CMS Watch Tridion Feed

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.

To boldly go where they have gone before

bloem@radagio.com(Adriaan Bloem) — Fri, 7 Mar 2008 07:47:00 -0500

Web CMS vendor SDL Tridion has opened a new office in Germany, almost eight years to the date after their first attempt. Which prompts the question: why would it be so hard for a Dutch software vendor to do business with their immediate neighbors, especially because outside our narrow realm of content management, ties between the two countries are very close?

Tridion's new digs in "Internationale Stadt" Mülheim an der Ruhr may not present as fancy a location as say, the Amsterdam or New York offices, but at least it's in the heart of commercial Germany. Tridion has certainly come a long way since their first offering, "DialogServer," and since the company's second foray into the North America seems to have started off much more successfully than its first try, the time might be right to give Germany another go.

But after visiting conferences in both North America. and Europe, I find it odd to see that while the web certainly has a global reach, most content management products -- and many best practices -- clearly do not. The U.S. still thinks the World Series is, well, the World Series. To be sure, there's some cross-pollination among Northern European countries (the U.K., Scandinavia, and The Netherlands); I meet a lot of the people I see in that region across the Atlantic, as well. It's not uncommon to have Australians make the long trip to participate, and I certainly know there's no shortage of content management expertise in India.

But there are still some big divides. Are they governed primarily by the fact that English isn't the world-wide lingua franca we tend to think it is? My experience in the relative micro-cosmos of Europe certainly suggests this. The German-speaking regions, content technology customers and suppliers alike more or less stick to their boundaries, as do the French, Spanish and Italian communities. Occasionally, we find out about a vendor that has "quietly" been building a very capable product (such as Nuxeo or Exalead). And there's certainly evidence that customers in Italy and beyond are dealing with much the same problems as anyone else.

Of course, I'm aware that this represents my very Dutch point of view. But the CMS Watch Reports are read around the world, which is why I'd love to hear more about what everyone's up to -- mail me and set the record straight. Is there more than open source in Italy? Got an exciting enterprise search implementation going in Nairobi? Let me know!

In the meantime, it'll be interesting to see whether Tridion will manage to convince the world there's more than tulips and windmills to The Netherlands. Some concepts translate well, but it's time to put the theory to the test: is content management a transcultural process, and can a system bridge the divide?

To boldly go where they have gone before

bloem@radagio.com(Adriaan Bloem) — Fri, 7 Mar 2008 07:47:00 -0500

SDL buys again, picking up Idiom

rockley@rockley.com(Ann Rockley) — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 14:26:00 -0500

Today comes news that SDL is acquiring Idiom, Inc. for US$21.7 million. Idiom was one of the first global information management systems (GIMS) to jump on the DITA bandwagon and they did it in a big way, forging partnerships with CCMS vendors Astoria Software and XyEnterprise CCMS, and authoring tools JustSystems XMetaL and PTC Arbortext Editor.

While SDL's GIMS and Idiom often went head-to-head as competitors vying for content management integration, when it came to XML-based content component management, Idiom frequently won because of it's strong XML and DITA support.

So in light of SDL's recent moves, SDL now supports a variety of different tools in this space:

Acquisition of Tridion (web content component management system)
Minority share investment in Trisoft (multichannel content component system)
Acquisition of Idiom (strong support of XML-based global information management)

Of course, as with most roll-ups, these products partially overlap as well. Customers should not assume an "integrated suite" here, at least not yet. But it makes me wonder...could an XML-based authoring tool be in the offing for SDL as well?

Looking beyond North America for your ECM vendor

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Thu, 10 May 2007 00:11:00 -0400

It's not surprising that enterprises around the world typically first consider major North American vendors like EMC, IBM, and Open Text for their ECM needs, considering the millions those companies pour into marketing efforts. But buyers should look beyond the marketing, as many regional vendors may well have good technology solutions, deep local support and also a deep understanding of your particular needs. As we explore in the ECM Suites Report, the global market in ECM is vibrant and growing. Add to this the turbulence at the high end of the market (particularly among VAR networks) and regional vendors like EVER & Nuxeo in France, NewGen in Asia and Saperion in Germany all become viable vendors in their chosen locales. The strength of, and innovation from, these regional vendors is only likely to improve over the coming years. So I advise ECM buyers is to consider local suppliers. Here's the longer story.

SDL invests in Trisoft

rockley@rockley.com(Ann Rockley) — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 11:50:00 -0500

Translation and Content Management vendor SDL has taken a minority stake in privately held Trisoft N.V., a Belgian-based vendor of InfoShare, a component content management system (CCM). There was no fanfare, and in fact no announcement; evidently because it wasn't a full acquisition, the two companies dispensed with any press release. However, I think it's a significant move. When it comes to translation information management, XML; and in this case DITA-based XML, can matter. SDL had previously acquired Tridion, a Web CMS that can be used for component content management, early last year.

