that's right: here's a sampling from the six weaknesses we identify:

"Developer-centric; more of a platform than an out-of-the-box solution, with comparatively longer implementation times"
"Some users may find the multiple, ultra-rich user interfaces overwhelming"
"Very resource-intensive at the contributor's desktop; may be sluggish on laptops and older machines"

So, while SiteCore doesn't exactly suck, like all tools it's not as good as its hyperactive marketing team makes it out to be. The broader lesson here is that you should remain skeptical about any vendor citing any analyst praising their products. There's two sides to every story, and the "best" WCM tool is the one that fits best for you.

SEO and CMS revisited

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 09:46:00 -0400

Implementing a Web CMS can help or hinder your search engine rankings, although done right, greater automation should ultimately improve your SEO performance. You should be suspicious of any vendor who says that their tool is uniquely better suited to optimization, since the devil always lies in the implementation details.

As such, I take a somewhat jaundiced eye to Sitecore's recent release of an "SEO module." You can develop a very search engine-unfriendly website in Sitecore, as you can in any other Web CMS tool. What's interesting and potentially useful, though, is the managerial reports Sitecore makes available, like in-bound link analysis and error alerts. I think web marketers want and need more metrics and analysis within their content management environments, and this is a good start.

There is a downside, however. The data will look scientific enough, but an emphasis on gimmickry (like "keyword density analysis") and attendant editorial tweaking to fool search engine algorithms can actually serve to take your eyes off the real prize. The best longterm SEO strategy is to publish fresh, useful content that other people want to link to. And therefore, the real question to ask your team is: how will our CMS -- or any CMS -- help us do that?

Questioning Sitecore's support model

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Fri, 1 Jun 2007 15:52:00 -0400

Web CMS vendor Sitecore sells its software exclusively through 3rd-party consulting partners. That has helped the formerly small Danish company expand rapidly in North America, among other locales, at a time when many other vendors pay only lip service to their consulting channels. These partners become especially important, because, as Web CMS Report readers know, Sitecore is also unusual among its peers as more of a development platform than out-of-the-box product.

However, this approach sometimes leads to confusion, first in the sales process, but then later, after the contract is signed. The implementation partner will typically charge annual support (after a warranty period) for its customizations, and Sitecore encourages those partners to serve as first-line support more generally as the team closest to the customer, and as the team who also undertook the necessary system modifications. But then Sitecore also charges the usual 20ish percent maintenance-and-support fee as well. To be fair, maintenance includes product patches and updates that only a vendor can supply. And of course, other vendors use implementation partners too, and sometimes other vendors' tech support engineers won't support customizations undertaken by their own firm's professional services organization.

Nevertheless, in this case combined partner+vendor support fees feels like double-dipping. In the mid-market where Sitecore lives, customers certainly prefer having one belly-button to push when things go wrong. In the event, shouldn't customers have only one company to pay for support?

Marketplace Realities: A European Perspective

jb@boyeit.dk(Janus Boye) — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 17:06:00 -0500

Janus Boye examines the content technology landscape from the perspective of a European customer, and finds much of concern (beta software, inexperience, confusing terminology), but much to laud (better accessibility, widespread choice) as well...

Gov't-funded proprietary CMS in Denmark

info@jboye.dk(Janus Boye) — Sun, 25 Sep 2005 20:34:00 -0400

Earlier this month we posted about a government-funded open-source solutions center in the UK. In Denmark, the government is active too, but in a different way. WebOffice is one of 181 registered active CMS tools in that small country. WebOffice stands out from the crowd, as it has been developed by KMD a publicly-funded systems integrator. Sold by KMD, the system is used by several municipalities, counties, and other public organizations. KMD has recently also partnered with local vendor Sitecore, which they tend to implement on larger projects. Still it seems awkward that Danish tax funds are going to subsidize a proprietary CMS when there are so many other options, commercial or open-source, small or large, available.

Next release of Sitecore to be based on delayed Office 2007

info@jboye.dk(Janus Boye) — Tue, 18 Apr 2006 08:27:00 -0400

While Microsoft has delayed the next version of Office, Danish CMS vendor Sitecore has recently announced that it will fulfill its promise of delivering the next release (V5.3 due out in July) based on Office 2007 usability principles. According to the company, Sitecore's updated editor is designed to "match the user interface of Microsoft products as closely as possible." With this bold announcement Sitecore demonstrates its impressive engineering skills, but as always licensees should make sure to look past the initial screens and test carefully, particularly since new UI concepts are being introduced here long before Microsoft has acclimated the marketplace to them. CMS Report readers already know that Sitecore is actually more web development platform than CMS.

Synkron Announces New CEO

info@jboye.dk(Janus Boye) — Thu, 18 Aug 2005 11:57:00 -0400

Danish CMS vendor Synkron announced that their current CEO, Thomas Marschall, has resigned. A new one has been found at one at of Synkron's oldest and most faithful customers, Danish design flagship Bang & Olufsen. As a former innovation manager and Group IT Manager at B&O, as well as current CEO at B&O subsidiary ICEpower, Poul Søjberg, brings a great deal of management experience. It will be interesting to follow Synkron over the next 12 months, as they are working hard to release a long-announced architectural upgrade from ASP to .NET technologies. Danish competitor Sitecore has been crabbing local marketshare lately, and open source vendors are also making inroads in the region.