Content components facilitate translation through content reuse (write once, use many; translate once, use many), decreased cost of preparing translated content for multichannel publishing, and improved cross-channel translation (content is no longer siloed based on format such as HTML, Quark, etc.). DITA provides additional support for translation not found in traditional XML. However, with the translation of components rather than full documents, there does come an increase in the complexity of translation management as there are many more "chunks" to manage.

This is just an investment, not an acquisition, and I expect SDL will continue supporting its partnerships with Astoria, Vasont, and XyEnterprise. But I think that SDL's investment (along with EMC's X-Hive acquisition last August) signals greater attention to component content management and XML among larger vendors.

What InfoWorld didn't tell you about Tridion

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Wed, 9 Jan 2008 13:48:00 -0500

Respected IT site (formerly magazine) InfoWorld recently packaged up many of its more positive product reviews from 2007 into a "2008 Technology of the Year" awards compilation. The reviews of some of the vendors we cover made me pause a bit.

Now, trade publications tend to emphasize what a product can do rather than what it cannot do, and that's useful. In fact, we could get better at describing product strengths ourselves. At the same time, if you rely exclusively on one-off reviews, you can miss some potentially very important product details, as well as nuances about the vendor itself.

So let's begin with the July, 2007 review of SDL Tridion's R5 Web CMS. The review was informative, if uniformly glowing, but we'd balance it with some other observations about Tridion you should know. For example...

...that underneath the covers R5 is actually a kaleidoscope of COM, .NET, and Java technologies
That, as my colleague Kas Thomas puts it, you typically need two developer-years' effort to get a full site up and running
That Tridion-experienced developers remain in very short supply around the globe
That the R5 user interface is famously difficult to customize, as well as very IE-dependent

I could go on. To be clear, I'm not arguing that Tridion sucks. The company and product surely have their merits, and InfoWorld uncovered most of them. But in software, as in life, if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. If you're going to implement complex technology, take the time to really get to know it before you commit.

The challenge of multi-site web content management

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Thu, 6 Sep 2007 13:22:00 -0400

Our customers tell us they are increasingly managing multiple websites. They typically want a platform that recognizes their (inevitably) unique approaches to centralization and distributed management. Many Web CMS tools can now "clone" websites, but this usually entails just copying a set of content, structural elements, vocabularies, and templates -- it does not address the problem of ongoing management of those assets.

Ongoing multi-site management typically requires some sort of object-oriented structure where you have central components that may or may not yield local (i.e., website-specific) derivatives or variants, depending on your rules. If you make a change to your standard corporate footer, you may want that to cascade down to all your web properties; if you change a navigation element on your "main" public site, you may not want that change inherited by all your other microsites.

As Web CMS Report readers know, there's a fairly clean divide in the industry between vendors who can do this and those who can't. Ironically, this is one of the many areas where most of the so-called "enterprise" tier vendors remain a year or more behind their more focused competitors.

Note, however, that there are few standard industry norms about how to organize multi-site management. Some products (e.g., Mediasurface Morello) allow you to maintain a central store of template, content, workflow, and other components separate from the actual website representations, and then you can build sites by drawing from this palette. I suspect this approach works well for media companies in particular, who want to share information across multiple properties without encumbering them too tightly from a structural standpoint.

Other tools assume a kind of "master" website, from which you can derive and manage local variants. This is particularly handy for multinational corporations who need to balance global and local communications across multiple properties under a single brand. The way that SDL Tridion controls variants is quite advanced in this regard, since you can create a master domain above your web properties that isn't actually a working website (i.e., your "main" website becomes a child as well). Of course, with power comes complexity, and Tridion customers sometimes report that it takes them some time and effort to fully grasp the concepts here.

But the bigger issue, as always, is one of governance. What kind of specific relationships do you want to create among your web properties? Issuing an RFP that just says "must integrate multiple websites" leaves you open to selecting a tool that doesn't let you standardize and experiment in the ways you want. We'll be watching this much more closely in the coming months...

London Calling

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 08:52:00 -0400

The Greater London Authority is going to share Web Content Management System services to boroughs and other government entities on a fee-for-service basis. I don't think it will work.

Don't get me wrong: I hope for their sake it does work. But having participated in at least two such attempts and witnessed several others, I'm not optimistic. The obstacles are many and serious:

Traditional Web CMS tools (including, in this case, Tridion) usually don't lend themselves to working well in a shared services environment
In the absence of meaningful shared policies, standards, and models (content, metadata, process, etc.), cost savings and customer value quickly dissipate
Similarly, not everyone wants to join an uber-portal, often for good reason
Public agencies typically don't make good service providers to other public agencies, even when they are using outside contractors, perhaps unless the service at hand is a true commodity, which brings us to...
...In this still-young market, the same tool inevitably doesn't work well across multiple scenarios, and prospective participating agencies eventually feel shoehorned into a tight technology box

For a longer critique of the broader concept, read "Question CMS Consolidation" in these pages by Graham Oakes.

Globalization and content component management

rockley@rockley.com(Ann Rockley) — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 14:02:00 -0400

I have a more sanguine view of the recent acquisition of Tridion by SDL than my CMS Watch colleagues. From the perspective of content component management (CCM), return on investment often comes in the area of translation. Content components facilitate translation through content reuse (write once, use many; translate once, use many), decreased cost of preparing translated content for multichannel publishing, and improved cross-channel translation (content is no longer siloed based on format such as HTML, Quark, etc.). Therefore, pairing up a CCM system with a Global Information System makes sense. For effective content globalization, components matter.

SDL acquires Tridion

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 07:54:00 -0400

Globalization management vendor SDL will acquire Web CMS vendor Tridion. Tridion has found a niche of sorts in global web publishing operations, but as Web CMS Report readers know, Tridion customers have been frustrated by the product's lack of native connectors to globalization management systems, making localization a more manual process than they'd like. I suspect the acquisition will help Tridion become more stable and better funded. Whether it helps Tridion's existing customers is another question. Many of them already use products from SDL competitors. Also, in North America, Tridion's emerging customer base seems more interested in generic multi-site management rather than globalization. Merger-mania frequently begets optimistic talk about "synergies" and "cross-selling," but at the end of the day, savvy technology buyers always evaluate products on their own merits.

A new report on Content Component Management

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 08:07:00 -0500

Today we announced an alliance with The Rockley Group to publish a report evaluating "Content Component Management" tools and practices. From today's release:

Significant vendors in the Content Component Management space include: Astoria, AuthorIT, DocZone, PTC, SiberLogic, Trisoft, Vasont, XHive, XyEnterprise, Percussion, Tridion, Documentum, and Interwoven. The report will also evaluate major structured authoring tools, including JustSystems XMetaL, PTC Arbortext Editor, Adobe FrameMaker, Microsoft Word, and In.Vision Xpress Author.

I'm very excited because our customers frequently ask us about this space, and it seems to remain under-covered in the media/analyst community.

Tridion opens U.S. office

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Mon, 5 Jun 2006 17:25:00 -0400

Holland-based CMS vendor Tridion has been making noises about crossing the Atlantic for as long as I've been watching them (more than 5 years). They could always point to multinational customers whose European headquarters had bought Tridion's R5 product and rolled it out to some U.S. facilities, but few (if any) bona fide North American customers. Earlier this year, however, Tridion opened a New York office. Still ramping up, the office only holds 4 staffers right now, presumably in sales and sales support. So the same cautions we issued to North American buyers about Tridion in The CMS Report still hold: make sure you know where and when tech support will be available. But to be fair, you'll want to perform such diligence on any software you consider, including North American products pitched in Europe and Asia. With Tridion, as with most other CMS vendors, you must pay extra for 24/7 support.

Tridion scrounging for dirt

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Wed, 23 Nov 2005 23:41:00 -0500

In a CMS marketplace with 1800 vendors, you shouldn't be surprised when one casts aspersions on another. Still, this message from a Tridion marketing guy to an Apache-Cocoon developer asking the latter for any FUD about Plone (nominally a competitor to Cocoon) is illuminating. [Via Paul Everitt.] To be sure, I can't vouch for the message's authenticity, and I second the commentator who noted that open-source adherents frequently disparage competitors as well. Still, always best to heed to your mother's advice about people who don't have good things to say...

Suites vs. Best-of-Breed

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Wed, 18 May 2005 00:00:00 -0400

Which is better, content management suites or best-of-breed solutions? See ECM suite vendor FileNet and Web content management vendor Tridion duke it out...

Sampling Ajax in a CMS

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Fri, 8 Apr 2005 00:00:00 -0400

A while back we invited some CMS vendors to demonstrate how they were using "Ajax" to improve system usability. Here is a short screencast with a representative sampling of what we saw, including:

An auto-suggest feature in Umbraco
Modifying a taxonomy in-place by Octane
Updates without full page-refresh in Tridion
A lightweight spell-checker from CrownPeak.

Ajax as a term and an approach has become mildly controversial, but remote scripting in general can make browser-based CMS interfaces less intrusive and more natural for authors. The sudden surge in interest represents, we think, genuine enthusiasm for more intuitive user experiences, and in the content management space, better usability remains long overdue...